Shortly after arriving at Penn State I heard about Professor Laurence Lattman’s Introduction to Geology course.

It was supposedly a piece of cake, an easy “A”. Lattman, so the story went, was a great lecturer, practically a stand-up comedian, he made Geology fun. Not only that, but the highpoint of every class was his lecture on the miracles of the Bible, where he purported to dissect how the miraculous events of the Bible could be explained in scientific terms—mostly geologic scientific terms, of course.

What with one thing and another, I never got around to taking the course until spring term of my third year.

The course was offered twice that term, and I opted for the morning series of lectures.

These were given in Schwab Auditorium, which has a seating capacity of either 900 or 1,500 (I’ve found both figures); that’s where the Thespians staged their musical productions. Obviously Lattman’s lectures were popular.

I remember the first lecture and his introductory remarks where he said he didn’t care which series of lectures we attended.

“The course content is the same. The jokes are the same.” 

And so it went.

He really did seem to think of himself as a stand-up comedian.

I need to pause for a moment here. Very often I find that what everybody else finds funny, I do not. Conversely, I’m apt to be amused at something where other folks are not. You may recall that I’m the guy that did not find The Odd Couple amusing (either the play or the movie that was made from it, and I’m not sure that I ever saw any of the TV episodes).

This is not universal. There are many things where I can join in the general merriment, so there’s no hard and fixed rule as to what tickles my individual funny bone.

In the case of Lattman—I found his brand of humor resistible. While everyone else was laughing, I was sitting there thinking his jokes were a bit lame. But then I’m not generally a fan of stand-up comedy.

Still, his explanations were clear and it was easy to follow what he was saying, even if I wasn’t laughing along with the rest of the class.

However, there was a lab. I never did well in labs. The lab counted for a significant part of the grade, so although I did fine in the lecture portion of the course, the lab pulled my grade down.

Oh, and the centerpiece of his course, that lecture on the miracles of the Bible?

I thought that was disappointing.

It only dealt with the Old Testament, or the Jewish Scriptures, not the Christian New Testament. He was trying to explain things that were clearly myths—things that never happened, at least as far as I was concerned. 

Alas, I no longer recall the details, so I can’t give any examples.

Oh, wait! Someone very graciously uploaded one of his Bible lectures from 1968 to YouTube! Listen for yourself, although the sound isn’t very good.

I listened to most of it and my verdict mostly stands. His brand of stand-up comedy still doesn’t really work for me, but kudos to him for making it fun for everyone else. As to the content, he tries to explain the Noah’s Ark story and Moses and the Exodus, and I’d give him an “A” for effort but he’s still trying to explain things that never happened. The Noah’s Ark portion is probably the best part and it sticks most closely to geology, though I don’t know how much water it holds, so to speak. He does give a possible plausible explanation for how a legend of a “world-wide flood” might have grown.

However, when it comes to the Exodus portion, I can give him props for trying to give rational explanations for seemingly incredible occurrences, starting with Pharaoh’s daughter finding Moses and raising him, through the various plagues, and finally the escape and crossing of the Red or Reed Sea. The problem is that there is no historical evidence that the Egyptians ever enslaved any Hebrew people. None. And this was known back when Lattman was giving these lectures. So if he were really explaining some actual historical events, I’d have nothing but praise for his lecture, but he’s actually trying to explain what are nothing but just so stories. By the time I attended Lattman’s Bible lecture, I had already read a good portion of a Jewish scholar’s history of the Jewish people, and he had admitted that there was no historical or archeological evidence for Moses or the Exodus.

This was Lattman’s last term at Penn State, although I didn’t realize it at the time.

He lived a good, long life, dying just a couple years ago in New Mexico at the age of 100.