God's False Mirror
Genesis 1-11 and their theological consequences
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.
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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.
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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.
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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:
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“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.
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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]
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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]
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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.
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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.
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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.
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[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
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God's False Mirror | Revelation and science
Written by Gabriel Baicu  |
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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.
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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.
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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]
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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“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.
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God's False Mirror | Religion and rationality
Written by Gabriel Baicu| |
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God, in the Christian vision, is also “Logos” and this Greek word means not only “word”, but it also means “rationality”. If we can make any sense of the outside world, by studying the nature and the cosmos, our endeavour is necessarily based on the fact that God is Logos, rationality. Only rationality is predictable and knowable, irrationality is not. If God reveals Himself in nature, and can be known through it and nature is rationally organised by the laws of nature, that means that God is knowable, at least to a certain degree, in a rational way. (Romans 1; 19-20) If God had deliberately done irrational things, in the process of His creation, God would have burned all rational bridges between Him and us and in this case He couldn’t be known by us through the study of His creation but the Bible says that He can. God speaks to us through rationality, through Logos, and for this reason one may expect to find consistency and rationality in the narratives of creation from the book of Genesis if they are to be seen as an expression of real facts.
The outside world unravels an extraordinary rationality, laws of nature, and perfectly rational connections between phenomena. The study of nature and of the cosmos is a way of knowing God, and, from my point of view, this is a very important path towards this knowledge. Why would that be right?
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The Bible is an old and not evolving book and its writings cannot be updated with new information. Even if knowledge has increased greatly comparing with three thousand years ago we cannot bring the information contained by the book of Genesis in line with what we know today.
The Bible is canonised but the ever-evolving human knowledge is not. In the Bible, what is written about the origins of the universe and humankind is written forever and can never be changed or improved. The terminology used by the Bible, also, cannot be brought into accord with the modern one. Its outdated form and its ancient patina are ingredients which seem to plead for the sanctity of the book of Genesis but they are only proof of its antiquity.
Where is the place of the biblical account of Genesis in our scientific knowledge? Is it at the foundation of modern astrophysics or is separated from the actual cosmological discourse altogether? If someone believes that the record of creation from Genesis is not science, then it shouldn’t try to replace science, and it shouldn’t compete with science in any way.
Do we really need science to tell us how the world had come into place or is it that we don’t need science, but we only need faith to enlighten us about questions pertaining to science also? Can spirituality, faith or revelation, replace the human need for scientific research? In my view, the book of Genesis doesn’t have in any case the standard of a book of science, and cannot and should not try to replace human research in scientific domains.
Many believe in the biblical record of the book of Genesis without a thorough analysis, considering it only a matter of faith. But is it really? The origins of the universe are not only a matter for faith but are also an object for sciences. Why and how the universe came into place is a common topic for science and religion and cannot really be divided amongst the two of them. Religion can endeavour to ask why and sciences to explain how the universe came to be.
Allegories and parables were very instrumental in conveying different spiritual messages in the past but at the present, in order to gather real knowledge, more precise and verifiable information is required. Even if the Bible contains true knowledge, and I don’t say it does, the way to express it remains outdated.
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Knowledge of nature, and the study of the universe are progressing continuously and they are using the language of today’s generations. Under the formula “given from the above” the book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, inherently prevents a true investigation of the cosmos, and limits the knowledge of nature to very general and unmovable considerations.
The language used by the book of Genesis is not in conformity with a scientific language and its assertions prove to be in conflict with basic rules of rationality. The biblical narratives of creation are mainly presented as “a given”, and take the form of metaphors and of allegories. No attempt to demonstrate anything, by careful observations or logical deductions, can be recognised, all must be accepted at face value. The message regarding the origins, from the book of Genesis, cannot be asked anything, in a hermeneutical way, because it is not prepared to answer to any question raised by new scientific observations.
What is the relation between the religious language and the scientific language? The scientific language, in which one clothes his or her belief or his or her unbelief, is much more adequate, more nuanced, and qualified for a dialogue with our contemporary world, by using the terminology of the newest discoveries of the modern sciences. On the other side, the Bible, striving to pass as infallible is showing us, more and more, its weaknesses, precisely because the scientific biblical studies have been evolving very much in the last two or three hundred years and not towards a confirmation of its inner consistency but quite the opposite.
The first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis are the core of the relationship between science and religion.
The fear and surprise generated by the newness of scientific discoveries and the incapacity of the clerical functionaries to give answers to the questions, raised by sciences, are the causes for countless confusions and misunderstandings. When comparing the explanations given by the Bible regarding the origins of the universe, with the information given by the modern sciences, they differentiate themselves by a very important element and that is the direct observations on nature. At the same time, the book of Genesis doesn’t present the conclusions of any study of nature but only very superficial and empirical descriptions contradicted by studies based on analyses of real causes of phenomena.
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The Genesis allegedly is based on revelation, but doesn’t say in its body of texts or somewhere else in the Bible, to whom that revelation was given and when was given. The first five books of the Bible, as more recent studies show, are not authored by Moses, as previously believed.
On the other side, the language and the knowledge of sciences, together, are giving us a real opening towards a better understanding of the possibility of God’s existence, grasping it further and further, with any new discovery. For a Christian believer, the study of the sciences is a true strength but for an unbeliever the sciences can be a reason not to believe in the existence of God. Let’s take an example. From a scientific point of view, eternal life for man is not an impossible dream but a possible one, followed already by certain scientists. The problem isn’t the attaining of the eternal life but living eternally on Earth where billions and in the future tens of billions or even hundreds of billions of human beings will live. They will not all be able to live eternally on Earth. At the same time, the expansion of humankind in the universe may encounter the problems of huge distances and of other civilizations living in the universe. Where there are conditions for life there is life also. In order to colonize the cosmos human beings have to leave the earth and reach other planets and adapt to new environments if they aren’t already occupied by other civilizations.
Eternal life and the expansion in the cosmos are linked closely because one without the other isn’t possible. In order to travel very long distances humankind has to live for a very long time, preferable eternally, and in order to have enough space for all human beings to live forever new cosmic frontiers have to be surpassed. Now is too early for humankind to discover the secrets of eternal life because the technology is not enough developed to bring so many human beings into the space, and on Earth there wouldn’t be enough space for everyone living eternally. The two aspects will come together, and when humankind is prepared to exit into space then the secrets of eternal life will be also discovered. The tree of life is within human reach and will be sometime in the future grasped by mankind, but its place isn’t on Earth, but in the sky. To reach the tree of life without God’s approval would be another disobedience to Him but would be also a necessary consequence and continuation of eating from the tree of knowledge. If there is a secret of eternal life it is impossible not to be discovered by humankind at a certain moment of its scientific development.
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God's False Mirror | The scope of this work
Written by Gabriel Baicu
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In this study, the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis are read carefully with a critical eye and not at all dogmatically and also with added attention to the consistency of each story and of the narratives of creation as a whole. The details of each biblical account are compared one with the other and all contradictions are underlined.
All stories of the book of Genesis must have a superior meaning if they are inspired by God. They also should have a general coherence which gives their unity, allowing them to be a valid general account of the origins of the universe and humankind. Where coherence is lacking and absurd conclusions are generated by the texts, following their logical consequences, their divine inspiration is in doubt. This is a proof that it wasn’t a superior intelligence that inspired the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis, but they are the product of ancient human beings striving to make light in a complicated world.
The present analysis tries to answer to a fundamental question. What kind of modifications, if any, happen in the content of a personal Christian faith when one has to admit by the force of evidence that the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis are neither factual nor inspired by God? The conclusion that Adam and Eve haven’t been real historical personages but only legendary heroes cannot leave the doctrinal and dogmatic fundaments of the classical theism unscathed but it bears important theological consequences. What these consequences are is an issue of concern for me and I am sure for many others also.
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In my opinion the answer to this question can be obtained by comparing the lack of arguments for the factuality of the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis with the most cardinal doctrines of the Christian faith which are based on those alleged facts. This lack of arguments is associated with many contradictions and absurdities found in the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis.
To be sure, I didn’t start my work from a preconception, meaning that I didn’t aim to find contradictions in the Bible with any cost, as if I wished to do such thing in purpose. I didn’t like that the Bible is filled with contradictions because this reality undermines in a way my personal faith in God, subverts that part which is related to how He is described by the Bible. Years after years, I have accepted, for the sake of conformism that the Bible is the word of God which cannot err. Moreover, I preached this principle, which is fundamental for the majority of Christian denominations, as a Christian evangelist, teaching people the Gospel of Jesus based also on the book of Genesis. I have considered the Bible to be the infallible word of God because it seemed to me as being important that every believer should have a strong textual basis for his or her faith.
In the same time, in the process of studying attentively the Bible, I noticed that some of its allegations are categorically in contradiction one with the other and other propositions are utterly absurd. It wasn’t easy for me to admit the reality of these findings and for this reason I have tried to identify serious documentation to contradict them and to uphold the validity of the biblical texts under scrutiny. The explications given by the defenders of the accuracy of the Bible didn’t look convincing to me; some explanations seem to be naïve, others insincere and still others trying to cheat the good faith of the readers. The very few explanations which apparently were more rational were greatly contradicted by the findings of modern sciences being in reality false constructions. Many of these explications can be found in the present work.
Loosing trust in some of the biblical texts, I didn’t reject the faith in God because this is based on a personal experience with Him and not on the validity of some texts written over 2,000.00 years ago, for example, the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis. Nevertheless, knowing the truth is more important than anything and knowing the truth about God is an important area of knowledge.
How really is God, the One in whom so many people invest their trust is an essential problem.
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The O.T. says that God would have killed through the Flood 99,99% from the earth population at that moment, millions of human beings including innocent children, because of their wickedness even if after that imaginary event the world was worse than before. This image is in a flagrant contradiction with what Jesus said about His Father who is perfect and who loves His enemy. (Matthew 5; 48) Something is wrong with the Bible. If the Flood would have done the world better we may doubt the means used to attain this purpose but the Bible says that the world became worse, for example, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah happen after the Flood. Why God would have killed so many humans and animals through the waters of the Flood if instead of the world becoming better it became much worse? There is an explanation. The Flood is a myth and not a reality therefore God didn’t generate in reality that genocide. The Bible doesn’t give us a fact but a legend in this case and in others. These kinds of absurdities prevent the Bible to be considered the infallible word of God. Many people don’t believe in God because He is described incorrectly by the religious institutions which interpret the Bible.
It is very important to cease maintaining that the Bible is the inspired word of God, in all its texts, because if we continue to promote this false presupposition we persist to feed a wrong image of Him. God is not as He is presented by the majority of Christian doctrines and dogmas which are based on a literal interpretation of the Bible but He is how He presents Himself in our consciousness and He is a Father who helps us to become better human beings. God doesn’t dwell in buildings made by man but in the minds of the believers (Acts 7; 48) God’s temples are the individual human beings and not religious organization with their institutional settings. (1 Corinthians 3; 16) Religious institutions have their role to play but nothing can replace the personal relation and direct experience of an individual with God.
I was hoping that the Bible would be a strong argument for my faith but unfortunately it is not the case. I think that the world cannot be saved with lies, with legends or any kind of mythology. Doesn’t matter how painful the truth may be it is better than everything else and a successful surgical operation can cure a sick person.
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The analysis of the first 11 chapters of the Bible from the present work is such surgical operations on the biblical texts which have transform the Christian faith in something similar to a sick person.
We should always remember that Christianity is not originated from the texts of the Bible but these texts are the product of this incredible spiritual movement with such a long history. First was Christ and after that the N.T. and in this equation the primordial factor is Christ not the texts of the Bible. Likewise the first 11 chapters of the O.T. are the result of a religious movement; they aren’t the unbiased expression of some pre-scientific research of nature. In the same time, there are many ways of understanding Jesus’ mission on earth and we don’t have any reason to cling on what is obviously outdated information, the stories of creation from the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis.
I want to express this unequivocally, the present study is not an attack against the Bible or an anti-Christian demarche because the legitimate critics which contains affect, in an equal proportion, all three monotheistic religions which maintain that Adam and Eve existed in reality. If Adam and Eve are only legendary personages, as I think many people will agree until the end of this work, than Judaism, Christianity and Islam base their spiritual offers on mythology and not on facts scientifically proven and this situation diminishes very much their relations with the truth.
The conclusions detached from this study would unavoidably affect not only the individual attitude of each Christian believer but also the dogmatic pillars of the Christian faith and I consider this dynamic to be rather positive regardless of how painful it can be. A faith which is based on as many facts as possible is a strong and not a weak faith. For example, the admission of the fact that the earth orbits around the sun didn’t erase the Christian faith from the spiritual landscape and that in spite of so much resistance to the truth. The foundation of the Christian faith is much stronger than that and the absorbance of such scientific truth allowed the general progress of humankind and in the end big scientific achievements in all domains.
Following the scientific and technological progress, travel is eased and distances shortened, medical interventions are much more efficient, communications between all human beings are much better comparing with the past, the average human life on Earth is longer, the general standard of life, at least in some geographical areas, is incomparably better than before, the circulation of information is quicker, and so on.
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As shocking as it may look the admission of the truth about the dynamic of sun and earth has been a necessary step toward this entire progress. The continuation of a stubborn adherence and forceful imposition on society of the Ptolemaic conception about the movements of the earth would have made impossible the promotion of sciences.
All these achievements have facilitated even the transmission of the Christian message of the good news of the gospel and have permitted it to reach the farthest corners of the earth. Anyone can find today material about the Christian faith on the Internet. In other words, everyone, including the Christian faith, benefits more from scientific truth than from promoting ignorance. Didn’t Jesus teach that the gospel has to be brought to the margins of the earth using “margins” in a metaphorical sense? Jesus’s messages travel around the globe brought by the Christian missionaries quicker than before.
Many steps have to be made in order to bring together faith and science and I am convinced that improving this relation will strengthen both of them. Only trying to understand the factual truth of the origins of universe and humankind, one can have a healthy base for the understanding of the world.
After a profound transformation, it is possible that many Christian doctrines will be very different than what we know today, but all of us will be closer to the truths we long for. As a matter of fact, the Christian world is already very different than a few hundred years ago and is less fanaticised and therefore much more tolerant and civilized comparing with that period. Many more people believe in God for themselves, for their personal spiritual enlightenment and not for the false ideal of the transformation of their religious faith in a universal religious ideology imposed by force in society. Trying to enforce a religious belief on someone else, regardless of his or her convictions is a moral crime which disqualifies totally the proponents of that religion from a moral point of view.
Tolerance and civilization shouldn’t be taken as weaknesses of a religious faith or another. In the Christian “equation” there are two terms, God and man. Respect for God implies consideration for man also and saying that we love God but despise human beings as His creatures on religious grounds doesn’t make any sense. The human beings are the most important part of His creation on Earth, the only one able to comprehend and to love Him.
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We should understand deeper and respect the human motives in connection to faith both when individuals accept God and when they reject Him.
Some people may have strong personal motives to reject the possibility of God’s existence and they prevent them to have faith in Him. Only He can judge the value and the importance of such motives in their lives. As a matter of fact, according to the Bible, the faith in God is a gift from Him and not everyone receives this gift in a comprehensive way. Some people reject this gift for considerations related to the adherence to another vision of the world than the one proposed by the book of Genesis. If the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis are considered to be the basis for faith in God it shouldn’t be any surprise that so many people reject that starting point.
We don’t need the false description of the beginning of the universe and of the humankind, provided by the Bible, in order to be responsible human beings. The care for human beings automatically means also respect for God, because Jesus has taught His disciples that the love for God derives from the treatment of other human beings. The care for other human beings comes from working in the service of their health, wellbeing, security, comfort, information and so on. Science and technology do that on an important scale every day. The good doesn’t come only from general religious principles declared from the pulpits and not always accompanied by practical deeds but rather from theoretical and practical scientific accomplishments. They are good deeds similar to what Jesus did on earth because they are done for the general wellbeing of humankind.
In this study, I attempt to present some of the most important inconsistencies coming from the first book of the Bible, Genesis chapters 1-11. Every such incongruence can be an issue for religious faith related to the reading of the Bible. The reading of the Bible can transform someone into a believer or into an unbeliever and for this reason I consider that the approach in an analytical way of some important themes is extremely important. There is a distance between an occasional reading of the Bible and a professional reading in which every detail of the texts reveals a whole bunch of information from all domains. For this reason, a professional reading very attentive to the coherence of the texts can help any interested reader to go deeply into different aspects, which otherwise can escape attention.
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In lack of a thorough reading of the biblical account of the creation many add their imagination to the actual record and see it not as it derives from the texts, but in an amended way. In this manner, many visualise the creation of the universe other than it is said by the texts of the Bible. Do we all realise that the Bible actually says that until the second day of the creation there wasn’t any sky, and that all space of the universe was covered by waters? In a biblical context we usually imagine that the planet Earth had been from the beginning of its existence as it is today, but the Bible doesn’t say that. It was somewhere, deeply under the waters of an imaginary primeval sea, as a heap of matter and not as a spherical planet. The earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep. (Genesis 1; 2)
Until the second day of the creation, according to the book of Genesis, the whole material universe had been a formless void. In spite of this, the Bible actually says that in the first day there had been a morning and an evening. The morning and the evening would have happened without a sky, without sun, and without earthly atmosphere. In the first day of creation, it would have been a morning and an evening under waters, generated by a supposed artificial light, in the depth of the ocean, even if the light travels with great difficulty under water, in full only until 200m and very little beyond that profoundness. Many contradictions emerge from a systematic, unbiased analysis of the book of Genesis which is something other than the dogmatic studies which flow from many Christian denominations.
I also try to establish in this analysis if God of the Bible is the same as God of the philosophers and theologians, or if the Bible says something different about Him than the image offered to the believer by the history of Christian philosophical thought. Does the Bible and especially the book of Genesis present God as an infinite, immaterial, All-powerful and Omniscient Being or as a divinity that can make mistakes, doesn’t know everything beforehand and sometimes regrets what He does? How did the philosophers of religion and theologians reach their conclusions that are so widespread amongst the Christians? Christians see as an undisputable truth, that God is a spiritual Being, that He has no origin, He lives forever, He loves and is All-powerful and that He is Omniscient and Omnipresent. Where in the book of Genesis or in other parts of the Bible is written about all these?
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Is it possible that God from the book of Genesis is a lesser Being than is currently thought by religion, for example, another civilisation existing in this universe and being technologically superior to us, such as the proponents of the ancient astronauts theories believe? Is it not reasonable to understand God as the representative of a civilisation which is interested in us and probably wants to control us? This study can help us to come closer to an answer.
There is also another possibility, which can be contemplated. The Bible could speak about two different realities. On one side an infinite and loving divine Reality, and on the other side, an extra-terrestrial civilisation interested in the evolution of humankind and them both being in conflict with one another. Some answers to these questions, sometimes at the most fundamental level, can be contained in a critical study of the narratives of the book of Genesis chapters 1-11.
I would avoid using the term “deconstruction” in order to evade easy cataloguing but in fact I would like to see the congruence, in the sense of agreement, harmony, conformity, or correspondence between the meanings, which are implied in the texts. What the texts of the book of Genesis are trying to tell us, what are their inbuilt messages? Are all the messages, contained by different texts, in harmony with one another? If the book of Genesis is to be considered a reliable book, then its texts must form a coherent and harmonious whole, but if the texts are incessantly contradicting each other, that must be because they represent a collection of different sources, written by many authors and there isn’t a leading Mind, a unique and divine Author, behind it.
Of course, this type of analysis was done before, but what I try to achieve here is a more complex evaluation, in which theology, sciences, and philosophy are involved. I will try to reconsider all arguments, which were used before, but also, more importantly, new argumentation, detached from any engagement to a certain religious stance or to another. Personally, I am a faithful man, but also I am an admirer of sciences and of their practical results and I fully consider that both religion and science are two facets of the same coin, as a matter of fact, of the same reality. Separation of the sciences and religion, to me, is an effect of a huge manipulation, practiced during a long period of time. Some elements, of the reality, can be easily accessed and understood by the sciences and other elements, and mostly the infinite dimension of it, still remains open for access, only via revelation if this revelation is real knowledge and not only classified as such by religion.
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This is a critical look, on the Christian religion and particularly on the texts of the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis. This critical and analytical approach is not made by an agnostic or an atheist but by a practicing Christian. Nevertheless, it could be that the amount and the level of the criticism of this present study surpass the criticism usually made by most agnostics or atheists to the Bible. From my point of view, the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis must either stand or drop, from the standards of authentic knowledge. If they contain a hidden spiritual message when they are read as parables this message has to be a congruent one and not a bunch of contradictions.
Even if the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis are only legends without any link to reality, the possibility of God’s existence and a personal non-dogmatic relationship with Him remains unaffected. At the same time, to me, a valid religious belief must be based also on factual truth when it claims the knowledge of reality in a certain area. If on the basis of the book of Genesis one says that he or she knows exactly how the universe came to be, he or she has to bring rational arguments to that, not only faith.
Our scientific understanding of the universe and the development of theology changed greatly since the book of Genesis was written. Ignoring the progress of knowledge in the areas of astrophysics and other scientific domains and clinging to the texts contained by the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis, it is not only about personal faith in God but also about a religious stance promoted by the organised religion. Denying directly or indirectly the progress of human knowledge from the times when the book of Genesis was written until today puts in question humankind’s ability of reaching any kind of knowledge in general and also of obtaining new understandings of reality.
Are we endowed with the capacity to know the reality or not? The history of humankind proves that we are. Even the book of Genesis says that we are able to acquire knowledge of good and evil, moral knowledge, which is inseparable from knowledge of reality in general. After all, for the people who believe literally the book of Genesis, Adam and Eve would have eaten from the tree of knowledge and that would have given them certain abilities in the area of knowledge, hence humankind is able to develop sciences, according to the Bible.
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If the biblical texts recognise the human capability to know reality that means that they implicitly admit that we can know the origin of the universe and of humankind. If this were not so, why would Adam and Eve have been punished for wanting to extend their knowledge? If knowledge was not within their reach, what danger could their attitude have posed? The presence of the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden wasn’t only a test for human obedience because it was able to open the eyes of the first two human beings. The book of Genesis tells us that acquiring knowledge was contrary to God’s will therefore was prohibited to Adam and Eve.
If humankind has the capacity to know reality, they should exercise this attribute and shouldn’t take for granted texts about the creation of the universe and humankind which maintain things contrary to human experience and knowledge such as the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis.
The human race has chosen a dignifying path; the path of knowledge is a human choice through which a human being can reach his or her dignity. Our present civilisation is the result of the path of knowledge, and the path itself has transformed humankind to be what it is today, a much-evolved civilization. Scientific knowledge is real and is present in all domains. In order to know the difference between good and evil, which is a necessary step in the understanding of God’s goodness, one must go on the path of knowledge of the reality created by God. According to the Bible, God would have offered us, through our ancestors, a kind of shortcut to happiness akin to ignorance but they have chosen the hard way, the way of knowledge, a much longer and complex way but much more fulfilling.
A comeback to the initial innocence, from which Adam and Eve wanted to escape, by turning our face from knowledge and from science, is not possible anymore. We have to go onward and not backward. We must know and confront reality and make other choices, this time well informed by the knowledge of what the world really is, and how it came to be. In this way humankind can know God in depth by the choices that each of us makes, based on the knowledge of facts and not only on religious dogma. In a metaphoric way, the initial choice was made by Adam and Eve, and if that were true, we couldn’t have changed that attempt for knowledge, or its consequences; we only can change the outcome of our own individual destiny through knowledge and faith in a very delicate proportion.
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We are called to know the universe and also to know God using our reason and also our faith.
Another problem that I try to solve in this study is the relationship between a personal view on the accuracy of the Bible and the strength of a Christian faith based on personal revelation and personal experience with God rather than on the biblical texts. God is a Reality but not necessarily in the way that the book of Genesis presents Him.
What foundation can have a personal faith which accepts that the universe was created through the Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago and wasn’t created in seven days, not even in seven longer periods of time? If we separate the creation stories from the whole corpus of the Bible what still remains as a reliable source of information in the rest of the Bible? Can someone know that God exists only because he or she met Him in a personal spiritual experience without any relation with the texts of the book of Genesis? What comes first, the personal spiritual experience or the reading of the Bible? In my opinion, reading the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis without having a personal experience with God isn’t an incentive for faith.
Not everyone who reads the Bible believes that they represent accurate realities because there are many inconsistencies in it. God doesn’t do stupid things; He didn’t create the daylight before the sky and before the sun which provides this light, as the book of Genesis says.
As a practicing Christian, I have considered, in the past, the Bible as a book inspired by God and this was the case until I persevered further and I “have dug” deeper. In the process I have come upon some fundamental contradictions and this prevented me maintaining the same stance about Bible inspiration. I now don’t reject entirely the principle of the presence of inspiration in some texts of the Bible but I am much more circumspect in proclaiming it without careful qualification and without defining what inspiration can possibly mean.
All texts imply meanings, some are intended by their authors and others aren’t and the conclusion on their consistency must be based on both categories. If the Bible shows on one page one thing and on another page another thing contrary to the first, in respect to the same theme, we have a problem because I strongly believe that God wouldn’t contradict Himself, if indeed He inspired those texts.
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Of course, God could have released, if He so wished, contradictory accounts about an issue, but when reaching such a conclusion, one must know what the admission of such an improbable situation can tell us about Him and what impact that has at a theological level.
At the same time, whoever rejects the possibility of divine revelation, as a consequence of that stance, he or she finds it hard to accept the possibility of God’s existence, because reason has its natural limits. Nevertheless, reason is the only criteria or the standard unit for the measurement of the consistency of any belief being it religious or otherwise. In other words, a text which is contradictory in its internal structure cannot be valid, no matter from where it comes.
If I start to contradict myself in what I maintain this is an important issue and strong enough to make my position unacceptable, including in the spiritual domain. For the same motif, I cannot adhere to a religious faith in which the underlying logic gives absurd or contradictory results and doesn’t go anywhere because its basic elements are totally disharmonious and disentangled. God’s revelation cannot be contradictory or absurd and to test it from these two perspectives, any person necessarily needs reason. A so-called revelation which is in contradiction with the laws of logic cannot come from God who is Logos, a term also meaning rationality.
The subjective inward activity of any person shouldn’t be underestimated and spirituality is essential for a full development of the inner self. Beside this subjective side, one must consider a more objective one; there are the results of the scientific observations of the outside world, which by no means can be neglected or discarded. Deep subjectivity must be mixed with a clear eye on the objective reality if one doesn’t want to get severed from the outer world. To cut off the human mind from the universal material world or to consider that the relationships between the cosmos and the human spirit are happening only in the “deepest valleys” of the inward human universe, is a sort of subjectivist reduction to which I don’t subscribe.
In the same time, it is not irrational, I would say, to admit that there is a sort of mystical or esoteric relation between some individual human minds and a universal rationality or even with an unseen universal Consciousness, which manifests itself inside human beings through a certain type of lucidity, clear vision and revelation.
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Separation of the inward “spiritual metabolism” from the outward dynamic amounts to a split in the human multidimensionality. The human being is a very complex reality and I don’t see why we should reduce it to a certain dimension or another. Nevertheless, it is one thing to integrate oneself into a bigger picture by his or her own spiritual mechanisms and it is another thing to be submitted socially to certain religious doctrines or dogmas foisted on individual consciousness in the name of some illusory ideals manipulated by a religious but also quasi-political force.
Is Christianity the only way to become a more spiritual human being, or indeed can one better oneself and ascend to the spiritual ladder in more than one way? Are other religions such as Buddhism or Islam or others as spiritual as the Christian religion? Is there any measurement unit for spirituality? Isn’t science bearing its own spirituality, which sometimes is as fulfilling as the religious one? What is the relationship between a spirituality inspired by religion and one induced by the sciences? These are questions which can be answered by the members of all those religions and each of them can probably give a positive answer, if not they wouldn’t profess their religious faith as they do. I consider that sciences can also inspire someone to have spiritual experiences such as contemplative, meditative, revelatory intuitions and thoughts.
At the same time, Christianity promises not only a spiritual evolution or a certain moral improvement but much more than that, it offers a new nature to human beings. God and man, a new being, a man who has Godlike features and, even more, a man with a Godlike nature is something which can be seen as an unending path towards human spiritual development. Religion professes to bring the deification of man but what does this really mean? Do we assist at the rising of a new dignity for man or of a new race spiritually motivated? In the book of Genesis, the union between the sons of God and the daughters of man hasn’t been seen favourably by Him. And yet the whole idea of Christianity is concentrated in the deification of the human beings. In the N.T. all human beings should become sons and daughters of God but in the O.T., His sons generated a big turmoil on Earth, which allegedly brought to the Flood, when they married the daughters of men.
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Can there be a Godlike man and woman wiser, more intelligent, more generous, more efficient and more powerful? Can this come only through spirituality and revelation or a continuous evolution in scientific knowledge is also needed? There is a long competition between human self-achieved knowledge and messages which are considered to have come from divine revelation and this phenomenon could affect negatively the reputation of religion as a transformative force. Many religious people seem very suspicious of human acquired knowledge, and in this way the old legendary dispute between God, Adam and Eve and also Satan about knowledge extends until our days. According to the Bible this debate would have started in the Garden of Eden or even earlier in the Kingdom of God. As a matter of fact, it is a conflict between the attitude of someone waiting to get everything from above and someone who researches in order to find out for himself or herself how the world was made.
Is there any scientific value in the biblical narratives from the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis or have they only a theological, metaphorical, symbolical and spiritual value? When considering the real scientific value of the biblical narratives one should not be mesmerised by the high spiritual offer of Christianity or of other religions. The profound resonances of a spiritual offer can hinder a demarche for a critical analysis of the biblical texts, and therefore such an endeavour must detach itself completely from any spiritual biases. Is such a thing as spiritual neutrality possible? One must approach the issues without preconceptions and that is the only way to create a real balance between inner and outer parts of the world. I am persuaded that one can continue to believe in God, even if he or she doesn’t believe in the inspiration of all texts of the Bible.
Concerning the inspiration of the Bible, an answer more detached from subjectivism, and more scientific, can be found only in a critical analysis, and comparison of the texts of the Bible between them, starting with the O.T. The texts are either sustaining each other or are contradicting between them, and I found that many biblical texts are inconsistent in themselves and also their individual meanings are in acute contradiction with one another. Moreover, when one compares possible theological interpretations, offered by the biblical texts, one can be surprised to see how many conflicting theologies the Bible contains. Some texts go in a certain direction, and others in an opposite or a very different direction.
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To understand the Bible, to me, means to grasp all possible interpretations of its texts, starting with more literal ones toward much more philosophical ones. Continuous exegesis of the Bible, made in the evangelical movements, which I would call “apologetic exegesis”, doesn’t tell us too much, when the texts which are commented on are not analysed in a critical manner. If the premises are wrong, the entire construction doesn’t matter how spectacular it is, it is also erroneous.
Constructing on a basis which is not clarified enough can build a huge infrastructure of institutions and ideas, but the whole edifice is fragile and can crumble at any moment, because its basis is on sand, on texts which are not able to sustain themselves alone if submitted to a critical analysis. The extraordinary recoil experienced by the Christian religion and other religions in the West can be explained also by the fact that many unsolved problems piled up during the last few centuries.
Only when one ends a stage of constructively criticising the texts of the Bible and deciphering their implicit messages, sometimes very obscure, one can see what really remains as the spiritual message of the texts, and what can be the object of belief and in what manner.
Many texts form the book of Genesis which seem to be historical or scientific may not make any sense historically or scientifically and, for this reason, it is very important to establish from the outset of any analysis if indeed these texts were intended by their author or authors to be historical accounts or some spiritual messages which were expressed in an allegorical form. This may not be an easy task. How can one know if the record of creation in seven days was intended to be a historical account, or is only mythology? We can try to find this out only by carefully analysing the texts and above all by testing their inner consistency.
How many details do we get from the texts of the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis and what types of details are available? Are the narratives really trying to explain certain natural phenomena or do they only use basic observations in an inconsistent manner, in order to cover the creation of the world? In other words, are the narratives of the creation from the book of Genesis a visible attempt to explain natural phenomena or they are used only as a pretext in order to build a foundation for a religious faith?
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Can we see any pre-scientific approach, available in that period of time, or only non-analytic statements based on faith? We can compare the biblical account with ancient scientific explanations from the same period of time only to see what was intended to be science and what was not. Such questions pop up in mind when one opens the book of Genesis from the Bible. Nevertheless, I don’t see any attempt in the first 11 chapters of the Bible to explain any natural phenomenon in a quasi-scientific manner, but rather only in a mythological way.
Any inconsistency in a story, if it isn’t convincingly explicated, is evidence for the lack of truthfulness of that account. God is not irrational and He doesn’t do irrational things. God does extraordinary things but not contradictory to their referential contexts and not willingly absurd only to confuse the reader. To do an absurd, contradictory, nonsensical or illogical thing it is not the proof of supernatural, quite the opposite.
Without internal logos, an immanent rationality, nothing can really exist in the world that we know. All that exists, all entities, are intelligently organised. In essence, existence of any individual reality means to participate to the infinite rationality of all that is. Nothing can exist outside the universal logos, universal rationality, which binds all reality together. All things are linked in one infinite reality by an invisible rationality, which sets coherent rules for all that is.
God can surpass the laws of nature, not because He doesn’t respect them but because He knows all of them too well and is able to control them. Nevertheless, if God set in place the laws of nature He doesn’t despise them nor He would have created the universe in a chaotic way as it is described by the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis.
God, in the process of doing miracles, can use unknown natural laws or could utilise the known rules in an unknown way. What rules did God use when He revived Lazarus from death? We don’t know and we can only try to speculate. If such a miracle is possible some special way to use the natural laws, unknown at the present time by science, could have been at work.
There is a problem with the literal interpretation of the narratives of creation, from the book of Genesis. These stories look so self-confident in their approach but they are flawed by contradictions. They are motifs for doubt rather than an incentive for believing in miracles.
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Nevertheless, the miracle of intelligent life is at the heart of all existence. Physically the universe could have existed without us but the fact that we exist raises a question. Are we inconsequential for the universe, a mere accident or much more than that? There are “natural miracles” beside what are thought to be supernatural ones and the confusion between them is easy to be made. Life in a sense is a miracle and it isn’t difficult to believe in a divinity when living in the middle of so many “natural miracles” in our universe. The laws of nature don’t exclude miracles because they are themselves miracles. What happens in the quantum world looks like a miracle or at least something very strange and inexplicable, at the moment. Quantum entanglement is a miracle because it is real but unexplained by the laws of physics. For science, even the origin of the laws of nature is not totally explained hence it looks like a miracle. The entire existence, coming out from absolute nonexistence, a theory maintained by some scientists, is not an extraordinary miracle, more spectacular than anything else? Of course, this would be something more spectacular than the Lazarus revival. Some atheists profess that they don’t believe in miracles yet they believe in the possibility of existence per se coming out from total nonexistence, which is a contradiction of the law of causality.
We are linked to God by the miracle of conscious life present in each human being. As a matter of fact, the existence of human beings on Earth is an extraordinary miracle and when we look to it like that we understand that Jesus realized miracles in a world of miracles. For the moment, the mechanisms of miracles are not fully understood and this is the reason why they are miracles and not scientific hypothesis.
Sometimes sciences bring us closer to miracles, for example, in medical matters. In relation to the origins of the universe it seems that the miracle of the existence of the universe is farther than ever from the biblical accounts. Every new human discovery in this domain widens the distance with the narratives of creation from the book of Genesis.
The numerous inconsistencies contained by the narratives of creation from the Bible tend to undermine the personal religious faith of many people. If these accounts were the most important part of one’s religious belief, many more individuals would give up their religious faith. But faith is more complex than following or believing what is written in the Bible; faith is the product of someone’s entire experience of life.
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Many realise that the Bible is not a book of science or history, and that its content is not an explanation of the reality. At its best the Bible could be more like a code or an elaborate cipher of the world but even that is put in doubt. At the same time, when one definitively discards the book of Genesis as a book of science, one opens the sky and allows the real explanations of the origins to take their rightful place, and from that point one can define his or her religious faith in a more congruent way.
There aren’t predictable rules for irrational facts in order to be applied to gain knowledge; there are only rules of rationality and logic and also of probabilistic calculations. Some of these rules are visibly contradicted by irrational propositions contained by the texts of the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis. For example, the assertions that God created daylight, on the first day, but the sun was created on the fourth day is an irrational statement, made by the book of Genesis, because it is a reverse of the rule of causality, in which causes must determine effects. As everyone knows, the cause of the daylight, is the sun and, beyond doubt, that is demonstrated both by daily empirical observations together with scientific ones. Anyone can notice that where there isn’t sun there isn’t also daylight. This is an argument amongst many others that the texts from the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis aren’t reliable.
If God created daylight in the first day and the sun in the fourth, based on the suppositions of the Bible, there must be two sources of daylight and when the sunlight is obscured by an eclipse the alleged source supposed to have been created on the first day of creation should become evident. This is not the case; hence for this reason and others the biblical narrative about the creation of daylight on the first day is false. In order to reach this conclusion one must assume that God didn’t create a provisional daylight to last only from the first day to the fourth one, because God wouldn’t have done such provisional things in His creation, declaring them at the same time to be good, because if they really were good they would have lasted for more than three days.
We can safely consider a provisional hypothetical daylight as being bad, in spite of what the book of Genesis says, because it was replaced after such a short period of time by another more permanent light, that of the sun, and also because it was created under the waters of the primeval sea. In other words, if the light allegedly created on the first day would have been really good it would have lasted more than three days, but soon it was considered to be bad by God and replaced by Him with the light of the sun.
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Such a procedure isn’t expected from the Almighty God, rather from an electrician who doesn’t have power when he or she starts working on a building site and uses a generator for a short while. I will show that any attempt made with the end of spiritualising the light from the first day of creation is unsuccessful and shows the failure of a literal interpretation of the narratives of the creation, from the Bible.
If we are summoned to take the texts about creation from the Bible literally, what is the legitimacy for spiritualising only the story of creation of the daylight? One cannot legitimately take a small part of a text, from the book of Genesis, the creation of daylight in the first day and extract it from its literal context, to spiritualise it at will.
Theologically, there probably is a reason for the discrepancy regarding the creation of light in the stories of creation, and that could be the efforts made by the writers of the book of Genesis to depart from the Egyptian mythology, which offered to the sun a central place and a very important function in the Egyptian religious faith. Again, the stories from the book of Genesis can be seen as having a religious purpose and not a quasi-scientific one, and were written with the idea of an intended dissimilitude with another religion. Jewish people had to be different, and manifestly so, from the religion of their Egyptian neighbours. That was a way of defining their national identity.
To assume that all human species were generated from Adam and Eve is a situation which is considered by other biblical texts to be immoral and infringing God’s laws, which condemn incest and in this way, contradict the book of Genesis. This is a serious internal contradiction of the Bible. This assumption is also a contradiction of the natural laws which consider incest to be unhealthy from the point of view of the evolution of the human species. Allegedly all human species came from the initial association between Adam and Eve’s first children, brothers and sisters, but marriage between brother and sister is prohibited and punished by the O.T. What is the logic of the biblical narratives in this case?
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Didn’t God find another way for the creation of humankind than the use of incest which He hates and condemns in the Mosaic Law? It is hard to base one’s faith on such a contradiction which is at the core of the future plan for the redemption of humankind.
Concerning the creation of humankind, God, as depicted by the Bible, was constrained by only one possibility and determined to use incest for the multiplication of human beings in spite that He considered it an abomination. That very much diminishes the image of His power. One should expect that God is not subject to natural circumstances which would have forced Him into moral compromises. The Almighty God cannot be seen as being submitted to historical determinism by saying: “God couldn’t do things otherwise; the multiplication of humankind had to be by incest, there wasn’t any other way, if not the theology based on Christ’s sacrifice on the cross doesn’t make any sense.” This God is not the All-powerful; He is not the Almighty that we were preached about. This story shows only an image of God determined and submitted to the limited conditions of His creation.
If God didn’t have another choice but to contradict Himself, that is a problem. In this case, God is not All-powerful; He adapts His actions to the conditions and submits His will to human history. In other words, if God had to create only one man and one woman and the entirety of humankind multiplied through incest, this is a moral compromise made by God. (Leviticus 18; 26-27)
The creation of only one man and one woman, in order to multiply, has been an invitation for moral decay in the context of widespread incest. How can anyone take seriously God’s of the Bible stance about incest, imposed by force on the Jewish people, later on in time? What do we have to believe, God s perfect character or the Bible? It seems that they contradict each other. God’s image in the O.T. in so many occasions is very unfavourable to Him: If He had independently created more than one man and more than one woman in the same time, to be at the origin of humankind, the problem would have been solved. As a matter of fact, the problem is solved in another way because science show us that at the outset of the development of human races they were few thousands human beings and not only two. Who should one believe? Should he or she believe science which gives a reasonable and realistic solution from a medical point of view and, in the same time, more valid morally or the Bible who presents a myth? Anyone can answer for himself or her.
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Of course, I am not in a situation to advise God how He should have created humankind but I can recognise an incredible contradiction between the story of the creation of man and woman and the moral law from the O.T. The Darwinian Theory of evolution, concerning the apparition of humankind, is much more adequate scientifically and also much more acceptable from a moral point of view. The evolution of the species doesn’t entail incest as a necessary mean for the multiplication of humankind because there were more human ancestors, not only two. I am persuaded that nature would have chosen a healthier way of multiplication, other than through incest and if God would have created nature He wouldn’t have contradicted the laws of nature set in place by Him.
The stories of the creation of humankind from the book of Genesis had to serve a religious purpose, not a historical one. Adam had to be unique in order to symbolise the entire humankind. Adam couldn’t have been created together with more human beings like him because in such a case they could have had different attitudes towards God and the stories would have been much more complicated. Hypothetically, if other human beings had been created by God some of them could have obeyed Him and lived in paradise forever. In this case, the entire story about how humankind had been created and entered into conflict with God would have been compromised. The logic of the story of human disobedience to God has required only one pair of human beings, not many.
Even Christ’s mission on Earth was understood after a long period of time through the story of Adam and Eve. Here is the biblical text:
“45 Thus it is written, ‘The first man, Adam, became a living being’; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. 46 But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the physical, and then the spiritual. 47 The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is* from heaven. 48 As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. 49 Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will* also bear the image of the man of heaven.” (1 Corinthians 15; 45-49 NRSV)
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The space for a new understanding of Christ’s mission on Earth is opened when one understands that Adam never had lived on Earth. Adam is a symbol, not a historical figure, the epitome of man in whom the entirety of mankind found its destiny. The story of Adam and Eve did serve in the end a religious and not a historical or scientific purpose. Later on, in the evolution of the Judeo-Christian tradition Adam’s sin was compensated by the sacrifice of the new Adam, the Son of God who is Jesus. How could the Jewish writers have known about Christ when they wrote about Adam? They didn’t have the chance to know, but they opened unconsciously a certain interpretation of the coming of Christ on Earth, meaning the new Adam. In time, a new religious tradition has been constructed on an old religious symbolism. Nevertheless, without a real Adam the Christ mission on Earth has to be understood differently.
The coming of Jesus on Earth was a new creation or a regeneration of the original creation and its symbolism was very well served by the story of Adam and Eve. This doesn’t mean that Jesus’ life and teachings can be interpreted only in a single way, that of the classical theism.
All religions are related by a common universal patrimony of symbols such as the filiation between divinity and human beings or the principle of sacrifice.
The Christian faith benefited extremely well from a certain ostensible theological consistency based on creation of man and woman, from the book of Genesis. Because it is less than probable that any man was ever able to anticipate the future of the Jewish religion and the apparition of Christian religion, at first glance only, it looks like this consistency has only one author, God. But this is not necessarily the case. It is more probable that, in time, based on the texts already existent, a new theology emerged, which developed the theology existent in nutshell in the older texts. This isn’t a programmed consistency, this is a constructed religious edifice built on a mythological basis.
This doesn’t mean that Jesus used the Judaic tradition in order to build a new religion. This only means that the interpretation given by the apostle Paul to the texts from the book of Genesis in connection with Jesus’ teachings is not based on how the universe and humankind have been generated in reality but is based on an old religious tradition. Jesus didn’t come as the second Adam if the first man never existed but He came, nevertheless, as the Son of God, an exceptional human being, an example of how human beings have to become in order to be suitable for the Kingdom of God. This new perspective changes very much the relation between God and human beings and the latter shouldn’t be seen any more as miserable and decayed creatures, tainted with the original sin and bearing a quilt which makes them unworthy partners for Him. Human condition has it’s inherit dignity and human beings are mortal not because Adam and Eve were disobedient to God but because human nature presupposes death. No religion should despise or blame the human mortal condition, in the name of God. Jesus didn’t come to save humankind from its hopeless sinful status in which Adam and Eve would have brought it, because there is no such thing, but He came to open a new possibility in the understanding of future human development.
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God's False Mirror | The inspiration of the Bible
Written by Gabriel Baicu| |
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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]
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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