Attack of the heretics.(INSIDER REPORT)

With the arrival of Easter, the most significant Christian holy day, it can be expected that anti-religion secularists will ratchet up attacks on the Christian faith. This year the attacks have been both unusually intense and occasionally silly.

Among the attacks to receive widespread attention in the press this Easter is the story that the miracle of Jesus' walking on water can be explained by the freak formation of ice on the Sea of Galilee. This "explanation" has been proposed by Florida State University oceanography professor Doron Nof and his colleagues in a paper entitled Is there a paleolimnological explanation for 'walking on water' in the Sea of Galilee?

In the abstract to his paper, Nof and his coauthors argue "that the unusual local freezing process might have provided an origin to the story that Christ walked on water." They base their conclusion on the notion that the climate in the region was somewhat cooler 2,000 years ago and that this cooler climate may have allowed ice to form in areas where saltwater springs feed the lake. It was on ice formed near these springs, the authors suggest, that Christ walked.

There are a multitude of problems with making such a sweeping judgment about a very rare weather event that may or may not have occurred two millennia ago. First, it is quite nearly impossible for even the best meteorological scientists to determine what the weather will be like even 10 days into the future. Such forecasts are notoriously unreliable even though they are based on ...