I started this study asking 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? From my point of view, we
now have an answer to this question. Knowing that the first 11 chapters of the
Bible are only mythology and not facts, the entire biblical foundation of one’s
faith is removed. The first 11 chapters of the Bible are essential for the
Jewish and for the Christian faith but also for Islam which recognises also that
all of humankind was created from the first two human beings, Adam and Eve. All
three monotheistic religions are affected when one realises that the story of
Adam and Eve is a myth and doesn’t have anything to do with reality.
God didn’t create the universe and mankind in six days and the
acknowledgment of this situation casts doubt on all theologies, regardless to
what religion one belongs, which are based on this foundation – it invalidates
their basis. A theology built on a false foundation cannot be other than
misguided in its conclusions.
Spirituality understood as a personal relationship with God doesn’t
suffer damages but religions cannot be trusted in what they say about the
origins of the universe and of humankind. If there is a relationship between God
and human beings and I believe that there is, this isn’t configured as it is
described by the three monotheistic religions. God didn’t say the word and the
universe didn’t come to be as a consequence of the spoken word. God didn’t form
the first man from dust or clay as the potter does with his statuettes.
The implications for this change of supposition are huge and I only
started to address them, but the complexity of this discussion is still to be
dealt with.
If Adam and Eve
are not real personages the faith in God isn’t the same and the relationship
between Him and every human being isn’t placed on His authority based on His
suzerainty over the world any more, but only on love.
If God is a Creator we don’t have any revelation of how He created
the world or if He created it, because the first 11 chapters of the book of
Genesis cannot be trusted and there aren’t other biblical texts to replace them.
The supposition that God created the world is based on nothing and is only an
article of faith chosen by the believers. It doesn’t mean that God doesn’t exist
or that He isn’t all-powerful. We don’t know anything about the creation of the
world by a divine Person and we can explain the origin of the cosmos without any
divine implication in it.
If God didn’t create humankind from mud, the evolution of the human
beings is based on a long story starting many millions or even billions of years
ago if one takes in consideration the first forms of life existent on Earth. God
didn’t create man but He could have influenced the apparition of life on Earth
by generating the right conditions for life. At the same time, we don’t have any
proof or any revelation that He influenced in any way the apparition of the
world.
God didn’t create man but he can help human beings to better their
moral statute and can give to each man and woman a new spiritual nature which is
closely linked with a new vision on life. If God is the Consciousness of the
entire existence, when He connects our consciousness with His Consciousness, our
minds open and at that stage we see the world differently. We can see our fellow
human beings with God’s eyes, in a new perspective; we can love the others as
ourselves. Having access to the universal Consciousness, our own way of thinking
improves greatly and this is a kind of out-of-body experience. It is an
out-of-body experience lived “in the body” in the sense that the universal
Consciousness dwells in our body in unity with our consciousness. In this way,
our consciousness extends out of our body as far as the universal Consciousness
allows us to go. This goes farther than a religious faith which doesn’t
experience direct contact with God’s infinity but which is based only on
religious dogmas and doctrines. Spirituality is based on a personal experience
with God, religions are based mainly on the experiences of others which they try
to transmit through religious traditions.
The spiritual experience is more like a kind of “out of our
biological instincts” experience. All human beings can communicate among
themselves through the universal Consciousness in which the individual human
consciousness finds a place in harmony with all other individual consciousness.
A spiritual connection between human beings happens when the universal
Consciousness dwells within the consciousness of those human beings.
The experimentation of the faith in God is an
“out of human nature” experience, in line with out-of-body experiences or
near-death experiences, in which we become one with the universal Consciousness
and we gain a higher awareness of the universe in our minds.
The second chapter shows that it is a
characteristic feature of the book of Genesis to present a reversed order of
creation. Everything which would have been created by God would have been
realised with the effects before the causes, and that gives a clear sign that
the author or authors of the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis had in
mind certain stories to be written by them. After writing those stories they
tried to find justifications for those events. In other words, the causes for
the events described by the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis are false,
they are pure imagination intended to explain events which were predetermined by
the ends followed by the writers. There isn’t a logical determination between
causes and effects.
Through the book of Genesis one is asked to believe unbelievable
stories. The beginning of all things started with a primeval sea which in
mythology is a symbol of the chaos and all was covered by waters until the
second day, when the dome of the sky was created. The earth was beneath the
waters until the second day, surrounded on all sides and probably a huge
pressure was on it. We don’t know exactly how thick the layer of water starting
from the earth’s surface was but it was thick enough to cover the space occupied
in the present time by the sky. We can imagine it as having a huge thickness. If
it had been a thin layer of water, above that water would have been empty space,
but this isn’t what the book of Genesis says. The primeval sea would have
occupied the entire space of the universe, including the terrestrial atmosphere,
because until the second day when the dome of the sky had been set in place
there wouldn’t have been any empty space able to separate the waters from above
from the waters from the earth.
Even if the waters from above were in continuity with the waters
covering the earth, a wind from God swept the surface of the waters. It is a
very contradictory image. There wasn’t any sky or the wind swept the surface of
the waters, both cannot exist at the same time. In order for the wind to be able
to sweep the surface of the waters the earthly atmosphere would have needed to
be already in place but according to the book of Genesis it wasn’t. Without the
sky, there wasn’t any surface of the waters.
According to the book of Genesis, in spite of the lack of sky, God
created light and consequently day and night, even if this light had to travel
through water in order to reach Earth. Under water the light travels over 200
metres with great difficulty so any light under water would have been unable to
illuminate the earth in order to generate a standard day.
At the same time, taking into consideration that such an alleged
light would have had to be fixed, the earth couldn’t have spun around its axis
being surrounded by waters and being under their enormous pressure if they
filled the entire sky. If this picture of the beginning depicted by the book of
Genesis was true, the creation of the first day and night in these conditions
would have been impossible. God couldn’t have created heavens, understood as the
entire cosmos, on the first day, because there wasn’t any place for them. The
dome of the sky was created only on the second day and with the lack of the sky,
heavens and light had to be created under the waters of the primeval sea.
If we imagine the earth at the beginning as a lonely sphere covered
by water hovering in an infinite space, that is an incorrect image. The Bible
doesn’t say that. The correct image is one of a universal sea which covered
everything, the earth and the place later occupied by the sky at the same time.
The earth was a formless void, it didn’t have any shape and it was covered
completely with waters which extended much beyond its limits. In order for the
days and nights to exist the existence of the sky would have been absolutely
necessary but the dome of the sky wasn’t in place when the Bible says that the
first day and night were created.
Another necessary condition for the existence
of days and nights would have been the possibility for the earth to spin around
its axis. How could earth have spun around its axis if it was formless and under
water?
God couldn’t have created days and nights before separating the waters
from above from the waters which covered the earth, liberating in this way the
earth from the enormous pressure of the waters which remained above the sky.
After all, the dome of the sky had the function of generating a proper
environment for life on Earth.
Everything had been created in a reversed order according to the
book of Genesis. The causes had been placed after the effects and the conditions
for events were such that if they had been real they would have made those
events impossible. First was created the light under the waters of the primeval
sea, after that was created the dome of the sky, and only after that the sun was
also created. Following the creation of the dry land the plants had been created
but they were set in place before the creation of the celestial bodies, even if
it is known that the heavy elements necessary for the existence of plants are
produced inside the stars. The daylight would have been created twice, on the
first day of the creation and on the fourth day.
No man could know God if he or she uses as a mental image what the
Bible says about the creation. Such a story portrays a confused God, with no
logic and no respect for His own laws which He had established for nature. The
book of Genesis shows us an irrational and absurd way of creating nature. The
presence of the stories of creation in Pentateuch is a motif of unbelief for
many people. These narratives gather in a syncretic way many sources from
different Near-Eastern mythologies but without proper respect for their
harmonious integration in the same collection of texts. The stories of the
creation from the book of Genesis are a reflection of a now outdated human
understanding of how the universe works.
The book of Genesis is the expression of a
certain vision about the universe, a static, not evolving universe, in which
once the different parts are set in their place, they will stay there forever or
at least until God destroys the entire work. This is a false presupposition. The
universe is evolving, it isn’t an already finished work.
I reckon that in our days none can see the universe in the same
manner as it was seen by the writers of the book of Genesis. It is common
knowledge that the universe evolves, even if very slowly, but nevertheless it
changes visibly. Stars die and others are created and the distances between them
are modifying in the process of the expansion of the universe. God didn’t finish
His creation in the sixth day of creation as is wrongfully stated by the Bible.
If the creation
wasn’t finished in six days, contrary to what the book of Genesis tells us, the
existence of the Sabbath, the rest day on the seventh day, doesn’t make any
sense. The rest day is a corollary of a finished work, the Bible says, but the
work is not finished yet. God didn’t finish the cosmos during the fourth day; it
continues to evolve over the time, hence the existence of the rest day doesn’t
make any sense.
The two stories of creation don’t refer to one another and cannot
be seen as completing each other. Each of the two stories was written in
different time periods and was interested in particular in a different subject.
Both stories contain the creation of the earth and heavens, the plants and
animals and humankind, but in a different manner. They simply are two different
stories with two different emphases which were seen as being similar by the
final redactor of the book of Genesis. The first story, from Genesis chapter 1,
gives a more general account regarding the creation of mankind in the context of
a much broader and confused universal setting. The second story, from Genesis
chapter 2, is not based on the first story from Genesis chapter 1. After
offering cosmological indications Genesis chapter 2 gives particular attention
to the apparition of mankind on Earth. The way of presenting this thematic by
Genesis chapter 2 cannot be integrated harmoniously in Genesis chapter 1 because
of their incongruous details.
Genesis chapter 1 and chapter 2 try to explain different things not
being in harmony with one another. They have in common the creation of plants,
animals, and mankind but present their creation very differently, contradicting
each other in the manner of their creation and the order of their making.
Beyond this visible contradiction, what is the theological
difference between Genesis chapter 1 and Genesis chapter 2? Genesis chapter 1
doesn’t give us any real or truthful information about the creation of the
universe but tells us that mankind is the image of God. Contrary to that,
Genesis chapter 2 shows man in the same category as animals but with the chance
to be summoned by God for a higher destiny. In Genesis chapter 1 God created
humankind in His likeness from the beginning but in Genesis chapter 2, mankind
was not created in His likeness but became like Him only after eating fruit from
the tree of knowledge in spite of His will.
In Genesis chapter 2, human beings would have been deceived by an
animal, a snake, but that would have been strange if they really did have
dominion over all animals. Equating the snake with Satan needed an important
theological turn and it isn’t demonstrated that the snake was really intended
from the beginning to be a personification of the devil, and was not only a
mythological personage as many others in the Middle-Eastern mythologies.
It is hard to accept that Genesis chapter 2 is a continuation of
Genesis chapter 1 because they tell a different story. In day six in Genesis
chapter 1, when humans were created they were blessed and ask to multiply on
Earth. If Genesis chapter 2 really is a continuation of Genesis chapter 1 we
should see no obstacle to the geographical expansion of human beings on Earth,
following their multiplication. Nevertheless, the Garden of Eden in Genesis
chapter 2 was a geographic delimitation for human beings before the Fall, it was
their place to live, designated for them.
The paradise, the Garden of Eden, would have
been a special place unlike the rest of the universe. Creating humankind to live
in paradise or giving them the entire earth isn’t the same thing and this
difference separates once more Genesis chapter 1 from Genesis chapter 2.
Leaving the Garden was a punishment, consequently we can imagine
that humankind wouldn’t have left it unless they were forced to do that. There
were two different places assigned to human beings in Genesis chapter 1 and
chapter 2, the entire earth and the Garden of Eden. Between the Garden of Eden
and the outside world would have been a certain kind of boundary which could
have been guarded when needed by an angel.
If the stories of creation weren’t only legends and if the fruit
trees existed all over the earth, as recorded in chapter 1, there wouldn’t have
been any difference between the whole earth and the Garden of Eden. We have the
delimitations of the Garden described in Genesis chapter 2. The Garden of Eden
would have been a Garden inside another garden but that is nonsensical. About
the disappearance of the Garden and the tree of life from the surface of the
earth, the Bible doesn’t say any word.
If the more general record is Genesis chapter 1 and the more
detailed is Genesis chapter 2, the more general had to anticipate in its message
the details given in Genesis chapter 2. The problem is that the two stories
don’t harmonise well with each other for many reasons.
One example is
that in Genesis chapter 2, vegetation wouldn’t have appeared on Earth before the
presence of man but in Genesis chapter 1 all plants would have been created
before humankind. Nevertheless, Adam wouldn’t have been able to work all the
fields of the earth by himself, hence such a determination for the existence of
vegetation in the fields is absurd. To that, must be added the absence of rain
which could have been a real cause for the inexistence of any kind of
vegetation, cultivated or uncultivated. In Genesis chapter 2 the only place for
vegetation was the Garden of Eden, watered by a river and being the home for
man.
According to Genesis chapter 2, only if the rain had come to Earth
before the Flood and the entire earth had been populated, would the vegetation
have covered the whole surface of the planet. The rain didn’t happen on Earth
until the Flood, according to the book of Genesis. The defence that the text in
Genesis chapter 2, verse 5, refers only to cultivated plants, is weak because
the expressions “plant of the field” and “herb of the field” comprise in them
the entire vegetation in the fields and usually many plants and herbs grow in
the fields uncultivated.
It is clear that in Genesis chapter 1, animals were created before
humankind and in Genesis chapter 2 they were created after man. The undeniable
proof is that in chapter 2 God expressed the will to create animals in the
future tense in relation to the creation of man. “It is not good that the man
should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” After this promise
“out of the ground the LORD God formed every animal of the field and every bird
of the air”. The speculation with the tenses of the verb “make”, made by some
harmonists, is another desperate attempt to justify the unjustifiable. This
despair shows how important those details are for someone who wants to affirm
the infallibility of the Bible. The book of Genesis isn’t infallible; it
presents two different stories of creation unconnected in a harmonious way but
in conflict with each other through many contradictions.
The creation of mankind is described in two different chapters of
the first book of the Bible, chapter 1 and chapter 2 of Genesis. In chapter 1,
God had created mankind together, male, and female. All animals were created in
pairs, male and female, and so were the human beings, says Genesis chapter 1.
This logic was
reversed by Genesis chapter 2 in which God initially had created man alone and
only after that He started to look for a partner for him. God wouldn’t have
created man alone in chapter 2 if He wanted him to multiply. It doesn’t make
sense. All animals had been created in pairs and only man was created alone,
according to Genesis chapter 2. God knew that animals had to be created in pairs
in order to multiply but He didn’t know that humankind had to be created also in
a pair in spite that He endowed man with the same reproductive system as that of
many animals. It is impossible to see God trying to find a helper partner for
man amongst animals.
How would God have ignored that no animal would be a good helper
for man? Didn’t God create the human species from a plan? Did He create
randomly, not knowing that man and woman should form a pair, like all other
living beings? Did God really try to find a helper for man amongst the animals?
Of course, He didn’t. The story is a fable but unfortunately if taken literally
as many believers do it creates very important theological consequences based on
incredible distortions of reality.
In Genesis chapter 2 God had created humankind apparently without
knowing what He was doing. The whole story is based on mythological imagination
intending to show the dependent situation of woman on man and to explain the
presence of evil in the world. It also refers to an alleged cause for sufferings
caused by birth and to the so-called motivation for difficulties encountered in
the process of agricultural work. In those days, the work of the land was so
hard that it was considered to be a punishment from God, but through human
knowledge these difficulties diminished very much in time.
“Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his
wife, and they become one flesh”. Who said this phrase, from Genesis 2; 24? What
father and what mother had been involved? No father and no mother had been in
existence when man pronounced that phrase. Only God could have been considered a
Father for the first pair but no mother was involved. Adam couldn’t have known
that humankind would be generated through fathers and mothers so the statement
attributed to him about fathers and mothers cannot be but false, because when he
allegedly made that declaration he couldn’t have had children with his wife.
The combination of Genesis chapter 1 and chapter 2 with the aim to
create one comprehensible story of creation is impossible. The details and the
underlining philosophy of the two stories are incompatible with each other. God
created a very good world, in Genesis chapter 1, but man is responsible for the
evil in the world, according to Genesis chapter 3. That is a bad philosophy. If
Genesis chapter 1 opens the understanding for Genesis chapter 2 and chapter 3,
then in Genesis chapter 1 the world was not very good because it contained the
germ for the Fall of man in it. Only if one sees Genesis chapter 1 and chapter 2
as two different stories of creation can this problem be solved.
The Bible is factually wrong when it says that there was a time
when all animals ate only plants. Through this text its human author wanted to
introduce the idea of a peaceful paradisiacal world before Adam and Eve sinned.
There wouldn’t have been death in God’s creation until Adam and Eve disobeyed
Him. God is good and He didn’t like killings; predation, and death came as a
consequence of Adam and Eve’s Fall and they are responsible for killing and
predation in the animal world as well as in the human reality. To allot all
responsibility to humankind’s Fall for the way in which the nature works is
nothing but absurdity. The animal world doesn’t function according to rules of
morality and such norms belong to humankind as an important attribute, but
having no connection with the way in which animals behave. To relate animal
behaviour with human morality and with obedience of humankind to God is
nonsensical.
The stories of animal creation by God don’t have anything to do
with reality. God, through nature, generated life and death from the beginning
of life on Earth. The evolution of living nature had started with very small and
simple forms of life which died long before the apparition of first humanoids on
Earth. Some of those forms of life are imbedded in rocks and their age is much
older than that of the first human beings.
There are plenty of animals which don’t feed mainly on green plants
and never did. Their biological structure, such as dentition, stomach,
intestines, claws, prove that clearly. There is a dilemma which weighs heavily
in the balance of the truthfulness of the biblical texts. God either created all
animal kinds or species and accordingly He created carnivores also, or He didn’t
create all animal kinds or species and many of them were generated by nature
through evolution.
Either of these
two cases nullifies the reality of the biblical texts referring to the creation
of animals.
Creationism doesn’t allow macro-evolution but only variations
inside every species. At the same time, carnivorous animals are structured in
such a way that they couldn’t have fed mainly on plants before the Flood, as the
Bible says; their species are different from herbivore species. The Bible also
says that God finished His creation in six days, so all species of animals had
to originate from that period because after that nothing else was created. The
supposed transformation which implied the change of a herbivorous animal in a
carnivore is profound and not only a variation inside one species or another. If
God created the carnivores from the beginning and they ate meat from the first
day that means that death entered the creation before the creation of humans and
of their disobedience. It is not Adam and Eve who attracted the death in God’s
creation but the existence of the first predators and other natural causes.
There are many reasons to believe that God didn’t create animals
and plants to be immortal. Adam’s disobedience was followed by the prohibition
to eat from the tree of life. If they were created immortal Adam and Eve didn’t
need to eat from the tree of life in order to gain immortality. If humans were
created mortal, animals also were created in the same way. If mortality was not
a problem in creation there was no reason for the interdiction of the use of
animal meat for food. If animal meat was eaten by other animals from the
beginning of their existence on Earth, death didn’t enter into creation as the
result of Adam and Eve’s sins. If death was always present in the creation there
isn’t any reason to believe that Adam and Eve would have been punished with
death by God for disobedience to Him. Death wasn’t a punishment but a natural
thing in the creation. If Adam and Eve weren’t punished with death they wouldn’t
have been punished at all by God. Their leaving the Garden of Eden and the
prohibition of reaching the eternal life weren’t punishments, but the natural
consequences of their choice. They preferred to suffer negative consequences and
have knowledge rather than live eternally without it. At the same time, no-one
can live eternally in heaven if he or she isn’t completely obedient to God. This
is the conclusion of the fables of creation from the book of Genesis.
If human beings had voluntarily chosen their historical evolution
and died according to their mortal nature, the idea of an original sin is
irrational. Choosing freely a path in life couldn’t have been a sin before God
because that way was opened to them by Him. Choosing freely in itself is never a
sin because there isn’t any sin in freedom per se. Nevertheless, all choices
have consequences which aren’t the results of a sin but of a particular decision
or another. If human beings decide to go on their own, as allegedly Adam and Eve
would have done, they inevitably would be confronted with many problems. If they
wanted to live in ignorance and to submit entirely to God, they would have been
rewarded with protection and eternal life. If death wasn’t a punishment for the
first human beings it also isn’t a retribution for any other individual, but it
is only a natural consequence for the choice of refusing to totally obey God.
Complete obedience of humankind was rejected in the mythological narrative of
Adam and Eve from the book of Genesis.
Another obvious absurd allegation of the book of Genesis is the
implicit negation of the absolute necessity of the ecosystems of the earth.
Nature exists inside ecosystems in which plants and animals are intertwined.
Predators have a very important role to play in ecosystems and without them the
natural balance is gravely affected. If all animals ate plants between creation
and the Flood, considering the number of such animals and the large size of some
of them, the plant kingdom couldn’t have survived. Without predators, the
herbivores would have multiplied in an uncontrollable way and the quantity of
vegetation couldn’t have covered the nutritional needs of so many animals.
Even the classification between plants and animals, made by the
book of Genesis, is not correct. There are other living beings which are neither
plants nor animals. Those living beings, such as bacteria, don’t eat green
plants, even if they were created by God. There isn’t such an acknowledgement in
the first chapter of the book of Genesis.
The book of Genesis is filled with contradictions and is far from
explaining the origins of the world. It is strange that in only two pages of the
Bible are contained so many contradictory and absurd messages. The image which
is given by the stories of creation from the book of Genesis about God is
contrary to the representation which one expects of the Creator of the universe.
God couldn’t inspire such contradictions to human beings because He
didn’t want to deceive humankind. There are many stories in the Bible written
over centuries, using the same symbols but in a contradictory way. There is a
continuation in the use of the symbols as such but these symbols are not
utilised in a consistent manner. The continuation in the use of the symbols
generates the appearance of continuity in the Bible, but is only a superficial
impression. For example, making offerings to God is also a symbol which is used
in other religions as well.
There are many religions on the earth practicing some kind of
sacrifices to deities or which practised them in the past. Older religions than
the Jewish one had practiced animal sacrifices long before Moses’ laws and if we
admit that such religions weren’t inspired by God we also have to recognise that
animal sacrifices to deities aren’t necessarily the result of divine
inspiration. Religion wasn’t invented by Jews and its roots are as old as human
civilization.
Why would God have used the same system of symbols comprised in
ritual sacrifices of animals if He is totally different from any other deity
invented by humankind? It is hard to believe that God would have used a system
of symbols which was invented and used by humankind before Moses’ laws and which
is deemed to be pagan by Christianity, the sacrifices of animals to appease
God’s justice. One can say that God had used a human invention just to make easy
the conveyance of His message. The problem is that so many killings of animals
generate the image of God being bloodthirsty and this is of course a distortion
for He who upholds the highest standard of love.
Abel would also make an animal sacrifice to God. Later, when the
Jewish people started to become more mature, less bloody sacrifices were also
accepted, for example offerings of cereals, but until then only bloody
sacrifices had been admissible and we can see that in the story of Cain and
Abel, of Noah, or of Abraham where the objects of sacrifices were all animals.
As a matter of fact, animals cannot replace human beings in any way because they
don’t possess consciousness and cannot be considered responsible for their deeds
or someone else’s actions.
God in the book of Genesis would have sacrificed the first animals
on the planet, taking their skins and giving them as garments to mankind.
From this alleged
situation many conclude that animal sacrifices could have covered human sin in
the past. If Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel are fairy tales this initial
sacrifice of the first animals is also a legend.
It is possible that the story of Cain and Abel was inserted in the
texts of Pentateuch after the establishment of Moses’ laws in order to relate
them with the creation of the world and of humankind, in this way strengthening
their legitimacy. In the stories of Noah and the Flood we also have a later
insertion because in one of the versions of the stories Noah took more than one
pair of animals from each kind. The writer understood that Noah needed more than
one pair of clean animals on the ark if they were to be sacrificed to God after
the Flood and at the same time if survive on Earth.
The idea that God had high moral standards and He tried to impose
them on the Jewish people through the Mosaic Law is contradicted by the book of
Genesis where such high moral standards are disregarded. Incest was seen in the
Mosaic Law as a very low moral standard and that is entirely understandable. At
the same time, the way in which the book of Genesis tells us about the creation
and multiplication of humankind, it is not only false but also profoundly
immoral and it is criticised severely in the Mosaic Law.
The first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis are in an
irreconcilable contradiction with the rest of the Bible from a moral point of
view and the construction of an entire theology on its basis cannot be but
wrong. An acceptable theology would have to discard the factuality of the book
of Genesis and reinterpret it as a metaphor with many possible meanings. The
transformation of an alleged factuality of the stories of creation into a
religious dogma with moral and social implications is something which doesn’t do
any good to so many people with an honest personal faith in God.
The last bastion of the defenders of the biblical story about the
multiplication of the human races is the idea that the genetic baggage possessed
by Adam and Eve was “perfect” or near perfection, and for this reason any
inbreeding couldn’t have been damaging for humankind. Being so good, the genetic
package of Adam and Eve didn’t need to suffer modifications. On the other side
this is an inept idea. The presence of many races, developed from the same
genetic material, is proof that important genetic modifications happened during
the time.
That means that
the initial genetic material wouldn’t have been “perfect” and it would have
needed modifications. All genetic modifications, according to the biblical
texts, are a transformation from superior to inferior, from perfect to
imperfect. Is the existence of many human races the proof of a diminished value
of the genetic material of humankind? It is not such proof but the proponents of
this unsuitable idea imply just that.
Immediately after their creation people would have lived up to 900
years but the lifespan diminished, gradually reaching 120 years. If the stories
of creation had been real, wouldn’t this reduction of the lifespan be
undisputable proof that multiplication through incest was extremely damaging for
humankind? The stories of creation aren’t true and much research has proven that
the lifespan of humankind has increased, gradually becoming what it is today. If
the stories of creation would reflect the real way in which humankind has
appeared on Earth, God would be responsible for humankind’s bad state of health,
but He is not responsible precisely because humankind’s multiplication wasn’t
done by incest but in the ways described by the theory of human evolution. The
stories of creation are the biggest accuser of God, charging Him with an immense
responsibility which in reality doesn’t belong to Him.
The Bible is contradictory about the issue of incest. It is seen as
the only manner of human multiplication but also as a disgrace and an
abomination. The two perspectives are incompatible with one another. If incest
is a disgrace and an abomination the development of all human races is a
disgrace and an abomination also, but allegedly God created humankind in His
likeness and therefore He couldn’t have programmed human beings to multiply
through incest. God, according to the Bible, has high moral principles which are
universal and absolute. God doesn’t change His principles from one day to
another and what one day is an instrument of His creation couldn’t be a disgrace
another day. God wouldn’t have used incest for the multiplication of humankind
and it is impossible to accept that He used a disgraceful method in order to
attain this purpose.
When studying the past some researchers noticed that many
technological achievements cannot be explained by the common level of human
knowledge which would have been acquired by humankind several thousand years
ago.
The “sons of God”
could be extra-terrestrials who visited the earth in the past, who taught
humankind how to use tools, metals, and other kinds of knowledge. The book of
Enoch speaks about this knowledge transfer clearly. This book has been
considered to be acceptable by many fathers of the Church. From the beginning of
the book of Genesis this transfer of knowledge to humankind wasn’t seen as a
good thing by God. Starting with the tree of knowledge, which attracted human
punishment, and with the “sons of God” who were chastised for giving knowledge
to humankind and for mixing with the “daughters of men” and ending with the
suspicions and persecutions against some medieval scientists, human knowledge
was considered to be in opposition to religious beliefs. This opposition, which
is artificial, is well known in ancient mythologies. For example, in Greek
mythology, Prometheus helped people, giving them knowledge.
The Bible follows the same principle according to which God was
angry with the “sons of God” and besides other motives, one reason would have
been that they increased the knowledge of humankind. God had created humankind
in His image and after that He became unhappy that human beings wanted to be
like Him, knowing good and evil. He created humankind in His likeness but tried
to prevent human beings having the same kind of knowledge as He has. Creation of
human beings in God’s likeness without the right to be like Him, knowing good
and evil, is nonsense. Without the knowledge of good and evil humankind couldn’t
have been like God in any way and this is because human beings couldn’t have
been moral beings without such knowledge.
The “sons of God” from chapter 6 of Genesis
cannot be angels because angels are spiritual and not material beings and they
don’t have human DNA. If they aren’t endowed by God with capacity to procreate
and are not divided into two genders, they surely wouldn’t have married the
“daughters of man”. When taking human bodies the angels would have also received
human DNA and that would have excluded the creation of other kind of beings than
normal humans. The “sons of God” would have been material beings very similar to
human beings, and having a compatible DNA with them. The possibility of their
existence is strengthened by many testimonies about possible extra-terrestrial
visits of alien civilizations on Earth in the past and in our days. The episode
with the “sons of God” is probably the only text out of the first 11 chapters of
the book of Genesis that has some relationship with reality, but probably very
loose.
Chapter 6 of the book of Genesis presents God as being concerned
with His own creation and ready to undo it. An important role in God’s decision
to annihilate humankind would have been played by the existence of the “sons of
God” who would have contributed essentially to humankind’s attitude of taking
distance from God through their knowledge.
Let’s us imagine the door of Noah’s ark opened and in a very long
queue tens of thousands of domestic and wild animals waiting quietly to enter
into the boat. Elephants or worms, birds and big cats, dinosaurs, hippopotami
and so on, all waiting peacefully in the queue to come to the door to go through
it and finally to take their place in a cage in one of the three decks of the
ark. Only human beings could have been so organised, but not the animals.
Every wild animal without bulling or killing other animals would
have taken its place in the queue, waiting for hours or even days to board the
ark. Lions, tigers, and many predatory animals would have queued alongside sheep
and rabbits all in good harmony. This is an idealistic, not a realistic image,
but is the only possible version if Noah’s Flood is fact, not fable. Otherwise,
in the real world lions and tigers and other predators would have eaten the
pairs of cattle waiting to enter the ark and most species of animals wouldn’t
have successfully entered the ark alive.
If the earth was filled with violence and inequity, as the book of
Genesis states, and animals also would have been punished for that inequity, we
can imagine that carnivorous animals would have already been in action on Earth
generating that violence. A climate of violence and inequity, described by the
Bible as existent before the Flood and all animals being herbivores and living
in peace with one another are two contradictory theses.
As if knowing their places in advance, wild animals would have
entered through the door and followed Noah or a member of his family to their
cages on the ark similar to pets going after their master. In the case of many
carnivorous animals this image induced by the book of Genesis is absurd because
it is known that such animals would have attacked human beings. All animals
including the wild animals such as dangerous snakes would have waited in peace
for the human command in spite of the situation that one snake would have
tempted humankind, and between human beings and snakes would have been enmity.
This image is
totally unrealistic and is based on the false presumption contained by the book
of Genesis that wild animals would have been under human dominion.
Animals would have been gathered to this meeting through unknown
means and the polar bears would have needed a few months to come to the boat
from the Arctic. Kangaroos would have come from Australia, being transported by
a commercial boat; lions from Africa, tigers from Bengali and so on would have
travelled in unknown conditions from the places where they lived to the boat.
One would say that probably this is an image from a fable because something like
that could have never happened in reality. Wild animals cannot behave like pets
and cannot travel like human beings.
If God couldn’t have tamed the human nature during a long period of
time how could He have domesticated and endowed with high intelligence the
animals of the earth, including the less sophisticated ones, to allow them to
make the trip to the ark? If even the human beings opposed resistance to God
when He wanted to bring them out from Egypt to another land, how could He have
convinced wild animals to go to the ark? Animals don’t possess consciousness and
their domestication is a long and sometimes very difficult process. There are
many problems with the description of the Flood by the book of Genesis.
It is obvious that there are two stories of the Flood and not just
one in the book of Genesis. That can bring one to the conclusion that one of
these stories has been inspired by God but the other one is the product of human
imagination. The problem is to know which has been inspired and which hasn’t. It
is impossible that both stories would have been inspired by God because they
divert one from another in important ways. Most likely none of these stories has
been inspired by God because they both enclose many contradictions and
absurdities. Both stories are two versions of the same myth about the universal
Flood. These stories create an unfavourable image of God who is represented as
an undecided Person, ready to commit mass murder which He afterwards would have
regretted.
In reality, God didn’t commit the atrocity presented by the book of
Genesis in the stories of the Flood because such a universal Deluge never
happened.
The evidence for
that is the existence of the natural world as we know it today, but which would
have disappeared following a universal Flood if that would have happened under
the conditions described by Genesis. The nature would have had to start the
process of recreating life on Earth again. All the plants would have been
covered by a deep layer of water and the light wouldn’t have been able to reach
them beyond 200m. In such a situation, all plants would have died and that
catastrophe would have attracted the extinction of all animals and human beings
due to a lack of available food. Even the sources of fresh water would have been
affected by the mixture with the salted water from the oceans. The regeneration
of plants on Earth from dormant seeds, if it happened under those unfavourable
conditions, would have taken time which wouldn’t have been available for
starving herbivorous animals coming out from the ark, and more likely such
dormant seeds would have been eaten by so many hungry birds after the Flood.
About the dynamic of the waters of the Flood, most translations use
the expression “high mountains” rather than “high hills”. That is probably the
most accurate translation but high signifies the same idea, no matter if one
uses the notions of hill or of mountain. All things would have had an important
size before the Flood, inanimate or animate things. How could a 200m hill be
described as high if the height of a dinosaur could have reached 40m or more at
the time? Most likely the high mountains would have had the height we know today
because they were formed a long time before the alleged date of the Flood which
is 2,304 B.C.
Another issue is the time in which it is said by some biblical
literalists that new mountains were created. In only 220 days all the new
landforms would have been created anew according to some creationist
interpretations, but that is unacceptable from a scientific or even a biblical
point of view. Those commentators try to justify the disappearance in a short
period of time of the waters of the Flood. The idea that the water remained on
Earth but the planet grew somehow bigger by the adjustment of the sea floor and
the height of the mountains is ludicrous if we take into consideration what that
would have implied.
The huge tectonic movements at the same time as Noah’s trip
together with animals on the ark would have endangered in the highest degree the
samples of human and animals from the ark.
The rising
mountains would have generated important tsunamis and earthquakes which would
have overturned the ark, probably killing most animals. The creation of all
volcanic mountains in the same period of time would have generated a volcanic
winter with disastrous consequences for the remaining life on the planet.
In the mantle of the earth there is lava, which some proponents of
the literal interpretation of the book of Genesis equate with the expression
“the fountains of the deep”. The same people advance the opinion that lava would
have determined the rise in the level of the sea floor. Magma temperatures range
from 700-1300 degrees Celsius, which is about 1200-2400 degrees Fahrenheit. Let
us imagine the temperature of the sea water after the combination of magma and
the salt water of the seas.
A layer of magma of a temperature between 700-1300 degrees Celsius
plus another layer of approximate 2,500 metres depth of salt water mixing
together would have given a temperature of the total compound much higher than
the boiling point of the waters of the sea. Under those conditions all animals
in the sea would have boiled, generating an immense soup.
Because the plants from the dry land would have been gone under a
deep layer of water following the Flood, the animals would have followed next on
the path of life annihilation and at the end no human beings would have remained
on Earth. Anyone can make an experiment, keeping a plant under salted water and
in complete darkness for more than 300 days to see what happens. At more than
200m deep the light didn’t get through water except in a very small quantity and
photosynthesis couldn’t have happened, consequently any plant using
photosynthesis as a feeding mechanism would have died during the Flood.
Another reason to reject the truthfulness of the story of the Flood
is the rationale for such a global Deluge. Nothing has really changed after the
Flood in respect to human nature. After the alleged Flood humankind has been as
sinful and as violent as would have been before it and still is today. The Flood
would have been a useless disaster and if it had been a punishment from God it
wouldn’t have had any practical effect.
If God was sorry for creating humankind,
trying to remediate the situation in the way described by the book of Genesis
was an inefficient attempt.
Humankind remained the same after the Flood as before it. In spite of
killing so many people through the Flood, after it, numerous disastrous wars and
pitiless autocratic political regimes have inflicted incredible suffering on
human beings all over the world.
Even the Nephilim, the giants of old, wouldn’t
have been destroyed by the Flood because they are mentioned by the Bible as
living on Earth after it also. What would generations have learned from the
experience of the Flood, living after it? Regarding the problem of sin, they
didn’t learn anything. The stories of the Flood are mythology with no
correspondence in reality. These stories undermine greatly the credibility of
the Bible as a factual description of reality.
The Nephilim, the giants of old, were still extant after the Flood
even if Noah and his family weren’t related to them. We don’t know how they
would have appeared after the Flood if the “sons of God” didn’t come back to
Earth. If they came back and multiplied with the “daughters of man” this is
another reason to affirm that the Flood was useless and it would have generated
countless deaths with no good reason. If the Deluge is only a myth it isn’t any
wonder that the Nephilim, if they really existed, would have survived after that
imaginary event.
Either God had a torturous plan for humankind
in which human beings had to be destroyed by waters and reborn from one family,
or He didn’t have any plan and when He saw that what He created was wrong He
tried to erase from the face of the earth almost all human beings.
The plan for the creation of humankind, as
exposed by the book of Genesis, is senseless. First God had created mankind with
certain characteristics which determined them to disobey Him. After that He
destroyed human beings and animals because they were evil and this in spite of
His declaration that His creation of humankind was good. When choosing to know
good and evil against blind obedience to God humankind became agents of evil
even if their choice wasn’t between good and evil, but between knowledge and
ignorance. The human beings were made in the likeness of God but they were
punished when they wanted to be like Him, knowing the difference between good
and evil as He does. The majority of humankind would have been destroyed by the
Flood because all flesh was corrupt and violent, but after the Deluge God
allowed the consumption of meat which would have made the world even more
violent.
God regretted the creation of man but also He regretted the event
of the Flood, and promised that would not happen again. The entire story is
senseless and its conclusions cannot be other than unfavourable to God’s image.
What guarantees could God have had that Noah’s descendants would
also be righteous? Righteousness is not transmissible like a gene and some sons
were morally better than their fathers and others worse than them. To choose one
righteous man and to expect that from him new and better generations of
humankind would appear would have been an illusion.
The story of the Babel Tower is by any
standards mythology with no connections with reality except a possible hint
about the sons of God, extra-terrestrial beings that are mentioned also in
Genesis chapter 6; 1-4, and the apparition of new technologies in construction
to allow the building of an impressive tower, such a pyramid, or similar to
that. The ziggurats were also a kind of tower and a relationship can probably be
made between the existence all over the world of such “towers” and the possible
visiting of some extra-terrestrial beings on Earth.
The story of the Babel Tower is one of the most manifestly
mythological narratives in the Bible and follows a consecrated pattern; it uses
a legend in order to explain the existence of many languages on Earth. The story
is so obviously a fairy tale that if taken as fact gives a negative impression
about deity. The image of God had been intended to be one of absolute power but
confronted with the descriptions offered by the story of the Babel Tower, His
portrayal diminishes greatly.
If one reaches the conclusion that the first 11 chapters of the
book of Genesis are fables, not facts, many theological consequences arise.
First of all, human nature is what it should be, not something degraded and
sinful. When Christ took on human nature, He demonstrated that any person can
live in this nature and do good things, living without sin. The only change for
a person to live without sin is that he or she be guided by the Holy Spirit
directly. This presupposes a profound spiritual regeneration known as the new
birth. Born again people don’t need to follow a certain religious dogma but they
live according to superior moral standards.
There is an important difference between
spirituality and religion. All religions imprison spirituality within a body of
doctrines and dogmas but an authentic spirituality liberates the human spirits
from the rigid bodies of religion. An out-of-body experience can be out of
bodies of religion. The bodies of religion can be perceived by the human spirits
as the biological human body for which the religious constraints were built. All
religious rules address the human comportment in the biological body but I found
here an inconsistency as far as the biological bodies die at a certain moment in
time. Religious rules die when the human bodies die because the surviving human
consciousness without the biological bodies follows other rules. All religions
address the way in which human beings should behave when they are still in
biological bodies but spirituality is the art of knowing how to live eternally
when we are still in the material bodies.
In the afterlife, we will not wear the same
biological bodies therefore many religious rules don’t make any sense when they
are compared with the spiritual life happening after death. Both religious rules
and religious institutions lose any impact on the life after death and entering
in the Kingdom of God in this life means to live a full spiritual life liberated
from any artificial constraints imposed by religions.
Spirituality doesn’t deny religions but it
goes beyond them, putting all human beings in direct contact with the supreme
Consciousness of all existence. When we allow the supreme Consciousness to dwell
in us, our consciousness and God become a unity which offers to every human
being who enters into this process incredible spiritual powers.
The story of Adam and Eve is a myth on which many theologies can be built. These
theologies which take a myth as fact cannot tell us, regardless of how much they
will try, the real story of humankind. Based on this myth, a body of dogmas and
doctrines was constructed and unfortunately, in this religious body, the human
spirituality dies slowly. We can see the signs of this death all around us. A
new revival necessarily means a new spirituality having another basis than the
first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis.
