The Nuts and Bolts of Creation (Why are there far more nuts gathered around this topic than bolts?) Genesis, Chapters 1-3
“In the beginning, God took a coconut and smeared it with the dingle berries off his Chihuahua’s butt. Man arose”… Wait! That’s not it. Sorry, wrong myth.
“In the beginning, when God created the heaven and the earth…” Yes, here it is! The great creation myth of the western literary tradition. Myths, actually. Were you aware there are two of them? They don’t tell the same story, but they’re not altogether different? When read, it gives a distinct impression that two different myths from two different times were crushed together to make one, not so very cohesive, whole. The first story deals with the six days of creation and the day of rest. This is the crux of the most anti-scientific elements of religion. So this is where we will start.
First, the Bible itself. I have studied for weeks about which Bible to use, fearing I would be faulted for using one that is currently out of favor with the whatever theists may read this. I read reviews, have been on numerous Christian sites, and paged through several at Barnes and Noble. The facts turned up by this rigorous search were few. Everyone likes something a little different. I wanted to go with the most literal translation possible and finally decided on the non updated 1972 New American Standard Bible. It was said to be more literal that it’s updated descendent, was readable and lively and had one other unique advantage: I had received one at my Catholic confirmation way back in 1983. So let’s just call it divine will and use it as my translation of choice.
There are some cool elements to this myth. Like the myths of Zeus, the golden apple, and the trojans, it has attractive parts. Much as the world of Middle Earth or the bottom of Alice’s rabbit hole, these types of stories attract great audiences and have fanatical followings. In the 14 to 24 male population there may very well be a better understanding of Middle Earth history than our own reality. But few have ever proposed that this is actually what happened in prehistory. It may be fun to imagine, but as history it is garbage. Genesis as scientific realism it remains absurd no matter how times or which translation I study. Although beauty exists within it, I will never be that attracted to the world it describes. Quite repelled actually. If I had the power to make a myth reality, it would be world of Tolkien that would spring out of the ground. Middle Earth rocks! The Garden of Eden… Meh.
Let me give you a few problems here which a completely literal translation brings out.
Before creation, the world was formless and void and a great wind blew across the waters. This indicates there were some things before creation, wind, water and earth. If God didn’t create these items at creation then when did he? Day minus one. An interesting fact arises here. My translation of a mighty wind was change in the updated NASB translation to the Spirit of God. How fortuitous!
Then God created light. Not the sun, mind you. That would be two days later, but light without a seeming source. He then separated light and darkness into day and night. Light without sources, no sun, moon, or stars. How do you have day and night without the sun? Sun? Sun? He don’t need no stinking sun! He’s God, bitches!
Then God created a dome to separate the waters above from the water below. He called the dome: the sky. Where in the unholy dogshit do we have a vast dome holding water into the sky? Conceptually, this idea of the universe above bears far more resemblance to all the other ancient myths and beliefs rather than anything modern and scientific.
Then the plants were created. No sun yet, just flowering plants.
Then the sun, moon and stars to give light to the earth. God must have forgotten he already created light on the first day. Keep in mind that it was a tough week. But enough of picking this apart nit by nit. Can you see why a literal viewing of this is absurd? I will quickly weary of this project if this is all there is. This is so obviously not the literal facts of creation. They are MYTHS!
The second myth details the creation of man more than the first myth and is therefore, the more interesting of the two. This is the Garden of Eden and the whole woman born from the man’s rib thing. They were created and given dominion over everything. They were naked, but felt no shame, presumably, because they did not know sin. The only sin in the Garden was the eating of a certain fruit from one tree at the center. They were forbidden by the Almighty God to eat from this fruit, forbidden in the strictest terms. So of course, being human, they ate the fruit. Someone will have to explain to me how an omniscient God could not see this coming? I could have predicted this in the blink of an eye, but God? Totally blindsided! A real WTF moment. Face it! Any thinking human on the face of the planet would be waiting for someone to eat the damned fruit, begging them really. But more on that later. The first and presumably most important thing they realized was that they are naked. This is the big epiphany they get from tasting the fruit containing the knowledge of good and evil. Nakedness? Is he kidding. Tits and ass everywhere and suddenly, they are terribly ashamed. God gave us wonderful bodies to be ashamed? Why was this? Was his work so shitty that he couldn’t bear to look at it. Jesus Christ people, cover that shit up.
So they cover themselves with fig leaves. This is how God finds them. The all seeing and and all knowing God has to look at their fig leaves before the gig is up. Does he turn that whole omniscient thing off at night? So he does what any parent of mildly rebellious children does. He throws them out on their little leaf-covered butts, never to return. That not being enough he then curses them for all eternity for that terrible, horrible, awful sin of not doing exactly as they were told. The merest deviation from “The Plan” casts us from paradise into drudgery. Woe is us. It is true; we are fukwits.
Other points bother me here and so many other places in the Bible. The Evangelicals state that God is all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful. He (and he’s always a HE) is perfect. I say that this negates any concept of free will. If one knows exactly what is going to happen at all times (this is the all-seeing part) then there is a predetermined future. The fact that anyone can see a certain future means it’s all preordained. If God knows what path you are going to take then there is only one path. If this is the case, the Calvinists were right and we are all saved or damned from the beginning of the universe. We have no choice in any matters. Hence, free will is absent. Life is just a movie we are stuck watching for eternity. Not a bad movie mind you, just not as interactive as we think it is.
In a similar vein, if God is all-seeing and all-knowing then he knew Eve was going to do what she did. Did he set her and Adam up? An all-knowing God would have to know how this would all turn out. He created us. He created our entire environment. We had no choice in the matter. It’s obvious that he created us to fail. We call it entrapment in our justice system. I wonder what God calls it? Fun?
Here is a perfect being who makes the hugely and wonderfully flawed human being. Is this possible? Perfect creating flawed? Was he drunk? Nippin’ on the communion wine? Either we are the way he always meant us to be (petty, mean, lustful, among other traits) or he messed up, kept us too long in the oven or mismeasured the ingredients. He probably confused teaspoons and tablespoons. I’ve done that before. Anyone not blinded by faith has to take note of this logical inconsistency. One cannot be all the things listed and still come out with us sinners and Him as ultimate saint. It’s either his mistake, or he did it on purpose. He must take the responsibility for our fall.
But just for the sake of argument, let’s assume this second myth is truth for a moment, as difficult as it is to accept the talking snake and the dome of the sky holding back a vast amount of water. There are ethical problems with this view. The Christians aren’t reading their own myths right. An omniscient God creates us in his image and then forbids us to do one thing, to know right from wrong. Am I the only one who finds this troubling? Isn’t this knowledge essential to be human? Were we not animals before “the fall” and only became truly human after the sin? Was God not denying our free will? For what is free will, but to exercise our choices with knowledge in hand. Our quest for knowledge and our ignoring God’s commandment is what made us sentient. Instead of original sin, this event should be viewed as our separation from the animals, our first step towards the future.
The castigation Eve has received throughout history is unjust. She should be applauded for making us human, for taking that first step to becoming a worthy companion of any supreme being worthy of being called such. Biting that apple was progress. Adam, the frakkin’ coward, should have made his first act in the garden a feast of all the knowledge offered by every damn tree in that garden. The yellow bastard should have been a glutton for the knowledge denied. To hell with edicts from above. Screw God! We should never submit to the slavery of one stronger than us. Might never makes right even when that might is all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-powerful.
It is a simple fact, humankind did not fall with that apple. We climbed. Way to go Eve!
I’m on a similar project right now. The thing that jumped out at me in the Garden of Eden story (NASB) was what God said when he found them after the Fall. “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever”
Two things:
1. One of “US”? How many of God were there in the Garden of Eden? This is looong before a doctrine of Trinity emerged; Yahweh was simply one of several Elohim. NOT unique.
2. There was a Tree of Life? So, basically, if Eve had nabbed one of those fruits as well, we would all be immortal, just like God. No wonder He didn’t mention that one earlier.
I’ve been thoroughly enjoying reading your posts; you make some intelligent and eloquent points – and the injection of humor is welcome also! Good job.
With respect to the omniscience paradox I found the following statement interesting, if only because I felt the need to play devil’s advocate (so to speak):
“If one knows exactly what is going to happen at all times (this is the all-seeing part) then there is a predetermined future. . The fact that anyone can see a certain future means it’s all preordained. If God knows what path you are going to take then there is only one path.”
Have you considered the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics as an alternative answer? Perhaps, if God existed, he could see all possible outcomes from all possible events simultaneously, so while you have the free will to choose, God could see the outcome of each choice and in fact, each choice would exist off in a parallel universe of its own – hence, omniscience and free will co-existing. Okay, it’s a stretch, and doesn’t help much with literal interpretation, but it is an interesting notion.
Of course, that does mean God would have to manage a more or less infinite number of parallel universes, so would need rather an exceptional filing system.
You know, it’s a bit warped, but I find the idea of mankind being God’s own personal Schrödinger’s cat type experiment rather entertaining.
I understand exactly what you are saying. The same thing that may allow us choices in a godless universe is the same thing the idea of God and free will can hide behind. I find this topic fascinating. But by a strict definition of omniscient, you still run into the end problem that God must know which path you are going to take. If you push the many worlds example to the extreme then “you” will take all or nearly all the possible choices. So in some universes I’m saved and others I’m in hell. Now I assume there is only one God for all these universes combined so would there be only one heaven? Were I to drop my atheism (removing a full third of my brain would about do it) and be saved, would there be a heaven full of saved Blessed theists at the same time a hell full of an infinity of Blessed atheists. Makes your mind boggle, doesn’t it? But again we are just stretching everything we possibly can to accommodate the idea of God. It’s far more logical to assume He is simply naught and carry on.
As for people as an experiment. This logically makes far greater sense than the perfection peddled by the fundies. A flawed god running long term experiments with his flawed creations. That is a huge step towards a consistent belief system. Of course, you’d have to change the very definition of God as to be unrecognizable by the “born again” crowd, and again we are changing the evidence to fit the idea rather than the way science taught us. But as a weapon to use against literalists it is a fine one. Thanks for the excellent comment.
The thing that always gets me about this is:
if Adam and Eve had to eat the fruit of the tree to find out what was good and what was evil, then by definition they couldn’t have know the difference beforehand, which means that when they ate the fruit they didn’t even know that what they were doing was ‘wrong’!
I have to say, these posts are pretty entertaining and educational! I got a lot of catching up to do now, but I hope I get a better understanding of the bible (not in a literal sense of course – the word parable is used over 150 times before a story in the Bible after all.)
On my own sort of twist, which goes along with your idea of eating the apple as becoming our step towards being human, I found that eating the fruit gave Adam and Eve not only knowledge, but also responsibility. Before, they could be naked, because they had no knowledge, and therefore weren’t responsible for what they did. Now that they know what is right and wrong because of the gained knowledge, anything they do from then on is their own responsibility, and can be shown as their fault.
Here’s another contradiction: God was worried that they’d eat of the Tree of Life and be immortal. But we’re also told that it was through the Fall that death came into the world. No death before that – so they were already immortal.
I have the same problem with an omniscient, benevolent
God, but the paradox I saw was with Lucifer. Did God know Lucifer would turn when he was created and just not care? Or did he not know and was surprised at the revolt?
And I don’t think an omniscient being (taking an active role with us or not) would necessarily undermine our ability to make choices. What’s interesting is that you might behave differently depending on whether you believe all things are predetermined, or that you have free will. This isn’t an actual paradox, but it is odd to consider.
One could also argue that free will is an illusion. In spite of quantum level phenomena being governed by probability, the cellular level and above are not strongly affected by quantum oddities in a direct way. So most organism level occurrences might be more deterministic, if you know enough. (As it happens, we can’t solve n-body problems compactly in an exact manner.)
Thanks to quantum physics, it’s clear that physical reality has much to do with probabilities, so it might not be possible for an omniscient being to predict everything–of course, then that’s not really omniscience, and the omnipotent, omniscient Judeo-Christian god is supposed to be able to know the future.
But even if they’re known in advance, *we* wouldn’t know how things would play out and so maybe any all-knowing gods would have to let things play out before casting judgments (that’d be depressing to watch–if you were human). After all, time isn’t really supposed to matter to god.
And the dome in the sky is my favorite (where else would rain come from?)–why no literalists believe in this water-sky-dome is beyond me. THe sky’s blue and everything! Proof!
(Sorry, sorry for this off-topicness!)
I’d take issue with “we can’t solve n-body problems compactly in an exact manner”. I don’t get what it means, especially since this link
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1991CeMDA..50…73W
to this article “The global solution of the n-body problem” by Wang, Qiu-Dong purports to be an exact solution to the very thing!
That work is a generalization of sorts (the approach, I’m told, is different) of the work of Karl Fritiof Sundman, who got an exact solution (a power series, that is, an infinite sum of ever-increasing powers of some variable, each multiplied by some quotient for which a formula exists) to the 3-body problem back in 1912(!).
These exact solutions however turn out to be “useless”: they converge slowly on the answer and most importantly if you solved for one system, you’re still in the dark as to how a just slightly different system will behave.
Now, I’ve just found out about these two things and would need to parse them, so just take this with some salt. It just appears, if F. Diacu from Mathematical Intelligencer is to be believed, that n-body unsolvability is just one of them folk-tales
http://www.springerlink.com/content/p60048m77781j76t/
I’m quite enjoying this so far. Excellent points, good writing, and a bit of humour sprinkled throughout, well done. Although I have to say, the comment, “You know, it’s a bit warped, but I find the idea of mankind being God’s own personal Schrödinger’s cat type experiment rather entertaining.” is the funniest thing I’ve read here so far.
Three guys were having a beer in a bar in London. They were all relative newly-weds and they were talking about their wives.
The first man said he’d married a woman from India . He told her that she was to do the dishes and house cleaning. It took a couple of days, but on the third day, he came home to see a clean house and dishes washed and put away.
The second man had married a woman from the Philippines. He gave his wife orders that she was to do all the cleaning, dishes and the cooking. The first day he didn’t see any results, but the next day he saw it was better. By the third day, he saw that his house was clean, the dishes were done and there was a huge dinner on the table.
The third man married a girl from London. He ordered her to keep the house cleaned, dishes washed, lawn mowed, laundry washed, and hot food on the table for every meal. He said that the first day he didn’t see anything, the second day he didn’t see anything but by the third day, some of the swelling had gone down and he could see a little out of his left eye, and his arm was healed enough that he could fix himself a sandwich and load the dishwasher. He still has some difficulty when he pees.
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Best transation I could find for this, assuming it’s Russian, and not some variant so different that the meaning changes drastically:
“Hello most users internet when one day familiarises himself in the Internet, of course users are not the same and everyone is looking for that is its people seeking simply dating. But there are and the mixed the strange requests. Dating Sites in Tomsk dating Sosnovy Bor сэкс dating in this”
I **think** it’s an ad for some sort of dating service KK.
Russian Dating services? Wow I must really be moving up in the world. Next up Iranian prostitution. Then, then I will rule the world. Muuhahaha!!!
Not sure you want to get into Islamic prostitution …
http://www.jesusandmo.net/2010/07/26/sheep/
Have you got a white cat? Can’t take over the world without a white fluffy animal to stroke while making with the menacing laughter.
Schrödingers cat! LMAO! The idea that a creator god could come and lift the lid just to see if (s)he had destroyed his/her creation. Another gap to fill? Priceless.
I’m going to enjoy this one.
Predestination vs Free Will, and a million other contradictions fit nicely into the concept of an omniscient, omnipresent God. If the God that Jews, Christians and Muslims try to describe as a Being, speaking in a way they arrogantly say they “understand”, were omniscient, he cannot be just merciful. He must also be relentless, he must be Good and Bad at the same time, how can he leave Evil in someone other’s hands? There IS no other, he is also Lucifer…..
Is it absurd to say that this is just another contradiction, essential to the God I envisage, who defies any description? The sky (the dome!) is the limit. Like the horizon, go find it!
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Many scholars have felt that the third chapter of Genesis is incomplete. A recently-discovered first draft of the Authorised Version furnishes what is probably the missing passage, which was evidently rejected by the other translators:
Genesis 3:11
And the LORD God said, Who told thee that thou wast naked?
12 And Adam said, The Health and Safety Officer, who came into the garden earlier and is even now inspecting the shrubbery over there, he told me. For he spake as one from the local authority, saying, Whose garden is this, and what dost thou in it?
13 And I answered him saying, This garden is the LORD’s, and he hath put me in it to dress it and to keep it.
14 And he laughed thereat, saying, Thou dressest the garden, yet thou canst not dress thyself? But I understood him not, at the time.
15 Then the LORD God said, Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?
16 And Adam said, I was coming to that, for he spake also unto the woman whom thou gavest to be with me, and she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.
17 Then the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And she answered saying, The officer said unto me that it is written, Of the fruits of the earth and of the trees, each day shalt thou eat five portions thereof. And I said unto him, There be no trees bearing fruit at this time of year, and he said, What about that one over there? So I took of it and did eat.
18 And Adam said, Then we both understood. Now I shall need overalls to work in, and stout boots lest I dash the spade against my foot, not to mention goggles and a hard hat. Whereupon Eve said, What about me? For I have absolutely nothing to wear.
19 Then the LORD God called unto the Health and Safety Officer and said unto him, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle [etc.]
From this point on, the narrative is essentially the same as in the Authorised Version, v14 onwards.
Ahh, I see, now that makes a lot more sense. Does that mean that I’m doing the Lord’s work if I smite the next health and safety officer to wander onto my site?
Perhaps, provided you first fill in all three pages of the appropriate Risk Assessment form. However, it’s probably best to leave the good Lord to do his own smiting (he needs the exercise).
But to return to the discussion above about ‘knowing good and evil’. Gabriel Herbert – an Anglican author who, in his book ‘The Old Testament from Within’ (1952) took a much more grown-up approach to the scriptures than the literalists do – pointed out that, when used elsewhere in the OT, this expression has the meaning of ‘the attainment of “savoir faire”, sagacity, and capacity to deal with affairs’. Sounds like ‘wisdom’ to me.
Anyway, when Solomon asked for ‘an understanding heart’ (I Kings 3:9) to cope with the responsibilities of kingship he used the same expression, and God evidently approved as his request was granted. Unfortunately, what remains unexplained is why the same God cursed Adam and Eve, and all their descendants, for obtaining this ability all by themselves (OK, so it was with a little help from the garden serpent).
Incidentally, I see that God himself planted the garden, but when things went wrong it was the maintenance staff and not the designer who took the blame. Nothing changes, does it?