God's False Mirror
Genesis 1-11 and their theological consequences
Genesis 1-11
Read the entire book online!
Chapter 1 - Science and Religion (9)
Contradictions in the Bible | Religious authority and science
As a matter of fact, the way of approaching knowledge by the religious authorities is manly based on axioms, fixed or rigid propositions, which are pronouncements not proven in any way, and which are accepted as truth through human agreement, by vote of a majority in a Church Counsel or Synod. The “truths” of religious dogmas have come sometimes with the force of a majority led by strategic interests, and aren’t based on direct observation and analysis of the phenomena but on statements of belief and canons of doctrinal faith.
Real knowledge comes in time, and is in evolution, and we cannot imprison all knowledge about God within the confines of some old dogma or religious doctrines based on ancient biblical texts. For this reason, I maintain that the knowledge of God is sometimes better reached through scientific research, through the knowledge of nature, than by the reiteration of the same religious propositions. The universe looks more complicated than ever, and precisely this multidimensionality points towards the possibility for the existence of an extremely complex and generous Reality infinite in space and time.
The narratives of the Bible are not to be blamed for trying to replace real knowledge with false information because at the time they were written such real knowledge didn’t exist.
- 57 -
In the context of the history of sciences, revelation about the origins of the universe didn’t compete with real knowledge; they are the product of a very different historical epoch and, from the point of view of information contained, the narratives of creation from the book of Genesis reflects the level of pre-scientific cosmology available in that historical epoch. They speak the same pre-scientific language as other non-Jewish sources, which tried to bring light to the mysteries of the origins around 2,500-3,000 years ago or more. That is another clue which leads to the conclusion that this revelation doesn’t present the superior knowledge of God about the universe but rather the average human knowledge at the time.
Scientific explanations are qualitatively superior to the imposition through the religious authority of certain dogma about the cosmos, precisely because they are based on continuous research for truth and incessant progress and not on religious authority. The latter pretend to possess a certain knowledge which was given to it once and for all. Faith and science can go together undisrupted but science and authority usually cannot befriend each other just because authority is by definition conservative and against change and science is, in its essence, the knowledge of things in change. Authority wants to keep what it has, but science disputes all that is.
Historically speaking, the competition between revelation and sciences emerged only when the development of modern sciences gained momentum. Real scientific knowledge was prohibited for a while by the religious clergy, who sustained the so-called revelation from the book of Genesis and a battle had been waged between progress and resistance to it. Notwithstanding, what was thought to be revelation from the book of Genesis has been step by step swept away by systematic human knowledge in spite of the power of the forces sustaining its permanence.
Some religious functionaries, representatives of religious institutions, tried, in the past, to impose their spiritual convictions on believers but, by not allowing any alternative to their cosmological or anthropological views, they have in fact unwillingly disclosed an incredible vulnerability. This fragility was demonstrated by trying to replace a critical analysis with spiritual authority. In time, what was based only on authority but not open for debate suffered defeat.
- 58 -
On the other side, no scientific discovery can be foisted on society and no authority can sustain obligatory scientific theories, and never did.
Are the newest discoveries of modern sciences prohibiting the possibility of the existence of God? Of course, they are not. The sciences cannot prove a negative fact, the inexistence of God, in any way. I think that whoever tries to “demonstrate” that God doesn’t exist on the basis of scientific facts is doomed to failure. If God’s existence cannot be proved or disproved scientifically it seems that this is a matter only for faith.
What the science can prove is that the narratives of creation from the book of Genesis don’t reflect reality, hence they cannot be trusted as the explanation for the apparition of the universe and of humankind. In this situation, God didn’t create the universe as the book of Genesis says and He isn’t correctly described by the first chapters of the Bible. When one rejects the book of Genesis God becomes even more mysterious and the understanding of His nature becomes very important. Dogmatic faith doesn’t explain God anymore and every believer needs to have his or her own personal vision about Him.
Knowledge of God through the study of nature is only the understanding of the possibility of His existence mediated by the knowledge of nature. A more advanced experience with God happens when He dwells in a particular human being and inside his or her consciousness, and the encounter between God and the human being takes place.
In the same time, before believing something one needs arguments for his or her belief or disbelief and all these arguments give the rationality of the faith. Faith is based on reasons because none can believe or refuse to believe anything without good motivation.
Does the Bible contain enough information, in the first two chapters of it, to make sense of the origins of the universe? I would answer negatively to this question because on just two pages of the book of Genesis, which contain contradictory texts and also which negate all basic human experience, it would be impossible to tell the whole story of the origins of the universe. The book of Genesis can be at the most an allegorical way to transmit a certain message, and it is not at all a book of science.
- 59 -
How credible are the narratives from the book of Genesis in our days, when astrophysics, quantum physics or genetics took their rightful place? Is there anyone left to believe that, at a certain moment in time, in the process of the creation of the earth, our planet was alone in cosmos, being the first created and wandering in complete isolation under the eyes of God for three days? This description is an unreasonable proposition.
Anyone can remember, from historical accounts, that, for a long period of time, the institution of the Church defended the belief that the earth is in the centre of the universe and the sun and all other celestial bodies are gravitating around it.
The Church didn’t yield to this position until it was forced to do so, by strong scientific arguments. How can anyone trust, any more, the interpretations given by the classical theist commentators, to the book of Genesis? It isn’t that the representatives of the Church made a mistake in the way in which they understood the dynamic of the solar system. The interpretation given by the clergy to the Bible was determined by what the book of Genesis and other biblical texts state about the earth, sun, moon, and stars. That interpretation was based on a myth in which the earth was created first, before the celestial bodies, and all the latter were set in place only in the service of our planet. Of course, that seems to mean that the earth is in the centre of the universe and all the cosmos gravitate around it. The description of the universe by the Bible being wrong, all interpretations based on it cannot be other than false.
Based on the Bible, for a long period of time the explanations given by organised religion to cosmological problems were wrong and the Roman Catholic Church not too long ago conceded that its cosmological views were incorrect. Nevertheless, many commentators of the Bible representing many Christian denominations continue to trust and to promote a literal interpretation of the book of Genesis. What must happen to persuade them to reconsider their positions? Such a literal interpretation was the cause for the misunderstanding of the functioning of the solar system. The geocentric theory has been adopted by the Church which endorsed it with all its spiritual authority in spite of its fundamental error:
- 60 -
“The early Greeks observed the sky and all that it contained. From their observations, the Greeks believed the Earth was the centre of the moon, Sun, and the only known planets at that time, Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter. These planets were said to be moving around Earth in a clockwise direction. They believed the Earth was motionless, because no one felt the Earth moving. The stars appeared to move around the Earth daily, further convincing them of this theory, which became known as geocentric or Earth-centred. The Greeks had a basic understanding of geometry and trigonometry, which lead them to conclude that fast moving objects were closer to the Earth than slower moving objects. Around 140 A.D., Claudius Ptolemy wrote thirteen volumes on the motion of the planets, and put the geocentric theory in its finest form.”[1]
With the book of Genesis at their disposal the representatives of the Church sustained Ptolemy’s theory and were ready to declare as heretic everyone who dared to reckon otherwise. This was not a coincidence. The book of Genesis is conceived in a way that not only permits, but also privileges the interpretation of the cosmos given by Ptolemy.
How can anyone trust the present endorsement of the Church for the book of Genesis if it clearly had interpreted it so wrong in the past? Placing so much weight behind the geocentric theory, the Church has compromised any credibility of its interpretation of the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis. Reading the book of Genesis from the Bible, one can easily notice an incredible resemblance between what Greeks thought about the universe and the record of the Bible. Why could that be? In my opinion, it is obvious that the narratives from the book of Genesis reflects the level of knowledge of the ancient time when the book was written, and isn’t at all a form of “high science” or a “science from above”, which bears the secrets of the universe transmitted to humankind through revelation.
The narratives of creation from the Bible are not at all a kind of an extraordinary knowledge, very exact and carefully descriptive, but a pre-scientific explanation of the origins of the universe, usual for that historical time, and it is in accordance with some similar explanations given by the Greeks. Both explanations have the earth in the centre of the universe, given its importance for humankind.
- 61 -
This earth-centricity is a direct effect of the narrowness and the limited view of humankind about the universe.
From that time on, until our days, the universe became bigger and bigger, due to the improvement of instruments of observation and the accumulation a scientific data. Nevertheless, for a divine discovery one would expect that the record of creation from the Bible to be ahead of its time and to convey a much more advanced knowledge.
Why was the empirical science of the universe embraced so much by the Christian religion? Probably just because religion in reality needs science, or it was felt at the time that it needed it in order to strengthen and legitimise its minute record of creation. To me, the adoption of the Greek science in the intimate corpus of dogma, by the Christian religion, shows the insufficiencies of the biblical record as an explicit model of the universe. If the biblical record was a quasi-comprehensive story of creation and didn’t leave anything unclear, the demand for extra biblical explanations would have been less obvious.
The association between religion and science wasn’t always a happy one. While in the Middle Ages thinkers like Thomas Aquinas embraced strongly the Aristotelian theory of the universe and through this helped the promotion of the Greek scientific thought, later on, at the dawn of the development of sciences and particularly of astronomy, the relationship between science and Christian religion became more problematic. The Greek philosophy with its scientific offshoots which once was acceptable and useful in order to sustain the religious doctrines, in time became unacceptable when it was obvious that science is no longer subservient to religion.
The victims, who died on “the altar of truth”, are well known and I would remember Giordano Bruno. He was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician and astronomer. His cosmological theories went beyond the Copernican model in proposing that the sun was essentially a star, and moreover, that the universe contained an infinite number of inhabited worlds populated by other intelligent beings.[2]
- 62 -
I also would propose for recollection the treatments applied to Copernicus and Galileo Galilee by the official Church, which by themselves show how far astray the stories contained by the book of Genesis can lead someone. One would say that the stories from the book of Genesis concerning the creation of the world are not directly responsible for the clerical abuses but they were the direct source of documentation and ideological support for such religious behaviour.
The Roman Catholic Church was not the only enemy of science but, based on the stories of creation from the book of Genesis, Martin Luther, one of the most important Christian reformers, also condemned the new theory.[3]
Martin Luther once said:
“People gave ear to an upstart astrologer who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens or the firmament, the sun and the moon. Whoever wishes to appear clever must devise some new system, which of all systems is of course the very best. This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth.”[4]
This statement makes us wonder if that sacred Scripture, mentioned by Martin Luther, was really inspired by God, even if clearly it is not in accord with the undisputed astronomical facts. There is only one reasonable answer and that is that God wouldn’t have inspired that story with Joshua, which is also a legend.
John Calvin, another important reformer, was not welcoming to the heliocentric theories. He stated:
“The Christian is not to compromise so as to obscure the distinction between good and evil, and is to avoid the errors of those dreamers who have a spirit of bitterness and contradiction, who reprove everything and prevent the order of nature. We will see some who are so deranged, not only in religion but who in all things reveal their monstrous nature, that they will say that the sun does not move, and that it is the earth which shifts and turns. When we see such minds we must indeed confess that the devil possess them, and that God sets them before us as mirrors, in order to keep us in his fear.”[5]
- 63 -
He referred clearly to the revolution of the sun, moon, and stars around the earth. For him, a person who could demonstrate that the earth moves around the sun, it was a deranged human being. What I want to say here is that the cosmology, suggested by the book of Genesis, was not just a misinterpretation of a certain particular Church but it is also, more fundamentally, inherent in the texts of the Bible themselves and whoever wants to take these narratives literally, unavoidably reaches the same conclusions.
How can a book be inspired by God if contains demonstrable untruths? How could Joshua ask to the sun to stand still and not to orbit around the earth, if in fact the sun doesn’t orbit around the earth anyway? This passage could not be inspired by God, who knows the truth.
Not only the book of Genesis but also other texts of the Bible seem to support the geocentric view of the cosmos. For example, psalm 93 was interpreted as evidence for the geocentric theory:
“1 The LORD is king, he is robed in majesty; the LORD is robed, he is girded with strength. He has established the world; it shall never be moved;” (Psalm 93; 1 NRSV)
Specifically, members of the Catholic Church took that line to mean that the earth did not revolve around anything because it is “immovable”. That stands in direct opposition to the heliocentric idea of orbiting planets.[6]
The question arises: “Was that line, from psalm 93, inspired by God?” If God knows everything it is hard to accept that He would inspire a text, which in fact contradicts a demonstrable reality. How many lines of the Bible are not inspired by God and what is inspired and what is not? I try to give an answer to this question in relation to the book of Genesis.
- 64 -
The Roman Catholic Church has rejected for a long time the heliocentric theory of the universe because it seems to be contradicted by the Bible. In time, it changed its position concerning the heliocentric theory. In 1758, the Roman Catholic Church dropped the general prohibition of books advocating heliocentric theory from the Index of Forbidden Books. Pope Pius VII approved a decree in 1822 by the Sacred Congregation of the Inquisition to allow the printing of heliocentric books in Rome.[7]
Even if the Roman Catholic Church changed its attitude in relation to geocentric and heliocentric theories, nevertheless, a literal interpretation of the texts concerning the creation of the world, contained by the book of Genesis, still continues to be present in the evangelical movements. The representatives of the Roman Catholic Church admit that mistakes were made in the past in the relationship between religion and science, but this admission doesn’t seem to have an important impact on the new apostles of the literal interpretation of the Bible.
The heliocentric theory of the universe is now taught in all schools and accepted in all but a tiny minority of communities as the definitive understanding of the universe. It posits that the Earth revolves around the sun, thereby overturning the previously accepted geocentric theory of the universe, which held that the universe revolves around the earth. Nicolas Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, and Johannes Kepler are some of the scientists most famously related to heliocentric theory.
Some people try to reconcile a literal interpretation of the book of Genesis with the modern discoveries of cosmology but the results are unconvincing. It was either seven days or 13.7 billion years. The earth is either a part of something much bigger, and they originated in the same unique process, for example the Big Bang, or the earth was created separated from the cosmos and all celestial bodies came afterwards only to service the blue planet.
- 65 -
The earth, as one amongst other planets of the solar system, always took its light from the sun, or for a certain period of time the earth was alone in the universe and was illuminated by an undetermined source. A literal interpretation of the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis is the basis for a false understanding of reality and for an incorrect theology about God.
It is probably not fair to choose based on religious beliefs which information offered by sciences we accept and which we reject. Religion should not dictate what information or scientific results we can accept and what we have to reject on the basis of religious dogmas. If one denies scientific methodology which is used to analyse the origins of the universe and humankind, why is he or she using practical scientific results in other domains? Sciences use, generally speaking, the same methodology, when drawing any of their conclusions.
The same methodological tools were used by sciences both when the principles which govern the functioning of our TV sets or our mobile phones were discovered, and when the age of the universe was established. Why is it that the same people accept or love the first category of scientific results and reject or despise the conclusions about the origins of the universe? Is there a double standard? The same human creativity and intelligence was at work. The same general methods applied by sciences are used in mechanics, communications, or in astrophysics. Sciences use the following steps in order to reach their conclusions:
“1. Observation and description of a phenomenon. The observations are made visually or with the aid of scientific equipment.2. Formulation of a hypothesis to explain the phenomenon in the form of a causal mechanism or a mathematical relation.
3. Test the hypothesis by analyzing the results of observations or by predicting and observing the existence of new phenomena that follow from the hypothesis. If experiments do not confirm the hypothesis, the hypothesis must be rejected or modified (Go back to Step 2).
4. Establish a theory based on repeated verification of the results.”[8]
These are the general steps which precede any scientific discovery. If we accept and validate the discoveries which give us the chance to communicate easier, for example via Internet, we should understand that human knowledge in astrophysics follows the same basic principles when dealing with the universe, albeit in a specific way. We are happy to drive a powerful car, but, at the same time, some of us become ironic with the idea of a Big Bang, on religious grounds, even if both aspects are the conclusions of similar processes of scientific knowledge. Sciences all work in the same direction and with the same purpose, the increase in human knowledge, inclusively in the topics of the origins of the universe and of humankind.
- 66 -
[1] academic.emporia.edu/abersusa/students/denning/geo.htm
[2] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno
[3] forums.catholic.com › Forums › Apologetics › Philosophy
[6] www.ehow.com › Culture & Society
[7] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliocentrism
[8] www.scientificpsychic.com/workbook/scientific-method.htm
 |
 |
God's False Mirror | The inspiration of the Bible
Written by Gabriel Baicu  |
 |
What happens if someone keeps faith in God but loses faith in the inspiration of the Bible and in its accuracy? Is there any valid Christian spirituality outside the texts of the Bible? Can one keep the conviction that Jesus Christ brought to the world teachings for real spiritual regeneration even if some of them are misinterpreted in the Bible? How about the relationship between Jesus and the old Scriptures, for example, the book of Genesis? Did Jesus believe or indeed know that the book of Genesis, found in the Jewish Scriptures, was inspired by God? If one finds Jesus’ references to the book of Genesis is that sufficient proof that the book itself is infallible? Actually, there is such reference in the N.T. about Noah but to me this is not sufficient evidence that the book of Genesis is inspired by God, because that saying could be a latter insertion made by the evangelist or the editor.
I don’t reject, in any way, the idea of revelation, either general revelation through Christ or personal revelation given directly to a believer. At the same time, it must be remarked that any message, including God’s revelation, coming through a prophet, is submitted to linguistic limitations and interpretations and possible historic reinterpretations which can change entirely the signification of the message. For example, the first gospel was written about 40 or 50 years after the referred events, which historically is a very long period of time. Let’s imagine that the history of the World War II was written in 1984, 40 years after its end. How accurate would that history be? In the meantime, between 1944 and 1984, let’s say that the war stories were kept in the public memory by the traditions of different communities communicated verbally from one generation to another. A similar thing happened with the life and events of Jesus’ life.
How long after the creation of the world, were the narratives from the book of Genesis written? Biblical scholars today think that several people wrote the creation accounts, and then these accounts were anthologised together much later in the book we currently call thebook of Genesis, and that explains why there isn’t unity between the texts.[1]
- 27 -
How can one know what part of the Bible is the product of divine inspiration and what is the result of human effort to explain the world? Only by studying carefully the texts of the O.T. and of the N.T. can one reach a conclusion in this respect. Is Genesis, the first book of the O.T., a book inspired by God? Is the book of Genesis the truth or it is a lie? Or is it neither truth, nor a lie? What else? The first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis could be a deep spiritual message embedded in mythological literature. The world hadn’t been made in seven days, the daylight was not created before the sun and Adam and Eve are not historical characters. What still remains as a spiritual message? It is the information that there is God, who created everything, even in another manner than the one described by the book of Genesis. But the manner of creation is important and is a useful tool in order to know God and His contribution to the creation of the universe and of humankind.
A question nevertheless persists. How can we trust that the information about God’s existence is correct if all details from the narratives of creation from the book of Genesis are wrong? I consider that the only way to answer this question is God’s personal revelation, personal in the sense that is individually addressed. If one has a personal revelation he or she can get the assurance that God exists even if the book of Genesis isn’t an accurate description of the formation of the universe and mankind. In my opinion, the narratives of the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis, alone, are not enough evidence in order to convince someone that God exists because many readers can reach the conclusion that particular details of the creation of the universe are wrong, being in contradiction with rationality and with scientific data.
The Christian tradition takes it that the book of Genesis is inspired directly by God together with all Scriptures, and this conclusion is based on the pseudonymous text from 2 Timothy 3; 16-17, found in the N.T. This text is important because it is the biblical reference on which is based the claim of the divine inspiration of the book of Genesis.
- 28 -
At the same time, another biblical book in the N.T. contains the claim that it wasn’t directly inspired by God but that it was written by composition, following the personal investigation of the author, and that is the gospel of Luke. (Luke 1; 1-4)
If Luke was directly inspired by God, he wouldn’t have needed to make any personal investigations because everything would have been given to him directly in his consciousness by Him. Luke making any personal investigation in order to check the exactness of the facts, after them being received by inspiration from God, if they really were communicated in this manner, could be considered a great impoliteness towards Him because that could be interpreted as a lack of trust in Him and in the content of the message, transmitted directly by Him.
As a matter of fact, Luke wrote the gospel by way of documentation and research and not by way of inspiration, as he declared himself. Maybe he contacted some eyewitnesses if such people had still been alive at the time, but that is not the same as the direct inspiration of God. One can ask if only Luke proceeded in that way, or all the evangelists acted in the same manner. As Luke himself mentioned, many had undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events happening in Jesus’ life on Earth, so probably Marc or Mathew used the same method when they wrought their gospels, and they also were not directly inspired by God.
Consequently, not all the Scriptures are insufflate by God, as 2 Timothy maintains. Most biblical texts are the product of compilations from early oral or written traditions. They reflect the theological views of their authors who investigated the collective memory of the events described by the texts.
After 40 years, after the events, not many eye witnesses remained, taking into consideration that the life span at that time was 35-40 years of age. At the same time probably not all of them died. Many witnesses of Jesus’ life were not very young at the time of the events, and some were persecuted, and died during the persecutions.
On the other side, concerning the book of Genesis, there were not eye witnesses to confirm the story of the creation of heavens and earth or of the creation of humankind. These stories also contain the influence of many myths of creation, circulating amongst the inhabitants of the Middle-East, at the time.
- 29 -
Some scholars see a reversed influence of the biblical texts on other mythologies but the real dynamic of the possible reciprocal influence isn’t clearly established.
This pretension of the Bible, to be an inspired book, comes mainly from the following biblical text attributed to the apostle Paul:
“16 All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17 so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.” (2 Timothy 3; 16-17 NRSV)
The difficulty with this text is that precisely the two of Paul’s epistles addressed to Timothy, the Pastoral Epistles, are at the core of a debate surrounding their authenticity. Not only are they contested in connection with their authorship, but their theology is somehow different from that of Paul’s in undisputed epistles. In other words, these two epistles seem to have been written by another author than Paul. Without entering into this debate in detail, I have to say that I also agree with the opinions of many scholars that 1 and 2 Timothy seem not to be written or dictated by Paul, and that is because, from my point of view, there is a difference in theology between Paul’s undisputed epistles, such as Romans or Galatians, and 1 and 2 Timothy.
Being a pseudonymous work, 1 Timothy doesn’t have any authority on the issue of the inspiration of the book of Genesis, because the epistle is not truthful in relation to its authorship. In point of fact, 1 Timothy was written before the gospels and because of that it cannot cover the whole canon of the Bible. It is important to establish to what Scriptures the text from 2 Timothy refers. The canon of the O.T. didn’t reach its final form until AD 90. Nevertheless, the Pentateuch had been authoritative for the community long before the time of Jesus.[2]
A pseudonym work casts doubts on its truthfulness in any of its aspects. Moreover, the reference to its inspiration could be proof that this epistle used the text from chapter 3, verse 16, only to artificially endorse its own inspiration.
- 30 -
The majority of the narratives of the N.T. are based on the transmission by eyewitnesses of their own experiences of events to their communities, and after that they were transmitted in the traditions of the first Christian communities. In the process of this handing over, in time a lot of new theological interpretations emerged. All the gospels were written in order to answer to the needs of the Christian communities and they did that to their best, and sometimes with disregard to the historical details or even to the precise content of Jesus’ teachings. The proof for this assertion can be found in countless discrepancies occurring between the texts of the N.T.
Taken literally, the expression “all Scripture is inspired by God” is not accurate and this observation refers also to the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis. A process of gradual integration and compilation of many sources happened with the book of Genesis. The present study dealing mainly with the reliability of the book of Genesis refers also indirectly to the inspiration of the whole Bible.
One thing must be said, God will never dictate contradictory or absurd texts. If He had decided to let us know some facts unknown by us concerning our pre-history or the origins of the universe, God would have given us real records. Instead what we have is only a mythological way of describing the origins of universe and humankind contained in the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis. I consider that the first 11 chapters from the Bible must be seen in the context of all mythologies about the origins of the universe coming from all ancient societies, and not disentangled from them.
Are the narratives from the book of Genesis inspired by God or are they mere human products? If they are inspired by God, are they inspired in their literal sense, a factual, historical one, or they are inspired in the form of parables, similar to ones used by Jesus, in order to communicate His messages? If Christ was present at the moment of creation, being everlasting, He could use the same parabolic way of speaking about the creation of the Cosmos, as He did when He lived on Earth about other issues. The problem with the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis is that the stories contradict each other and are in many ways absurd. Opposite to that, Jesus’s parables in the N.T. were short stories, coherent and with rational conclusions.
- 31 -
If one admits that the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis are parables, inspired to humankind by God, even if no particular details of the process of creation can be taken as real facts a certain rational order of creation and meaningful conclusions should be expected. If the stories of creation from the Bible are neither real facts nor parables they have to be considered mythology and that is a different genre.
If we credit the stories of creation from the Bible with the qualification of parables inspired by God, the paradise and Adam and Eve could only be symbols for what God intends to achieve for human beings in the future, if they will enter in a certain relationship with Him. At the same time, the story of Adam and Eve could be similar to the parable of the prodigious son, which can happen in everybody’s life hence it has a universal value. They never really existed but they are legendary personages, through whom God shows us His interest for human beings. The only message would be that God exists and He created the world. Such message, nevertheless, is repeated in many texts of the Bible and the book of Genesis doesn’t bring any added value or any originality to it, instead creating plenty of confusion.
If one believes that the stories of creation from the book of Genesis are a way in which God speaks to humankind through parables, then the conclusion is that these stories were inspired by Him. Along these lines, if one compares the rationality of Jesus’ parables with the irrationality of the stories of creation from the book of Genesis, the conclusion is that they cannot have the same author.
If the book of Genesis was inspired by the eternal Christ, as Christians believe, the style and language of Genesis should be similar to all messages expressed by Him, when He lived on Earth. If Jesus never contradicted Himself, and He spoke always very rationally, why are the biblical texts from Genesis so contradictory? This cannot be Jesus’ style. Their different situation in time doesn’t matter if the book of Genesis was dictated by God.
In my opinion, the texts from the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis aren’t inspired by God, neither as fact nor as parables. They are in many ways irrational, hence absurd, and if we want to attach any spiritual message what results is a mixture of contradictory information which doesn’t present a coherent story of creation.
As far as the stories of creation from Genesis cannot be seen as an exact description of facts or alternatively the texts of parables, inspired by God, what remains is a human authorship and mythological meanings which can be attributed to them. It is important to observe that there are two stories of creation in the book of Genesis and not just one, and those narratives contradict each other.
- 32 -
| |
➤  |
|
God's False Mirror | About the authorship of the book of Genesis
Written by Mike| |
|
Was the book of Genesis compiled from oral traditions or previously written sources, or from both, by many writers, or was it written by Moses? Were the Near-Eastern mythologies sources of biblical accounts or did the latter influence the former? Is it possible that the first 11 chapters of Genesis were written by Adam, and transmitted in writing through generations? I will not enter into all details of this debate, but I am inserting a few observations into it.
A reference to the activity of writing is found in Genesis 5:1 which says: “This is the book of the generations of Adam.” This proposition is considered by some commentators to be an expression suggesting that the art of writing was known within the lifetime of Adam and this could make writing as old as the human race. It should be noticed that the cuneiform writing became the system used by all civilized countries east of the Mediterranean. Cuneiform writing consists of wedge-shape impressions made in plastic clay. The Hebrew word for “write” means “cut in” or “dig.” The contention is that Adam would have used this system of writing which he knew from his Creator.[1]
There are some problems with this interpretation and one of them is that Adam was only a literary figure and not a historical one, therefore he didn’t live on Earth at all. Even if Adam had been a real personage and not a fictitious one, he couldn’t have been a conscious witness to his own birth. As a matter of fact, the expression “this is the book of the generations of Adam” is not an argument for the existence of writings from Adam’s times as long as we don’t know when that book was written. It could have been a text talking about an alleged past written late in time and not during Adam’s life. Being a book about Adam isn’t the same as being a book written by Adam.
- 33 -
Another objection is that Adam couldn’t have authored the book of Genesis because he couldn’t have witnessed the things before his creation. The following quotation explains it:
“Apparently God wrote the first chapter. There is no way anyone else would have known those things. But for chapter 2 Adam was there and was an eyewitness to what was happening. Adam wrote chapters 2, 3, and 4.”[2]
What language would God have used if He had written the book of Genesis? As the original of this writing is nowhere to be found one must deduce that the oldest written language known by humankind would have also been God’s language. The oldest written language of human civilization, discovered by man, is the cuneiform writing and, being its age, the deduction which is apparently logic, is that it must be the writing used by God and transferred to Adam. At the same time, cuneiform is a difficult language to be used and it is hazardous to affirm that God would have used such a cumbersome form of communication.
Cuneiform writing today is seen as pretty obsolete and for this reason human civilization discarded it long ago. Cuneiform writing began as a system of pictographs. In the third millennium, the pictorial representations became simplified and more abstract as the number of characters in use grew smaller. The system consists of a combination of logo-phonetic, consonantal alphabetic and syllabic signs. Between half a million and two million cuneiform tablets are estimated to have been excavated in modern times. At the same time, no texts about the creation of Earth and man were found in cuneiform until now, hence there is no writing in cuneiform about creation from Adam.[3]
The only known cuneiform texts, related to Genesis, refer to the Flood. This has come to light since the recent deciphering of a clay cuneiform tablet first shown to curators at the British Museum in 1985, but not surrendered by its owner for translation until 2009. The conclusions of this finding were analysed by Irving Finkel in his book “The Ark Before Noah:
- 34 -
Decoding the Story of the Flood”. Irving Finkel was very interested in the writings, and precisely in their cuneiform style. He said about that:
“The world’s oldest and hardest writing, older by far than any alphabet, written by long-dead Sumerians and Babylonians over more than 3,000 years, and as extinct by the time of the Romans as any dinosaur. What a challenge! What an adventure!”[4]
Is it possible that God would have utilised and thought of a language which in time would become extinct, risking in this way the loss of much important information? It is very hard to accept that God wrote the first chapter of the book of Genesis or so in cuneiform, taught Adam the cuneiform writing, and that Adam wrote the remaining few chapters of Genesis in cuneiform also. Why was all written in cuneiform if God’s intention was to transmit the message over the millennia? At the same time, no other tablets have been found, except what I mentioned, and the core of the message about creation eventually has been lost.
To me, accepting Adam as an historical personage and not only a legendary one, is unreasonable and, in any case, it is very improbable that God would have taught Adam to write in the cuneiform system, as this type of writing is based on pictograms and difficult to use. Ideographic scripts (in which graphemes are ideograms representing concepts or ideas, rather than a specific word in a language), and pictographic scripts (in which the graphemes are iconic pictures) are not thought to be able to express all that can be communicated by language, as argued by the linguists John DeFrancis and J. Marshall Unger. Essentially, they postulate that no full writing system can be completely pictographic or ideographic; it must be able to refer directly to a language in order to have the full expressive capacity of a language.[5]
The writing systems have been developed in time, therefore they are evolving phenomena; they haven’t been given by God once and for all.
- 35 -
If indeed the language had come directly from God one would expect Him to teach man the most evolved system of writing and not the most incipient and primitive one. God could have taught Adam the use of the phonetic alphabet, which is more flexible and evolved, in which case the first man would have been a developed and sophisticated being, as he should. In point of fact, written language has been invented by man and this is the reason one can see an evolution of written languages along the millennia, from more complicated and tortuous ones to more efficient ones.
At the same time, it is well documented that there is more than one human author of the book of Genesis; consequently Moses couldn’t be the only author of it. I will not enter into detail, at this point, about the obvious differences between the two versions of the creation stories, found in chapter 1 and in chapter 2 of the book. In any case, if only one author had written the book, these differences wouldn’t have been possible. The same stands true if God had inspired the whole book of Genesis to one or many human writers. Contradictions are explained by the multitude of the authorship, and the plurality of sources.
The idea that God has written the beginning of the book of Genesis can be negated also from the way in which the Bible speaks about God’s revelation. God has inspired messages to human writers through the Holy Spirit, in almost all cases. He didn’t write the message Himself, except the situation presented in Exodus 31: 18. The only time when the Bible says that God has written Himself a text was clearly emphasised as such. None can legitimately infer that God had written other texts, as far as such a thing is not expressly notified by the texts themselves. He could, of course, theoretically, inspire the book of Genesis, to a human mind or to more than one, but so many contradictions contained by the book of Genesis discourage such a conclusion. At the same time, the book itself doesn’t say that is written, totally or partially by God.
I am convinced that it wasn’t Moses alone who had written the book of Genesis, but that there is a multiple authorship of the texts and the final editing has been done after Moses’ death. Is Moses the author of some of the texts from the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis? It isn’t sure what Moses would have written but if he really was one of the authors of the texts, he was contradicted by the other authors writing other parts of the stories.
- 36 -
Was only Moses inspired by God and all the other authors have written from their imagination or under the influence of other mythologies? Both stories of creation are contradictory and absurd hence neither of them were inspired by God. They aren’t a factual account of the creation of the universe. Firstly, they are contradictory internally, and absurd, and secondly they diverge greatly from the laws of nature established by God.
We can notice that almost all the stories from the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis present a reverse order starting with the creation of daylight before the sun and continuing with others. How do we know what are the laws of nature set in place by God? We can know the origins of the universe and its laws through the revelation in nature. In the matter of origins, revelation through nature is much stronger and precise than the old texts of Genesis. Neither version of the creation, chapter 1 of the book of Genesis, or chapter 2, are consistent with their own assertions and none of them could be considered a credible record of how the universe came to be in place.
Regardless of who wrote the book of Genesis, the existing contradictions still remain and they are degrading the stories to be no more than unbelievable tales. The Almighty God wouldn’t inspire absurd things to human beings only to confuse their beliefs. According to the Bible, He had confused the human language, but this is pure fantasy. If someone believes that God would have inspired deliberately false and contradictory stories to humankind, that would open another way of understanding the Christian religion. Such a proposition is contradicted by many texts of the Bible in which He is portrayed as a loving God.
It wouldn’t be right to say that Moses didn’t write any book from Pentateuch, because such closure would contradict many biblical texts in which God has asked him to write different things:
“14 Then the LORD said to Moses, ‘Write this as a reminder in a book and recite it in the hearing of Joshua: I will utterly blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.’ (Exodus 17; 14 NRSV)
“4 And Moses wrote down all the words of the LORD. He rose early in the morning, and built an altar at the foot of the mountain, and set up twelve pillars, corresponding to the twelve tribes of Israel.” (Exodus 24; 4 NRSV)
- 37 -
“27 The LORD said to Moses: Write these words; in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel.” (Exodus 34; 27 NRSV)
“2 Moses wrote down their starting points, stage by stage, by command of the LORD; and these are their stages according to their starting places.” (Numbers 33; 2 NRSV)
These texts and others which speak about Moses writing messages given by God don’t refer to the creation of the universe or of humankind. If they are all the messages written by Moses, none of them have any direct connection with the creation. Many people who believe that Moses was an historical personage would probably accept that he has written some parts of the Pentateuch but many texts have been probably altered by later editing. Nowhere in the Bible is there proof that he has written texts within the first 11 chapters of Genesis. When God asked Moses to write something, that occasion is mentioned by the O.T. and if He had demanded Moses to write a history of the creation of the universe that situation would also have been recorded by the Bible, but it isn’t, most probably because such request never happened.
If we start to believe some messages only because they are said to be inspired by God regardless of how absurd they are, we have a problem, and we put our rationality aside. The other way around is the valid path. A message could possibly be inspired by God only if it is coherent in any way, and if it transmits important information to humankind. The starting point is the spiritual value of the message and not the religious claim that a certain text is the result of God’s inspiration. If a series of texts don’t contradict each other, and they form a unitary and consistent story with a profound spiritual message, that is the starting point for the admission that the story could have a divine source.
On the other side, many religious texts from different religions claim that they are inspired by divinity, but they contradict each other in the interior of the same religion or between religions when they refer to the same theme, and this is a strong proof that, in fact, they aren’t the result of such an inspiration. If two contradictory things are said to come from the same source their origin cannot be a divine one. If two different religious texts both claim to be inspired but they don’t agree among themselves in important points, either one is inspired and the other one isn’t or both texts aren’t inspired but they are a mere human effort. The difficulty is to know which text is inspired and which isn’t. If the texts not only contradict each other but also are inconsistent with their own claims, such texts aren’t inspired by God.
- 38 -
[1] www.british-israel.ca/Genesis.htm
[2] www.truthingenesis.com/2013/01/03/who-wrote-the-book-of-genesis/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform_script
[4] www.theguardian.com › Arts › Books › History
[5] wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_writing_systems
| |
➤ |
|
God's False Mirror | Revelation and science
Written by Gabriel Baicu| |
|
Revelation isn’t only what the Bible contains. Revelation through nature is also a very important form through which we can know God. The objects of all sciences are given by God’s revelation in nature. God had revealed Himself in the origins and structure of the universe and also through the vegetal and animal nature. Nature is a revelation in no way inferior to the written Bible and revelation in nature can be better understood from the study of nature than from the biblical texts. Revelation in nature is a revelation written in the life of so many species of plants and animals and in the structure of the cosmos. Very importantly, God revealed Himself in His Son, Jesus Christ, and that is also a revelation in nature, but in human nature. God has revealed Himself in human history also, at a particular time and in a particular way. Besides the revelation in nature and history, God reveals Himself to us in our inner selves and sometimes through the Bible; not as directly as one would probably be inclined to believe, but through many layers of human interpretations by the authors and redactors of the texts.
In case of divergence, which has priority as a more valid revelation of God, Scriptures or nature? Both Scripture and nature are recognised as being the result of God’s revelation by the Bible. What happens if God reveals one thing through Scriptures and another thing through nature in the same matter? This is the essence of the debate between science and religion. How can we maintain that both Scriptures and nature are God’s revelation if they contradict each other in many of their aspects? Scripture and nature have to be in harmony if both have God as their source, but they aren’t.
- 39 -
If one states that revelation through Scriptures has priority upon the revelation through nature, what is the biblical basis for such a claim? Nowhere in the Bible can be found the claim that Scripture is more authoritative than the revelation in nature but this is the presumption maintained by many religious commentators. Nevertheless, one can safely maintain that revelation through nature is a much older and direct source than any revelation through Scripture and, even more, nature goes back until the beginnings of all things, and keeps an unbroken continuity and perceptible traces from then until today. Nature as a revelation would have been much more difficult to alter than some texts written by man, because it is a story inserted in the structure of reality.
Many commentators of the Bible try to sanction the false idea that all nature has been corrupted following Adam and Eve’s sins, and that the disobedience of the first man and of the first woman had the power to drastically change God’s creation. God had created the universe in a certain way but following Adam and Eve’s transgression everything that He had built was overturned by the human beings’ faults. Initially God did everything very good but because of man it became very bad. Death, suffering, killings, illnesses, wars and others aren’t the effect of God’s creation but are caused by man’s disobedience to God. With this false idea those commentators want to demonstrate that nature cannot be trusted as source of knowledge about the origins of the universe and humankind, therefore the results of scientific studies also cannot be trusted.
According to those commentators, carnivorous animals had been created good and peaceful but they became bad and destructive because Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge. Nothing is more absurd than that. All nature is exactly in the situation which had been created by God not in seven days but during billions of years, through evolution. A major transformation of nature following humankind’s disobedience would have meant a new creation, but God created nature once and not twice. According to the book of Genesis God created nature in seven days and He didn’t create it again in another period of time.
Nature speaks very precisely about how God is and tells us that He had accepted from the beginning death as an important tool for evolution. Without death, evolution wouldn’t have been possible because death permits something imperfect to be replaced by something better.
- 40 -
God is a divinity of life and death and He does His own kind of selection for eternal life similar to nature, which also does a selection but for natural life. This is the revelation contained in nature and can be enriched with the amount of revelation contained by the Bible.
One form of revelation without the other is incomplete and that was not really well understood, in the history of Christianity. The revelation through the Bible was always emphasised and considered to be God’s main form of discovery because it was canonised and therefore easier to keep under institutional control. Being “unmovable”, the Bible was considered to confer more stability for the authority of religious institutions. Any new scientific discovery based on the study of nature was regarded, by the religious clergy, as a direct attack on the Bible and surely it wasn’t at all intended to be that. Starting with the recent past and caused by the development of the sciences, the emphasis had gradually been moving onto the revelation through nature from the revelation through the Bible, and that caused important debates.
Where can we find our priorities, in nature or in the Bible? Is God’s revelation more valid in some ancient texts or in nature? It seems that we have to choose between what allegedly is revealed through some ancient texts contained by the Bible, and what humankind can discover carefully researching nature. What they both say greatly contradict each other. All tentative attempts to correlate harmoniously the two of them, aren’t really convincing, and some of them are ridiculous. The Bible is considered to be scientifically accurate by some Christian commentators on a very thin base:
“The Bible is not a science book, yet it is scientifically accurate. We are not aware of any scientific evidence that contradicts the Bible. We have listed statements on this page that are consistent with known scientific facts. Many of them were listed in the Bible hundreds or even thousands of years before being recorded elsewhere. Many concepts and notes on this page are adapted from ideas and statements that appear in The DEFENDER’S Study Bible.”[1]
- 41 -
The author of the article isn’t aware of any scientific evidence that contradicts the Bible but there is much evidence which shows that the first 11 chapters from the book of Genesis are as far as possible from sciences. The arguments used by the author of the article in order to demonstrate the so-called scientific character of some biblical texts are very naïve. Here we have some of them:
“The Bible frequently refers to the great number of stars in the heavens. The Bible also says that each star is unique. The Bible describes the suspension of the Earth in space. The Bible describes the circulation of the atmosphere.”[2]
The great number of stars can be seen by any man living on Earth. Nevertheless, when the Bible has compared the number of children of Israel with the number of the stars or the number of the grains of sand, it was a metaphor and didn’t have anything to do with science. Of course each star is unique by its size and shine but no divine intervention is needed to realise that and none was necessary in the past either. About the suspension of the earth in space the Bible says that it hangs on nothing, which is a very strange description of gravity and as a matter of fact the earth “hangs” on the sun, through the law of gravitation. Keeping the metaphor, it is wrong to maintain that the earth “hangs” on nothing. About the circulation of the atmosphere, the Bible presents an impossible situation from the creation until the Flood period in which there wouldn’t have been any rain on Earth according to its texts. We should remember that the rainbow would have appeared only after the Flood but in an atmosphere where it rains periodically rainbows would have been a usual phenomenon. The Bible is inconsistent in many ways with science, starting with the short periods of time allocated for the apparition and development of earthly history and up to the order of creation where the earth is said to have appeared before the apparition of the sun and disentangled from the rest of the cosmos.
- 42 -
Basically, true revelation in order to be validated should not contradict direct observations, when referring to the origins of the universe. For example, if we all see the daylight coming from the sun, we shouldn’t be pushed by religion, under the threat of eternal hell, to believe otherwise. God cannot reasonably ask us to believe something contrary to our direct observations, contrary to what we see and is scientifically undisputable. In other words, God cannot ask us to believe things which are obviously contradicted by our direct experience of natural phenomena materialised in scientific thesis. If God would insist for us to take something which was meant to be a metaphor as having the value of a historic or scientific fact, that would equate with the unreasonable obligation of believing a lie.
In my opinion, God would never ask us to believe something contra-factuality, so it isn’t Him, but the organised religion which insists on a literal interpretation of the narratives from Genesis, chapters 1-11. Jesus has encouraged people to believe what they have seen and have heard:
“22 And he answered them, ‘Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers* are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them.” (Luke 7; 22 NRSV)
Even God’s miracles presuppose the existence of valid senses and a healthy mind in order to be understood. One legitimately can doubt that Genesis, chapters 1-11, was inspired by God as a real description of the apparition of the universe, on the basis of the contradictions and inconsistencies that these texts contain. Through direct observations of reality anyone can understand that what the book of Genesis says about the creation of the universe cannot be but legend. One can believe in the existence of God but not necessarily in the literal interpretation of the book of Genesis.
A loving God wouldn’t demand us to believe blindly all that religious systems maintain is inspired by Him, even if it is manifestly not the result of inspiration. If He would do it, which is not the case, all rational coordinators, indicators, or points of reference of reality are gone.
- 43 -
In such a case, we would be obstructed from rationally leading our lives, and we would have to choose Him through constraints and not on the basis of personal convictions and rational arguments. In such a case men couldn’t approach reality in a thoughtful manner and couldn’t be asked to have rational behaviour.
If God would ask us to be irrational, how could society ask us to be otherwise? In other words, if God would ask us to be irrational, all rational fundament of our lives vanishes. The idea dissipated by organised religion that in order to be a good Christian one has to believe literally the entire Bible, is false and doesn’t serve the spiritual interests of the believers.
If the unreasonable obligation to take myths as facts was imposed on human beings in real life, none could be held responsible anymore for any irrational or inconsistent personal attitude. This is one point which reveals the dark side of any religion where freedom of consciousness is replaced with enforced authority. If one sincerely rejects the truthfulness of any religious proposition which is absurd or contradictory, what would be God’s rationale to punish him or her in an allegedly eternal hell, for lack of religious faith? Being thoughtful, and accepting the rational conclusions of sciences shouldn’t be seen as the ultimate sin even if one rejects a certain religious doctrine because of that. Probably the best work that a Christian can do at the moment is to disentangle the faith in the universal God from the boundaries of the biblical fables about creation and about the universal Flood.
Together with other myths of creation, the narratives from the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis give us an intuitive hint about God’s existence. If there is any revelation in the book of Genesis, it is not historic or scientific information. No myths or parables should be taken literally. In the course of history God spoke through parables, through Jesus Christ. Why don’t the advocates of the biblical literalism interpret literally all Jesus’ words and cut their hands or pluck their eyes when they sin as He has said word for word? It is the same idea. A myth or a parable must be recognised as such and one should try to decipher its spiritual meaning. The myths of creation from the Bible can be interpreted as having some spiritual content in spite of their numerous contradictions but this doesn’t mean that they have been inspired by God. This kind of spirituality reflects the human need to understand the universe outside our world in connection with fundamental human concerns. The stories of creation can bring to our days some echoes coming from the most ancient times of human history.
- 44 -
At the same time, trying to serve God but in the wrong direction, many commentators of the book of Genesis obtain the opposite outcome than the one intended by emphasising a literal interpretation of the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis.
As a matter of fact, the beginning chapters from the book of Genesis don’t reveal anything about what happened before the moment of creation, before the beginning, meaning before the Big Bang and in that respect don’t add anything to what the sciences bring to human knowledge. The book of Genesis, in its beginning chapters, doesn’t contain any revelation at all, meaning that it doesn’t refer to an area to which the human mind cannot ascend. What happened before the Big Bang is an area for possible revelation but that space isn’t approached at all by the book of Genesis even in its outdated language. Of course, the stories of creation from the Bible don’t refer at all to an event as it was, the Big Bang, but it refers to a beginning. What would have been a true revelation, or true information, would be what happened before that beginning.
In a domain where revelation would be very useful, in the area of beginnings which extends before the apparition of the universe where human beings don’t have the possibility to investigate, in the proper area of revelation, the message coming from God is not there.
"In the beginning when God created* the heavens and the earth, 2 the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God* swept over the face of the waters.” (Genesis 1; 1-2 NRSV)
Our universe has a beginning but an eternal existence cannot have such beginnings. God without space, time, energy and matter isn’t other than the absolute nonexistence, and from this nothingness absolutely nothing could have appeared. The vision of classical theism on God is the view on a non-reality which couldn’t have determined anything in any way. Nothing can be caused by absolute nonexistence which doesn’t contain anything and it cannot be said to exist. If God existed before the beginning of the universe as something totally different than the components of our world, we have to know what that is, but the Bible doesn’t give us any idea about that.
- 45 -
The only so-called revelation from the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis is nothing but a mythological explanation of the existence of our world.
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth the earth was a formless void. That is what the Bible says happened in the beginning. What happened in the beginning is discovered by science, which explains how things happened in the first moments of the apparition of the universe. At the present time, there isn’t any need for a scriptural revelation for the beginning of the universe on; a revelation about what was before the beginning would be very important to have, but the Bible doesn’t offer it to us in any way. For this reason, the book of Genesis, chapters 1 and 2, cannot be considered to contain revealed information about the origins of the universe, and proves that their human authors didn’t know anything about this issue.
What happened technically in the moment of creation and immediately afterwards? The book of Genesis doesn’t give such information. The first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis don’t show us exactly how the plants and animals were made and why there is a common descent to all living beings. All plants and animals would have been created miraculously, in a supernatural way, according to Genesis, but in the world of nature everything functions according to natural laws. The main explanations regarding nature can be found in the way in which nature works, and unless one understands the dynamic of nature he or she cannot comprehend reality.
Why wouldn’t God have used the natural laws set in place by Him rather than having supernatural interventions? There isn’t any reason why God would have created the entirety of nature miraculously if on the other side He organised its functioning according to natural laws. At the heart of the knowable reality there are not miracles but rationally predictable laws.
We are led to believe, falsely I would say, by some interpreters of the book of Genesis, that human beings are somehow biologically different from other living beings, because they were made in a different manner, shaped by God out of the ground.
- 46 -
“7 then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground,* and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.” (Genesis 2; 7 NRSV)
Such interpretation of the texts of the Bible isn’t right because these texts state that both man and animals had been formed out of the ground. Both man and animals had to receive the breath of life from God in order to become living beings.
“19 So out of the ground the LORD God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.” (Genesis 2; 19 NRSV)
Man and animals are made from the same material and have the same fate, a finite existence on Earth. What differentiates them is rationality, and if we take that from man he becomes an animal like all other animals. In a subtle way, many religions try to discourage a rational inquiry into their doctrines and dogmas. They boast about humankind being above any other earthly beings by using rationality, but on the other side they don’t like all the consequences of what a reasonable mind would generate about what they believe.
What happened before the Big Bang is an area of pure speculation and is a domain which cannot be analysed through scientific means such as direct observations, experiments, predictions about the phenomena and construction of scientific theories based on concrete data. Why can such thing not be done? If direct observations aren’t possible no experiments can verify hypotheses made for that area. Are we the prisoners of our universe? It may be that the future will prove we aren’t. We cannot go back to before the Big Bang but we can go forward in the immensity of the cosmos where other universes are born. String theory or M-theory endorses the idea that existence doesn’t come from absolute nothingness – existence is the norm, the rule.
Revelation should be a bridge which helps us in crossing the impassable darkness of a transcendental reality. Transcendentalism has to be understood in the sense of a reality which transcends finitude, not in the sense of something beyond existence. What really happened before the Big Bang isn’t the object for the sciences, at least at the moment, because it cannot be the object of a thorough, direct, and verifiable research, but only an unverifiable hypothesis. Humankind doesn’t have at its disposal the necessary instruments to access the reality before the Big Bang. At the same time, if God exists and He is above and before our universe what other way of communication than His revelation could be possible? God didn’t pass through the Big Bang, He was before it, He was unaffected by it, and He would be the only contact that we can get from previous stages of existence. God couldn’t have created the universe from inside of it therefore He has to be situated before the Big Bang as an eternal Reality.
If that is so, why do we have to continue to consider it an important revelation? The book of Genesis doesn’t reveal to us anything concrete about what the infinite existence is. From this point of view, the Bible could have brought about knowledge of the origins of our entire existence but it didn’t, its texts aren’t a revelation because they don’t reveal anything hidden which cannot be found through scientific research.
- 47 -
| |
➤ |
|
More...
God's False Mirror | Revelation and reason
Written by Gabriel Baicu| |
|
Can God be known by human beings or not? If the answer is a positive one there is another question. Can God be known only through reason or do we also need revelation in order to be able to know Him? Even if God cannot be known completely by finite human beings living on Earth, we can know many things about Him. According to the Bible knowing God is the main purpose of human salvation:
“3 And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” (John 17; 3 NRSV)
Apostles John also had written in one of his epistles about the knowledge of God:
- 48 -
“14 I write to you, children, because you know the Father. I write to you, fathers, because you know him who is from the beginning. I write to you, young people, because you are strong and the word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the evil one.” (1 John 2; 14 NRSV)
In order to know God He has to reveal His Person to human beings. He already offered His revelation through human nature in Jesus Christ who was not only divine but also human.
“18 No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son,* who is close to the Father’s heart,* who has made him known.” (John 1; 18 NRSV)
God can be known through the study of natural world which is also revelation. Nevertheless, the natural world was created by God in a very different way than the one described by the two stories of creation from the book of Genesis.
“19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse;” (Romans 1; 19; 20 NRSV)
If Adam and Eve’s alleged sins would have changed the way in which nature was created, Paul wouldn’t have been right in maintaining that God can be known from His creation because that creation wouldn’t have been the same as He had made it.
At first glance it seems that sciences contradict the existence of God because they don’t agree with all that the Bible says about the universe and nature. It has to be said that the sciences don’t automatically reject the existence of God and His eternity even when they don’t agree with what the book of Genesis or other biblical texts maintain about the creation of the universe or the origin of humankind. The sciences rightfully reject the biblical descriptions of the creation of the universe and humankind as being in contradiction with observations made on reality.
- 49 -
Rejecting the Bible is one thing and rejecting God is another thing. It doesn’t matter how strong is one’s faith in God, he or she can be totally unconvinced that God created the light before the sun or about other similar things contained by the book of Genesis. Even if many texts from the book of Genesis are contradictory and absurd, this isn’t enough reason to discard all faith in an eternal personal God.
The revelation through nature and particularly through human nature shows us the possibility of God’s existence. Revelation in nature reaches its most important scope in human nature. We can find God in us if we allow Him to dwell in our human beings. As Apostle Paul says, Christ in us is the hope of glory. (Colossians 1; 27) Anyone can believe in a personal God on the basis of his or her personal experience with Him even if he or she doesn’t find knowledge of nature in the book of Genesis.
Above all, no scientific data can be interpreted as a categorical rejection of the possibility of God’s existence even if they disagree with the facticity of the narratives from the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis. Paradoxically, even if revelation in nature is real, sciences cannot prove either the existence of God or His nonexistence from the study of nature, but they open the way towards the understanding of the possibility of His existence. Revelation in everyone’s human nature as the revelation in Christ in order to be confirmed needs the personal experience of the believer with God.
Through the natural world, the existence and eternity of God is fully revealed and that revelation doesn’t need the book of Genesis in order to understand how things had been done. The revelation in human nature is an argument for God’s existence only for the human beings who have personal experiences with Him.
God can be known from nature because through the study of it one can understand that existence didn’t come from absolute nonexistence, hence it is eternal. Nature demonstrates clearly that from absolute nothingness nothing can appear because only existence can generate existence. All phenomena are caused by other existent phenomena, not by nothing at all, no space, no time, no particles, and no nothing. If existence per se is infinite and intelligent this intelligence cannot be other than an infinite intelligence and an infinite intelligence is God.
- 50 -
The Christian religion teaches that God can be known as a subject through a personal relationship but also through the objects of His creation. The personal relationship between God and every human being is based on a personal experience with Him made possible through personal revelation. At the same time knowing Him through reason is possible and means using sciences to acquire knowledge about the objects of His creation.
Scientific knowledge cannot replace a personal relationship with God and the latter doesn’t need to follow any religious doctrine or dogma in relation to the origins of the universe and humankind. We cannot pretend to know God as a subject only through scientific means because sciences generate an objective way to relate with reality. The personal God can be known in a personal way by every human being who has faith.
Personal revelation and reason don’t contradict each other as long as they keep working together. A personal revelation from God gives us what we cannot know through scientific means. At the same time, any information coming from God is rational and can be understood through human rationality. God is rationality and all irrational and absurd messages don’t come from Him.
Any meaningful revelation from God has always a rational content through which it expresses its message. Through rationality in this context I understand what isn’t confused, contradictory, absurd, or contrary to everyday facts. Through rationality I also understand what is commonly understood through this term, meaning what is agreeable to reason; reasonable, sensible, having or exercising reason, sound judgment, or good sense.[1]
St. Thomas Aquinas, a great medieval theologian and philosopher, asked why we need revelation at all if we can already know God by reason. He then answered his own question.
“Few people, he writes, would acquire adequate knowledge about God by mere exercise of the intellect. Some people lack talent to think with acumen; others are too busy with necessities imposed on them by their daily lives and would not give much time to the leisure of contemplative inquiry as to reach the highest peak at which human investigation can arrive, namely the knowledge of God. Finally, some, being indolent, do not make the needed effort to learn about God properly.”[2]
- 51 -
St. Thomas goes on to state that the truth about God is so profound that we can acquire it only after a long training. Secondly, young people are prisoners of their fillings and passions and their condition is not suitable to acquire the knowledge of God. St. Thomas Aquinas continued in his analysis of the relation between reason and faith:
“Therefore if the only way open to us for the knowledge of God were solely that of the reason, the human race would remain in the blackest shadows of ignorance. For then the knowledge of God, which especially renders men perfect and good, would come to be possessed only by a few, and these few would require a great deal of time in order to reach it” (Summa Contra Gentiles 1,4; trans. Anton C. Pegis).[3]
In St. Thomas Aquinas’ view, because of our errors in judgment many human beings cannot see the truth of things even if that truth is thoroughly demonstrated. For the same reasons, something erroneous can look to be right by its apparently correct argumentation. For these motifs, the truths concerning divine things have to be presented to human beings by way of faith. For Thomas Aquinas, there are truths for which divine revelation is absolutely necessary..[4]
“Finding the creator and father of this universe is toilsome and, after he has been found, it is not possible for everyone to speak of him”. (imaeus, 28,c; see Albert Vanhoye, S.J. - “The discourse at the Areopagus and the universality of truth” in Oss. Rom. 24 Feb. 1999)[5]
- 52 -
If Plato found God not being a believer, he could have found Him only through reason, not through faith. This would be an example that God can be found through reason alone.
Vatican I, in 1870, articulated as a doctrine of the faith the teaching that divine revelation is absolutely necessary for humans in order to gain access to supernatural truths; heaven and divine adoption are truths that lie beyond the natural sphere, and can be known only through revelation.[6]
If we need revelation for the knowledge of so-called supernatural truth it means that we don’t need it for the natural realities which can be analysed only by reason. Is the problem of the origins of the universe in the natural or in the supernatural domain? In my opinion, the issues regarding the origin of the cosmos are in the natural domain because its beginning happened in the natural world. Everything which happens in the natural world is a theme for the study of the sciences of nature.
Even if for the era before the Big Bang science doesn’t have the necessary means to investigate reality, that reality is nevertheless natural. For what happened during and after that initial event there are scientific possibilities of research and the phenomena are in the natural domain. Even God, a supernatural Reality, has His own nature. As far as we don’t know what God’s nature is we cannot really make clear delimitations between natural and supernatural. God having a different nature than human beings doesn’t mean that He is supernatural. Supernatural cannot mean above any nature because there isn’t anything, not even God, without a particular nature. If the spiritual nature is different than the material nature, it has its own consistency, but the former, we don’t know, hence we cannot define it. We only suppose that there is a spiritual nature but we don’t know what it is. If there is a spiritual nature it is possible that it is very closely linked to the material nature in ways which are still unknown.
How the universe exists and why it exists are two different questions and they are related. The answer to the first of these questions can make easier the finding of the answer to the second one. Why the universe exists is a question which can be answered by science but also by theology and philosophy. It is wrong to adjudicate all the problems of the origins of the universe exclusively to one domain, either to science or to religion. At the same time, it must be emphasised that religion without scientific arguments cannot contradict direct observations made be science.
- 53 -
As far as the book of Genesis doesn’t offer a coherent description of the creation of the world from the era correlative with the scientifically identified period after the initial event of the Big Bang, a description which can be verified through the study of nature, there isn’t any value in the conclusions based on its texts. Many contradictions and absurdities in the texts lead to the conclusion that the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis are mere human products. The presumption is that the word of God can be neither contradictory nor absurd.
This problem of the origins of the universe is so important that all means must be employed in order to reach some conclusions. If we accept this assumption, we will be closer to the ongoing disputes between science and religion.
There isn’t a supernatural discovery in the Bible about the origins of the cosmos. Where else can be found such revelation of the origins of the universe if not in the Bible? The only remaining place is the natural world. Why wouldn’t God show to scientists the right path through knowledge if He wants humankind to have an understanding of origins of the universe? If God really wanted to give us the understanding of how the universe came to be, He didn’t do that through the book of Genesis, but He can do it by revealing important information to scientists working in that field of knowledge.
“Religion without science is blind, science without religion is lame/font>.”[7]]
- 54 -
More and more people accept spirituality as a complement to science, the combination of both being capable of giving a more complex image of reality. The same view is expressed by the author of the following quotation:
“Science and religion are two sides of the same coin. Recent scientific discoveries have unknowingly provided evidence that supports the multi-dimensional nature of reality that Hindus, Buddhists, Gnostics and abbalists have known about for thousands of years. By combining modern scientific facts with ancient spiritual knowledge we can begin to uncover the whole truth and bring unity out of the existing duality. There can be only one true reality, but we will never know the whole truth if we only look from one perspective and hold on to our preconceived ideas.”[8]
The competence of sciences and religion regarding the beginning of the universe and of the human races is a very important issue. Do they have competence in the same areas of reality, or is each of them competent in a certain domain? What exactly is the sphere proper to scientific cosmology, and what of religion? The two differ greatly through the methods employed so the frontier between the competence of modern sciences and of religion must be also given by the most adequate method of study of the object. What is the most legitimate manner of investigation of the origins of the universe? Can the reading of two pages in the Bible, the first two chapters from the book of Genesis, be considered to be more relevant than countless efforts made by many scientists for the understanding of the universe? The affirmation that the book of Genesis is more informative or more relevant than the scientific discoveries on the topic isn’t reasonable.
What is the stronghold of religion, the sphere where it cannot be contested in connection to our universe? Is there such an area of human knowledge which is only confined by the boundaries of religion? Which would this be? Can we understand the infinite dimension of reality only through scientific methods? Probably the area where religion in its more philosophical expression is called to give us enlightenment, is the infinite dimension of reality, where the sciences cannot use their usual methods of research. experience with God isn’t necessarily
- 55 -
The intuition of infinity given by a personal based on deductive reasoning but is an authentic opening towards the wholeness of reality. Is there an infinite dimension of reality or did all existence start from absolute nothingness? This is the most important problem of the debate between science and religion and a personal experience with God can become a gate for entering into the infinite dimension of existence per se.
The modern sciences are the only valid instrument when dealing with direct observation on the reality, measurements, experiments, theories and predictions. What can we do in the situation when the so-called revelation and the results of modern sciences contradict each other? Which one can we follow when drawing conclusions? We are pushed to choose between one and the other if they don’t agree among themselves, and if they cannot be brought to a common denominator.
“Whatever one’s conclusions concerning the process of human origins, Christian theology stands or falls with a historical Adam and a historical fall.”; (Horton 2011, p 424)
I fully agree with this assertion which synthesises very well the reason for which I write this study. The Christian religion changes fundamentally if one rejects the authenticity of the narratives of creation and of the Flood from the book of Genesis. Many other texts of the O.T. can be put in doubt but none of them are as fundamental for the Christian religion as the first 11 chapters from the book of Genesis, which present God as a Person who created our universe with all its components from quasi nothing. If one contests this creation from quasi nothing the entire vision of the cosmos changes dramatically. God isn’t any more the supreme Creator who contradicts all known laws of nature in order to realise a universe based on those laws.
At the same time, the theology constructed by the apostle Paul about the first and the second Adam, isn’t relevant any more if one considers that Adam is not a historical personage. This conclusion is based on the observation that Paul treated the story of the creation of Adam quite literally. That being said, this doesn’t mean that new theologies are not possible, or that a better explanation of Jesus’ mission on Earth wouldn’t be even more revealing. In my view, faith in God shouldn’t be that closely related with the narratives from the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis.
- 56 -
[2] www.lifeissues.net › Zimmerman
[3] www.lifeissues.net › Zimmerman
[4] www.lifeissues.net › Zimmerman
[5] https://www.ewtn.com/library/Theology/fides5.htm
[6] www.lifeissues.net › Zimmerman
[7] www.huffingtonpost.com/david-l.../genesis-and-science_b_500201.html
[8] www.esotericscience.org/
[9] https://answersingenesis.org/creationism/.../influential-pastors-and-theologians-on-the-...
| |
➤ |
|
Content of God's False Mirror
Philosophical Articles
Search
Theological Articles
Recent Posts
Visitors Counter
© Copyright 2026 Your Joomla! Site Joomla Templates by JoomDev