In a way, the sheer cussedness of this is admirable.

46% of Americans believe in special creation of human beings within the last 10,000 years.

Here is the Gallup Poll on the subject.

Naturally, the oikophobes and atheists are looking at this as evidence of the unredeemable ignorance of Republican/uneducated "godbotherers" but notice that 41% of Democrats and 25% of those who made their way through a post-graduate education believe in the most extreme form of creationism.

Perhaps 41% of the Democrat party are church-going Evangelicals, but how does anyone make through post-graduate education and remain committed to "special creationism."

Science and Religion.

Geologists may have found exact date of Crucifixion.

Geologists??? You wouldn't expect that connection.

And, although it is nice to have a dodgy science story affirm orthodox Christianity for a change, this story still seems "dodgy."

Apparently, some geologists have found evidence of "seismic activity" in the Dead Sea region between 26 AD and 36 AD which they correlate to the references in Matthew 27 to the earthquake at the time of Jesus' crucifixion. Then using what we know about the date of the crucifixion, they then use that information to date the seismic activity. Here's the story:

Geologist Jefferson Williams of Supersonic Geophysical, along with Markus Schwab and Achim Brauer of the German Research Center for Geosciences, studied three cores drilled from a beach of the Dead Sea adjacent to the Ein Gedi Spa. Upon examining annual layers of deposition in the sediments that settle in the Dead Sea, known as varves, the scientists could show that at least two major seismic events were evidenced in the core sample.

One was a region-wide earthquake that occured in 31 B.C., another seismic event that happened sometime between the years 26 and 36 A.D. According to Williams, the latter event occurred during “the years when Pontius Pilate was procurator of Judea and when the earthquake of the Gospel of Matthew is historically constrained.” While the year of the event described in Gospels and underscored by scientific testing, the actual year was in question. Williams said, "The day and date of the crucifixion (Good Friday) are known with a fair degree of precision."


Summarizing a paper published in Nature by Colin Humphreys and Graeme Waddington, Williams noted that all four gospels of Christian scripture, and Tacitus in Annals (XV, 44), coincide in that the Crucifixion of Jesus took place while Pontius Pilate was procurator of Judea from A.D. 26 to 36:

• All four Christian gospels say the crucifixion occurred on a Friday.
• All four gospels agree say Jesus died a few hours before the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath at nightfall on a Friday.
• The gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, known as the Synoptic Gospels, concur that Jesus died before nightfall on the 14th day of Nisan, right before the start of the Passover meal.
• The Gospel of John’s differs from the Synoptic Gospels in indicating that Jesus died before nightfall on the 15th day of Nisan.

When data about the Jewish calendar and astronomical calculations are factored in, a handful of possible dates result, with Friday, April 3, 33, being the best match, according to the researchers.

Williams and his team acknowledge that the seismic activity associated with the Crucifixion could refer to “an earthquake that occurred sometime before or after the crucifixion and was in effect ‘borrowed’ by the author of the Gospel of Matthew”, and a localized tremor occurring between 26 and 36 A.D. that was strong enough to deform the Ein Gedi sediments of Ein Gedi but not energetic enough to produce a still extant and extra-biblical historical record. “If the last possibility is true, this would mean that the report of an earthquake in the Gospel of Matthew is a type of allegory,” they write.

I'm not seeing that the earthquake confirms the gospel; it looks like the gospel is being used to confirm a date for the seismic activity, and, then again, maybe not, because the seismic activity could have happened at some time other than the crucifixion.

This is a lot like the "science disproves miracle" story we see every year in Newsweek sometime around Easter.

By the by, I disagree that John necessarily indicates that Jesus died on the 15th of Nissan. St. Thomas Aquinas didn't think that was what John had in mind:

But the words (John 13:1) "Before the festival day of the Pasch" are to be understood to refer to the fourteenth day of the moon, which then fell upon the Thursday: for the fifteenth day of the moon was the most solemn day of the Pasch with the Jews: and so the same day which John calls "before the festival day of the Pasch," on account of the natural distinction of days, Matthew calls the first day of the unleavened bread, because, according to the rite of the Jewish festivity, the solemnity began from the evening of the preceding day. When it is said, then, that they were going to eat the Pasch on the fifteenth day of the month, it is to be understood that the Pasch there is not called the Paschal lamb, which was sacrificed on the fourteenth day, but the Paschal food--that is, the unleavened bread--which had to be eaten by the clean. Hence Chrysostom in the same passage gives another explanation, that the Pasch can be taken as meaning the whole feast of the Jews, which lasted seven days.

Some early commenters, however, did seem to think that the Crucifixion was on the 15th day of Nissan; so realize that there is a legitimate diversity of opinion on the subject.

Religion answers the factual questions that science neglects...

...acording to the philosopher Keith Ward:

Julian Baggini raises the question of whether religion and science are compatible. But, as he implies, that question is too generally phrased to be helpful. We need to ask if particular religious and scientific claims conflict, or whether they are mutually supportive or not. Some are and some are not, and it would be silly to say that all religious claims conflict with all scientific claims, or that they do not.


Many religious statements are naturally construed as statements of fact – Jesus healed the sick, and rose from death, and these are factual claims. So Stephen Gould's suggestion that religion only deals with value and meaning is incorrect, though it is correct that scientists do not usually deal with such questions.

A huge number of factual claims are not scientifically testable. Many historical and autobiographical claims, for instance, are not repeatable, not publicly observable now or in future, and are not subsumable under any general law. We know that rational answers to many historical questions depend on general philosophical views, moral views, personal experience and judgment. There are no history laboratories. Much history, like much religion, is evidence-based, but the evidence is not scientifically tractable.

I do not see why Baggini says that religions "smuggle in" agency explanations where they do not belong (for instance, claiming that the cosmos exists because it is created by a God with a purpose). That seems to be a perfectly acceptable factual claim that no known scientific technique can answer. The physical sciences do not generally talk about non-physical and non-law-like facts such as creation by God. That does not mean that such questions are meaningless, or that there are not both rational and silly ways of answering them.

Claims that the cosmos is created do not "trespass onto" scientific territory. They are factual claims in which scientific investigators are not, as such, interested. Scientific facts are, of course, relevant to many religious claims. But not all facts are scientific facts – the claim that I was in Oxford last night, unseen by anyone, will occur in no scientific paper, but it is a hard fact. So it is with the miracles of Jesus, with the creation of the cosmos and with its end. The interesting question is not whether religion is compatible with science, but whether there are important factual questions – and some important non-factual questions, too, such as moral ones – with which the physical sciences do not usually deal. The answer seems pretty obvious, without trying to manufacture sharp and artificial distinctions between "hows" and "whys".