Craig V. Svensson (The Scientist, January 26, 1987) claims to be a biblical literalist. Those of us who spend some of our spare time combating the obfuscations of creationism wish heartily that this claim were true, for the literal words of the Bible are much more compatible with Darwinism than is the pseudoscientific bilge of creationism.
The fact is that fundamentalism cannot get by without hundreds of nonbiblical canons for which there is no authority but the word of scientifically illiterate evangelists. For example, Svensson says that, according to Genesis, animals were to reproduce only "after their kind." The word only does not appear in the Genesis text. By putting it in his sentence (although quite correctly not in quotes), he has changed the commonplace observation that offspring resemble their parents into a divine injunction. One cannot erect the simple sentence, "And God said, Let the earth bring...
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