Methuselah and tooth decay

Sent in by The Atheist Tooth Fairy

Before I state my question, first some basic history about myself.

My wife is a very devout Christian woman, while I'm now a complete atheist, one who not only doesn't believe in God and the bible, but also sees zero evidence for anything supernatural on this earth as well.

You can surely imagine how the debates must go between my wife and I. My ongoing efforts to show her with extensive proof that the bible is nothing supernatural to 'worship' and her telling me that she'll be praying for God to give me my faith back, for to my wife my problem is surely just a matter of 'fixing' my faith to get me back on track etc.

In all my research of the supposed supernatural things of the bible that Christians and atheist debate about, there is one interesting item I never see anyone talk about. This subject came up during one of our many little debates with my wife, about the extraordinary claims of the bible.

If one assumes that folks of the old testament, like Noah, lived to be a few hundred years old, then such a life span raises some obvious practical questions.

Even if we suppose our DNA was different back in those ancient days and that our bodies didn't degenerate as quickly as they do in modern times, then we might make the assumption that such things as our internal organs and even our skin, just repaired themselves much more efficiently than we see today. Perhaps there were no "free-radicals" in those days that caused cell damage.

Such natural degradation of our physical organs obviously still happened, just more slowly, as humans of that long ago era still eventually died from getting old.
However, the rate at which we degraded in those times, wouldn't seem to have external causes, but it was more like our life spans were pre-programmed pretty much as they are today....just for a longer period of life.
Let's call this slower body degradation of those times, "Internal Influences", which would allow such organs as our hearts, kidneys, brains, eye's, ears etc. to maintain a better health state than we see in modern times.

This leads to the question of "External Influences" that might make it very difficult to survive for something like 600 years. No, I'm not talking about being killed in battle or even succumbing to some dreaded disease of the times but something far more simpler and all too common.

That simple external problem would be Tooth Decay.

I won't even go into the problem that half of us have, about impacted wisdom teeth that require surgery to rectify, but one could surely ask if we were made perfect (as my wife insist if the case) then why did God give us such problematic unneeded extra teeth? Shouldn't ALL of us have larger jaws to accommodate such extra teeth?

I won't ask God why we don't grow an extra set of adult teeth when our primary set of adult teeth decay or even fall out, but it sure would have been nice if he had done so for most of us.

Now unless you can tell me that God only invented a substance called SUGAR once he shortened our lifetimes to what they are now, then I have to assume they had sugar in those ancient times and if they did, it surely turned to acid in our mouths as it does today, and thus it surely broke down the enamel that protects our teeth from decay, just as it does today. Oh, but as I recall there was fruit in the Garden of Eden. Was it sugarless fruit perhaps? Perhaps God changed the formula for fruit later on.

So then that leads to the obvious question of how one could survive for say 600 years and still have teeth to eat with all that time.
Perhaps the answer is that they did lose their teeth in the first hundred years and for the next several hundred years they just gummed their food to survive? Perhaps God supplied them with a blender to liquefy their food for 500 years.
Hey, I'm trying hard here to find the answers to an obvious problem.

Now I'm sure as often happens when talking to Christian apologist, they will do their normal thing of the "Insert Miracle Here" in the equation.
Surely in their minds, God came along and either gave them a new set of choppers every so often, or perhaps he put super fluoride in their water.

From a practical mind however, we know eating sugar causes tooth decay and short of one of those miracles, it surely would have left these long-lived ancients with no teeth to chew with for the majority of their super long lives, yes/no?

Unlike the assumption I've made where some super DNA keeps our organs healthy for a longer period of time in those old days, the problem with tooth decay is that our teeth aren't naturally degrading of their own accord, but instead are being 'attacked' by the very external foods we must eat to live.

So is there anyone out there who can explain to me how the God of the bible solved this very basic human problem of tooth decay?

Just another practical question that the bible doesn't seem to answer for some strange reason.

Signed,
The Atheist Tooth Fairy

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20 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow!

You really despise your wife, don't you?

mothpete said...

There will be weeping and gnashing of gums.

Jamie said...

How someone gets you despising your wife from this post is beyond me. But it points out a problem I've noticed in the church and that is the idea that "if you disagree with me you don't love me".

Great post...gnashing of gums...hehe...

Anonymous said...

Sounds like someone needs to read up on the history of processed sugar. But your story still sort of holds up since processed sugar isn't the only thing that causes tooth decay.

Best of luck to ya. I know I couldn't live with a Christian for more than a few arguments. Then I'd be ready to send'em to the god they love so much.

~AA

Anonymous said...

I have the perfect apologetic fundy answer to your question.

According to the BIble Gen.: 9:29 Noah lived to be 950 years old, But at that time there was some confusion between the months and the years in the translation back then that a year was equal to a month, so Noah lived 950 months which is equal to 950mo./12 = 79 years old.

Methuselah lived 960mo./12 = 80 years old

Apologetic answer: Just a mistake in the translation between years and months.

God created the heavens and the earth in 6 days, just a simple mistranslation, it should have been written, as 6 million years.

Just move things around to suit you and you will become a bona fide apologetic fundy, that's how it works.

The Bible is open for any translation, interpretation or preconceived vision or expectation one chooses in order to enhance their faith.

Notafundy

freethinker05 said...

Great post there ATF. Makes one also think of all their hygiene needs that long ago, Ror example, how did they keep so clean without a bar of soap, did they use anything to wipe their asses with,(if they didn't wipe, I bet they had alot of "skeet-marks" in their drowers their wives had to get out, come laundry time). Also, I wonder what they used on the ones that were circumcised to stop the bleeding. Peace, Roger

freethinker05 said...

Just remember anony, also, the buybull states that one thousand yrs.= 1 day to god, and visa versa. so, 6 days = 6 thousand yrs. goddamnit, I don't think I spelled, visa versa right, but it sounds good enough for me. Peace, Roger

Anonymous said...

I do believe that what the ancients used to wipe their bums were their left hands...it was all very "sinister."

Shannon

Spirula said...

Regarding tooth decay and lifestyle, Jared Diamond deals with this in "Collapse" to illustrate how agrarian civilization actually decreased the overall health and growth of humans, as illustrated by the bones and teeth of pre-civilized Greeks compared to post-civilized remains. In pre-civilized, dental caries are actually rather uncommon by comparison.

Bloviator said...

Oh no, not the left-handed thing!! It is true that people used to think left-handedness was a sign of the devil and perhaps some were burned at the stake accordingly. Good thing for me I didn't live back then.

Another issue with the 950 year thingie. I am not an archeologist, but it seems to me that bones which lasted several hundred years would be different than other bones -- denser perhaps, or maybe some other tell-tale sign a scientist would pick up on. Given we have no fossil record of any such thing, I find such stories somewhat fanciful. But then again, I am nothing but a hell-bent sinner deliberately denying god and the power of the holy spirit, amen. Or something like that...

Bloviator said...

Spirula,

In regards to your comments, I recently read an article about a man who was frozen in the alps for perhaps the last 5,000 years or so -- a victim of murder apparently -- and they estimated him to be around 50 years of age with ZERO tooth decay.

Anonymous said...

To me, if the bible is supposed to be god’s supernatural holy writ…nothing should be fuzzy or gray. No matter how many time the bible had be translated or how many editors were involved, the words of the bible should not have never changed or be subject to such polarized interpretation. Not ever; otherwise, god FAILED to protect his message.

Knowing god should be practical and understood the same way by everyone, as this is not about life or dying, it’s about eternity. Regardless, of my piety – my sacrifices, my love for my god - if my finite understanding of the infinite truth is found to wrong by the true god, I will be punished - forever.

The most practical is that there is no god.

Shannon

Huey said...

Blair said:

"You really despise your wife, don't you?"

Blair haven't you learned anything from reading our posts? Or are you just cherry picking our comments, like you do the bible? Or worse, are you claiming that we say things that we really don't, like you do with the bible?

dano said...

Blair,
You are such an effete intellectual air head, I don't think all of my natural instincts to be kind to those who are "less gifted" would get me past more than just a cursory grimace and a nod, if I ever met you in real life.

How can you cook up burgers and fries all day and find the strength to be a troll on this website?
Dan, Agnostic

J. C. Samuelson said...

Blair is very likely a troll. Stop feeding and it'll go away - at least until it picks another name.

Kyan said...

' Perhaps there were no "free-radicals" in those days that caused cell damage. '

Yeah, and that's not all that causes aging. We are actually getting now, scientifically, to a point where we might be able to reverse the damage that living causes our bodies (what we call aging), but we're still a far ways off, and there's no way we lived 950 years. Which honestly is not nearly as unbelievable as 'rising from the dead'.

Slightly off topic, sorry, but If you want to learn something really fascinating check this out:

http://www.sens.org/just7.htm

it's the 7 things that make up 'aging', and how we can start to attack the problem.

Anonymous said...

The ancients didn't have so much a problem with sugar but with sand. Egyptian mummies show that the amount of sand that got into their food would grind down their teeth. I believe it was the mummy of Ramses the Great (who lived to a ripe old age of 80) that showed that he probably died of a tooth abcess, which was caused by the wearing down of his teeth.
The desert tribes (who wrote the Old Testament to, to quote Lewis Black, remind themselves that they didn't have airconditioning) would've had the same problems.
As for sugar; the Romans only had honey (seasonal, expensive, rare) and defrutum, which is grapejuice boiled down to a thick, sweet syrup. They used it in all kinds of recipes, to preserve fruit and, especially, to sweeten en preserve their wine.
The problem with defrutum: it was usually boiled in kettles clad with lead (gave a better taste than copper or bronze) which meant that if you had too much of a defrutum intake, tooth decay would be the least of your worries...
(I'm writing my thesis on leadpoisoning in the Roman Empire, hence the small history lesson)
Toothdecay-by-sugar would probably only affected the rich, and we do have biting epigrams about middle-aged Roman society ladies wearing dentures..
All this doesn't substract from the fact that if we truly were 'perfectly designed' by a 'intelligent designer', it would've designed better teeth, as on of mine broke last year by simply chewing on a currant bun which had something hard in it (pip? piece of grit? I dunno, but it broke my effing tooth!)
Heck, if I had to design a human body, I would've done a better job!

TheJaytheist said...

I seen a guy with no teeth gum down a t-bone steak and corn on the cob. Not that I am agreeing with the ages stated in the bible.

Bill B said...

.........And I used to work with a guy at Dominos Pizza who had nary a tooth in his head, yet he could eat pizza like it was going out of style.

xrayman

Anonymous said...

Hi everyone,

Well it seems the comments to my post have stopped, so I thought now would be a good time to comment back on some comments some of you have made.
I have to say there were some unexpected comments as well, to which I had to either ponder for awhile or take the time to do a bit of research on.
I want to think everyone for the feedback (well almost everyone).

Okay, on to the comments now:


"Blair wrote:
You really despise your wife, don't you?"

I had hoped by now that trouble making trolls had been imprisoned in some special Usenet 'News Group' .....Perhaps a group with a name like; Alt.trolls.destined.to.burn.in.hades

To those of you not familiar with USENET news groups, these are discussion groups that long preceded the websites we use today.
Trolls, such as Blair obviously is, never contributed anything to a group's discussion, but were always around to stir up trouble wherever possible. They get their kicks from causing trouble and one can pretty much expect a troll to show up in almost any discussion group from time to time.



"J. C. Samuelson wrote:
Blair is very likely a troll. Stop feeding and it'll go away - at least until it picks another name. "

Yes J.C., the old rule of thumb says not to feed them and they'll go away, or as you say, change it's name.
The problem arises when the casual new visitor happens by and doesn't realize they are reading the words of a mere hateful troll and then walk away taking their words seriously.

In moderated websites/groups, such troll comments would be removed for this very reason, but alas not every site does this pruning of troll 'weeds'.

Obvioulsy this troll Blair doesn't agree with the theme of this website and is out to use his only weapon to fight us with...HATE.
After all, it's quite apparent this troll lacks the ability to use intelligence to show us the 'errors of our ways', so hate words are their only means left to such trolls.


"Jamie wrote:
How someone gets you despising your wife from this post is beyond me. But it points out a problem I've noticed in the church and that is the idea that "if you disagree with me you don't love me"."

Jamie,

Far from despising my wife, as troll blair suggest, I think it works more like how we might view a child's belief in Santa and the Easter Bunny....or well, the ummm tooth fairy (g)

Just as that young child isn't ready to give up the belief in such comfortable myths, I also very much realize that most folks have a great inner need to believe in something supernatural, be that a personal god hero, or the paranormal, or even aliens visiting earth on an hourly basis.
I think such folks just aren't cozy with the idea that our lives are what we make them and there is nothing supernatural that will bale us out from the fate we make, or have bestowed upon us by chance etc..

I also think any relationship based on one partner not being able to disagree with the other, on the idea that you can't love that person if they disagree with you, well, if you and your partner agreed on everything in life, I would think it would get quite boring very fast.
Diversity of ideas is one of things that keeps life interesting, right.


"~AA
Sounds like someone needs to read up on the history of processed sugar. But your story still sort of holds up since processed sugar isn't the only thing that causes tooth decay. "

~AA,

You had me wondering for a bit when I read your comment, if indeed processed sugar would be vastly worse than other forms of natural sugars.
Naturally (no pun intended) I had to do some internet searching on your suggestion.
From what I'm reading it seems all sugar is bad for our teeth, although I would agree that processed sugar might be a bit worse than natural sugars.

What I really see being the primary problem is not so much the type of sugar, but rather the duration or exposure to sugars.
I'd have to guess that in our more primitive history that folks didn't go around all day sucking on fruits, but rather ate a meal of some kind and didn't eat again until the next meal time.

Today's modern world gives us inventions like chewing gum and sugared candies to suck on and some of us love to sip a sugared soda or fruit drink over a period of hours.
This longer exposure to such sugared products would surely keep the process of sugar turning to acid in our mouths going on for hours and hasten the destruction of our tooth enamel.

Did I miss something here ~AA ?


These are two of the sites that discuss sugar and tooth decay:

From ..... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental_caries

"Tooth decay is caused by certain types of acid-producing bacteria which cause damage in the presence of fermentable carbohydrates such as sucrose, fructose, and glucose"

From....... http://www.mchoralhealth.org/OpenWide/mod1_4.htm

· Sucrose, which is highly concentrated in candy, cookies, cake, and sweetened beverages (for example, fruit drinks and soda), is a major contributor to tooth decay.
· Fructose, the naturally occurring sugar contained in fruit, contributes to tooth decay, although fruit is more nutritious than candy, cookies, and cake.
· Lactose, the sugar contained in milk, contributes to tooth decay, although milk is more nutritious than candy, cookies, and cake.
· Starch, contained in processed foods such as bread, crackers, pasta, potato chips, pretzels, sweetened cereal, and French fries breaks down into simpler sugars. Processed foods containing starch produce as much acid in plaque as sucrose alone, but at a slower rate.


---
Spirula wrote:
Regarding tooth decay and lifestyle, Jared Diamond deals with this in "Collapse" to illustrate how agrarian civilization actually decreased the overall health and growth of humans, as illustrated by the bones and teeth of pre-civilized Greeks compared to post-civilized remains. In pre-civilized, dental caries are actually rather uncommon by comparison.

Spirula and Bloviator,

I recall in the 1960's they discovered that folks who lived in area's of the USA where fluoride occurred naturally in their water supply, had far less tooth decay than non-fluoride area's of the country were showing. So this factor might help explain why some might not show extensive tooth decay.
In addition, as I already pointed out, folks back then didn't have the exposure to sugar that is so easy for us to have today. I'm also willing to bet they drank plain water with their food and not the soda/fruit drink/coffee etc. we have today.

I've known a few rare folks who just don't seem to every get a cavity, even though their eating habits surely would indicate they should, so perhaps some folks just have a natural resistance to tooth decay. This is not to say that someone who lived hundreds of years would have strong enough teeth to survive such an extended lifetime without tooth decay, for I still find that idea quite improbable.

---
Marion wrote:
The ancients didn't have so much a problem with sugar but with sand. Egyptian mummies show that the amount of sand that got into their food would grind down their teeth. I believe it was the mummy of Ramses the Great (who lived to a ripe old age of 80) that showed that he probably died of a tooth abcess, which was caused by the wearing down of his teeth.

Marion,

I also recall that Rameses story as well.
So now we have decay caused by sugar and perhaps sand grit in their food to.
Sounds like those folks of old didn't have much of a chance of keeping their teeth for hundreds of years, not unless God also ran a dental clinic on the side (g)
Gosh, I wonder if God used Novocaine or if one had to wave one's hand frantically for them to stop the drilling.
Knowing how often the god of the old testament rendered pain to his creations, I'm betting on the hand waving technique being the norm here.


Thank you everyone for your inputs

AtheistToothFairy

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