In the last few months I've found
myself doing something I swore off years ago: arguing with creationists. I had stopped because I
realized you can't convince most of them that evolution is true, no matter how good you
think your arguments are, or how much evidence you offer them. The problem is that creationism and science proceed in
entirely different directions. Creationism takes it on faith that Genesis is literally true, and then (sometimes) seeks to find
arguments that support that claim. Science (ideally) looks at nature,
and then proposes theories that seem to explain it. If the theory seems to match the
evidence, it's retained. If it doesn't, it's discarded.
So, with
creationism, belief comes before evidence, while in science, evidence comes before belief. Darwin didn't start with a belief in evolution, and then set out to prove it. He observed the natural world, and
then proposed a theory that seemed to explain it. Creationism values faith
above all, while science values empirical evidence above all. That's
why debating a creationist is like playing basketball with someone
who refuses to count your baskets, and insists they've already won no matter how well you play. They've made up their minds that Genesis
is literally true, so they aren't particularly interested in hearing
reasons it might not be. I'm no Galileo, but it always makes me think about how he must have felt when people refused to even look through his telescope.
In other words, it's absolutely maddening, so I
had given up the creation/evolution debate. For years, the topic
rarely came up, because I wasn't around many people who liked to discuss it, and the ones who did took creationism no more seriously than Norse mythology.
Honestly, I had forgotten how many Americans are biblical literalists who
believe Genesis is fact, not parable or myth. Then came Facebook,
which put me back in touch with old friends and family members, and
gave me a window into their thoughts. They are good, funny, smart
people, most of them—and an astounding number of them believe the
Earth is just a few thousand years old. I was shocked by that, and
they were shocked by me. Creationism and biblical literalism are certainly not uncommon. Gallup polls show that nearly 50% of people in the US think "God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years." Around 30% of people in the US agree with the statement that "the Bible is the actual word of God, and is to be taken literally, word for word."
The difference between mainstream scientific views and young earth creationism is a huge one. If the earth is really 4.56 billion years old, and creationists think it's 6 to 10 thousand years old, that's equivalent to saying Texas is ten feet across. If mainstream science is right, then creationists aren't just a little bit wrong. They're outrageously, spectacularly wrong. From my perspective,
hearing someone say the earth is a few thousand years old is just
about as bewildering, and admittedly frustrating, as hearing someone
insist that Texas is the width of a mobile home.
Anyway, I found myself in the
creation/evolution debate again, but I soon remembered why I had
stopped. There's no point in trying to convince creationists using
scientific evidence. They're playing a different game; a game based
on faith. So I decided to try to understand where they're coming
from, and take another look at the creation story in Genesis.
And a fascinating story it is. One
surprising thing is how short it is. In my New Oxford Annotated
Bible, it's only a little over 5 pages from “In the beginning”
to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden—and half
of those pages are footnotes. Another surprising thing is that there
isn't just one creation story. There are two, and they are very
different. I had always heard this, but it's amazing to read them and
see just how different they are.
The first (Genesis 1:1 through 2:3) is
the one that describes the creation of the world in six days, and God
resting on the seventh. In this version, the original Hebrew text
calls God “Elohim”; which is basically a generic name for “god”
or “deity”. The second narrative (Genesis 2:4 through 25) refers
to God as Yahweh in the original Hebrew. If I understand it
correctly, Yahweh is the personal name of this particular god
(apparently, the early Hebrews believed in many gods, but came to
worship the one named Yahweh exclusively. Only later did they come to
believe there were no other gods). The name Yahweh is rendered in many
Bibles as “the LORD”.
Before I get into what the two
narratives say, a little background on Genesis as a whole might be
useful. Genesis, of course, is the first book in the Old Testament.
It describes the creation of the world, the fall of Adam and Eve, the
Flood, the Tower of Babel, and the lives of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob,
and Joseph—the lineage thought to give rise to the
Jews. Genesis is the first of the five books traditionally thought to
have been dictated by God to Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus,
Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Jews call these five books the Torah, and
Christians call them the Pentateuch. In the late Renaissance, when
the risk of being killed or imprisoned for heresy began to decline, people started pointing out that
the Torah/Pentateuch, like the rest of the Bible, gives the distinct
impression of having been written by more than one person, in more
than one style. In the 1800's, the German scholar Julius Wellhausen
proposed that the first five books of the Bible were composed by four
different people (or groups of people) who he called J (for Jahweh, German for
Yahweh, because this is what J calls God), E (because this source
calls God “Elohim”), P (for Priestly), and D (for Deuteronomist,
because this source wrote much of Deuteronomy as well as some later
books in the Old Testament). This line of thinking is known as the
Documentary Hypothesis. The idea has been hugely influential, though
it's become more controversial since the 1970's. Still, the basic
idea that the Pentateuch was written by different people at
different times is still accepted by all but the most conservative
biblical scholars, and clear to anyone who takes a close look at both stories in Genesis.
The First Creation Story
The first creation narrative in the
bible is thought to be written by P, the Priestly author (or group of
authors). This source depicts God as a distant, all-powerful deity
who creates an orderly cosmos from a primeval, watery
darkness. He does this with the power of words, beginning with, “Let
there be light”. In this narrative, God (Elohim) separates light
from darkness on the first day, and names them Day and Night. On the
second day, he divides the primordial waters by raising the dome of
the sky, which separates the waters below from the waters above the
dome. When this text was written, Hebrews thought of the Earth as a
flat place surrounded by water. The sky was thought to be an actual,
solid dome, and the sun, moon, and stars were lights embedded in the dome. In this narrative, there is water beyond the
dome (a disconcerting thought, really). Later, Hebrews adopted the
Greek idea that the world is a sphere, surrounded by a series of
concentric domes. At the time this narrative was written, the world
was not only thought to be the center of the universe, but a flat
piece of ground in a dome-shaped bubble between primordial waters. Not even young-earth creationists these days are willing to take Genesis that literally.
On the third day, God creates land and commands it to bring forth plants. On the fourth, he says “Let there be lights in the
dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be
for signs and for seasons and for days and years”. Signs were important to the ancient Hebrews, who, like most other ancient people, took it for granted that you could
see portents in the motion of the stars. God also creates the sun and moon, “the greater
light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night”. On
the fifth day God creates sea creatures (including “great sea
monsters”) and birds. On the sixth day he creates land animals, and
then says “Let us make humankind in our image”. This “us” is
a puzzler, and it may indicate an ancient belief that God was the
head of a heavenly court or counsel. The other members may have also
been considered gods early on, but as monotheism evolved they were
demoted to angels, cherubim, and such. In this narrative, unlike the
next, God seems to create male and female simultaneously. Then he tells them
to “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and
have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air
and over every living thing that moves upon the earth”. He also
says he has “given every green plant for food,” implying that all
living things were vegetarians at the time. On the seventh day of
course, God rested, and “blessed the seventh day and hallowed it.”
The Second Creation Story
The second narrative is very different
from the first, and is identified with J in the documentary
hypothesis. It's most likely the older of the two stories. J is so-called
because the writer refers to God as “Yahweh” ("Jahweh" in German), or “Yahweh
Elohim”. Sure enough, Genesis 2.4 begins by saying, “In the day the LORD
God [Yahweh Elohim] made the earth and the heavens...”. In this
narrative, the earth begins as a place with no rain or vegetation,
watered by a stream. Here, God creates humans before he creates
plants and animals. Instead of creating him with a word, he takes a
more intimate approach: “the LORD God formed man from the dust
of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breathe of life;
and the man became a living being.” This first man is called Adam; a
Hebrew word for “humankind”, which is also a play on the word
“adamah” or “soil”.
After Adam is created, God plants the
Garden of Eden, a beautiful place whose trees include the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. God tells Adam he
may eat fruit from every tree except the tree of knowledge of good and
evil, “for in the day that you eat of it you shall die”. Only
then, in this narrative, does God create the animals, letting Adam
name each one. None of these are a fit “helper” or “partner”
for Adam, though, so God makes Adam go to sleep, removes one of his
ribs, and creates the first woman from it (some people to this day
believe that men have one less rib than women).
The next part of the story is well
known. The first couple is naked and unashamed at first, because they don't
know the difference between good and evil. But a serpent (who really is just a serpent, and wasn't identified with the devil until
later Christian thought) convinces the woman (she still doesn't have
a name) that she won't really die if she eats from the tree of
knowledge of good and evil. He's right—she eats it, and gives some
to Adam. They don't die, but they do realize they are naked, and scramble for the nearest fig leaves. Then they hear God walking through
the garden “at the time of the evening breeze” (the author of
this creation narrative saw God in much more earthly terms than the
other author). The people hide from God, because they are naked. God
says “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the
tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” Adam fesses up, and God
curses him, his wife, and the serpent. He tells the woman he will
“greatly increase your pangs in childbearing”, and that her
husband will rule over her (Adam soon names her Eve). He tells Adam:
“Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it
all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth
for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of
your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out
of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
Then God says,“See, the man has
become like one of us [there's that “us” again], knowing good and
evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the
tree of life, and eat, and live forever.” Rather than risk Adam and
Eve gaining immortality, he casts them out of the garden, and leaves cherubim with flaming swords to guard the tree of life.
Before long, Eve gives birth to Cain (a farmer) and Abel (a herder).
God likes Abel's offerings of sheep, but not Cain's offerings of
grain, so Cain slays Abel in a fit of jealousy. It's the first of
many, many murders in the Bible. Genesis continues with the story of
the flood, which is strikingly similar to older Sumerian flood myths,
down to the boat, and the bird sent out to look for land.
Biblical scholars call the section of
Genesis from the creation to the flood the “primeval history”,
because it's a highly mythic story in which serpents talk and people live for hundreds of years. It's not just about the ancestors of the
Jews, but of all people. After the flood, people all speak one
language, and start cooperating to build the great tower of Babel.
God decides once again that people are getting too big for their
britches, and “confuses their tongues” and scatters them. The
next major character is Abram, who comes from “Ur of the Chaldeans”
(a historical city in Mesopotamia). He will soon be renamed Abraham,
and will become the ancestor of the Jews.
Should We Take The Creation Stories as the Literal
Truth?
I could get into when these two
narratives were written, and what the political currents of the time
might have been, or whether the Priestly narrative was based in part
on the Babylonian story of the great god Marduk creating the universe
from the slain corpse of Tiamat, but this post is getting long, and
those topics are controversial among scholars. So I'll get back to
the reason I'm writing about this. First, I want to understand where
my biblical literalist/creationist friends are coming from. Second, I
want to investigate the idea that the creation stories in Genesis
could be the the infallible word of God, and therefore the absolute,
literal truth. I'm not going to discuss the scientific consensus on human origins. I've accepted that
creationists aren't impressed by scientific evidence. Rather, I'd
like to meet the creationists on their own turf, and take a critical
look at Genesis itself. Does it make sense to think of the two
creation stories in Genesis as the literal truth?
In a word, no. The two stories were
obviously written by different people, and they are completely
divergent; even contradictory. The first says plants and animals
were created before people. The second says people were created
before plants and animals. Which is it? You can believe one is
literally true, or that the other is literally true, but you can't
logically believe both any more than you can believe a square circle
is possible. They can't both be true at once. There are other
difficulties, too. It's obvious that the writer of the first
narrative thought of the world as flat, and at the center of the
universe, and thought that the sky as an actual, solid dome. I don't
mean to belittle that author. The earth looks like it's flat, and if
you watch the stars turn, it really does look like they're embedded
in fixed places in a great cosmic dome that arches over the earth,
spinning around the axis of the North Star. The sun and moon really do
seem to orbit the earth. So, it's understandable that the author was
mistaken, but he was mistaken nonetheless. If you are truly going to
take the Genesis creation story literally, then you would have to
reject Copernicus as well as Darwin. You would even have to reject
Ptolemy, and declare that the world is flat. Hardly anyone believes
that these days, of course, and that's a good thing.
Even the most ardent fundamentalist
doesn't take the Bible absolutely literally, though he might claim
to. You can't take every word of the Bible literally, because
it contradicts itself, and some of it, like the idea of the solid
dome of the sky, has turned out to be undeniably false. Everybody who
follows the Bible has to pick and choose which verses to follow, and
which to ignore, otherwise every Christian, Jew, and Muslim today
would follow every rule in Leviticus. I've never met anyone who
doesn't interpret at least some part of the Bible metaphorically.
Once I went camping with an ardent young-earth creationist. We were
talking about religion, and I brought up the story in Matthew 19
where a rich young man tells Jesus he has followed the law, and
wonders what else he should do to be assured of eternal life. Jesus
tells him to sell his possessions and give the money to the poor. The
man goes away, dismayed. Jesus then tells his disciples—twice--how
hard it is for a rich man to get into heaven:
“Truly I tell you, it
will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again
I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a
needle then for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
When I asked my creationist acquaintance about this, he started
telling me how the “eye of the needle” was really a narrow gate
into Jerusalem. Here was a guy who was a literalist when it came to
Genesis, but was only too happy to give an uncomfortable saying--from
the mouth of Jesus himself--a metaphorical spin. It's true that Jesus did like
parables, but there's no evidence for a gate called the "eye of the
needle" in Jerusalem, and good reasons to think that this time, Jesus meant exactly what he said. But some people don't want to believe that, any more than they want to believe we came from monkeys.
My point is that nobody is a true biblical literalist,
and it's a good thing, because if they were, we would still be acting
like an ancient, violent, Iron Age tribe—stoning people to death
for things like homosexuality and suspected witchcraft, owning
slaves, wiping out rival peoples (like Joshua did at Jericho), and
sequestering women in their “unclean” time of the month.
Humankind has gotten, well, kinder since then, and less
superstitious. At most, stories like the ones in Genesis should be
taken as allegories, not seen as literally true. It's not clear
that the even the original authors thought they should be taken
literally, or they would have tried harder to iron out the inconsistencies. People like Karen Armstrong claim that people then were more
comfortable thinking in mythic or allegorical terms than they are now. I don't
know, but it's true that early Christian figures like St. Augustine
and Origen thought Genesis should be seen as allegory. Consider the
words of Augustine:
“It not infrequently happens that
something about the earth, about the sky, about other elements of
this world, about the motion and rotation or even the magnitude and
distances of the stars, about definite eclipses of the sun and moon,
about the passage of years and seasons, about the nature of animals,
of fruits, of stones, and of other such things, may be known with the
greatest certainty by reasoning or by experience, even by one who is
not a Christian. It is too disgraceful and ruinous, though, and
greatly to be avoided, that he [the non-Christian] should hear a
Christian speaking so idiotically on these matters, and as if in
accord with Christian writings, that he might say that he could
scarcely keep from laughing when he saw how totally in error they
are.”
This sounds a lot like the lament of many progressive Christians today, who are embarrassed by the literal-mindedness of their brethren. But we need to be careful even with
allegory. St. Augustine, for example, based the idea of original sin
on the fall of Adam and Eve. For hundreds of years, people
pointed to Genesis as evidence that, not only are people basically
bad, but it was women who got us into this sinful predicament in the
first place. No wonder so many people have used the Bible to justify
the subjugation of women. Even today, there are weddings
where women are told to obey their husbands. Women still can't be
priests in many denominations. Why? Partly because of the stories in
Genesis.
We should know better these days. We've made a bit of progress in the 2,500-3,000 years since Genesis was written. Science has shown that men didn't come before women, and there is no
reason to think there ever was a tree of knowledge of good and evil,
much less a talking serpent. These stories read like mythology
because they ARE mythology. That doesn't mean they are useless. They
are actually rather beautiful in places, and they give us vital insights into how our ancient forebears thought; and where we came from culturally--just not biologically or cosmologically. The creation stories are valuable,
but they should be taken with many, many grains of salt if we want to
relate them to modern life. The Bible was written by many people,
over many hundreds of years, in a violent and superstitious time.
There's a great deal of wisdom in the Bible, but there are also innumerable horrors and hurtful superstitions. The Old Testament remains the most
violent book I have ever read. Nobody takes it absolutely literally
these days, even if they claim to. And that's a very good thing.
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