An interesting and timely question prompted this article. Earlier, I wrote again about how facts alone can be incomplete. Giving information and evidence is good, but addressing worldviews and presuppositions are very important, and can give a more complete answer to a question or challenge.
To briefly recap, everyone has a worldview based on presuppositions (things they assume to be true). When presented with evidence, we naturally use our worldviews to interpret it. When someone has an anti-Bible bias, he or she can easily reject evidence supporting the Bible (and especially biblical creation science).
Cockatrice drawing by Oliver Herford, 1912 at Reusable Art
Here is the question that I was given this morning (writing this the day before I publish it) at The Question Evolution Project on Facebook:
If you can't make out the picture, he said, "Hey again. Question for you. In Isaiah when it mentions cocktracies and satyrs what do you think it is referring too. Probably not two legged dragons and goat men."
Well, this question made me work, it wasn't a quick answer that I could look up and crank out.
When looking these things up, I saw that there are several anti-theist sites that were taking ancient words like unicorn, cockatrice and satyr and putting more modern conceptions on those words. They had the assumption that not only was the Bible worthless, but worthy of mockery. Posts with the tone of, "You gotta believe in satyrs, unicorns and cockatrices because the Bible sez so, haw haw haw!" are plentiful. If they had bothered to do some research instead of indulging in prejudicial conjecture, they would not have been making such foolish utterances.
One thing that should embarrass these people is that in 1860, Samuel Wilberforce wrote a review of Darwin's "Origin of Species". In this, he quoted Henry More's remarks, "And of a truth, vile epicurism and sensuality will make the soul of man so degenerate and blind, that he will not only be content to slide into brutish immorality, but please himself in this very opinion that he is a real brute already, an ape, satyr, or baboon..." To be consistent, these Christophobes should be mocking other authors who used some of these words, yes?
Unlike the unicorn, a real animal with a drastically different meaning now (basically, it's a sort of extinct rhinoceros), the cockatrice is totally mythical. Cockatrice appears in the King James version, and the original word is translated correctly in modern Bible versions. Translators did not quite understand the word that was in the original manuscripts.
Similarly, the word "dragon" appears in the King James version more often than in other translations. It is usually rendered as "snake", "cobra", "adder" and so on, except in places like Revelation where dragon means Satan. If you want a biblical creationist view of dragons as dinosaurs (and remember, "dragon" was a known word, and "dinosaur" had not been coined until Richard Owen came up with it in 1842), you can read "Dragons - Fact or Fable?" and the additional information linked on that page.
The satyr (and this is being published on Satyrday...oh, that was bad...) is a bit more difficult to deal with. Again, this is found in older Bible versions. (The KJV copied from the Geneva Bible, and the 1611 KJV and Geneva are extremely similar because the Geneva was used by the KJV translators.) Modern translations and commentaries differ on the meaning of "satyr". Some use "hairy beast", others refer to a kind of desert demon that neighbors of the Jews believed in. Because of demonic and goat-like associations with the word, "satyr" may actually give a good representation of the demonic worship. Just like when God said not to bother with idols who are not gods, who do not walk, speak or anything but were still evil, I think this is meaning not to fear or deal with the demons that other people around them would worship. Anyway, the original word seems uncertain, and the desert demon interpretation "may" be the most reasonable.
Again, it is not just a matter of evidence, but of worldviews and presuppositions. If someone has an irrational worldview like materialism or evolutionism, and especially when it is dominated by negative emotions rather than reason, he or she is prone to giving ridicule and making excuses rather than accepting the evidence. The atheist worldview is incoherent, lacking the necessary preconditions of human experience. Only biblical Christianity can do this, and can make proper sense of the evidence.
