Pepsi, Polls, and the Flat Earth

Pepsi advertised on billboards and in newspapers throughout Israel with pictures of the alleged evolution from monkeys up to an Israeli businessman holding a can of Pepsi.

But the solidly creationist Religious Council of Jerusalem black-banned the product.

Rabbi Yitzhak Ralbag from the council said, ‘Judaism does not view the connection of humanity with monkeys as much of an honour for mankind.’

At first Pepsi considered defying the ban. Then it realized the threat from Orthodox Jews would have seen sales of Coca-Cola (Pepsi’s rival) increase at Pepsi’s expense. So the ads were all scrapped.

Weekend Australian, May 16–17, 1992.

Diggings, June, 1992 (p. 12).

Genesis belief irks pollsters

The high number of Australian university students who admitted in a poll that they accept the Bible’s account of creation as literally true has unsettled the poll-takers.

Up to one in every five first-year biology students said they believed the Genesis account of creation and rejected the theory of evolution.

Results of the Australian Institute of Biology poll were released in June. They revealed that 4,255 students at 17 universities responded to the survey on attitudes to creation and evolution. Of these, 535 said they believed ‘God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.’

President of the biology institute, anti-creationist Professor Roger Kitching, said he was opposed to the book of Genesis’s ‘primitive mythology about life on earth’.

‘We can’t have science with mysticism built into it’, he said.

Of concern to Christians were the 43 per cent of students who said they believed life had arisen through evolution and that God had taken no part.

The Sydney Morning Herald, June 13, 1992.

The West Australian, June 23, 1992, p. 4.

A Gallup Poll in the United States last November found that 47 per cent of those surveyed believed God had created humans in their present form within the past 10,000 years.

Flat-earth heyday came with Darwin

The idea that the earth is flat is a modern concoction that reached its peak only after Darwinists tried to discredit the Bible, an American history professor says.

Jeffrey Burton Russell is a professor of history at the University of California in Santa Barbara. He says in his book Inventing the Flat Earth—written for the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s journey to America in 1492—that through antiquity and up to the time of Columbus, ‘nearly unanimous scholarly opinion pronounced the earth spherical.’

Russell says there is nothing in the documents from the time of Columbus or in early accounts of his life that suggests any debate about the roundness of the earth. He believes a major source of the myth came from the creator of the Rip Van Winkle story—Washington Irving—who wrote a fictitious account of Columbus’s defending a round earth against misinformed clerics and university professors.

But Russell says the flat-earth mythology flourished most between 1870 and 1920, and had to do with the ideological setting created by struggles over evolution. He says the flat-earth myth was an ideal way to dismiss the ideas of a religious past in the name of modern science.

Ottawa Citizen, May, 1992.

The Bible of course teaches the correct shape of the earth. Isaiah 40:22 says God sits above ‘the circle of the earth’ (the Hebrew word for ‘circle’ can also mean a ‘sphere’). Also, Luke 17:34–36 depicts Christ’s Second Coming as happening while some are asleep at night and others are working at daytime activities in the field—an indication of a rotating earth with day and night at the same time.