Mark Schlereth Has Some Thoughts On The Solar System

Today, son of Alaska, ESPN football analyst, and chili plug Mark Schlereth piqued our interest when he tweeted this smuggish tweet...

... in response to a smuggish tweet from some guy in a hat:

This, of course, got our attention. So we dug a bit, and saw this exchange with Thenextking83 a few days back ...

... to which Schlereth replied:

This is great. Schlereth is an openly pious man (he semi-regularly tweets scripture from an app directly onto his timeline) and even though evangelism is one of the few most destructive and horrible things in the history of the species, having a belief system and being unafraid to interrogate that belief system through nonviolent debate is good. This is because it illuminates a lot. When Thenextking83 pointed out how ludicrous and laughable that a pair of penguins, say, traveled from Antarctica, say, to the Middle East to board a big-ass boat to wait out a big-ass storm that was so gnarly it flooded the entire dang planet and managed to kill all but two of each species of marine animals (who also loaded up on the big-ass boat?), Schlereth countered that it was equally ludicrous and laughable that a big-ass explosion released basic elements that eventually cohered into planets and comets and a sun and life and shit, fixed in place by gravity. The Big Bang theory applies to the universe, not the solar system, but Schlereth appears a good man, and so we are willing to cut him slack and allow that he makes a decent point.

A diplomatic or enterprising mind would say that while both of these phenomena are virtually unbelievable, God squares the circle, perhaps having created the universe through an explosion 10 trillion times more powerful than a nuclear bomb (or what have you) and then later calling the penguins to the big-ass boat. That’s not precisely what it says in the Bible, though, so we can only assume that Schlereth is saying that the Big Bang theory is wrong, and that the Bible is correct.

The great thing about life is that strictly speaking—and only strictly speaking—no one knows for sure! Perhaps the Big Bang is no more than a vast conspiracy. That’s why these debates are fun, and also why diverse, neverending acts of religious terrorism would be laughable if not for how ultimately meaningless they really are.

I digress. The Big Bang probably happened, though.

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