Author: Eugene Ulrich of dirtwriter.com
Years ago I was excommunicated and shunned from my church for my views regarding the Universe’s birthday. Took me years to get where I could write more lightly of it. Here’s an article I wrote once, just for the fun of it. Titled, “Male Cow Pies and Astronomy”.
“So let me just come out and say it. Much as I’d like to assure you I’ve purely logical reasons for rejecting Young Earth theories, I’ve got to admit I experience profound aesthetic and philosophical ugliness entertaining the YEC paradigm.
Here’s what I experience.
You walk up to an open-air milk barn, (preferably in some lush Costa Rican hills) and catch a dairy boy midway through his afternoon milking. You can tell because there’s a long row of cows, heads stuck through wooden stanchions and noses thrust deep into fresh green chop soaking in molasses water.
A thick aluminum milk can sits middle of the aisle entertained by its shiny reflection in the wet concrete and sporting a tin strainer bowl set atop its neck.
A quick intuitive glance at the cows’ udders tells you which way the boy’s been milking down the row. Twenty cows, 9 of them milked by counting the empty udders. Watching him milk and counting your fingers you deduce he’s been milking for about an hour and has about 65 minutes to go.
Checking the milk can confirms your intuitive connection between empty udders and the milk level in the can.
Checking the feed trough you noticing the fresh wet markings in its concrete sides and you’re further confirmed intuitively these cows have been munching for a time that roughly corresponds to cows milked, and the volume of milk in the can.
A quick look into the milk room and there’s cheese in the large wooden press, and opening the cooler, there appears to be several days’ worth of cheese.
Apparently, you just came across a boy doing his regular afternoon chores. Until his Dad comes out of the house barking, “whatcha doing, pal?”. You guiltily admit you’re just watching the boy do his chores and quite fascinated by the process. To which the Dad replies, “what process?”, and you say, “the chores your son is doing”.
The Dad quickly corrects you, “no, you don’t understand, there is no process. My son is not doing chores. I just created this scene to make it look like a place where stars birth and die. Where simple elements like hydrogen cook in the furnace of stars creating heavy elements like carbon and oxygen with which I build life.
I just made it look like suns clean up their inner sanctuaries building heavy rocky planets near their hearths while blowing the lighter gaseous elements out the front porch collecting into spheres of methane and other such fluffy leftovers. I just made it look like worlds take a meteoric beating over time through this phantom process.
The beautiful spirals you see in billions of galaxies are merely artwork. There’s no gravitational or inertial dynamic playing at all between the stars.
Heck, I just placed these cows in the stanchions, fed them and installed the half-full milk can with its strainer bowl in the tiniest fraction of a nanosecond.”
Just then you notice the boy angling the cow’s teat and squeezing a long squirt of milk into the throat of a most beautiful Persian cat and you watch in amazement as it closes its eyes, yapping up the end of this fortuitous milky way.
You turn to the Dad and ask incredulously, “how long ago did you create this scene”? The old Farmer twists his wrist and says, “6 billionths of a nanosecond ago”. You look at him and say, “really, that’s not even enough time for that squirt of milk to go from the cow’s teat to your cat’s throat.?”
To which the old pastor replies, “pal, God can do anything as fast as he wants to. Only the tiniest end of that milk squirt traveled through the air and landed on the cat’s tongue. The rest of the milky way was built to make it look like there’s a boy squirting milk from a cow. But as you know, God can feed a cat anyway he wants to.
Just then a big brown bull gets up from its comfy bed in the pasture beyond the fence, curls up and leaves a large, round pie in a grass that merely appears to have been flattened by a sleeping bull.
You turn and run. It’s too much male cow pie for one night, amigo!”
