The Damned

Chapter 8 of Dr Paul D. Ackerman's creationist book, It's A Young World After All is a mercifully short and simple chapter. It's also easy to dismiss. In fact, it's so easily dismissed that even a psychologist with no science training could have done so had he wished.

It does illustrate quite nicely though a couple of the techniques creationist 'scientists', that is creationists who write books about science, use on their customers. It's probably worth recalling here how creationists who wish to have their work published by the Institute For Creation Research (ICR), which is the source of much of the 'science' behind such creationist websites as Answersingenesis.org and Creationministries International, are required to take an annual oath which means in effect that they will only ever reach a conclusion which supports a literal interpretation of the Christian Bible and especially the account of Creation in Genesis.



Chapter 8 - The Speed Of Light.

Ackerman describes this as the "most amazing clock of all". Apparently, he believes the speed of light (c) is changing. Supposedly, when his god created the universe in just six days, the value of c was almost infinite. This explains why object in the universe look like they are billions of light years away and yet their light, which would take billions of years to reach us, can be seen. Clearly, the light we see must have started out billions of years ago and not the 6000 or so years creationism requires us to believe the universe has existed for.

Now, the velocity of light in a vacuum is a universal constant. It does not matter how fast you are travelling relative to the source of light it will always be the same. The reason for that is that the faster you travel the slower time gets (and also the more massive you become). At the sort of speeds we are used to this effect is too small to be noticed but it can make a difference when it comes to things like space travel and satellites. A geostationary satellite like those used for communications and in particular GeoPositioning Systems (GPS) on which satellite navigations depends, are travelling considerably faster through space-time than is the surface of Earth over which they are 'stationary' so a small but important time correction needs to be applied to allow for relativity.

So, where on Earth does Dr Paul D. Ackerman, PhD, get this idea that c is getting slower from?

You might have guessed it. He gets it from another creationist 'scientist' of course. He gets it from Barry Setterfield, an Australian creationist. Setterfield based his notion on historical measurements for the speed of light starting in 1667 (sic) and working up to the 1960s. Of course, we are expected not to question the validity of measurements of light travelling at 186,000 miles per second in 1667 with the limited technology at their disposal.

So, plotting some of these data points on a graph and drawing a line through them extrapolated back until it curved up to infinity, Setterfield concluded that this proved that the Bible was true after all. The curve became infinite at about 4300 BCE.

There was a slight flaw in the science, though. As exposed in Talkorigins.org, had Setterfield plotted the rest of the data points he had available, he would have produced a plot whose best fit would have shown the speed of light increasing not slowing down, though allowing for a margin or error, a straight line, with increasing variability about the mean as they went back in time could have been plotted through them. So, his maths should have told him the startling fact that we weren't very good at measuring the speed of light in those days. Instead, by starting out with the answer he wanted, then selecting the data which best fitted it, he dutifully produced the conclusion required by the ICR.

Later, Setterfield was to claim that recent measurements had shown the value of c had reached it's minimum in the 1960s and was now stable, so handily making it impossible to validate his claim, since any future measurement would produce a flat line. I wonder what the chances of that happening at just the right time were. Just the ticket, eh? A nice claim which is impossible to falsify. How absolutely er... creationist!

The site, Dealing With Creationism In Astronomy also looks at this piece of creative creation 'science'.

Now isn't that an interesting example of how creation 'science' works? One 'scientist' comes up with the required answer and another 'scientist' presents that as authoritative.  It's then left to the unfortunate customer who is probably singularly ill-equipped to question it, to check it's validity and satisfy him or herself that it's good science. But then most customers for this stuff are just looking for something to confirm what they think they already know anyway and just want the reassurance than 'scientists' agree with them. Nice work if you can get it.

As for Dr Paul D. Ackerman, PhD., he seems to have merely accepted this bad science with no attempt to check it or to question it's validity. It shows what he wants it to show, or, more likely, it shows what he knows his customers want it to show, so in the book it goes.

Earth during 'Creation Week'?

Had Ackerman, or Setterfield for that matter, been real physicist, or had they checked with any of them or had their work peer-reviewed by some, they would have been told that had c been infinite at day one, Earth would have melted during 'creation week' as a result of the very rapid rate of radioactive decay, and there would have been 417 days in a year when Jesus was born. I'm sure someone would have noticed that the calendar was 52 days too short then and that years have been getting noticeably shorter during recent historic times.

Ackerman posed an interesting question in Chapter 3: "Now the tables have turned, and the believer can throw the challenge back by saying, "If the universe was created as long ago as the evolutionists claim, why does it look so young? God is surely not a deceiver."

And if it doesn't look so young, just who is the deceiver?

We're now half-way through the treasure-trove of creationist bad science called It's A Young World After All By Dr Paul D. Ackerman, PhD., an assistant professor of psychology with no history of research in any science subject and no peer-reviewed science papers to his name nor record of having presented any papers to an audience of professional scientists. Dr Ackerman never-the-less feels competent to assure his readers that science has got it all wrong.

This blog deals with Chapter 7. Just another seven chapters to go...

7 - The Vast Beyond.

Here he lays his cards on the table:

"As a biblical creationist, I believe that God created the heavens and earth out of nothing (i.e., not out of any preexisting matter) a few thousand years ago. ... If the seven days of the creation week described in the first chapter of Genesis are understood as regular twenty-four-hour days, the figure of six thousand years then applies to the whole of creation.

To many, the idea of a recent creation by the Word of God is an incredible concept. Agreed, the concept is incredible. However, in the area of ultimate origins, all the alternatives are incredible. Consider, for example, the dominant evolutionist scenario for the beginning: the Big Bang.

According to the Big Bang concept all the matter of the universe—all of reality—was once compressed into a tiny ball. For some reason the tiny ball became unstable, exploded, and turned into stars, planets, strawberries, cockroaches, Good Humor wagons, committees, and this book.

A great portion of the resources and brainpower of modern science is being poured into an effort to make this materialist scenario sound plausible. The attempt has been monumental and the results impressive, but the conflicting hard data are mounting up, and it is time for people to begin pointing out that "the emperor has no clothes." The view that the present physical universe somehow created itself and is billions of years old is contradicted by the growing weight of powerful physical evidence. The creation is not billions of years old; it is quite young."

Of course this is nothing more that the Kalâm Cosmological Argument (KCA) in disguise, but what's interesting here is how Ackerman sets his readers up with a straw man argument in his grossly over-simplified and frankly wrong definition of the Big Bang Theory and then presents his own 'Magic Man Magicked It Out Of Nothing By Magic' notion as a more reasonable alternative. There is not, and there never will be, any attempt to explain how this magic works to make everything out of nothing nor where the magic man came from and what it was made of and yet creationists continually demand science provide detailed proof of every minutiae of a scientific theory.

"You have to prove beyond any possible shadow of a doubt everything about your theory or my evidence-free notion wins!" This is of course nothing more that an abdication of responsibility and a triumph of intellectual moral cowardice on the part of creationists. You can bet your house that if creationists had even the slightest scrap of real, authenticated, definitive evidence for their particular god which came anywhere close to the standard of proof they demand of science, we would never hear the last of it.

False Dichotomy. If this isn't a plane it must be a peanut-butter sandwich.

What he is trying here is the classic Creationist tactic of the False Dichotomy Fallacy and it depends entirely on the parochial ignorance of his target market for its success. His readers are expected to assume without question that, if he can cast doubt on science, the only reasonable alternative on offer is the locally popular god which just happens to be the one he is pushing. What he doesn't say, and what his readers are expected not to know, is that precisely the same argument can be used for any other hypothetical god or any other crack-pot notion you can dream up and to which you can simply assign responsibility for everything. The fact that the KCA was devised by medieval Islamic theologians to support their version of a god is simply ignored.

Let's move on to the specifics:

"Consider, for example, the dominant evolutionist scenario for the beginning: the Big Bang. According to the Big Bang concept all the matter of the universe—all of reality—was once compressed into a tiny ball."

The Big Bang Theory of course is nothing to do with the Theory of Evolution By Natural Selection (TOE). TOE would still apply even if you could show that the universe has always existed or that it was built by a construction firm. TOE is an explanation of the biological fact of evolution on Earth just as the Theory of Gravity is an explanation of the fact that there is an attractive force between bodies related to their mass.

But that error aside, if indeed it was an error, the gross distortion of Big Bang (BB) cosmology here is disgraceful. No serious cosmologist of theoretical physicist would claim that all the matter in the universe was once compressed into a ball. The BB explains how matter was created. It does not claim it was all there to begin with.

The basic concept is actually quite easy to follow. As Einstein showed, matter is energy and energy is matter. At its lowest level energy consists of four fundamental forces: weak and strong nuclear force; electromagnetic force, and gravity. All observation confirm that the gravitational energy in the universe is equal to the sum of the other three forces, so, if gravity is regarded as the opposite of the other three forces, the sum total of energy in the universe is zero. The universe is, in total energy terms, nothing. It's like borrowing from a bank. You have money, the bank has an asset in the form of your debt, but you have money to spend. No wealth was created in that transaction.

And where is the evidence for all this? As with all science, the evidence can come from making predictions from the theory and testing them:

One of the predictions made by the BB Theory is that there will be a particular ratio of light elements in the universe. Guess what? The observation matches that prediction exactly.

One of the early criticisms of the BB was that there should still be traces of the initial heat and there was none. Except there was. When the microwave background radiation was detected, by accident as it turned out, by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson and for which they were awarded the 1978 Nobel Prize for Physics, it turned out to be exactly as the BB Theory predicted, if the universe is as old as BB cosmologists say and has been expanding at the rate the red-shift suggests.

This has been discussed at length in a recent book by a real scientist Professor Lawrence M Krauss, A Universe From Nothing. It has also been the subject of a book by Professor Stephen Hawking, The Grand Design.

Lawrence Krauss' book also deals at length with the origin of 'dark energy' and 'dark matter' which leads me on to the last of Ackerman's attempts at the false dichotomy fallacy: the clustering of galaxies and his half-baked analogy with helium-filled balloons.

Quite simply, galaxies do not fly apart because they have gravitational mass holding them together. We know this because we can see them er... not flying apart. Incidentally, they would fly apart if they had insufficient gravitational mass, not because they behave like helium-filled balloons in Earth's atmosphere, but because of the speed of rotation of galaxies. As Relativity tells us, moving objects travel in a straight line through curved space and space is curved by mass, so, to appear to be moving in an orbital motion, they must be moving through a gravity field sufficient to hold them in that orbit.

Dr Ackerman's helium-filled balloons tended to disperse because their movement in Earth's locally chaotic atmosphere was also chaotic. Basic physics tells us that in the absence of energy to overcome it, entropy means loss of order. They tended to move away from one another because there are more ways in which they can do that than there are ways in which they can move towards one another and none of them had sufficient mass to produce a gravity field which would prevent it - which a few moments thought would have told him, is also why they floated upwards.

Once again, Ackerman has, either wilfully or through ignorance of the subject on which he so confidently expounds, got his basic science badly wrong and so, inadvertently or by design produced another misleading chapter which would have been laughed at by any decent scientific peer-review process.

Lastly, and so far the only subject raised by Ackerman for which science does not yet have a complete answer, is the question of the 'Dog Star' Sirius and the evidence from ancient history that it had a distinct red tinge to it whereas today it is blue-white. This question is discussed here.

Ackerman, as we've come to expect now, get's his science muddled and presents only one hypothesis to account for this apparent change as though it were the only one. Firstly, he 'forgets' to mention that Sirius is actually a binary star, that is, two stars in stable orbit around each other. Sirius B (beta) is one of them and is, as he says, a white dwarf.

From the Wikipedia article: "The possibility that stellar evolution of either Sirius A or Sirius B could be responsible for this discrepancy has been rejected by astronomers on the grounds that the timescale of thousands of years is too short and that there is no sign of the nebulosity in the system that would be expected had such a change taken place. An interaction with a third star, to date undiscovered, has also been proposed as a possibility for a red appearance. Alternative explanations are either that the description as red is a poetic metaphor for ill fortune, or that the dramatic scintillations of the star when it was observed rising left the viewer with the impression that it was red. To the naked eye, it often appears to be flashing with red, white and blue hues when near the horizon."

So, as Ackerman could easily have found out had he tried, there are several alternative hypotheses to account for the apparent change in Sirius' hue as seen from Earth. None of them is entirely satisfactory. Quite simply, we do not yet know and we are not even certain that there was a change, though that seems probably.

And so here we have an example of Dr Ackerman trying the familiar old creationist fall-back, the God Of The Gaps Fallacy. The reader is expected to assume that if there is something science has not yet discovered or answered in the minutest detail, the only possible explanation is that the locally popular god did it. Note also the uncritical acceptance as true the evidence that Sirius really did once appear red. Strange that Ackerman seems so ill-disposed to accept science which doesn't agree with his theology, when a completely different set of impossibly high standards of evidence are called into play, eh?

We could, of course, fill all these gaps with the equally preposterous and evidence-free notion that it was caused by a celestial peanut butter sandwich with equal logical validity and intellectual honesty. As a technique it appeals only to those who like to pretend that their ignorant superstition somehow trumps science and learning and gives them a greater understanding of reality than those who study it. It is nothing more than an excuse for intellectual indolence and it goes hand-in-hand with cultural arrogance and parochial ignorance.

I wonder how many scientific discoveries Dr Paul D. Ackerman, PhD. can think of which were made by a scientist sitting back in smug self-satisfaction and declaring that it must have been a god that did it. In fact, it was only when we stopped thinking like that that science began to make any real progress.

Hey! I can almost see a wood through these trees!

Here's a neat little trick. It's just like the one religious apologists often play on their audience:

Think of a number, any number. Don't tell me.... (Keep it small to make it easy for yourself in a moment)

Double it.

Now add 10 to the answer.

Now halve the result.

And take away the number you first thought of.

Now, you're probably wondering how I know the result was 5. (If it's not, go back and check your math because you've made a mistake.)

You see the trick here is to be in control of your thoughts. I told you what to think and what to do, so I controlled your conclusion. In fact I started with the answer and worked back from there.

When religious apologists and theologians try to construct a seemingly logical argument for their particular god - any god, it works for them all - they start off with the conclusion that their god exists and work backwards from there.

They then construct an argument about, say, the origin of the universe, or life on earth, or human morals, or the laws of physics - almost anything will do but if it's something really hard which only people who've bothered to learn about understand, so much the better because that makes it easier to bamboozle you - and include their god in the explanation.

Then they tell you that is the only way to explain whatever it is, and, because their explanation has their god in it, it must prove their god exists.

But, as dear old William of Occam explained, unless a step adds anything essential to an argument it should be pared away with Occam's trust razor, because the chances are that the least complicated argument is the one most likely to be true. So, fitting a god somewhere in the argument simply because you want it to be there adds nothing to the argument and just complicates it unnecessarily. In fact, it adds an almost infinitely complicated step.

Of course, religious apologists and theologians dance around the fact that any argument with a god in it needs to explain the god - what it does, how it did it, where it came from and, most importantly, why the explanation won't work without it.

There's the argument. It has my god in it. QED. My god exists (and if you can't understand my very clever argument, you're too stupid to - isn't that right very clever audience? [Applause]). Copies of my books are available in the foyer.

Nice work if you can get it.

Of course, their argument is no different in principle from drawing a picture of a god on a piece of paper and then telling you the picture proves the god exists. But you'd never fall for that one would you... unless the 'picture' is drawn in words in a book.

If only they would take away the god they first thought of they, and you, would see that the answer is zero. They haven't proved a god exists; they've only proved they can fit a god into their argument... and fool people with it.

BTW, if you're still wondering how I knew what you were thinking, the answer is always half the number you told them to add halfway through the trick. What you started with is irrelevant. I didn't know what you were thinking. I made you think what I was thinking. Do you want to buy a bridge? I have a photograph of it to prove it's mine.

Browsing my trusty KJV Bible today I came across the following astonishing passages - well, astonishing that is to anyone who believes that the god of the Bible gives their life purpose and reason and promises an eternity in Heaven (or Hell):

Ecclesiastes 9:1-5 So I reflected on all this and concluded that the righteous and the wise and what they do are in God’s hands, but no one knows whether love or hate awaits them.

All share a common destiny—the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad, the clean and the unclean, those who offer sacrifices and those who do not.

As it is with the good, so with the sinful; as it is with those who take oaths, so with those who are afraid to take them.

This is the evil in everything that happens under the sun: The same destiny overtakes all. The hearts of people, moreover, are full of evil and there is madness in their hearts while they live, and afterward they join the dead. Anyone who is among the living has hope — even a live dog is better off than a dead lion!

For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no further reward, and even their name is forgotten.

Job 14:1-12 Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.

And doth thou open thine eyes upon such an one, and bringest me into judgment with thee? Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one.

Seeing his days are determined, the number of his months are with thee, thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass; Turn from him, that he may rest, till he shall accomplish, as an hireling, his day. For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground; Yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant.

But man dieth, and wasteth away: yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up: So man lieth down, and riseth not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep.

Blimey! So God tells us in his inerrant book that there is no afterlife and it doesn't matter what you do in life, it'll all count for nothing in the end! No purpose and no meaning to life whatsoever. What a forlornly depressing thought, unless you find a purpose for it yourself and so give your own life meaning...

It's a pig! On my life! Would I lie to you?

Talk about Nihilism.

Where on earth did all the later stuff about Heaven and Hell and having a grandstand seat to watch everyone who disagrees with you suffering in eternal agony for that heinous crime come from? Surely it can't have been made up to give sanctimoniously self-righteous people something to look forward to, or so preachers could pretend to be selling us something useful, like a pig in a poke, could it?

Mind you, it was a master stroke any snake-oil salesman would have been proud of: it'll only work after you're dead - when it'll be too late to come looking for me, even if you are aware of the con, which you won't be, according to Ecclesiastes 9:5.

Still, at least the Bible has nailed that lie and agrees with Atheists, eh?

So, it looks like the only thing left is to do what Atheists and Humanists advocate - enjoy life, live it to the full and try to leave earth a little better than the way you found it. No ambition could be more noble and worthwhile that that modest ambition.

It's probably easy to work out why this is never taught in Sunday-school or preached about from any pulpit.

As Christians in the West celebrate the execution of an incarnation of their god in a strange fusion of the Jewish Passover and various Middle Eastern and European pagan spring/fertility festivals which they call Easter, something which is celebrated on a different date in the Eastern version of the Christian superstitious cult, it's maybe worth asking them once again a simple question to which they never seem to be able to give an answer.

Christian god being sacrificed to itself

The sacrifice of this legendary incarnation of their god was supposedly an act of atonement for something some legendary remote ancestors supposedly did, and for which their god had arbitrarily and apparently capriciously, and against any notion of natural justice, decreed us all to be responsible.

The legend goes that, although believed to be omnipotent, the Christian god lacked the power to remove this designation of guilt until it was empowered to so do by a blood sacrifice of an innocent human being. The problem was, having decreed us all to be guilty, the only way this god could think of to get an innocent human being to sacrifice to itself was to pretend to be one and have itself symbolically sacrificed because none of the humans measured up, by definition.

So the Christian festival of Easter is the celebration of this god having itself, as a simulacrum of a human being, sacrificed to itself, so it could acquire the power to remove this assigned guilt from us. Since this is perhaps the central tenet of the Christian superstition, I can't see this being a question any true Christian will have any problem answering.

The question is: how? How did this blood sacrifice empower an already all-powerful god and why was it unable to remove the arbitrary designation of guilt which it had itself imposed, without one.

(Note. An assertion that it did does not explain how it did it.)

Try exchanging banter with a Christian fundamentalist on Twitter, or some other social media like the comments section on these blogs, and you very quickly discover that very many of them know next to nothing about their religion. It's hardly surprising that few of them know anything about science either, but you really would expect them to know about the thing they constantly wave in peoples' faces.

Take an exchange a few days ago with one such Christian. I won't identify her because I don't want this blog to become a vehicle for continuing things started on Twitter.

The exchange started with her asking me why I was so afraid of Christians (note the smug judgementalism). So I answered in kind with "Because of what they would do to us Atheists if only they had the power. Jesus tells you to slay his enemies." I always try to play with a straight bat (a cricket metaphor, not a reference to the sexuality of flying mammals).

The reply was almost immediate: "Jesus did NOT say that. Where does it say that in the Bible? You're a liar"

So I gave her Luke 19:27 (But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me)

A long silence. I could almost hear her looking for a Bible and trying to find the chapter and verse. At one point, out of boredom, I tweeted that Luke was the chapter following Mark, if that would help.

I would love to have seen her face. Obviously, no Sunday-school teacher, preacher or televangelist had ever told her that verse. No one told her Jesus instructed her to slay his enemies. The Jesus she had been told about was the one who told her to turn the other cheek and forgive her enemies (and not to judge them either, though that seemed to have passed her by). Just the nice, kind, carefully cherry-picked and sanitized version of Jesus from the milquetoast Bible.

Eventually, about twenty minutes later, a tweet came back - "That is a parable, not Jesus telling us to do something".  She had actually found and read it!

Me: "Indeed. A parable in which Jesus tells you to bring his enemies and slay them before him. Was Jesus right or wrong?"

Inevitably the reply was the fall-back "You have taken it out of context". Strange how every inconvenient Bible quote is always "out of context" yet random quotes from the Christian rent-a-proof Bible can be used to support whatever a Christian needs it to support, no matter what the context is.

And that was that. All my questions went ignored.

Someone who proclaimed her love for Jesus and had came rushing onto Twitter to defend him had not actually read the Bible and seemed to have just swallowed a version handed out to her by someone else. Her Jesus was was a Jesus of her own or someone else's creation, yet she felt empowered by it to wave her holier-than-though judgmental moral superiority in our faces and would no doubt welcome the opportunity to force-feed our children with her 'faith' and have our laws based on her notion of Christianity.

Obviously, when you know it all you don't need to look in the books, where it stands to reason that God and Jesus will just be agreeing with you. Hardly worth the bother of opening it really. Just display it where visitors can see you have one and marvel at your piety and devotion to Jesus.

No wonder that many people who DO read the Bible are Atheists and many of those who profess to be Christians have only read selected passages if any, and are much more likely to be just going by what they've been told is in it or even what they assume is in it.

So, Christians, risk Atheism and read the Bible if you fancy your chances in debate against an Atheist. The chances are they will know it far better than you do. The nasty, inconvenient bits won't go away if you ignore them. Your ignorance really does not trump knowledge, and your 'faith' won't tell you what's in there. For that, you need to read it.

That goes for science too, by the way. Ignorance is not your strength; it's your weakness.

Debating from ignorance is like running proudly out onto the pitch and finding, when the pitcher throws the ball, that you don't have a bat. Hilarious for the watching crowd...

Page 33 of Codex Tchacos, the first page of the Gospel of Judas.

Nope. This isn't an April Fool joke. There really IS a Gospel attributed to Judas Iscariot.

It was written before 180 CE, when Irenaeus, a bishop of Lyons, wrote a document railing against it. The only known existing copy - a Coptic version which seems to have been translated from Greek and which was discovered in 1970 near Ben Masah, Egypt - has been carbon dated to between 220 and 340 CE.

It is an account contained within the so-called Codex Tchacos, in which Judas relates how Jesus taught him the secrets of Gnosticism because he alone was capable of understanding them, hence his separation from the other disciples. Judas also relates how he was carrying out Jesus' instructions when he identified him to the Roman soldiers, so ensuring the planned crucifixion went ahead. This would explain the curious paradox of it being Judas who ensured that the 'divine' plan for Jesus' crucifixion happened, whilst Simon Peter tried to stop it, yet Judas is despised and reviled as the archetypal traitor and Simon Peter is the 'rock' upon which the Catholic Church is built.

One thing which is interesting about this document, the so-called Euangelion Ioudas (Gospel of Judas), is that it is one of the earliest recorded extra-biblical mentions of Jesus, and yet it's never cited as evidence for the historicity of the biblical Jesus, at least not the traditional citations.

Now, I'm not going to go into the rights and wrongs of this claim or the authenticity of the document. I'll leave that to the biblical scholars and Christian apologists and marvel at the way they incorporate new knowledge without adjusting their opinions in the slightest - always entertaining.

No, what I'm interested in are the answers to a couple of questions:

1. Given that this is the ONLY surviving copy of any of the Gospels, on what basis can it be excluded as false or mistaken, compared to the ones which are accepted by Christians as true and accurate?
2. If it can be so excluded, why can the other Gospels not be excluded on the same basis?

Hint: evidence-free assertions and statements of personal belief are not evidence. Nor can the Gospels (any of them) validate themselves by claims of authenticity.

One of the core beliefs of Christianity is that the birth of Jesus was foretold in the Bible. By circular reasoning, they say this:

1. Proves Jesus is the Messiah
2. Proves the Bible is their god's word because it makes accurate prophesies

This neatly ignores the fact that the stories of Jesus' birth were written by people who knew the prophesies and wanted us to believe Jesus's birth was prophesied by the then well-know prophets. The prophet they quote is of course Isaiah. The same Isaiah who brought two bears out of the woods to eat forty-two boys who called him 'baldy'.

Let's take a look at this prophesy.

Isaiah 7:1-17 And it came to pass in the days of Ahaz the son of Jotham, the son of Uzziah, king of Judah, that Rezin the king of Syria, and Pekah the son of Remaliah, king of Israel, went up toward Jerusalem to war against it, but could not prevail against it. And it was told the house of David, saying, Syria is confederate with Ephraim. And his heart was moved, and the heart of his people, as the trees of the wood are moved with the wind.

Then said the LORD unto Isaiah, Go forth now to meet Ahaz, thou, and Shearjashub thy son, at the end of the conduit of the upper pool in the highway of the fuller's field And say unto him, Take heed, and be quiet; fear not, neither be fainthearted for the two tails of these smoking firebrands, for the fierce anger of Rezin with Syria, and of the son of Remaliah. Because Syria, Ephraim, and the son of Remaliah, have taken evil counsel against thee, saying, Let us go up against Judah, and vex it, and let us make a breach therein for us, and set a king in the midst of it, even the son of Tabeal:

Thus saith the Lord GOD, It shall not stand, neither shall it come to pass. For the head of Syria is Damascus, and the head of Damascus is Rezin; and within threescore and five years shall Ephraim be broken, that it be not a people. And the head of Ephraim is Samaria, and the head of Samaria is Remaliah's son. If ye will not believe, surely ye shall not be established.

Moreover the LORD spake again unto Ahaz, saying, Ask thee a sign of the LORD thy God; ask it either in the depth, or in the height above. But Ahaz said, I will not ask, neither will I tempt the LORD. And he said, Hear ye now, O house of David; Is it a small thing for you to weary men, but will ye weary my God also?

Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil, and choose the good. For before the child shall know to refuse the evil, and choose the good, the land that thou abhorrest shall be forsaken of both her kings. The LORD shall bring upon thee, and upon thy people, and upon thy father's house, days that have not come, from the day that Ephraim departed from Judah; even the king of Assyria.

Isaiah (Love the prickly pear cactus not introduced to the Middle East from the Americas before the Sixteenth Century. Another prophesy?)

Isaiah then writes a lot of dire apocalyptic stuff about flies and bees and shaving (honestly!) and a man rearing a cow and some sheep. In the next chapter he takes a couple of paragraphs to boast about impregnating a prophetess (no ordinary woman for Isaiah) claiming God told him to write in her with his 'man pen' (Isaiah 8:1-3)

But let's not delve too far into Isaiah obvious ego mania here but just stick with this particular prophesy of a virgin conceiving and bearing a son who will be called Immanuel.

Firstly, this is quite probably a mistranslation. The original Hebrew text uses the term almah meaning 'young woman', that is, a girl who had not reached puberty. The Hebrew for virgin is bethulah. It has been argued that these two terms are synonyms but they are not. Almah would not be used to describe a sexually mature virgin and an almah may not necessarily have been a virgin. Almah clearly refers to the girl's physiological state and bethulah to her physical condition.

So, when we see in Matthew 1:23:

But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the LORD appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost. And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins.

Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.

we can be sure that Matthew was using a Greek version of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, in which the Hebrew alma had been wrongly translated as παρθένα (parthenos). And this is a fairly good indication that he was trying to make sure his story had some scriptural basis and also that he was more familiar with Greek than with Hebrew

The other problem with Matthew's use of this 'prophesy' is that nowhere else in the Bible is either the Messiah or Jesus ever referred to as Immanuel or Emmanuel.

But that is not the main problem with this prophesy.

The 'prophesy' very clearly, in the context of Chapters 7 and 8 of the Book of Isaiah is dealing with immediate events. Indeed in Chapter 8, almost casually, Isaiah refers to what seems to be his son by the prophetess whom he impregnated with his 'man pen', as O Immanuel. But the entire point of the prophesy seems to be that while this child is still young the enemies of Jerusalem will be defeated. And surely, for the supposed son of the Christian god, there would never be a time 'before [he] shall know to refuse the evil, and choose the good' (Isaiah 7:16) would there?

But even that is not the major objection to this being a prophesy about Jesus, whom, so it is claimed, was sent to Earth to provide mankind with henceforth the only way to salvation and eternal life in Heaven.

The main objection is; if God had already decided that a Messiah was what mankind needed, and that this was the way he was going to do it, why did he wait so long before providing that means? Biblical scholars date the 66 books of Isaiah as written by several authors between the eighth and sixth centuries BCE with the relevant Chapter 7 written in the eighth.

So, having decided that was what mankind needed, and having told Isaiah to tell us about it, this 'omni-benevolent' god then waits another 800 years before providing it.

Pull the other one...