Top five wrongest parts of the creation story in Genesis

I should not have to enumerate this. It should be obvious to the most casual reader of the beginning of the Bible that the creation story is a bunch of guesses by some ancient people -- and they got it wrong pretty much from top to bottom.

Which is fine. It can be read as a charming poem or metaphor or something if you're from a tradition that cherishes this story. The problem arises when modern people doggedly insist -- in the face of all evidence and reason -- that this story gives an accurate description of how life, the universe, and everything began.

So I will enumerate here the top five wrongest points in the story. They're not the only wrong bits, but these wrong parts are so egregiously wrong that I don't want to cloud the issues by nit-picking the lesser details like whether the two stories contradict each other, etc.

#1. Day four: God creates the Sun.

Yes, after having created daylight back on day one, and all of the worlds plants on day three, God finally gets around to creating the Sun.

This is game over. It is sincerely not possible to get the sequence of events of Earth's formation more wrong than this.

The only apologetic excuse I've heard for this one is that the Earth's atmosphere was originally so opaque that it wasn't until the Earth was covered with plants that the Sun and Moon and stars became visible, so -- to the observer writing this story -- it looked like the Sun and Moon and stars were created at that point.

There are several problems with this excuse. The first is that's not what it says.

There is nothing in the text to indicate that the other uses of "God created" something refer to Him actually creating the thing, but this one refers to the unnamed observer first noticing it. This interpretation comes from the popular Bible-literalist syllogism: 1. The Bible is not wrong, 2. The thing written in this Bible passage is wrong, therefore 3. What's written in the passage is not what's written in the passage.

This interpretation of this passage is a classic example of the "Who are you going to believe -- me or your lying eyes reading what's written on the page?" school of Bible study.

But, even if we were to grant that that interpretation is reasonable (which I don't), it's still wrong.

The Earth's atmosphere was not opaque (or cloud-covered) enough to block the view of the Sun. Probably not at any point in the Earth's formation, but certainly not continuously from the beginning of the Earth's formation to the point where the land was covered with plants.

And finally, if your own most charitable interpretation of this passage is that the author of the creation story can't tell the difference between God creating something and himself simply noticing the thing, why would you treat this story as accurate?

#2. Day four: God creates the stars

Yep, day four, as an afterthought to creating the Sun and Moon, God creates the stars -- which are described as lights that He placed in the expanse/firmament that He created to hold up the water when it's not raining (see below).

This one is (in an absolute sense) even more wrong than #1 because the stars already existed for several billion years before the formation of the Earth. Also, they are other suns -- they are not little lights embedded in the firmament.

I put this one after the one about creating the Sun, though, because it's not quite as bad. Ancient people couldn't really be expected to know that the stars are distant suns. Whereas, I would hope that even the most ignorant ancient person could be expected to figure out that daylight comes from the Sun -- it does not exist independently of the Sun. And hopefully they could also figure out that plants rely on the Sun, and hence wouldn't be green and growing before the Sun existed.

#3. Day two: God creates the "Firmament" or "Expanse"

At this point God created something that does not exist and never did.

This one is easy for modern Christians to ignore because there's no modern word for this thing because no modern people believe in its existence. So it's easy to (intentionally or unintentionally) misread this passage as just referring to the atmosphere or something.

In reality, this is a reference to an ancient belief that there was a solid physical barrier that "separated the water under the expanse from the water above it." In other words, this is supposedly the thing that holds up the rain except for on the occasions when God opens the heavens and makes it rain. It's also where He embedded the stars, as I mentioned earlier.

If you don't believe me, the footnote in the  "NIV Study Bible" that I am quoting from gives the following cross-references for the term for this thing God created: "Hard as a mirror" (Job 37:18) and "Like a canopy" (Isa 40:22)

#4. Days three, five, and six: God creates all living things in the wrong order

The short version is as follows: day three: all plants, (day four: the Sun??!!!??!), day five: all water-dwelling and air-dwelling animals, day six: all land animals.

The water-then-land part is kind of correct, but birds existing before any land animals is dead wrong. And the text says that each category was created completely in the above sequence -- which isn't true. New species of plants, water-dwelling animals, land-dwelling animals, and air-dwelling animals (along with other types of life forms) have continuously arisen concurrently from essentially the earliest days of complex cells.

The evidence for this sequence, by the way, does not depend on the theory of Evolution. The evidence comes from the fossil record -- the millions of fossils that are found in consistent strata around the globe. Let me emphasise this point: the evidence shows that the Biblical creation story's account of the formation of life is wrong all by itself -- no reference to evolution is required.

#5. God creates the first human by making a clay sculpture and then breathing life into it.

In the earlier segment of the story, the author is really vague about the mechanisms by which God "creates" things. So you can believe it says that He brought these things into existence with a poof of magic or through some mechanisms that roughly correspond to the evidence. This is the first time that we get some specifics about how God makes things.

And, unsurprisingly, the method described in the story does not bear any resemblance to any natural process that we have any evidence for.

Again, I would like to emphasise that the creation story here is wrong all by itself -- without any reference to evolution. A lot of Bible-literalists weirdly single out the theory of Evolution as something they don't want to "believe in" -- because it somehow threatens the Bible. But that line of reasoning misses the point entirely:

Even if we didn't have the weight of scientific evidence showing us that evolution of species by natural selection did occur and continues to occur, it still wouldn't mean that we have any reason or evidence to conclude that "blowing life into an inanimate statue" is even close to the way that human life arose. The Bible author's guess here is just wrong.

I'm not going to throw in the creation of Eve at this point because I guess that some Bible literalist could claim that God cloned Eve from DNA in Adam's rib -- which (unlike the animating-a-clay-figure idea) is at least in the same universe with something that is possible. Still, with all the incest coming up later in the book, it's a little horrifying to imagine that the parents in the story were actually clones of one another (not to mention the fact that if Adam is biologically male with a functioning male reproductive system, his clone would not be a female with a functioning female reproductive system).

Anyway, I hope this list is instructive. But I know it won't be because convincing yourself that the creation story in Genesis is literally true requires such a profound level of delusion that there's no hope that the light of reason will ever penetrate it.

A Great Riff on "The Good (??!) Book": The FOB Bible

I'm not a huge fan of The Old Testament. It's not just that the moral lessons it contains are abhorrent, it's also the fact that -- as ancient texts go -- that particular batch of legends is not particularly interesting. But, by some winds of chance, this one set collection of stories (The Bible) has become the best-selling book of the year, every year, and it's not clear that any other text in human history has been as thoroughly and repeatedly discussed and analyzed. Much like Twilight, the huge body commentary spawned by the text is a lot more interesting than the text itself (here's a fun new post about Twilight that just sprung up). In a similar vein we have The FOB Bible. Despite the retread subject matter, The FOB Bible adds some clever and original insights to these familiar tales.

The FOB Bible is a collection of literary shorts (stories, poetry, etc.) inspired by the stories of The Old Testament. Instead of just taking the biblical tales at face value (the way we normally think of them), the authors (the "Friends of Ben") imagine what it would be like if these stories really happened, filling them out in lively detail.

As an example, "The Book of Job's Wife" adds a very human dimension to what it would be like for a family to suffer the misfortunes described in "The Book of Job." The story is almost an apologist's rendition of "The Book of Job" in that it cleans up some of the most questionable aspects of the story (the idea that getting a new family makes up for burning his kids to death; the idea that God decided to make Job's family suffer on purpose, on a bet; etc.) -- portraying God as a force of good and comfort instead. Yet, I liked "The Book of Job's Wife" anyway, as a well-told story. That one was my second-favorite in The FOB Bible collection, right after "Ezra's Inbox": which is "The Book of Ezra" re-imagined as a collection of emails. That one was fun because I've been in web-like email discussion like that one, and it's an entertaining way of illustrating each character's position and what they think of one another. It almost made me want to go back and read "The Book of Ezra". Almost. But I suspect that (like the band) this short retelling is a tad better than Ezra.

Some stories from The FOB Bible have been posted online, such as the powerful Abraham's Purgatory (correcting the thoroughly despicable moral in the original story of Abraham's sacrifice), and The Changing of the God -- a lighter look at the transition from The Old Testament to The New Testament. Other excerpts (including some of the clever rhymed poetry) can be found here.

Overall, The FOB Bible is beautifully produced and illustrated with gorgeous (public domain, I assume) engravings by Gustav Doré that complement the tone and text well. I'd recommend this book as a good choice to pass around and discuss on a pleasant, rainy weekend getaway with friends.

My deconversion, part 1: background

disclaimer: I will be recounting my own experiences in a direct and straight-forward manner. None of this is intended as disrespectful to those who believe differently, it is merely a statement of my personal conclusions and how I reached them.

Ironically, growing up Mormon taught me to value non-conformity. This is ironic because Mormons are famed for lockstep conformity in action, dress, and thought.

But training Mormon kids to be like other Mormons necessarily requires training them to be unlike everyone else. And when you live in an area where Mormons are few and far between -- like Minnesota, where I grew up -- that means being unlike just about everybody.

As a kid, with or without Mormonism, there was no way I was going to fit in easily with other kids my age. I was a shy, socially awkward, late-bloomer-tomboy-bookworm, living in my own imaginary world, as likely to be talking to myself as to be talking to other people.

I was kind of a classic nerd, so Mormonism's "hip to be square" attitude fit my personality. There's a current in LDS culture that values tastes that outsiders might consider nerdy such as adults having fun by dressing up and doing silly skits for talent nights and Road Shows, or or teens and college students picking Disney movies as their favorite movies. This sort of fun nerdiness was something I could relate to, and I liked being part of a culture that said to me: "Every schmo tries to be cool by following the crowd. It takes guts to ignore the direction the crowd is going -- it's beyond cool."

"Beyond cool" was great for me because "cool"... Well, there was no way that was going to happen.

On the other hand, I never fit well into the role Mormonism had picked out for me (and for every other girl on the planet). I believed wholeheartedly that the LDS church was God's one true church, and -- motivated by the "how long will you be dead compared to how long you're alive?" argument -- I tried the best I could to "live the gospel." But my "question authority!" streak was too deep for me to fit neatly into God's divine, immovable hierarchy.

I'm not sure if my parents taught me skepticism or if it was just some sort of natural rebelliousness -- probably a combination of both -- but it limited my ability to be satisfied by learning from the examples of others rather than setting out to learn from my own experiences. So a lot of the time I was a sweet, righteous little Molly, and on the side I was testing the rules and boundaries with a vengeance.

The role of women was a big sticking point for me. But while the church taught me that a woman's divine role is to be a wife and mother period, my parents taught me something slightly different. They taught me in essence that of course your children come first -- especially when they're small -- but there's no reason that should stop you from being whatever else you want to be and from from following every dream. My mom was essentially a feminist at heart, and she had reconciled her faith with her feminist leanings in this way. Similarly, her example showed me how to deal with other church or doctrinal problems without immediately scrutinizing the church or gospel itself.

My mom falls into the category of what I would consider "Mormon intellectuals" even though she subscribed to Sunstone for only a very short time while we were growing up.

From my perspective, Mormon intellectuals are the following set of people: Their unquestionable axiom number one is that the church is true. They're educated and aware enough to know that the church has some pretty serious "issues" and intelligent enough to have the ability to warp the very fabric of time and space around the gospel so that any piece of seemingly contradictory real-world evidence can be reconciled with axiom number one.

Fixing reality to fit "the truth" is not an impossible task. Here's a simple illustration of how it works (not invented by Mormons, but this is an example of the sort of thing I'm talking about):

2 Chronicles 4:2
Also he made a molten sea of ten cubits from brim to brim, round in compass, and five cubits the height thereof; and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about.

So the diameter of the circle is 10 cubits and its circumference is 30 cubits. Even if it's an approximation, why not say 31 cubits? Or 31-and-a-half?

The simplest explanation is that the passage is in error because whoever wrote this verse didn't know that the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle is pi, which is not three.

I've heard people interpret this verse as indicating that the circumference was measured from the inside of the basin and that the diameter was measured all the way to the outside edge of the brim, and thus the passage cleverly gave thickness of the wall of the basin. There is nothing in the passage to suggest this interpretation except for one's prior knowledge that the Bible is not wrong.

By similar reasoning -- and granting that the Devil and his angels are doing everything in their power to destroy the church -- anything at all can be reconciled with the axiom that the church is true. Everything has an explanation. I learned many of the familiar ones, and learned to come up with them myself.

For a time.


to be continued...