....BEFORE making fools of themselves on the internet. Exhibit A:
This delightful bit of snark comes from a website called Godless Engineering. I guess this was supposed to make some kind of point about science vs. the Bible.
Unfortunately, the creator of this little graphic not only ignored the context, but the actual wording of this story from the Genesis.
If you look at the entire passage beginning at verse 25, you get the whole story. In a nutshell, Jacob made a deal with his brother Laban to take his spotty, speckly, and black colored sheep and goats and leave behind the white, "perfect" sheep and goats, which were more valuable. These were a payment to Jacob for tending and increasing Laban's flocks, which helped Laban become wealthy.
But Laban tried to shaft his brother by taking all the "imperfect" animals and sending them off with his sons.
Jacob said nothing. He took Laban's animals and cared for them. The story goes that Jacob cut hardwood sticks and peeled the bark off of them. He then set the sticks in front of the animals at the watering holes and the animals bred as they drank. The animals produced stripey, spotty and black offspring, which Jacob kept as his part of the deal. The sheep that bred next to the sticks were more robust. Laban's herds were then bred without the sticks being planted, and they were fewer and weaker as a result.
That's quite a bit different than the cute little picture above, which claims that Jacob carved stripes and spots into a tree and that explains color change in animals.
First of all, it was already established that stripes and spots existed in the sheep and goats. There is also nothing in the story that suggests this was any kind of adaptation which spontaneously emerged from white animals.
This is just another silly straw-man attempt to ridicule the Bible by cherry-picking a couple of verses. The attempt is made even funnier by the misquote from Genesis, leading me to wonder if the author bothered to read it at all. It also shows that most atheists, despite their claims, probably never read the Bible either, so this glaring error wouldn't be obvious to the ignorant.
How can one be expected to understand Genesis when they can't even spell it right? Just look at the bottom right corner of the graphic.
'Nuff said.
