June 2010

Dear Sir/Madam,

The members of the Belfast Humanist Group are concerned by the activities of the Caleb Foundation and by the criticisms of the Ulster Museum that Nelson McCausland has made. Caleb and McCausland are trying to impose their evangelical religious beliefs on public institutions and the education system of N Ireland. They are wrong to do so because the Bible cannot be taken literally.

The first book, Genesis, which was allegedly written by Moses, contains several references to the "firmament". The firmament was thought to be a huge container in the sky, full of water which fell down through holes in the base onto the ground beneath. Hence references to 'the waters over the Earth' in Genesis. Stars were thought to be small shiny things stuck to the container and a shooting star was when one fell off.

The notion of the firmament was a crude attempt to explain familiar phenomena like rain, stars and shooting stars. In the time of Moses, 3000 years ago, people did not know how rain is produced, nor what stars are, and so they invented the firmament as a stop-gap solution to the problem.

The firmament is part of a Flat Earth cosmology. People in ancient times had no idea that the world is a sphere. Moses held the primitive beliefs of early civilisation and so he believed that the world was a flat surface with a firmament suspended above it.

In their campaign to promote Genesis cosmology, Caleb and McCausland are trying to overthrow the established academic teaching of geology, astronomy and biology. However, to be consistent, they should also object to the way geography is taught and insist that every image of a spherical Earth be accompanied by an image of a Flat Earth and a firmament. Obviously this policy would have to apply to travel agents as well as schools, colleges and museums. Travellers would have to be warned about the risk of falling off the edge of the world.

The antics of Caleb and McCausland would be merely laughable, were it not for the serious damage that could be done to science education in N Ireland if such out-dated notions were imposed on our schools and colleges. Our young people need a proper science education, not ancient theology, if they are to find jobs in the world-wide science-based economy. Theology belongs in the RE class, not the science class.

Les Reid

Chair

Belfast Humanist Group

www.belfast.humanists.net