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The Lie: Evolution


Does the Bible Really Claim that Insects Only Have Four Legs?

by John Morris, Ph.D.







It was interesting that when the student made the claim of the Bible's error, it followed my 90-minute lecture on the scientific evidence for creation. I had not directly mentioned the Bible. The question, as were several others, was a smoke screen —an effort to sidestep the issue. But even if the Bible has an error (which it doesn't), that still doesn't produce transitional fossils, or identify beneficial muta tions, or account for the exquisite design in living things. Such diversionary tactics are really a futile attempt to avoid the personal implications of creation.



From a 9-24-2007 article by Paul Taylor: Isn’t the Bible Full of Errors?





Does the Bible err on how many legs insects have?

By James Patrick Holding


Is this an error -- since insects have six feet, not four, and since "fowl" have two feet, not four?


Now we might call this a poetic phrase (i.e., "crawling around on all fours"), and this is partially right. But there is an even better - and more correct - answer.





Shifts of terminology like this happen even today; check this proposal (http://www.dtm.ciw.edu/boss/definition.html) to redefine "planet". A helpful reader also noted a similar issue with the "legs" of the octopus; see 1.)

Unacceptable? The alternative is to say that the Hebrews - who ate these things raw - didn't see that these bugs had six legs.

Objection: Such insects are sometimes hard to find, and some cannot be found for up to decades at a time. So it's possible they did make such a mistake.

Not all such insects disappeared entirely for any length of time, and the author of Leviticus, by virtue of his literacy, clearly within the context of the ancient world had to be someone with a few years under his belt. There is no way it can be claimed that he happened to live in a timeframe when there were never and insects of this type around, or no one who knew better.

I did a little private survey and found out that a few people, even intelligent ones, did not know that insects had six legs.

All this really shows is that people aren't getting a decent science education...not that this is relevant anyway, since it is doubtful that any of them ate insects as part of their regular diet and had them constantly in their face as the Hebrews did.

What other "winged insects with four feet" (11:23) could there be?

The last pair of legs of many winged insects are specially designed for jumping or "lifting off" and therefore serve a differing function than the other four legs. With millions of species of insects in the world it seems rather presumptuous to try to select just a few and claim that these make a hash of Lev. 11:23. But let's just take one as an example.

There is a site (http://www.captted.com/bees/beemanual/cb05.htm) on the anatomy of the honeybee. The picture shows clearly enough that the rear legs present an entirely different orientation than the other four. More technically, they serve a different function and have a different structure:

[T]he hind legs differ from the other legs in their larger size and broad flattened form. These legs differ in size in the queen, worker & drone. It is only the worker that collects pollen and places it in the pollen baskets on these hind legs. The legs have long curved hairs. The space enclosed by these hairs is called the pollen basket. The worker bees carry pollen to the hive storing in these conclave shaped hind legs. The pollen is collected from the body by the front and middle legs and deposited on the large flat brushes on the inner surfaces of the hind legs. Each of which is covered by 10 transverse rows of stiff spines projecting backwards.

Although these legs are used to walk (even as the grasshopper's can be and are), in function and appearance they are clearly, vastly different. The Hebrews were just as able (and by extension of the same scheme used with grasshoppers, katydids, etc) to regard the back legs of other types of flying insects as being of a different order, of being something different, so that only the first four were called plain old "feet" as only the first four on the hoppers, etc. were called feet, while the others were given a differing name such as "legs above their feet".

1. In a new study they found that the creatures used six of their tentacles as arms and two as legs. (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23531749-how-many-arms-does-an-octopus-have-only-six---the-other-two-are-legs-say-scientists.do


Also see“Are Praying Mantises Kosher?”.


Karl asks:

How many legs does a butterfly have?

Count them.