One surprising aspect of “biblical” Christianity is just how much of it doesn't come from the Bible, and just how much can be refuted without looking at anything but the Bible. A perfect example of this is the Fall.
The Snake/Satan
What happens is that Satan appears to Eve as a serpent/enters a serpent and deceives her. Right? Actually, that's the evangelical version of the story, which is quite different than the biblical version.
The talking snake is to be contrasted with the talking donkey in Numbers 22:28. With Balaam's donkey, the text recognizes that donkey's don't normally talk, and thus it says that “the LORD opened the mouth of the donkey.” This story actually makes sense within the context of Bible. Now, I'm not saying that I just believe stories about a talking donkey just because a superstition scribe who believed in the power of curses wrote it down millenia ago. But at least it's internally consistent with the world of the Bible.
With the talking snake, there is nothing suggesting that Satan was behind this particular reptile's speaking gifts. It's a literal snake that was able to literally speak just because – well, because snakes can talk, I guess. Genesis 3 begins “now the serpent was more crafty than ...” Not, “now Satan was crafty.” The snake. The craftiness comes from the snake.
When the snake talks to Eve, the conversation proceeds without any mention of anything supernatural that allows the snake to talk, and without any mention of Eve thinking anything is unusual about this particular reptile's level of linguistic development. Personally, I think a good case can be made that even the ancient Israelites didn't take this literally, although I appreciate no longer having to care if YECs are wrong due to believing an ancient superstition or due to believing an ancient work of fiction.
The Curse on the Snake
When God hears about what happened, he's not mad at Satan for using an animal to enact his evil plan. God is mad at the snake. And so he curses the snake. The first part of the curse is directly targeted at snakes and they now have have to eat dust(!) and crawl on their bellies. The second part of the curse is about the snake's seed and Eve's seed, but evangelicals consider it to be a prophecy about Jesus' death: “And I will put enmity Between you and the woman, And between your seed and her seed; He shall bruise you on the head, And you shall bruise him on the heel.”
Several things need to be stretched for this to be talking about Satan v. Jesus. First off, the snake needs to have something to do with Satan, when in fact, there is no biblical connection between the two. (Or a literal snake needs to talk to Judas...) But suppose for the sake of argument that in the biblical version, Satan had entered into the snake when it tempted Eve. Still, the curse is on the snake's seed. Satan still isn't the snake's seed. For the curse to be a prophecy about Satan v. Jesus, it should be enmity between “you and her seed,” not between “your seed and her seed.” The snake's seed is future generations of snakes, and Jesus hasn't bruised their head, and they haven't bruised Jesus' heal.
Next, there is no reason to think “her seed” refers to one person. Unless you're Paul and twisting the words to mean what you want them to mean, “her seed” is referring to future generations of humanity. The exact same arguments that I used in reference to Abraham's seed apply here.
(“He” in “He shall bruise your head” is not justified by the Hebrew words, unless one is operating under the assumption that the prophecy is true and therefore using the NT to guide the interpretation/translation of the OT. But for consistency, I'm sticking to the NASB, even though the KJV uses one fewer male pronoun.)
Finally, suppose that Jesus' heal was literally bruised as a significant part of his crucifixion in one or several of the Gospel accounts. We can be certain that Christians would consider it to be evidence that prophecy is accurate down to the exact detail. We know this because when Isaiah talks about Jesus' “stripes” or being “pierced”, this is seen as a prophecy about the particular details of the crucifixion process and evidence for the divine nature of biblical prophecy. If those literal details are seen as evidence that biblical prophecy has an uncanny accuracy, I think that the lack of a literal fulfillment of this detail should be seen as evidence that biblical prophecy is sometimes wrong.
Alternatives to Literalism
Of course, a good case can be made that none of these are literal prophecies and therefore none of these are evidence for or against the accuracy of biblical prophecy. But if you take this position, think carefully about whether or not Jesus fulfilled a single prophecy and just what prophecy is good for.
Similarly, as much as it complicates the case against Christianity, I actually still agree with position that much of Genesis was not meant to be understand as a literal account. IMO, Christianity's most intellectually robust form includes the positions that the beginning of Genesis is myth and the Gospels are historical. But it's hard to learn to respect the cryptic wisdom and “spiritual truths” of a fable after once having thought of it as “true” in the sense of “actually happening.”
Showing posts with label Genesis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Genesis. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Friday, May 15, 2009
Two Creation Stories
Just as there are two flood stories, there are two different creation stories. While Bible contradictions will be part of the argument, keep in mind that I'm not countering inerrancy directly – I'm taking another step in making a positive case for the Documentary Hypothesis that the Torah consists of several conflicting documents woven together. My arguments are not “... therefore the Bible contradicts itself” but “... therefore there are two different creation accounts.” Establishing the existence of a reconciliation between the two versions would not alone answer my arguments. Differences can be less than a contradiction but still evidence that there are two different creation accounts contained in Genesis 1-2 and that neither account shows any signs of having been written to go with the other account.
Understanding the distinction between contra-inerrancy arguments, and arguments that lead to a positive conclusion (in the context of the Gospels) was quite possibly the final “aha” moment for me on the way out of Christianity. With the second approach, to goal is not to find contradictions but to find clues that help us figure out the history of the writing of the Bible. Once dozens of these clues are harnessed together by all supporting the same point, they cannot be belittled one piece at a time as trivial details or something for which an explanation will present itself at a later time.
I would like to begin my argument by pointing out that the prima facie case is mine. Read Genesis 1:1-2:3 by itself and you have a complete story of the creation of the world and everything in it. Read Genesis 2:4-2:25 and you have a complete story of the creation of the world and everything in it. Both stories are begun with verses that would make perfect sense as the first verse in a book.
If these really are different stories, what we should expect to find is differences in the details that must be explained away to maintain that it's really all the same story. If this really is the same story, we should expect the halves of the story to refer to each other in ways that just don't make sense when viewing the stories as individuals – especially because the second half is claimed to cover a time interval contained within the first half. These are the criteria by which I will be making the case for two different stories.
(Don't think that I think I'm some scholar who knows the official criteria by which this is normally judged. I'm merely spelling out precisely what I consider to be common sense so that if anyone disagrees with my overall approach, it's clear what they are arguing against.)
Man Before Plants?
Plants are created on the third day, which is certainly before the creation of people on the sixth day.
However, Genesis 2:5 lets us know that plants are not created yet. “Now no shrub of the field was yet in the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted, for the LORD God had not sent rain upon the earth, and there was no man to cultivate the ground.” Before plants are created in 2:8-9, Adam is created in 2:7. The prima facie case is mine again: Adam is created before plants in the second creation account.
Looking closer at the logic of the story makes the point even more clear. In 2:5, we are given two reasons for a lack of plants: no water, and no man. 2:6 solves the first problem as a mist comes. 2:7 solves the second problem as man is created. Both problem are now solved. So God is now ready to plant a garden and make plants grow, which he does in 2:8-9. It's not just the order in which event are recorded that suggest Adam was created before plants, but the logical flow of the account as well.
Creationists' rebuttal is that Genesis 2:5 refers only to specific kinds of plants, namely cultivated plants. Thus, most of the plants were created on the third day, while the cultivated plants of Eden were created after Adam on the sixth day. I'm no Hebrew scholar, but just looking up all the different words used for shrub and plant in Strong's Concordance offers absolutely no support for this position. I see no reason to think Genesis 1:11-12 excludes some kinds of plants and I see no reason to think Genesis 2:5 includes only the kinds of plants not created on the third day. Without either of these arguments, the YEC position fails without even looking outside the Bible.
The only reason I see for even speculating about either is simply that it is needed to make Genesis 1-2 flow as a single story. Another way of saying this is that the creationist position is to begin with a certain conclusion and then look for an interpretation of the words to make it work. But that's not how you're supposed to read things when the goal is a truth search and not merely the affirmation of preconceived ideas. The intellectually honest approach is to let Genesis tell you what Genesis is saying. The way young-earth creationists cannot do this is precisely the kind of bending over backward that should be expected if there really are two creation stories.
Also, this doesn't make sense of the logic of 2:5-9. The reason for no plants of some kind is a lack of rain and a lack of man. Now, what kind of plants either need rain or need man? Pretty much all of them, at least according to non-technical ideas of what a plant is. If there's a distinction between wild and cultivated plants, then I would guess that no rain is why there are no wild plants and no man is why there are no cultivated plants in 2:5.
Animals Before Eve?
On the sixth day, God first creates the animals, and then he creates people. However, in the second creation account, the order is Adam, animals, Eve. Creationists generally agree with the first part, so I won't belabor that point.
The order in which the events are recorded is the creation of Adam (2:7), animals (2:19), and finally Eve (2:22), so the prima facie case is mine again. But the case is much stronger than the mere order in which the facts are recorded – this is the order that is implied by the logic of 2:18-2:22. In 2:18a, God observes a problem: man is alone. In 2:18b, God suggests a solution: Adam needs a helper. The next thing that happens is God creates the animals in 2:19 as an attempt to find Adam a helper. My claim that the creation of the animals was an attempt to find a helper for Adam is all but explicitly stated in 2:20: “but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him.” In verse 2:21, God tries a more successful solution: taking one of Adam's ribs and making a woman.
To argue that Genesis 1-2 is a single literal account means that three things that must be explained away. First, the order in which the events are recorded must be overlooked. Second, the awkward insertion of the story of the creation of the animals (2:19-20) into the story of the creation of Adam's helper (2:18 & 2:21-22) must be ignored. And finally, Genesis' own explanation for why the creation of animals fits into the creation of Adam's helper must be ignored. I don't see how this position can be held unless one is taking the approach that Genesis must be true and literal therefore there must be some way of resolving the contradiction.
This is precisely what should be expected if these are two different creation accounts that were not written to go together. The six days of creation have their own logical structure, and the second creation account has a logical account of needs and solutions. Each makes sense alone, but to view them as going together prevents the reader from seeing what the second author is saying.
Two Creation Stories/Two Flood Stories/Two Authors
The case for two authors gets even better when compared with the two flood stories. In one of the flood stories, God was known as Elohim, while in the other, he was known as Yahweh. In all 38 instances, the God of 1:1-2:3 is Elohim. In all 11 instances, the God of 2:4-2:25 is Yahweh.
Also, in the flood stories, it was the Elohim author that spoke of the opening of the windows of heaven and fountains of the deep, while the Yahweh author says the flood comes because it starts raining. One is giving more of God's perspective while the other is giving more of man's perspective. We see the same thing with the creation accounts. The Elohim author doesn't even mention people until the end, and then man fades into the background again as Elohim rests. The Yahweh author describes the creation of plants and animals in the contexts of plants needing man and man needing a helper.
Furthermore, on the second day of creation, Elohim creates an expanse and calls it heaven. Water is created that is above this expanse. It was Elohim who opens the windows of heaven to let this water out to flood the earth. This suggests that not only are there two authors of the creation and flood stories, but they are in fact the same two authors.
If Genesis 1-2 is a single narrative, it is quite curious that we find internal references and similarities between certain halves of the creation and flood accounts, but we don't find internal references between the two halves of the creation account, in spite of the fact that the time interval of the second half is completely inside the time interval of the first half.
I encourage you to read creationists' rebuttal to these arguments, because it so clearly shows that the arguments I am presenting have been noted and answered poorly. Both sides have reasonable positions if you are just reading an overview of the positions. Where creationists lose is when you compare each position to the specifics of the details in how Genesis 1-2 is written.
Understanding the distinction between contra-inerrancy arguments, and arguments that lead to a positive conclusion (in the context of the Gospels) was quite possibly the final “aha” moment for me on the way out of Christianity. With the second approach, to goal is not to find contradictions but to find clues that help us figure out the history of the writing of the Bible. Once dozens of these clues are harnessed together by all supporting the same point, they cannot be belittled one piece at a time as trivial details or something for which an explanation will present itself at a later time.
I would like to begin my argument by pointing out that the prima facie case is mine. Read Genesis 1:1-2:3 by itself and you have a complete story of the creation of the world and everything in it. Read Genesis 2:4-2:25 and you have a complete story of the creation of the world and everything in it. Both stories are begun with verses that would make perfect sense as the first verse in a book.
If these really are different stories, what we should expect to find is differences in the details that must be explained away to maintain that it's really all the same story. If this really is the same story, we should expect the halves of the story to refer to each other in ways that just don't make sense when viewing the stories as individuals – especially because the second half is claimed to cover a time interval contained within the first half. These are the criteria by which I will be making the case for two different stories.
(Don't think that I think I'm some scholar who knows the official criteria by which this is normally judged. I'm merely spelling out precisely what I consider to be common sense so that if anyone disagrees with my overall approach, it's clear what they are arguing against.)
Man Before Plants?
Plants are created on the third day, which is certainly before the creation of people on the sixth day.
However, Genesis 2:5 lets us know that plants are not created yet. “Now no shrub of the field was yet in the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted, for the LORD God had not sent rain upon the earth, and there was no man to cultivate the ground.” Before plants are created in 2:8-9, Adam is created in 2:7. The prima facie case is mine again: Adam is created before plants in the second creation account.
Looking closer at the logic of the story makes the point even more clear. In 2:5, we are given two reasons for a lack of plants: no water, and no man. 2:6 solves the first problem as a mist comes. 2:7 solves the second problem as man is created. Both problem are now solved. So God is now ready to plant a garden and make plants grow, which he does in 2:8-9. It's not just the order in which event are recorded that suggest Adam was created before plants, but the logical flow of the account as well.
Creationists' rebuttal is that Genesis 2:5 refers only to specific kinds of plants, namely cultivated plants. Thus, most of the plants were created on the third day, while the cultivated plants of Eden were created after Adam on the sixth day. I'm no Hebrew scholar, but just looking up all the different words used for shrub and plant in Strong's Concordance offers absolutely no support for this position. I see no reason to think Genesis 1:11-12 excludes some kinds of plants and I see no reason to think Genesis 2:5 includes only the kinds of plants not created on the third day. Without either of these arguments, the YEC position fails without even looking outside the Bible.
The only reason I see for even speculating about either is simply that it is needed to make Genesis 1-2 flow as a single story. Another way of saying this is that the creationist position is to begin with a certain conclusion and then look for an interpretation of the words to make it work. But that's not how you're supposed to read things when the goal is a truth search and not merely the affirmation of preconceived ideas. The intellectually honest approach is to let Genesis tell you what Genesis is saying. The way young-earth creationists cannot do this is precisely the kind of bending over backward that should be expected if there really are two creation stories.
Also, this doesn't make sense of the logic of 2:5-9. The reason for no plants of some kind is a lack of rain and a lack of man. Now, what kind of plants either need rain or need man? Pretty much all of them, at least according to non-technical ideas of what a plant is. If there's a distinction between wild and cultivated plants, then I would guess that no rain is why there are no wild plants and no man is why there are no cultivated plants in 2:5.
Animals Before Eve?
On the sixth day, God first creates the animals, and then he creates people. However, in the second creation account, the order is Adam, animals, Eve. Creationists generally agree with the first part, so I won't belabor that point.
The order in which the events are recorded is the creation of Adam (2:7), animals (2:19), and finally Eve (2:22), so the prima facie case is mine again. But the case is much stronger than the mere order in which the facts are recorded – this is the order that is implied by the logic of 2:18-2:22. In 2:18a, God observes a problem: man is alone. In 2:18b, God suggests a solution: Adam needs a helper. The next thing that happens is God creates the animals in 2:19 as an attempt to find Adam a helper. My claim that the creation of the animals was an attempt to find a helper for Adam is all but explicitly stated in 2:20: “but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him.” In verse 2:21, God tries a more successful solution: taking one of Adam's ribs and making a woman.
To argue that Genesis 1-2 is a single literal account means that three things that must be explained away. First, the order in which the events are recorded must be overlooked. Second, the awkward insertion of the story of the creation of the animals (2:19-20) into the story of the creation of Adam's helper (2:18 & 2:21-22) must be ignored. And finally, Genesis' own explanation for why the creation of animals fits into the creation of Adam's helper must be ignored. I don't see how this position can be held unless one is taking the approach that Genesis must be true and literal therefore there must be some way of resolving the contradiction.
This is precisely what should be expected if these are two different creation accounts that were not written to go together. The six days of creation have their own logical structure, and the second creation account has a logical account of needs and solutions. Each makes sense alone, but to view them as going together prevents the reader from seeing what the second author is saying.
Two Creation Stories/Two Flood Stories/Two Authors
The case for two authors gets even better when compared with the two flood stories. In one of the flood stories, God was known as Elohim, while in the other, he was known as Yahweh. In all 38 instances, the God of 1:1-2:3 is Elohim. In all 11 instances, the God of 2:4-2:25 is Yahweh.
Also, in the flood stories, it was the Elohim author that spoke of the opening of the windows of heaven and fountains of the deep, while the Yahweh author says the flood comes because it starts raining. One is giving more of God's perspective while the other is giving more of man's perspective. We see the same thing with the creation accounts. The Elohim author doesn't even mention people until the end, and then man fades into the background again as Elohim rests. The Yahweh author describes the creation of plants and animals in the contexts of plants needing man and man needing a helper.
Furthermore, on the second day of creation, Elohim creates an expanse and calls it heaven. Water is created that is above this expanse. It was Elohim who opens the windows of heaven to let this water out to flood the earth. This suggests that not only are there two authors of the creation and flood stories, but they are in fact the same two authors.
If Genesis 1-2 is a single narrative, it is quite curious that we find internal references and similarities between certain halves of the creation and flood accounts, but we don't find internal references between the two halves of the creation account, in spite of the fact that the time interval of the second half is completely inside the time interval of the first half.
I encourage you to read creationists' rebuttal to these arguments, because it so clearly shows that the arguments I am presenting have been noted and answered poorly. Both sides have reasonable positions if you are just reading an overview of the positions. Where creationists lose is when you compare each position to the specifics of the details in how Genesis 1-2 is written.
Friday, April 17, 2009
The Role of Evolution in my Deconversion
Perhaps the most common reason people reject Christianity is evolution, and I am no exception. However, the way it influenced me was very different from the usual way that learning Genesis is not historically reliable leads to learning the rest is not historically reliable either. For me, the primary effect was sociological – it changed my social standing within [evangelical] Christianity and this caused me to see how Christians think about the rest of their faith as well.
It's hardly a revolutionary observation to notice that if Christians thought about Christianity with the same critical thinking they use when approaching the evidence for any other religion, then most of them would stop believing. But as a bare claim, this is something anyone could say about anything. An argument that can refute anything refutes nothing. (See Romans 1:22.)
The fact that Christians believe in Yahweh but not the other deities of antiquity is, in and of itself, no more reason to suspect Christians are wrong than the bare fact that scientifically minded people usually believe in the theory of relativity but not in UFOs. What is needed are the particulars of how the “problems” with and evidence for every other religion are similar to the “mysteries” inside one's own religion that are just accepted. It is only with these particulars that either side can justify the comparison.
Once I became a theistic evolutionist (TE), my Christianity became one of the positions to which young-earth creationists (YEC) apply critical thinking. And consequently, claims about the consistency of evolution and Christianity were both essential to my faith and rejected by most Christians. To understand their position was to view my faith as an outsider.
While the emotional fallout of this situation should not be dismissed, it was also a fundamentally intellectual struggle that could not be wished, tolerated, or loved away. First, a lot of the theological arguments against TE make sense. Second, most of these arguments have a twin argument which is against Christianity as a whole. Most seriously, the arguments against Christianity as a whole are equal to or stronger than the arguments against TE. But these claims are only as strong as my examples:
The Ten Commandments
While supposedly the entire Bible is God-breathed in some sense, with a few parts, more is claimed. Perhaps most dramatically, with the ten commandments, God didn't just work through the historical process of the recording of events. These words were written with by the finger of God. In the Exodus version, right after the specifics of the commandment about the Sabbath, God's finger wrote in 20:11, “For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and made it holy. ”
However, Deuteronomy 5 disagrees regard precisely what God's finger wrote. In that version, the fourth commandment is followed in verse 15 by “You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out of there by a mighty hand and by an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God commanded you to observe the sabbath day.”
Even ignoring the question of the degree of similarity and differences, which version did God's finger write? I don't typically hear the phrase “written by God in stone” and think of it as something quite so flexible. As is so often the case, there is an enormous difference between having actual reasons to think that God's finger wrote something, and having a book that claims God helped write it. To outsiders, it can be a bit strange that this isn't thought of more often, but we don't know that God really wrote the ten commandments just because the Bible tells us so. In fact, the Bible itself accidentally testifies that God's finger probably didn't write some or all of the ten commandments.
This is a sticky enough of a question that I was not willing to charge ahead and draw deep theological conclusions out of a trouble text. Another way of saying this is that what the Bible says is so unclear, that even if it is true, trusting what one thinks it says would be unwise.
Genealogies
Luke traces Jesus' genealogies all the way back to Adam. My half-answer was that I still believed in a literal Adam and a literal Fall about which all we know is myth. The reason this only halfway works is that I accepted science's dating of early civilizations that are older than the Bible suggests Adam to be by means of genealogies. However, before I was willing to trust the minute details of biblical genealogies, there were some major issues that had to be dealt with that are internal to the Bible.
First off, Luke and Matthew's genealogies clash. Before giving a rehearsed answer of one being Mary's and the other being Joseph's, look them up. “Jacob the father of Joseph” is clear in Matthew 1:16, and everyone agrees with this. Luke 3:23-24 says “[Jesus] was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph, the son of Heli, the son of Matthat, ...” This communicates with great clarity that Heli was Joseph's father.
The best inerrantist answer I've seen to this is that the repetitions of “the son” are not present in the original – they are incorrectly added words in English to smooth out the grammar. The literal translation is then “[Jesus] was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph, of Heli, of Matthat ...” where the implication is “Jesus son of Heli, Jesus son of Matthat, ...” And then the way this is consistent with Matthew is that this is merely a list of Jesus' ancestors without implications of their relationships to each other, and thus Heli could be Mary's father.
This is quite strained, but I accepted the explanation for quite a while. However, notice that it means that Luke failed to communicate clearly. You must twist the text to even get to the point where Heli could be Mary's father. What we know with certainty is that Luke didn't tell us that Heli is Mary's father. Telling us that Heli is related to Jesus because he's Mary's father is, in fact, precisely the sort of thing that genealogies are supposed to communicate. If you just read Luke and trust it to be reliable, you will conclude that Heli is Joseph's father. Perhaps the genealogies in Genesis are the same, and they need to be viewed with a grain of salt – meaning science.
Also, in several places Matthew's genealogy skips generations that appear in the OT. He doesn't tell us why, but presumably, his reason for doing this is to turn it into a clever 14-14-14 pattern. He also fails to make to 14-14-14 pattern work by only coming up with 14+14+13=41 names. If you double-count one name it works out. But there is a commonly accepted term for counting something twice: a mistake. I just don't see why I should take the OT genealogies more seriously than the NT writers took them.
Furthermore, the Bible is consistently quite bad at getting numbers right. Jesus died on Friday and rose on Sunday, and yet Matthew 12:40 says Jesus was dead for three days and three nights. I'm very curious about which three nights these might have been. While I'm sure Matthew knew how to count, the point is that to think the numbers in the Bible are mathematically accurate is, at best, to misunderstand the Bible. To argue against evolution based on the genealogies is to assume their mathematical accuracy.
Evolution leads to the Holocaust
Suppose for the sake of argument that it does. God told Moses to slaughter the Midianites, including the male children. (The soldiers were commanded to save the girls “for themselves.”) What would become of society if everyone believed in a ideology that condones genocide?
The ease with which Christians see the depravity of the Holocaust is the ease with which I see the depravity of the Bible.
Problem of Pain
Not accepting YEC certainly makes the problem of pain more difficult. Instead of physical death being something that followed the curse of sin, it's present as part of the original creation. But if you believe in hell as I did, this objection is bizarre. The majority of humanity is supposedly going to be tortured for eternity because God didn't call them. And yet if God's plan involves animals living finite and painful lives this is supposed to be something that indicts God as cruel and unloving.
What's going on is very simple. When God's the sadistic keeper of a medieval torture chamber filled with heretics and it's part of my theology, it's just something that I'm supposed to struggle with until I can train myself to realize that it's what justice really means – if I don't accept the answer, then my sin is causing me to have a warped understanding of what a loving God is really like. But think of the bunnies! Look at them! A loving God wouldn't design a system where mean coyotes eat cute little bunny rabbits. If your theology says that God created lots of bunnies to die for no reason better than lunch, that means you are calling God evil. Is seems as though the YEC God is one of the founding members of PETA.
Of course, that's not to say the problem of animal pain is trivial. But it seems more like a concern for a universalist, an annihilationist, or at least someone who thinks God was genuinely surprised by Adam's rebellion and the necessity for hell. Otherwise, it's like a vegan wanting to venerate Stalin for being so loving but first stopping to ponder the moral implications of his occasional steak.
There is actually is a way that an evolutionary story of life can fit with the YEC doctrine of the physical death of animals being due to sin. Maybe God created the first bacterium to live forever. But before he had a chance to split, it rebelled and ate of the forbidden lactose. And then animals inherited its sin, for which they are personally (animally?) responsible, and that's why animals deserved to die for billions of years. I may not have evidence showing it actually happened, but you don't have evidence saying it didn't happen. It also may not make a lot of sense to one's mind, but maybe it's just the kind of thing that should be accepted by faith and believed in one's heart. (By the way, Pascal's wager calls for the baptizing of your pets.)
Why did God take so long?
This is a really good question. It doesn't make much sense for God to create billions of years of existence for the cosmos when the center of his attention is alive for only thousands of years. But similarly, why did God created billions of light years and billions of stars most of which no person will ever see? As a theistic evolution, I thought it was weird that creationists ask only the first. While I appreciate the consistency of asking neither, I now ask both.
Similarly, why did God wait so long after the Fall to send Jesus? Why make so many animals die as pointless sacrifices? Why spent so much time between Abraham and Jesus with only the Jews and a scattering of Gentiles having a real chance to know him? Christians' reaction to this is fairly predictable. God has a plan. We don't always understand it, but it's quite presumptuous for us to think we could have done better than him. This is precisely how I hope creationist readers react to these questions. Here's the kicker: why not give theistic evolutionists/old earth creationists the same leniency? Maybe God made the universe old for a similar “reason” – it's part of his plan that we can't understand.
Paul's use of Genesis
When talking about the Fall, Paul says that death entered the world through one man's sin. While this isn't clear at all, especially because Adam didn't physically die on the day he ate the fruit, I'll suppose for the sake of argument that we know that Paul is talking about not just spiritual death and not just about human death, but physical death and animal death as well.
But since when have the NT authors been a valid source concerning what the OT actually says? When God makes a promise to Abraham's seed, is seed singular or plural? If singular, I would like to know the verse of Genesis that helped you reach this conclusion. If plural, then Paul was not only wrong about what the OT says, but this faulty understanding was his basis for a theological argument about the promise to the Jews being transferred to Christians.
So maybe Paul was a young-earth creationist, Paul was wrong, and Paul tangentially communicated these false ideas in the process of communicating true theological ideas about Jesus' death. And we're still supposed to believe these theological truths even after learning the debunking of the argument for these theological truths. The ease with which YECists see the weakness in this position is the ease with which I look at Galatians 3 and see that it is false.
Blurring the Line Between Man and Animals
Another problem is that evolution blurs the line between man and animals. And it certainly does. This means “human” is not a yes/no question, but rather a question of degree. There are ways around this like believing that in a certain moment in time, God gave an animal that looked like an ape-man a soul, but this isn't as clean of an answer as the one provided by creationism.
Consider embryonic development. The same problem appears. We have a smooth transition between non-human sperm and egg to a fully human baby. This cannot be evaded by just “believing” God creates a soul at conception. Theistic evolutionists believe that God created the first human soul at some point in the evolution process, and YECists don't let them get away with this equally evidence-free claim. Here, the problem is even worse. At least with evolution, you could go back 40,000 years and look at a child and say it is human while the parents were animals – while the line may be arbitrary, at least the line can't be blurred further by looking at the generation between the child and the parents. But with embryonic development, it's a fully smooth transition. YECists easily see that a mostly smooth transition from animal to human suggests that talk of a soul or being created in the image of God doesn't make sense. With the same ease, I see that embryonic development shows the concept of a soul to be nonsensical.
Randomness
In Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology, on page 276 he writes “The fundamental difference between a biblical view of creation and theistic evolution lies here: the driving force … is randomness.” This is tangential, but this is a common misconception about evolution. Evolution is like the weather – it's a process involving randomness. Due to the randomness of weather I can only guess within ten or twenty degrees what the temperature will be in a week. But I could guess the average temperature for 2010 within a degree or two (and without knowing about global warming.) Due to random effects averaging out, a process that looks chaotic on a small scale is often one that behaves predictably on a larger scale. Evolution says that changes are the predictable long-term result.
But theologically speaking, the misunderstanding doesn't change the implications. In theistic evolution, God's guidance of evolution looks precisely the way it would look if it looked like he stopped caring billions of years ago.
However, the same issue of randomness appears when thinking through the implications of actuarial science. If you know the rate at which heart attacks occur, and you know the size of the population, you can make a very good guess about how many people in the population will have heart attacks. For a more precise prediction, you don't pray to learn the will of God. You learn more about the population, like their age distribution. Actuarial science requires thinking about death in terms of the naturalistic cause and effect that comes from supposing death is left up to chance. And it works. This means that the way in which God takes away life looks precisely the way it would look if it looked like God doesn't care. There are less fatalist ways of saying this, but it's no different than the spin creationists universally give to evolution. Personally, I find the threat actuarial science and statistics pose to believing God still cares about death to be far more severe than the threat evolution poses to believing God cared while creating.
YECists show the proper approach to theistic evolution – skepticism toward the meaningfulness of talking about a creator who is indistinguishable from no creator at all. With the same ease, I apply this same skepticism to Christianity and see that the reasoning behind actuarial science supports the conclusion that God doesn't exist or doesn't care.
Problems in the Local Flood
Most old earth creationists and theistic evolutionists believe that Noah's flood was a local flood (a myth is the alternative.) The Bible talks about the whole world as a hyperbole in many places, so perhaps here as well. To this position, YECists have an excellent response. Why didn't Noah just migrate several hundred miles? Why not just have the birds fly a few hundred miles away? Noah had a hundred years to kill, so I don't suppose finding the time to pack would have been too burdensome.
I really like this objection. It's an excellent reason to not believe in the local flood. What I like so much about it is the underlying assumption that if a plan is completely illogical, then an omniscient God probably didn't come up with it. This assumption comes as naturally as the basic rules of logic – unless one's own beliefs are under the microscope.
So here's my question: Why didn't God just smite everyone and skip the whole flood thing entirely? This would have saved so much trouble for everyone. Noah could have preached about coming judgment for years and he could have shown he believed his own message by making provisions for surviving on his own. I would be interested in hearing if there are any reasons to send a flood at all that don't also defend the idea of having Noah build an ark for a local flood. Maybe there are reasons, but I could throw in an extra miracle or two if they are needed for the practicality of my smiting proposal.
With the local flood, YECists show the proper way of thinking about dramatic claims about what God did. If the story has God commanding a lot of pointless milling about, this should count strongly against its chance of being true. By applying the same skepticism to the global flood that creationists apply to the local flood, I reject the story of Noah even without the scientific and biblical cases against it.
Reconciling the Bible with evolution is really quite easy compared to reconciling the Bible with the Bible and other realities in the here and now. Creationists' ability to see the problems in my answers to comparably easy questions helped me see how contrived both our answers were to the hard questions.
Failing The Insider Test
Small step at a time, I moved my theology a bit while staying inside what I thought was inside. I would wait a bit, and my idea of “inside” would be stretched with me. After moving a moderate distance, I thought that where I came from was inside while the painful truth is that where I came from thought I was outside. This placed me in a curious position: YEC was still inside to me, YEC viewed me as an outsider, I was seeking to fully understand different positions within my idea of orthodoxy, and therefore the logically inevitable result was viewing my faith as an outsider.
I don't remember if anyone ever told me that I would reject Christianity if I used the same skepticism toward it that I use toward every other religion. If so, I don't remember it because it made no impact on my thinking. But eventually, I found myself looking at creationists and seeing that if they were to apply the same critical thinking to their own beliefs that they apply to mine, they would stop being Christians. Conversely, if I thought about my own faith the way other Christians thought about my faith, I would stop being a Christian.
While I thought my way out of many aspects of faith, here I simply got lucky. The desire and ability to think critically about my own beliefs was a very small part of the final step out. Thinking critically about my own beliefs was forced upon me as an unintended consequence of other decisions that were much easier to make. Perhaps this is the difference between me and Christians smarter than I am.
While many of the arguments against Christianity work just fine as academic arguments, I doubt this can be written so that readers will feel the weight of the argument as I did. It took the grind of over two years of not only trying to fit evolution in with Christianity, but trying to fit evolution in with the Christian community to see the blatant inconsistencies on both sides. It's not a matter of people being dogmatic or whatever negative adjective you want to throw in. It's simply the predictable clash of incompatible beliefs – or rather, different Christianities.
My YEC and inerrantist Christianity failed the insider test because the arguments against it are so solid that any perspective save for closing one's eyes is sufficient to see it. My TE Christianity failed the insider test because even the very idea of an insider test failed the insider test. To define “inside” as bigger than “me” was to include people who don't agree on everything. To be willing to have candid conversations with other Christians who believed a bit differently and to honestly seek to understand where they were coming from was to look at many of my own beliefs and critically think through if I had reasons for believing them or not. Sociological circumstances turned this into looking at all of my beliefs with skepticism.
Few faiths, if any, can survive under the scrutiny that everyone applies to everyone else's faith. Truth has nothing to fear from inspection and Christianity should be terrified. My mortally wounded faith staggered on for a while, but my fate had been sealed. I had escaped.
It's hardly a revolutionary observation to notice that if Christians thought about Christianity with the same critical thinking they use when approaching the evidence for any other religion, then most of them would stop believing. But as a bare claim, this is something anyone could say about anything. An argument that can refute anything refutes nothing. (See Romans 1:22.)
The fact that Christians believe in Yahweh but not the other deities of antiquity is, in and of itself, no more reason to suspect Christians are wrong than the bare fact that scientifically minded people usually believe in the theory of relativity but not in UFOs. What is needed are the particulars of how the “problems” with and evidence for every other religion are similar to the “mysteries” inside one's own religion that are just accepted. It is only with these particulars that either side can justify the comparison.
Once I became a theistic evolutionist (TE), my Christianity became one of the positions to which young-earth creationists (YEC) apply critical thinking. And consequently, claims about the consistency of evolution and Christianity were both essential to my faith and rejected by most Christians. To understand their position was to view my faith as an outsider.
While the emotional fallout of this situation should not be dismissed, it was also a fundamentally intellectual struggle that could not be wished, tolerated, or loved away. First, a lot of the theological arguments against TE make sense. Second, most of these arguments have a twin argument which is against Christianity as a whole. Most seriously, the arguments against Christianity as a whole are equal to or stronger than the arguments against TE. But these claims are only as strong as my examples:
The Ten Commandments
While supposedly the entire Bible is God-breathed in some sense, with a few parts, more is claimed. Perhaps most dramatically, with the ten commandments, God didn't just work through the historical process of the recording of events. These words were written with by the finger of God. In the Exodus version, right after the specifics of the commandment about the Sabbath, God's finger wrote in 20:11, “For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and made it holy. ”
However, Deuteronomy 5 disagrees regard precisely what God's finger wrote. In that version, the fourth commandment is followed in verse 15 by “You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out of there by a mighty hand and by an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God commanded you to observe the sabbath day.”
Even ignoring the question of the degree of similarity and differences, which version did God's finger write? I don't typically hear the phrase “written by God in stone” and think of it as something quite so flexible. As is so often the case, there is an enormous difference between having actual reasons to think that God's finger wrote something, and having a book that claims God helped write it. To outsiders, it can be a bit strange that this isn't thought of more often, but we don't know that God really wrote the ten commandments just because the Bible tells us so. In fact, the Bible itself accidentally testifies that God's finger probably didn't write some or all of the ten commandments.
This is a sticky enough of a question that I was not willing to charge ahead and draw deep theological conclusions out of a trouble text. Another way of saying this is that what the Bible says is so unclear, that even if it is true, trusting what one thinks it says would be unwise.
Genealogies
Luke traces Jesus' genealogies all the way back to Adam. My half-answer was that I still believed in a literal Adam and a literal Fall about which all we know is myth. The reason this only halfway works is that I accepted science's dating of early civilizations that are older than the Bible suggests Adam to be by means of genealogies. However, before I was willing to trust the minute details of biblical genealogies, there were some major issues that had to be dealt with that are internal to the Bible.
First off, Luke and Matthew's genealogies clash. Before giving a rehearsed answer of one being Mary's and the other being Joseph's, look them up. “Jacob the father of Joseph” is clear in Matthew 1:16, and everyone agrees with this. Luke 3:23-24 says “[Jesus] was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph, the son of Heli, the son of Matthat, ...” This communicates with great clarity that Heli was Joseph's father.
The best inerrantist answer I've seen to this is that the repetitions of “the son” are not present in the original – they are incorrectly added words in English to smooth out the grammar. The literal translation is then “[Jesus] was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph, of Heli, of Matthat ...” where the implication is “Jesus son of Heli, Jesus son of Matthat, ...” And then the way this is consistent with Matthew is that this is merely a list of Jesus' ancestors without implications of their relationships to each other, and thus Heli could be Mary's father.
This is quite strained, but I accepted the explanation for quite a while. However, notice that it means that Luke failed to communicate clearly. You must twist the text to even get to the point where Heli could be Mary's father. What we know with certainty is that Luke didn't tell us that Heli is Mary's father. Telling us that Heli is related to Jesus because he's Mary's father is, in fact, precisely the sort of thing that genealogies are supposed to communicate. If you just read Luke and trust it to be reliable, you will conclude that Heli is Joseph's father. Perhaps the genealogies in Genesis are the same, and they need to be viewed with a grain of salt – meaning science.
Also, in several places Matthew's genealogy skips generations that appear in the OT. He doesn't tell us why, but presumably, his reason for doing this is to turn it into a clever 14-14-14 pattern. He also fails to make to 14-14-14 pattern work by only coming up with 14+14+13=41 names. If you double-count one name it works out. But there is a commonly accepted term for counting something twice: a mistake. I just don't see why I should take the OT genealogies more seriously than the NT writers took them.
Furthermore, the Bible is consistently quite bad at getting numbers right. Jesus died on Friday and rose on Sunday, and yet Matthew 12:40 says Jesus was dead for three days and three nights. I'm very curious about which three nights these might have been. While I'm sure Matthew knew how to count, the point is that to think the numbers in the Bible are mathematically accurate is, at best, to misunderstand the Bible. To argue against evolution based on the genealogies is to assume their mathematical accuracy.
Evolution leads to the Holocaust
Suppose for the sake of argument that it does. God told Moses to slaughter the Midianites, including the male children. (The soldiers were commanded to save the girls “for themselves.”) What would become of society if everyone believed in a ideology that condones genocide?
The ease with which Christians see the depravity of the Holocaust is the ease with which I see the depravity of the Bible.
Problem of Pain
Not accepting YEC certainly makes the problem of pain more difficult. Instead of physical death being something that followed the curse of sin, it's present as part of the original creation. But if you believe in hell as I did, this objection is bizarre. The majority of humanity is supposedly going to be tortured for eternity because God didn't call them. And yet if God's plan involves animals living finite and painful lives this is supposed to be something that indicts God as cruel and unloving.
What's going on is very simple. When God's the sadistic keeper of a medieval torture chamber filled with heretics and it's part of my theology, it's just something that I'm supposed to struggle with until I can train myself to realize that it's what justice really means – if I don't accept the answer, then my sin is causing me to have a warped understanding of what a loving God is really like. But think of the bunnies! Look at them! A loving God wouldn't design a system where mean coyotes eat cute little bunny rabbits. If your theology says that God created lots of bunnies to die for no reason better than lunch, that means you are calling God evil. Is seems as though the YEC God is one of the founding members of PETA.
Of course, that's not to say the problem of animal pain is trivial. But it seems more like a concern for a universalist, an annihilationist, or at least someone who thinks God was genuinely surprised by Adam's rebellion and the necessity for hell. Otherwise, it's like a vegan wanting to venerate Stalin for being so loving but first stopping to ponder the moral implications of his occasional steak.
There is actually is a way that an evolutionary story of life can fit with the YEC doctrine of the physical death of animals being due to sin. Maybe God created the first bacterium to live forever. But before he had a chance to split, it rebelled and ate of the forbidden lactose. And then animals inherited its sin, for which they are personally (animally?) responsible, and that's why animals deserved to die for billions of years. I may not have evidence showing it actually happened, but you don't have evidence saying it didn't happen. It also may not make a lot of sense to one's mind, but maybe it's just the kind of thing that should be accepted by faith and believed in one's heart. (By the way, Pascal's wager calls for the baptizing of your pets.)
Why did God take so long?
This is a really good question. It doesn't make much sense for God to create billions of years of existence for the cosmos when the center of his attention is alive for only thousands of years. But similarly, why did God created billions of light years and billions of stars most of which no person will ever see? As a theistic evolution, I thought it was weird that creationists ask only the first. While I appreciate the consistency of asking neither, I now ask both.
Similarly, why did God wait so long after the Fall to send Jesus? Why make so many animals die as pointless sacrifices? Why spent so much time between Abraham and Jesus with only the Jews and a scattering of Gentiles having a real chance to know him? Christians' reaction to this is fairly predictable. God has a plan. We don't always understand it, but it's quite presumptuous for us to think we could have done better than him. This is precisely how I hope creationist readers react to these questions. Here's the kicker: why not give theistic evolutionists/old earth creationists the same leniency? Maybe God made the universe old for a similar “reason” – it's part of his plan that we can't understand.
Paul's use of Genesis
When talking about the Fall, Paul says that death entered the world through one man's sin. While this isn't clear at all, especially because Adam didn't physically die on the day he ate the fruit, I'll suppose for the sake of argument that we know that Paul is talking about not just spiritual death and not just about human death, but physical death and animal death as well.
But since when have the NT authors been a valid source concerning what the OT actually says? When God makes a promise to Abraham's seed, is seed singular or plural? If singular, I would like to know the verse of Genesis that helped you reach this conclusion. If plural, then Paul was not only wrong about what the OT says, but this faulty understanding was his basis for a theological argument about the promise to the Jews being transferred to Christians.
So maybe Paul was a young-earth creationist, Paul was wrong, and Paul tangentially communicated these false ideas in the process of communicating true theological ideas about Jesus' death. And we're still supposed to believe these theological truths even after learning the debunking of the argument for these theological truths. The ease with which YECists see the weakness in this position is the ease with which I look at Galatians 3 and see that it is false.
Blurring the Line Between Man and Animals
Another problem is that evolution blurs the line between man and animals. And it certainly does. This means “human” is not a yes/no question, but rather a question of degree. There are ways around this like believing that in a certain moment in time, God gave an animal that looked like an ape-man a soul, but this isn't as clean of an answer as the one provided by creationism.
Consider embryonic development. The same problem appears. We have a smooth transition between non-human sperm and egg to a fully human baby. This cannot be evaded by just “believing” God creates a soul at conception. Theistic evolutionists believe that God created the first human soul at some point in the evolution process, and YECists don't let them get away with this equally evidence-free claim. Here, the problem is even worse. At least with evolution, you could go back 40,000 years and look at a child and say it is human while the parents were animals – while the line may be arbitrary, at least the line can't be blurred further by looking at the generation between the child and the parents. But with embryonic development, it's a fully smooth transition. YECists easily see that a mostly smooth transition from animal to human suggests that talk of a soul or being created in the image of God doesn't make sense. With the same ease, I see that embryonic development shows the concept of a soul to be nonsensical.
Randomness
In Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology, on page 276 he writes “The fundamental difference between a biblical view of creation and theistic evolution lies here: the driving force … is randomness.” This is tangential, but this is a common misconception about evolution. Evolution is like the weather – it's a process involving randomness. Due to the randomness of weather I can only guess within ten or twenty degrees what the temperature will be in a week. But I could guess the average temperature for 2010 within a degree or two (and without knowing about global warming.) Due to random effects averaging out, a process that looks chaotic on a small scale is often one that behaves predictably on a larger scale. Evolution says that changes are the predictable long-term result.
But theologically speaking, the misunderstanding doesn't change the implications. In theistic evolution, God's guidance of evolution looks precisely the way it would look if it looked like he stopped caring billions of years ago.
However, the same issue of randomness appears when thinking through the implications of actuarial science. If you know the rate at which heart attacks occur, and you know the size of the population, you can make a very good guess about how many people in the population will have heart attacks. For a more precise prediction, you don't pray to learn the will of God. You learn more about the population, like their age distribution. Actuarial science requires thinking about death in terms of the naturalistic cause and effect that comes from supposing death is left up to chance. And it works. This means that the way in which God takes away life looks precisely the way it would look if it looked like God doesn't care. There are less fatalist ways of saying this, but it's no different than the spin creationists universally give to evolution. Personally, I find the threat actuarial science and statistics pose to believing God still cares about death to be far more severe than the threat evolution poses to believing God cared while creating.
YECists show the proper approach to theistic evolution – skepticism toward the meaningfulness of talking about a creator who is indistinguishable from no creator at all. With the same ease, I apply this same skepticism to Christianity and see that the reasoning behind actuarial science supports the conclusion that God doesn't exist or doesn't care.
Problems in the Local Flood
Most old earth creationists and theistic evolutionists believe that Noah's flood was a local flood (a myth is the alternative.) The Bible talks about the whole world as a hyperbole in many places, so perhaps here as well. To this position, YECists have an excellent response. Why didn't Noah just migrate several hundred miles? Why not just have the birds fly a few hundred miles away? Noah had a hundred years to kill, so I don't suppose finding the time to pack would have been too burdensome.
I really like this objection. It's an excellent reason to not believe in the local flood. What I like so much about it is the underlying assumption that if a plan is completely illogical, then an omniscient God probably didn't come up with it. This assumption comes as naturally as the basic rules of logic – unless one's own beliefs are under the microscope.
So here's my question: Why didn't God just smite everyone and skip the whole flood thing entirely? This would have saved so much trouble for everyone. Noah could have preached about coming judgment for years and he could have shown he believed his own message by making provisions for surviving on his own. I would be interested in hearing if there are any reasons to send a flood at all that don't also defend the idea of having Noah build an ark for a local flood. Maybe there are reasons, but I could throw in an extra miracle or two if they are needed for the practicality of my smiting proposal.
With the local flood, YECists show the proper way of thinking about dramatic claims about what God did. If the story has God commanding a lot of pointless milling about, this should count strongly against its chance of being true. By applying the same skepticism to the global flood that creationists apply to the local flood, I reject the story of Noah even without the scientific and biblical cases against it.
Reconciling the Bible with evolution is really quite easy compared to reconciling the Bible with the Bible and other realities in the here and now. Creationists' ability to see the problems in my answers to comparably easy questions helped me see how contrived both our answers were to the hard questions.
Failing The Insider Test
Small step at a time, I moved my theology a bit while staying inside what I thought was inside. I would wait a bit, and my idea of “inside” would be stretched with me. After moving a moderate distance, I thought that where I came from was inside while the painful truth is that where I came from thought I was outside. This placed me in a curious position: YEC was still inside to me, YEC viewed me as an outsider, I was seeking to fully understand different positions within my idea of orthodoxy, and therefore the logically inevitable result was viewing my faith as an outsider.
I don't remember if anyone ever told me that I would reject Christianity if I used the same skepticism toward it that I use toward every other religion. If so, I don't remember it because it made no impact on my thinking. But eventually, I found myself looking at creationists and seeing that if they were to apply the same critical thinking to their own beliefs that they apply to mine, they would stop being Christians. Conversely, if I thought about my own faith the way other Christians thought about my faith, I would stop being a Christian.
While I thought my way out of many aspects of faith, here I simply got lucky. The desire and ability to think critically about my own beliefs was a very small part of the final step out. Thinking critically about my own beliefs was forced upon me as an unintended consequence of other decisions that were much easier to make. Perhaps this is the difference between me and Christians smarter than I am.
While many of the arguments against Christianity work just fine as academic arguments, I doubt this can be written so that readers will feel the weight of the argument as I did. It took the grind of over two years of not only trying to fit evolution in with Christianity, but trying to fit evolution in with the Christian community to see the blatant inconsistencies on both sides. It's not a matter of people being dogmatic or whatever negative adjective you want to throw in. It's simply the predictable clash of incompatible beliefs – or rather, different Christianities.
My YEC and inerrantist Christianity failed the insider test because the arguments against it are so solid that any perspective save for closing one's eyes is sufficient to see it. My TE Christianity failed the insider test because even the very idea of an insider test failed the insider test. To define “inside” as bigger than “me” was to include people who don't agree on everything. To be willing to have candid conversations with other Christians who believed a bit differently and to honestly seek to understand where they were coming from was to look at many of my own beliefs and critically think through if I had reasons for believing them or not. Sociological circumstances turned this into looking at all of my beliefs with skepticism.
Few faiths, if any, can survive under the scrutiny that everyone applies to everyone else's faith. Truth has nothing to fear from inspection and Christianity should be terrified. My mortally wounded faith staggered on for a while, but my fate had been sealed. I had escaped.
Monday, March 2, 2009
The Two Flood Stories
Sometimes surprises are hiding in plain sight. One of my biggest biblical shocks was when I first heard someone make a passing reference to the two flood stories. What? How could I not know about the second story if this is one of the many repeated stories in the Bible? How could someone mistakenly think there are two stories? This would lead to an enormous shift in the way I viewed the history of the writing of the Bible.
The Contradiction
I couldn't count how the dozens of times I've read the flood story straight out of the Bible. I was even told several times that Genesis contradicts itself by saying says seven of each kind in one place and two of each kind in another. But the reconciliation is easy: it was two of every unclean kind and seven pairs of every clean kind – right? No. In one place, it's two of every kind, and in the other, it's two of every unclean kind and seven pairs of every clean kind and bird.
Genesis 6:19-20 “And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every kind into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female. Of the birds after their kind, and of the animals after their kind, of every creeping thing of the ground after its kind, two of every kind will come to you to keep them alive.”
Genesis 7:2-3 “You shall take with you of every clean animal by sevens, a male and his female; and of the animals that are not clean two, a male and his female; also of the birds of the sky, by sevens, male and female, to keep offspring alive on the face of all the earth.”
It's not a matter of the “two of every kind” instruction being less detailed. Two of every bird is explicit in the first instruction, and seven pairs of every bird is explicit in the second version, just as it is with the clean animals. I find it to be incredible just how long it took me to notice this after having been trained by creation scientists to not see it.
(Fellow skeptics and liberal Christians, take note: I would have noticed this one a lot sooner if I had been told that the Bible says two of each kind in one place, and two of unclean animals and seven pairs of clean animals and birds in another. If you screw this one up by saying two in one place and seven in another, Christians will remember 7:2-3 and know you are wrong.)
But there is an odd objection to this contradiction. What sense does it make to for this mistake to have been made? Jacob's mistaken view of genetics makes sense – the author didn't know about modern science and hence contradicted a truth that he had no way of knowing. But how could an author get this wrong? With something so blatant, is not the explanation that we misunderstanding the author more plausible than to call this a mistake? This discrepancy is not alone enough to support the conclusion I'm moving toward, so before stating it, I wish to first point out several other weirdnesses in the story.
Premeditated Lambslaughter
Bible contradictions are often dismissed by non-inerrantists is as trivial details that do not matter to the story. I wouldn't hold a newspaper up to a standard of perfection. Surely a report getting the number of sheep in a zoo wrong doesn't compromise the truth of a story about a zoo's existence. But once we get to the ending of the story in 8:20-22, the apparently trivial detail of the number of animals on the ark shows itself to be critically important.
If you plan on making sacrifices of the clean animals at the end, having extras of specifically the clean animals is a very good idea. If you only bring two of every kind like Genesis 6:19-20 says, and then sacrifice one of them when you get off the ark ... um ... that's quite the sacrifice. The pair could have had a baby in the year on the ark, but I wouldn't stretch my luck. (Also, mating in the ark lines up poorly with creationists' speculation that the animals on the ark hibernated.) So back at the beginning of the story, one of the sets of instructions quite specifically prepares for the sacrifices, while for the other set, a sacrifice would make for a comical blunder. Interestingly enough, the bit about the sacrifices isn't repeated like nearly everything else.
(And why is Noah sacrificing only clean animals centuries before The Law? This is like Marco Polo stopping to celebrate Thanksgiving. Now, I know that the laws of God are written on mens' hearts, but an example of a particular law that I have not found written upon my heart is: “You may eat any animal that has a split hoof completely divided and that chews the cud. There are some that only chew the cud or only have a split hoof, but you must not eat them.” Maybe Noah was wired differently than I am, but without the Bible, I certainly wouldn't have figured this one out.)
Choppy Narration
Genesis 6:5-8 starts out with a coherent narrative. The earth is wicked and God decides to destroy mankind, except for Noah because he is righteous. But then all of a sudden, Genesis 6:9 begins the story all over again. Starting at verse 9 makes a great opener – Noah is righteous, the rest of the earth is corrupt, so God decides to destroy all mankind except for Noah and his family. In the 6:9-22 segment, God gives Noah detailed instruction about what to build, how many animals to bring on the ark, and Noah does everything he has been commanded to do.
So now we should be ready to get on with the story. Next up should be actually entering the ark and the rain starting. But no, Genesis 7:1-4 takes us back a step and repeats some earlier information. Just like in 6:19-20 (well, not just like), Noah is told how many animals to bring in 7:2-3. It is important to notice that I'm not just pointing out the mere fact of repetition, but the fact that this part of the story is different under a retelling.
7:13 starts out with “On the very same day.” One would expect this to mean that the previous verse was something that happened on a particular day. “The final version of the Declaration of Independence was completed on July 4. On the very same day it was announced” makes sense. “The Declaration of Independence was written in June and July. On the very same day it was announced” does not make sense. 7:12's “The rain fell upon the earth for forty days and forty nights” leads into the grammar of 7:13 very poorly.
Two Calendars
In 8:3-4, the days line up differently than might be expected. In 7:11, the flood starts on month 2, day 17. In 7:24, the water floods the earth for 150 days until 8:3's month 7, day 17. What's worth noting is that the forty days of rain are not in there. I'm not suggesting that the idea that the forty days of rain are the first forty of the 150 days is impossible – what I am saying is that the chronology in the form of months lines up seamlessly if you just ignore the forty days.
8:6 tells us that “it came about at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window.” From a purely literal perspective, there is nothing wrong with this. But from a literary perspective, it's out of place. In 8:4 and 8:5, time is marked in absolute terms – the month and day. Now it switches back to talking in time intervals. But this alone would not be that significant of an observation. In 8:3, “at the end of one hundred and fifty days” isn't a new number – it refers back the 150 days the waters prevailed in 7:24. Similarly, 8:6 seems to be referring back to some previously mentioned forty days that are now over. Flood story. Forty days. What could this possibly be referring to? Why the forty days of rain in 7:4, 7:12, and 7:17. I don't mean to oversell the significance of these new forty days. Noah waits seven days before sending out the dove again, and no one suggests it is the same seven days from 7:4. However, it is worth noting that if you ignore the chronology in the form of months, 7:4, 7:12, 7:17, and 8:6 all fit together very nicely: “I will send rain on the earth forty days and forty nights … The rain fell upon the earth for forty days and forty nights … the flood came upon the earth for forty days … it came about at the end of forty days that Noah opened the window.” But if you insert 150 days between the third and fourth mention of forty days, the continuity is disrupted.
Two Birds
In 8:7, a raven is sent out and flies around until “the water had dried up from the earth.” One bird later in 8:9, “there was water all over the surface of the earth.” I understand that “dry” and “water all over” are very relative terms, and in this story, the ground goes from being under miles of water, to under several feet of water, to being covered in pools of water, to horribly muddy, to “dry ground” in the sense of drier than a marsh, and finally to truly dry ground. But surely, the shades of meaning behind “there was water all over the surface of the earth” imply vastly more moisture than “the water had dried up from the earth.” It sounds like the raven wasn't sent out first, assuming these stories go together at all.
What was the point of the second bird? If you have a raven that flies around until the earth dries up, why send a dove? If you have a dove that you can send out until it doesn't return, why send a raven? It's not that I think these problems are completely irreconcilable. What I'm saying is that sending either the raven or the dove is a much more natural story than sending both.
The Two Flood Stories
So here's a recap: Noah is introduced twice. There are two conflicting versions of the instructions about the animals. Verse 7:13 looks like it was written to come after something other than 7:12. The time is marked while switching between seven and forty day intervals and month-based time. Viewed together, the two systems are in tension. Viewed individually, the two systems make as much sense as should be expected from a narrative that coherently keeps track of time. After the ground dries up, water is all over the earth again. Noah redundantly sends out two birds. And after only one of the two sets of instructions prepared for a sacrifice, and the repetition of nearly every detail, we have but one account of a sacrifice.
Suppose someone tried to harmonize Luke and John by cutting up each Gospel and putting them together in what they thought was the best order, added little or no extra-biblical text to smooth over the transitions, and just left the surface contradictions in place. If you only read the final product, you may or may not be able figure out which story went with which author – but you certainly would notice things like Jesus saying “it is finished” and dying followed by saying “into your hands I commit my spirit” and then dying a second time. You also might notice switches between two different writing styles. If you could fully split it up into the two sources this would greatly add to the case for two authors, but it wouldn't be essential to an argument that there are two authors. That's what the Documentary Hypothesis says the Torah is – the splicing together of primarily four sources. In the case of the flood story, there are two different authors.
Start with 6:5-8 and call this story A. 6:9-22 is a continuous piece and it's not A, so call it story B. 7:1-5 is a continuous piece and it isn't B, so it's part of A. (My A and B are usually called J and P, but I'm setting up my argument as step one in making the case for a JEPD source theory, not an argument in support of an existing theory. I'm using my own letters so I can't subliminally cheat and take advantage of what people know about J and P through other means.)
In what we have so far of A, the deity is called the LORD (Yahweh) all six times. In B, the deity is called God (Elohim) all five times. In A, there are sevens of some kinds and pairs of others, while in B there is a single pair of each kind. These differences are even more striking because they show up together in the rest of the flood story. In 7:8-9 and 7:14-16a, there are two of each kind and they come as Elohim commanded (both B.) In 8:20-22, Noah utilizes the extra clean animals and sacrifices to Yahweh (both A.)
From this point on, most my arguments are that this particular way of splitting the text in two is the correct split. They are not meant to be arguments that a split is correct, only that if a split is correct, this is the correct one.
Based on the names of God used, to A we can add 7:16b, and to B we can add 8:1 and 8:15-19.
Because the first mention of the seven days until forty days of rain is in 7:4 which is A, we can place the month-based verses in B and the other time interval verses in A. To A we can add 7:10, 7:12, 7:17, and 8:6. To B we can add 7:11, 7:24, 8:3-5, 8:13a, and 8:14.
One of the most obvious seams in the story is between 7:12 and 7:13. 7:12 is A already and so 7:13 is B. This fits nicely with 7:14-16a already being labeled B. 7:13's “On the very same day” now makes sense because it directly follows 7:11's “on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth.”
In A, the floods come because it starts raining in 7:4 and 7:12. But in B, the floods come because the windows of heaven and fountains of the deep are opened in 7:11. And hence 8:2a is B, while 8:2b is A.
The dove account marks time not only in time intervals but also in seven days like A, rather than speaking in months like B. So 8:8-12 is A and the raven in 8:7 is B.
This leaves 7:6-7, 7:18-23, 8:13b without a clear story. I didn't leave them out because they don't fit, but because at my low level of OT scholarship, it works either way. There is no reason to open myself to criticism by guessing poorly, or doing “too well” and cleverly splitting them so as to create coherence in two accounts of my construction rather than discovering coherence in two accounts as they actually exist.
If you look at the accounts side-by-side, you can see two complete stories. Of course, I haven't completely argued for this splitting, but I have no disagreements with it, and it's certainly easier to see than pulling out a Bible and trying to read 7:1-5, 7, 9-10, 12, etc.
Dissenting Opinions
One criticism is especially important for me to point out because I held Josh McDowell's feet to the fire for a very similar problem. Of course, if I thought my case was even close to equally open to criticism, I wouldn't have written this post at all – but it's open enough that I feel the need to point it out.
The problem is that googling “two flood stories” brings up pages with slightly to significantly different ideas about what verses go in which story. The top 3 agree on how to split 6:1-7:5 and 8:8-22, but for the middle third of the story, two are similar while the third is in a world by itself. The cheap defense is that I'm right and he's wrong – while this is not necessarily false, I didn't throw McDowell this line, so I won't depend on it myself. The key difference between the two situations is that McDowell needs every single detail in his argument for it to work at all. If someone disagrees with his starting event, his ending event, or the time between them by a single day, then their entire arguments are contradictory.
If two people disagree on the authors of only a few verses, then the remaining points of agreement do support each other. Furthermore, details of the unweaving are not even required to argue for two authors. My arguments about the conflicting concepts like one pair/seven pairs, raven/dove, forty days/months, Yahweh/Elohim all stand without figuring out what goes together. People getting different answers is evidence that the stories cannot be fully and definitively separated (or at least not easily.) Contradictory opinions on even significant details is not a rebuttal to the evidence that there are two authors in the first place.
To present a broad theory and only then look back and see if the evidence supports it is a form of reasoning that easily admits poor arguments. He writes “But, what really proves beyond any doubt that there were two authors—not one--is the wealth of unique correspondences found in disconnected passages.” This is quite inconvenient for me because with several of the correspondences (seven/seventh/seventeen, six hundred years, and probably sons), I think the correspondences don't really exist in the correct splitting.
The way scholarship is supposed to work is to begin with evidence and show how the evidence itself points toward the theory. Every single piece of the theory must be individually supported. One cannot bind up related claims into one package and use truth by association. When this is done, five good ideas get mixed with five bad ideas and yet the overall theory has real evidence in support of it due to the parts of it that are true. For instance, he's not completely wrong about one author caring about the number seven, so some of the correlation he's finding isn't just a coincidence. The problem is that lots of authors of the Bible liked the number seven, so you can't just go by that. He writes “Not once does the [Elohim] author use the numbers seven, seventh, seventeen.” Yes, but only in 7:1-5 is seven associated with Yahweh, so that's not saying very much. This is the problem with just presenting a split – it's not clear when you have found a characteristic of one author and when you have simply moved similar verses to one side.
But still, the only reason he can find two stories at all is because there really are two stories which provide an abundance of repetition that makes it very easy to divide Genesis 6-8 into two complete stories. But that is not to say it is easy to correctly divide Genesis 6-8 into the real two stories from which it came.
There are drawbacks to arguing from the evidence instead of starting with the theory and showing it has evidence in support of it. It's much, much more work and when you get done, it might not be the answer you wanted. But that is the price of knowledge.
What it Means for Christianity
While this alone need not undermine Christianity, it can and should very greatly change how the Bible is viewed. It seriously undermines inerrancy by the mere idea that the “surface” discrepancies are actual discrepancies that come from different authors. But it also makes perfect sense for more liberal Christians to use this to make the case that the problems conservatives have come not from the Bible itself, but from misunderstanding what sort of a book it is. Historically speaking, these arguments did originate from within Christianity. (And this is not just because they were “liberal Christians.” These are the reasons many are liberal in the first place.)
But there are two features in particular that are especially difficult to reconcile with Christianity. The first is that this means Moses didn't write Genesis 6-8, or at least not in the way conservatives think he did. Even if Moses wrote the original flood story, which split into two different traditions and were later merged, the Genesis version isn't Moses' version. Or maybe Moses was the compiler of earlier and contradictory sources, but this is vastly different from the idea that God quite nearly dictated the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai. And yet Jesus talks about the Law as if Moses wrote it. Of course, we could be misunderstanding Jesus and he might have meant the Law as the legal code rather than the Torah, but the hope that Moses at least wrote the legal code does not survive the remainder of the Documentary Hypothesis. The possibility that Jesus as a man was ignorant of the real authors is possible, but saying that something Jesus said that is directly relevant to core doctrine was wrong is a very dangerous direction to move in for conservative Christianity.
The second problem is that it makes belief in the inspiration of the autograph of the Bible look completely arbitrary. Why not look to the two flood stories pre-combination for the inspired version? If the two stories have a common literary source, why not look to that as the inspired version? Why look to the combination in Genesis? Why not go a step further and say that the Septuagint or the King James Version is inspired? Even under the assumption that something Bible-related is inspired by God, to say it is the original Hebrew of Genesis and not the true original seems just as arbitrary as randomly pointing to an English translation and assuming it to be inspired.
When you come to Genesis 6-8 with the Documentary Hypothesis in mind, the text makes sense. But that's not point. You don't have to come to Genesis 6-8 with the Documentary Hypothesis to come away with it. This is what it means for evidence to support a position. Countering with how it might be a single story isn't an argument. The consistency of evidence with a position is not enough – real evidence for a position is evidence that has the ability to point someone to a conclusion they don't already accept or even know about.
Of course, I have only provided evidence to get as far as two authors of Genesis 6-8 – that isn't the Documentary Hypothesis yet, but it's a start.
(Kudos to Richard Elliott Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible. My argument is set up very differently than his and hence any errors are mine, but his book and a private email greatly enhanced my partial understanding of this topic.)
The Contradiction
I couldn't count how the dozens of times I've read the flood story straight out of the Bible. I was even told several times that Genesis contradicts itself by saying says seven of each kind in one place and two of each kind in another. But the reconciliation is easy: it was two of every unclean kind and seven pairs of every clean kind – right? No. In one place, it's two of every kind, and in the other, it's two of every unclean kind and seven pairs of every clean kind and bird.
Genesis 6:19-20 “And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every kind into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female. Of the birds after their kind, and of the animals after their kind, of every creeping thing of the ground after its kind, two of every kind will come to you to keep them alive.”
Genesis 7:2-3 “You shall take with you of every clean animal by sevens, a male and his female; and of the animals that are not clean two, a male and his female; also of the birds of the sky, by sevens, male and female, to keep offspring alive on the face of all the earth.”
It's not a matter of the “two of every kind” instruction being less detailed. Two of every bird is explicit in the first instruction, and seven pairs of every bird is explicit in the second version, just as it is with the clean animals. I find it to be incredible just how long it took me to notice this after having been trained by creation scientists to not see it.
(Fellow skeptics and liberal Christians, take note: I would have noticed this one a lot sooner if I had been told that the Bible says two of each kind in one place, and two of unclean animals and seven pairs of clean animals and birds in another. If you screw this one up by saying two in one place and seven in another, Christians will remember 7:2-3 and know you are wrong.)
But there is an odd objection to this contradiction. What sense does it make to for this mistake to have been made? Jacob's mistaken view of genetics makes sense – the author didn't know about modern science and hence contradicted a truth that he had no way of knowing. But how could an author get this wrong? With something so blatant, is not the explanation that we misunderstanding the author more plausible than to call this a mistake? This discrepancy is not alone enough to support the conclusion I'm moving toward, so before stating it, I wish to first point out several other weirdnesses in the story.
Premeditated Lambslaughter
Bible contradictions are often dismissed by non-inerrantists is as trivial details that do not matter to the story. I wouldn't hold a newspaper up to a standard of perfection. Surely a report getting the number of sheep in a zoo wrong doesn't compromise the truth of a story about a zoo's existence. But once we get to the ending of the story in 8:20-22, the apparently trivial detail of the number of animals on the ark shows itself to be critically important.
If you plan on making sacrifices of the clean animals at the end, having extras of specifically the clean animals is a very good idea. If you only bring two of every kind like Genesis 6:19-20 says, and then sacrifice one of them when you get off the ark ... um ... that's quite the sacrifice. The pair could have had a baby in the year on the ark, but I wouldn't stretch my luck. (Also, mating in the ark lines up poorly with creationists' speculation that the animals on the ark hibernated.) So back at the beginning of the story, one of the sets of instructions quite specifically prepares for the sacrifices, while for the other set, a sacrifice would make for a comical blunder. Interestingly enough, the bit about the sacrifices isn't repeated like nearly everything else.
(And why is Noah sacrificing only clean animals centuries before The Law? This is like Marco Polo stopping to celebrate Thanksgiving. Now, I know that the laws of God are written on mens' hearts, but an example of a particular law that I have not found written upon my heart is: “You may eat any animal that has a split hoof completely divided and that chews the cud. There are some that only chew the cud or only have a split hoof, but you must not eat them.” Maybe Noah was wired differently than I am, but without the Bible, I certainly wouldn't have figured this one out.)
Choppy Narration
Genesis 6:5-8 starts out with a coherent narrative. The earth is wicked and God decides to destroy mankind, except for Noah because he is righteous. But then all of a sudden, Genesis 6:9 begins the story all over again. Starting at verse 9 makes a great opener – Noah is righteous, the rest of the earth is corrupt, so God decides to destroy all mankind except for Noah and his family. In the 6:9-22 segment, God gives Noah detailed instruction about what to build, how many animals to bring on the ark, and Noah does everything he has been commanded to do.
So now we should be ready to get on with the story. Next up should be actually entering the ark and the rain starting. But no, Genesis 7:1-4 takes us back a step and repeats some earlier information. Just like in 6:19-20 (well, not just like), Noah is told how many animals to bring in 7:2-3. It is important to notice that I'm not just pointing out the mere fact of repetition, but the fact that this part of the story is different under a retelling.
7:13 starts out with “On the very same day.” One would expect this to mean that the previous verse was something that happened on a particular day. “The final version of the Declaration of Independence was completed on July 4. On the very same day it was announced” makes sense. “The Declaration of Independence was written in June and July. On the very same day it was announced” does not make sense. 7:12's “The rain fell upon the earth for forty days and forty nights” leads into the grammar of 7:13 very poorly.
Two Calendars
In 8:3-4, the days line up differently than might be expected. In 7:11, the flood starts on month 2, day 17. In 7:24, the water floods the earth for 150 days until 8:3's month 7, day 17. What's worth noting is that the forty days of rain are not in there. I'm not suggesting that the idea that the forty days of rain are the first forty of the 150 days is impossible – what I am saying is that the chronology in the form of months lines up seamlessly if you just ignore the forty days.
8:6 tells us that “it came about at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window.” From a purely literal perspective, there is nothing wrong with this. But from a literary perspective, it's out of place. In 8:4 and 8:5, time is marked in absolute terms – the month and day. Now it switches back to talking in time intervals. But this alone would not be that significant of an observation. In 8:3, “at the end of one hundred and fifty days” isn't a new number – it refers back the 150 days the waters prevailed in 7:24. Similarly, 8:6 seems to be referring back to some previously mentioned forty days that are now over. Flood story. Forty days. What could this possibly be referring to? Why the forty days of rain in 7:4, 7:12, and 7:17. I don't mean to oversell the significance of these new forty days. Noah waits seven days before sending out the dove again, and no one suggests it is the same seven days from 7:4. However, it is worth noting that if you ignore the chronology in the form of months, 7:4, 7:12, 7:17, and 8:6 all fit together very nicely: “I will send rain on the earth forty days and forty nights … The rain fell upon the earth for forty days and forty nights … the flood came upon the earth for forty days … it came about at the end of forty days that Noah opened the window.” But if you insert 150 days between the third and fourth mention of forty days, the continuity is disrupted.
Two Birds
In 8:7, a raven is sent out and flies around until “the water had dried up from the earth.” One bird later in 8:9, “there was water all over the surface of the earth.” I understand that “dry” and “water all over” are very relative terms, and in this story, the ground goes from being under miles of water, to under several feet of water, to being covered in pools of water, to horribly muddy, to “dry ground” in the sense of drier than a marsh, and finally to truly dry ground. But surely, the shades of meaning behind “there was water all over the surface of the earth” imply vastly more moisture than “the water had dried up from the earth.” It sounds like the raven wasn't sent out first, assuming these stories go together at all.
What was the point of the second bird? If you have a raven that flies around until the earth dries up, why send a dove? If you have a dove that you can send out until it doesn't return, why send a raven? It's not that I think these problems are completely irreconcilable. What I'm saying is that sending either the raven or the dove is a much more natural story than sending both.
The Two Flood Stories
So here's a recap: Noah is introduced twice. There are two conflicting versions of the instructions about the animals. Verse 7:13 looks like it was written to come after something other than 7:12. The time is marked while switching between seven and forty day intervals and month-based time. Viewed together, the two systems are in tension. Viewed individually, the two systems make as much sense as should be expected from a narrative that coherently keeps track of time. After the ground dries up, water is all over the earth again. Noah redundantly sends out two birds. And after only one of the two sets of instructions prepared for a sacrifice, and the repetition of nearly every detail, we have but one account of a sacrifice.
Suppose someone tried to harmonize Luke and John by cutting up each Gospel and putting them together in what they thought was the best order, added little or no extra-biblical text to smooth over the transitions, and just left the surface contradictions in place. If you only read the final product, you may or may not be able figure out which story went with which author – but you certainly would notice things like Jesus saying “it is finished” and dying followed by saying “into your hands I commit my spirit” and then dying a second time. You also might notice switches between two different writing styles. If you could fully split it up into the two sources this would greatly add to the case for two authors, but it wouldn't be essential to an argument that there are two authors. That's what the Documentary Hypothesis says the Torah is – the splicing together of primarily four sources. In the case of the flood story, there are two different authors.
Start with 6:5-8 and call this story A. 6:9-22 is a continuous piece and it's not A, so call it story B. 7:1-5 is a continuous piece and it isn't B, so it's part of A. (My A and B are usually called J and P, but I'm setting up my argument as step one in making the case for a JEPD source theory, not an argument in support of an existing theory. I'm using my own letters so I can't subliminally cheat and take advantage of what people know about J and P through other means.)
In what we have so far of A, the deity is called the LORD (Yahweh) all six times. In B, the deity is called God (Elohim) all five times. In A, there are sevens of some kinds and pairs of others, while in B there is a single pair of each kind. These differences are even more striking because they show up together in the rest of the flood story. In 7:8-9 and 7:14-16a, there are two of each kind and they come as Elohim commanded (both B.) In 8:20-22, Noah utilizes the extra clean animals and sacrifices to Yahweh (both A.)
From this point on, most my arguments are that this particular way of splitting the text in two is the correct split. They are not meant to be arguments that a split is correct, only that if a split is correct, this is the correct one.
Based on the names of God used, to A we can add 7:16b, and to B we can add 8:1 and 8:15-19.
Because the first mention of the seven days until forty days of rain is in 7:4 which is A, we can place the month-based verses in B and the other time interval verses in A. To A we can add 7:10, 7:12, 7:17, and 8:6. To B we can add 7:11, 7:24, 8:3-5, 8:13a, and 8:14.
One of the most obvious seams in the story is between 7:12 and 7:13. 7:12 is A already and so 7:13 is B. This fits nicely with 7:14-16a already being labeled B. 7:13's “On the very same day” now makes sense because it directly follows 7:11's “on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth.”
In A, the floods come because it starts raining in 7:4 and 7:12. But in B, the floods come because the windows of heaven and fountains of the deep are opened in 7:11. And hence 8:2a is B, while 8:2b is A.
The dove account marks time not only in time intervals but also in seven days like A, rather than speaking in months like B. So 8:8-12 is A and the raven in 8:7 is B.
This leaves 7:6-7, 7:18-23, 8:13b without a clear story. I didn't leave them out because they don't fit, but because at my low level of OT scholarship, it works either way. There is no reason to open myself to criticism by guessing poorly, or doing “too well” and cleverly splitting them so as to create coherence in two accounts of my construction rather than discovering coherence in two accounts as they actually exist.
If you look at the accounts side-by-side, you can see two complete stories. Of course, I haven't completely argued for this splitting, but I have no disagreements with it, and it's certainly easier to see than pulling out a Bible and trying to read 7:1-5, 7, 9-10, 12, etc.
Dissenting Opinions
One criticism is especially important for me to point out because I held Josh McDowell's feet to the fire for a very similar problem. Of course, if I thought my case was even close to equally open to criticism, I wouldn't have written this post at all – but it's open enough that I feel the need to point it out.
The problem is that googling “two flood stories” brings up pages with slightly to significantly different ideas about what verses go in which story. The top 3 agree on how to split 6:1-7:5 and 8:8-22, but for the middle third of the story, two are similar while the third is in a world by itself. The cheap defense is that I'm right and he's wrong – while this is not necessarily false, I didn't throw McDowell this line, so I won't depend on it myself. The key difference between the two situations is that McDowell needs every single detail in his argument for it to work at all. If someone disagrees with his starting event, his ending event, or the time between them by a single day, then their entire arguments are contradictory.
If two people disagree on the authors of only a few verses, then the remaining points of agreement do support each other. Furthermore, details of the unweaving are not even required to argue for two authors. My arguments about the conflicting concepts like one pair/seven pairs, raven/dove, forty days/months, Yahweh/Elohim all stand without figuring out what goes together. People getting different answers is evidence that the stories cannot be fully and definitively separated (or at least not easily.) Contradictory opinions on even significant details is not a rebuttal to the evidence that there are two authors in the first place.
To present a broad theory and only then look back and see if the evidence supports it is a form of reasoning that easily admits poor arguments. He writes “But, what really proves beyond any doubt that there were two authors—not one--is the wealth of unique correspondences found in disconnected passages.” This is quite inconvenient for me because with several of the correspondences (seven/seventh/seventeen, six hundred years, and probably sons), I think the correspondences don't really exist in the correct splitting.
The way scholarship is supposed to work is to begin with evidence and show how the evidence itself points toward the theory. Every single piece of the theory must be individually supported. One cannot bind up related claims into one package and use truth by association. When this is done, five good ideas get mixed with five bad ideas and yet the overall theory has real evidence in support of it due to the parts of it that are true. For instance, he's not completely wrong about one author caring about the number seven, so some of the correlation he's finding isn't just a coincidence. The problem is that lots of authors of the Bible liked the number seven, so you can't just go by that. He writes “Not once does the [Elohim] author use the numbers seven, seventh, seventeen.” Yes, but only in 7:1-5 is seven associated with Yahweh, so that's not saying very much. This is the problem with just presenting a split – it's not clear when you have found a characteristic of one author and when you have simply moved similar verses to one side.
But still, the only reason he can find two stories at all is because there really are two stories which provide an abundance of repetition that makes it very easy to divide Genesis 6-8 into two complete stories. But that is not to say it is easy to correctly divide Genesis 6-8 into the real two stories from which it came.
There are drawbacks to arguing from the evidence instead of starting with the theory and showing it has evidence in support of it. It's much, much more work and when you get done, it might not be the answer you wanted. But that is the price of knowledge.
What it Means for Christianity
While this alone need not undermine Christianity, it can and should very greatly change how the Bible is viewed. It seriously undermines inerrancy by the mere idea that the “surface” discrepancies are actual discrepancies that come from different authors. But it also makes perfect sense for more liberal Christians to use this to make the case that the problems conservatives have come not from the Bible itself, but from misunderstanding what sort of a book it is. Historically speaking, these arguments did originate from within Christianity. (And this is not just because they were “liberal Christians.” These are the reasons many are liberal in the first place.)
But there are two features in particular that are especially difficult to reconcile with Christianity. The first is that this means Moses didn't write Genesis 6-8, or at least not in the way conservatives think he did. Even if Moses wrote the original flood story, which split into two different traditions and were later merged, the Genesis version isn't Moses' version. Or maybe Moses was the compiler of earlier and contradictory sources, but this is vastly different from the idea that God quite nearly dictated the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai. And yet Jesus talks about the Law as if Moses wrote it. Of course, we could be misunderstanding Jesus and he might have meant the Law as the legal code rather than the Torah, but the hope that Moses at least wrote the legal code does not survive the remainder of the Documentary Hypothesis. The possibility that Jesus as a man was ignorant of the real authors is possible, but saying that something Jesus said that is directly relevant to core doctrine was wrong is a very dangerous direction to move in for conservative Christianity.
The second problem is that it makes belief in the inspiration of the autograph of the Bible look completely arbitrary. Why not look to the two flood stories pre-combination for the inspired version? If the two stories have a common literary source, why not look to that as the inspired version? Why look to the combination in Genesis? Why not go a step further and say that the Septuagint or the King James Version is inspired? Even under the assumption that something Bible-related is inspired by God, to say it is the original Hebrew of Genesis and not the true original seems just as arbitrary as randomly pointing to an English translation and assuming it to be inspired.
When you come to Genesis 6-8 with the Documentary Hypothesis in mind, the text makes sense. But that's not point. You don't have to come to Genesis 6-8 with the Documentary Hypothesis to come away with it. This is what it means for evidence to support a position. Countering with how it might be a single story isn't an argument. The consistency of evidence with a position is not enough – real evidence for a position is evidence that has the ability to point someone to a conclusion they don't already accept or even know about.
Of course, I have only provided evidence to get as far as two authors of Genesis 6-8 – that isn't the Documentary Hypothesis yet, but it's a start.
(Kudos to Richard Elliott Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible. My argument is set up very differently than his and hence any errors are mine, but his book and a private email greatly enhanced my partial understanding of this topic.)
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Jacob and Genetics
For Christians who think Genesis' creation story is other than myth, science poses a great threat. But rather than arguing that they are taking the Bible too seriously, I'm going to take the opposite approach. If creationists really want to stand up for the Bible, they need to be less selective in the sciences that they deny. We should have a controversy over genetics, too.
Genesis 30:25-43 is the story of the negotiations over Jacob's wages. Laban had little when Jacob began to live with him, but now he's rich. They both recognize the role played by Jacob in producing the wealth, but Laban's wealth is still his to give.
Laban: If now it pleases you, stay with me; I have divined that the LORD has blessed me on your account. Name me your wages, and I will give it.
Jacob: You shall not give me anything. If you will do this one thing for me, I will again pasture and keep your flock: let me pass through your entire flock today, removing from there every speckled and spotted sheep and every black one among the lambs and the spotted and speckled among the goats; and such shall be my wages. So my honesty will answer for me later, when you come concerning my wages. Every one that is not speckled and spotted among the goats and black among the lambs, if found with me, will be considered stolen.
(Don't let the precision of the NASB distract from the humor. This is the feigned courtesy of two guys who are trying to swindle each other.)
Next Jacob separates the flocks with the white ones in Laban's flock, and the rest in his flock. But Jacob is still working for Laban and hence has the ability to bolster his own flock without actually breaking any rules. What he does is show the white sheep striped rods while they are mating. Sure enough, the sheep who were shown stripes give birth to striped lambs, and Jacob claims them. Also, he wasn't content to just get random sheep; he wanted the best.
Genesis 30:41-42 “Moreover, whenever the stronger of the flock were mating, Jacob would place the rods in the sight of the flock in the gutters, so that they might mate by the rods; but when the flock was feeble, he did not put them in; so the feebler were Laban's and the stronger Jacob's.”
And so Jacob the deceiver wins this round due to his brilliant scheme.
However, what is to be made of this story due to genetic theory? To apply creationist reasoning to it, we can't rely on the conclusions of geneticists because they are atheistic scientists who assume that God doesn't create new genes. (Also, it's called genetic theory. That's means scientists don't really know if it's true or not.) Every time you see a genetics chart of the alleles of the parents and the potential offspring, think to yourself “naturalistic presuppositions.”
For whatever reason, here Christians are willing to bend the clear meaning of the Bible so that it can be consistent with reality. So how can the striped offspring be explained? You guessed it, Goddidit.
But look back at the story. Where are we told that God intervened to make the plan work? Jacob conned Esau into giving away his birthright without a miracle – Esau was exhausted and a fool. Jacob conned Issac out of Esau's blessing without a miracle – Rebekah helped him, he used goat skins to fake hairiness(!), he wore Esau's clothes to smell right, and mostly he took advantage of Issac's poor eyesight and senility. Laban conned Jacob into sleeping with Leah the night Jacob thought he was marrying Rachel, although the Bible's a bit short on details regarding the logistics of how this one was pulled off. Just like all the other tricks, Jacob's plan via striped rods worked. Jacob was crafty, and “so the feebler were Laban's and the stronger Jacob's.” The Bible doesn't attribute the result directly to God, but to Jacob.
Now, when it comes to believing in miracles, there's believing because you saw, believing because of hard evidence, believing because you know someone who saw, etc. Toward the bottom of the scale of good reasons to believe in a miracle is just because some ancient document says so. Now this miracle – this is several steps below that. This is claiming a miracle happened when the Bible doesn't even suggest that one happened. It's believing in a miracle just to fill in a plot hole in a story ancient people told each other, a plot hole that would have been a perfectly logical mistake for pre-scientific writer.
And yet people still believe Genesis is a reliable source of scientific knowledge. Despite being shown that the story doesn't make any sense without suspending your knowledge of how reality works. It reminds me of a country song:
That's My Story – Colin Raye
I came in as the sun came up.
She glared at me over her coffee cup.
She said, "Where you been?"
So I thought real hard and said,
"I fell asleep in that hammock in the yard."
She said, "You don't know it boy, but you just blew it."
And I said, "Well that's my story and I'm sticking to it."
"That's my story.
Oh, that's my story.
Well, I ain't got a witness, and I can't prove it,
but that's my story and I'm stickin' to it."
I got that deer-in-the-headlight look.
She read my face like the cover of a book
and said, "Don't expect me to believe all that static,
'cause just last week I threw that hammock in the attic."
My skin got so thin so you could see right through it,
and I stuttered, "Well that's my story and I'm stickin' t-t-to it."
Genesis 30:25-43 is the story of the negotiations over Jacob's wages. Laban had little when Jacob began to live with him, but now he's rich. They both recognize the role played by Jacob in producing the wealth, but Laban's wealth is still his to give.
Laban: If now it pleases you, stay with me; I have divined that the LORD has blessed me on your account. Name me your wages, and I will give it.
Jacob: You shall not give me anything. If you will do this one thing for me, I will again pasture and keep your flock: let me pass through your entire flock today, removing from there every speckled and spotted sheep and every black one among the lambs and the spotted and speckled among the goats; and such shall be my wages. So my honesty will answer for me later, when you come concerning my wages. Every one that is not speckled and spotted among the goats and black among the lambs, if found with me, will be considered stolen.
(Don't let the precision of the NASB distract from the humor. This is the feigned courtesy of two guys who are trying to swindle each other.)
Next Jacob separates the flocks with the white ones in Laban's flock, and the rest in his flock. But Jacob is still working for Laban and hence has the ability to bolster his own flock without actually breaking any rules. What he does is show the white sheep striped rods while they are mating. Sure enough, the sheep who were shown stripes give birth to striped lambs, and Jacob claims them. Also, he wasn't content to just get random sheep; he wanted the best.
Genesis 30:41-42 “Moreover, whenever the stronger of the flock were mating, Jacob would place the rods in the sight of the flock in the gutters, so that they might mate by the rods; but when the flock was feeble, he did not put them in; so the feebler were Laban's and the stronger Jacob's.”
And so Jacob the deceiver wins this round due to his brilliant scheme.
However, what is to be made of this story due to genetic theory? To apply creationist reasoning to it, we can't rely on the conclusions of geneticists because they are atheistic scientists who assume that God doesn't create new genes. (Also, it's called genetic theory. That's means scientists don't really know if it's true or not.) Every time you see a genetics chart of the alleles of the parents and the potential offspring, think to yourself “naturalistic presuppositions.”
For whatever reason, here Christians are willing to bend the clear meaning of the Bible so that it can be consistent with reality. So how can the striped offspring be explained? You guessed it, Goddidit.
But look back at the story. Where are we told that God intervened to make the plan work? Jacob conned Esau into giving away his birthright without a miracle – Esau was exhausted and a fool. Jacob conned Issac out of Esau's blessing without a miracle – Rebekah helped him, he used goat skins to fake hairiness(!), he wore Esau's clothes to smell right, and mostly he took advantage of Issac's poor eyesight and senility. Laban conned Jacob into sleeping with Leah the night Jacob thought he was marrying Rachel, although the Bible's a bit short on details regarding the logistics of how this one was pulled off. Just like all the other tricks, Jacob's plan via striped rods worked. Jacob was crafty, and “so the feebler were Laban's and the stronger Jacob's.” The Bible doesn't attribute the result directly to God, but to Jacob.
Now, when it comes to believing in miracles, there's believing because you saw, believing because of hard evidence, believing because you know someone who saw, etc. Toward the bottom of the scale of good reasons to believe in a miracle is just because some ancient document says so. Now this miracle – this is several steps below that. This is claiming a miracle happened when the Bible doesn't even suggest that one happened. It's believing in a miracle just to fill in a plot hole in a story ancient people told each other, a plot hole that would have been a perfectly logical mistake for pre-scientific writer.
And yet people still believe Genesis is a reliable source of scientific knowledge. Despite being shown that the story doesn't make any sense without suspending your knowledge of how reality works. It reminds me of a country song:
That's My Story – Colin Raye
I came in as the sun came up.
She glared at me over her coffee cup.
She said, "Where you been?"
So I thought real hard and said,
"I fell asleep in that hammock in the yard."
She said, "You don't know it boy, but you just blew it."
And I said, "Well that's my story and I'm sticking to it."
"That's my story.
Oh, that's my story.
Well, I ain't got a witness, and I can't prove it,
but that's my story and I'm stickin' to it."
I got that deer-in-the-headlight look.
She read my face like the cover of a book
and said, "Don't expect me to believe all that static,
'cause just last week I threw that hammock in the attic."
My skin got so thin so you could see right through it,
and I stuttered, "Well that's my story and I'm stickin' t-t-to it."
Saturday, December 6, 2008
The Bible's Most Mythical Story
Genesis 6:4 “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.”
Christians don't all agree on what the Nephilim were. I will make the case that the Nephilim were a mighty race of the half-demon/half-human.
Unless you have something against the idea that at times the Bible is as implausible as a fantasy novel, this is the most natural reading of Genesis. “Sons of God” is contrasted with “daughters of men,” so one group comes from God and the other from men. Also, “sons of God” is also used in Job 1:6 “Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them.” This further established that “sons of God” takes its natural meaning of angels/demons. This alone is enough to make my case.
If you accept the inspiration of the NT, the case is even stronger. The author of the book of Enoch agreed with me in 300-200 BC. Enoch 6:2-3a “And the angels, the children of the heaven, saw and lusted after them, and said to one another: 'Come, let us choose us wives from among the children of men and beget us children.'”
At first glance, Enoch is irrelevant to Genesis. Enoch is neither contemporary to Genesis nor canonical. However, no less than Tertullian, the man who first articulated the doctrine of the Trinity, accepted this book as canonical. One reason he accepted it is that Jude quotes from Enoch:
Jude 14b-15 “Behold, the Lord came with many thousands of His holy ones, to execute judgment upon all, and to convict all the ungodly of all their ungodly deeds which they have done in an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.”
Enoch 1:9 “And behold! He cometh with ten thousands of His holy ones
To execute judgement upon all,
And to destroy all the ungodly:
And to convict all flesh
Of all the works of their ungodliness which they have ungodly committed,
And of all the hard things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.”
While this is not a full endorsement of Enoch by Jude, it does suggest that Jude had the ideas of Enoch in mind in other parts of his letter, and these ideas should be considered when trying to determine what Jude meant. Jude 6-7 fairly clearly communicates that demons bred with women:
“And angels who did not keep their own domain, but abandoned their proper abode, He has kept in eternal bonds under darkness for the judgment of the great day, just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them, since they in the same way as these indulged in gross immorality and went after strange flesh.”
Looking at the phrase “they in the same way as these indulged” it's clear from context that they = angels and these = Sodom and Gomorrah. Thus, Jude believed demons engaged in some kind of gross sexual sin. As this happened through the abandoning of their proper abode, the best conclusion is that they sinned sexually after leaving heaven and coming down to earth, thus with humans. Especially in light of Jude's connection to Enoch, the conclusion is inescapable. If you accept the Bible as the word of God, you should also believe the Bible's most mythical story.
I would like to pause and savor a few choice implications the Nephilim have upon our understanding of the world:
1. Demons are straight, so we should reconsider Paul's whole being-evil-makes-you-gay line of reasoning.
2. Due to the reproductive compatibility of demons and humans, demons should be referred to as homo sapiens minionus, as they are clearly at least a sub-species of homo sapiens.
3. If we found the right ancient remains, and if Jurassic Park were not so obviously fictitious, we could genetically engineer demons, or at least creatures whose might comes from their demon DNA.
4. Homo sapiens minionus have needs, too.
5. In the throughs of a nasty break-up or divorce, women occasionally wonder if the man for whom she fell is really a demon. This is a possibility that deserves more serious consideration than it typically receives.
The Bible is myth and superstition. Why is this a controversial statement?
Christians don't all agree on what the Nephilim were. I will make the case that the Nephilim were a mighty race of the half-demon/half-human.
Unless you have something against the idea that at times the Bible is as implausible as a fantasy novel, this is the most natural reading of Genesis. “Sons of God” is contrasted with “daughters of men,” so one group comes from God and the other from men. Also, “sons of God” is also used in Job 1:6 “Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them.” This further established that “sons of God” takes its natural meaning of angels/demons. This alone is enough to make my case.
If you accept the inspiration of the NT, the case is even stronger. The author of the book of Enoch agreed with me in 300-200 BC. Enoch 6:2-3a “And the angels, the children of the heaven, saw and lusted after them, and said to one another: 'Come, let us choose us wives from among the children of men and beget us children.'”
At first glance, Enoch is irrelevant to Genesis. Enoch is neither contemporary to Genesis nor canonical. However, no less than Tertullian, the man who first articulated the doctrine of the Trinity, accepted this book as canonical. One reason he accepted it is that Jude quotes from Enoch:
Jude 14b-15 “Behold, the Lord came with many thousands of His holy ones, to execute judgment upon all, and to convict all the ungodly of all their ungodly deeds which they have done in an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.”
Enoch 1:9 “And behold! He cometh with ten thousands of His holy ones
To execute judgement upon all,
And to destroy all the ungodly:
And to convict all flesh
Of all the works of their ungodliness which they have ungodly committed,
And of all the hard things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.”
While this is not a full endorsement of Enoch by Jude, it does suggest that Jude had the ideas of Enoch in mind in other parts of his letter, and these ideas should be considered when trying to determine what Jude meant. Jude 6-7 fairly clearly communicates that demons bred with women:
“And angels who did not keep their own domain, but abandoned their proper abode, He has kept in eternal bonds under darkness for the judgment of the great day, just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them, since they in the same way as these indulged in gross immorality and went after strange flesh.”
Looking at the phrase “they in the same way as these indulged” it's clear from context that they = angels and these = Sodom and Gomorrah. Thus, Jude believed demons engaged in some kind of gross sexual sin. As this happened through the abandoning of their proper abode, the best conclusion is that they sinned sexually after leaving heaven and coming down to earth, thus with humans. Especially in light of Jude's connection to Enoch, the conclusion is inescapable. If you accept the Bible as the word of God, you should also believe the Bible's most mythical story.
I would like to pause and savor a few choice implications the Nephilim have upon our understanding of the world:
1. Demons are straight, so we should reconsider Paul's whole being-evil-makes-you-gay line of reasoning.
2. Due to the reproductive compatibility of demons and humans, demons should be referred to as homo sapiens minionus, as they are clearly at least a sub-species of homo sapiens.
3. If we found the right ancient remains, and if Jurassic Park were not so obviously fictitious, we could genetically engineer demons, or at least creatures whose might comes from their demon DNA.
4. Homo sapiens minionus have needs, too.
5. In the throughs of a nasty break-up or divorce, women occasionally wonder if the man for whom she fell is really a demon. This is a possibility that deserves more serious consideration than it typically receives.
The Bible is myth and superstition. Why is this a controversial statement?
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