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Essays, Opinion, & Commentary |
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by George J. Irbe INTRODUCTION Some years ago I wrote an essay titled God, His Laws and Mankind in which I presented my understanding of God's master-design (what I call his Laws) on which he bases his creation (call it the Universe or the Cosmos) and according to which he orders it to function. I also said that I believe that God gave man intelligence far greater than any other creature on Earth for a special purpose: man was to observe, interpret, comprehend, and - last and most important of all - comply with all these Laws, even as man took advantage of his great intelligence to eventually become dominant over all other living things on Earth, and developed the skills to exploit all the Earth's resources for his own betterment. In that essay, I also stated that it is my belief that men appear unwilling to learn from past mistakes, to learn from the consequences of breaking both the moral and physical Laws laid down by the Creator. Men continue to perpetrate moral wrongs against their own kind and against other living creatures; and they continue to despoil the physical environment. What I said in God, His Laws and Mankind was mostly an outpouring of thoughts and what are colloquially called 'gut feelings,' which were based partly on my own philosophical understandings, and partly on my life's experiences and observations of human nature and human behavior. Recently I came across a remarkable little book by Ronald Wright, titled A Short History of Progress, published in 2004 by House of Anansi Press, Toronto. The book presents the unvarnished and not-so-glorious history of man from the dawn of his beginnings to the present. I found that the factual historical evidence in this book substantiates many of my 'gut feelings' and inferences about the short-comings of human nature and behavior which I had expressed in God, His Laws and Mankind. Therefore, I thought it would be worth my while to re-visit the point that mankind always has acted, and continues to act, in defiance of God's Laws; however, this time I would enlist Wright's factual evidence in support of my philosophical arguments which are posited on an admittedly amateurish model of theistic creationism. Before proceeding further, a few remarks about Wright's A Short History of Progress are in order: Wright has packed an astonishing amount of historical, anthropological, archeological, and cultural information on the ascent (and in many ways, I would argue, the descent) of man in this little book of only 132 pages of text. It is also a very scholarly work, in that it includes copious footnotes, a bibliography, and an index. For all that, Wright's language is often sprinkled with wry humor and is quite digestible by the ordinary person. That marks this little book as a truly exceptional piece of work. The only smudges to be found in Wright's work are his occasional gratuitous injections of leftist ideological beliefs into the scientific commentary. These, however, will be tolerated and forgiven by informed readers: Wright is a Canadian, and A Short History of Progress was originally produced as a lecture for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's production of the 2004 Massey Lectures, as part of CBC Radio's Ideas series. Enough said. When I searched my mind for a suitable theme under which I could best combine Wright's factual evidence with my abstract philosophical model, I discovered that certain statements in Genesis 1 and 9 of the Bible provided a perfect fit. The Genesis theme also served admirably well for the title: The Genesis Declaration.
DISCUSSION The Genesis Statements Genesis 1:26-29 states: [26]Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth." [27]So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. [28]And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." [29]And God said, "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food." And later, Genesis 9:1-3 states, once again: [1]God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth. [2]The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every bird of the air, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea; into your hands they are delivered. [3]Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything." General Comments To begin with I want to mention that in God, His Laws and Mankind I did not specifically cite Genesis, nor analyze its contents in detail. Rather, I used a general term "holy books" to denote any and all ancient writings of a religious nature; I did so because it seemed to me most likely that Homo sapiens has worshiped innumerable deities and believed in his superiority over all other creatures on earth already for tens of thousands of years before Moses; and could very well have recorded his beliefs in places and in ways that I, being neither a trained historian nor archeologist, would not be aware of. Thus, in God, His Laws and Mankind I made only this general statement: As man became aware of his superiority over other life forms and as he learned that this superiority was due not to greater physical prowess but to his greater intelligence, he decided to willfully misinterpret God's purposes. Man had the egocentric presumptuousness to claim, and like a shyster to write the false claim into his "holy books", that God had exempted him from compliance with the Laws that apply to the rest of his Creation, and that God had granted man absolute dominion over everything on Earth, including absolute powers to dispose of all other things, living or inanimate, without measure, without limits, without mercy, and without accountability. So it is that while - by Natural Law - most living things, save perhaps the most primitive, kill other living things only in order that they themselves can live and propagate, man kills in excess of his needs and simply for pleasure, to boot. Upon taking a closer look at the Genesis statements in question, verse by verse, I was amazed by how laden they are with meaning which may escape a casual reading of them. So much so, that I found I could correlate the import of individual verses with passages from A Short History of Progress (hereafter SHP), and with my own ideas which were expressed before in God, His Laws and Mankind (hereafter GLM). Genesis is the first book of the Bible. According to biblical scholars, Genesis was most likely written by Moses around 1420 BCE, give or take a decade or two. Genesis thus covers a very long span of time, from the creation of the universe to the sojourn of the tribes of Israel in Egyptian captivity. In the first 25 verses, Genesis 1 recounts, in short order, everything from the very beginning of the creation of the universe to the creation of all the living things on Earth, except for the creation of man, who is treated as a separate living thing starting with verse 26. Most modern cosmologists concede that there are aspects of the theoretical model of creation portrayed by Moses (and therefore the one most likely to have been generally held by learned men of his times) which are not to be laughed at even today. Particularly notable is Moses' chronological order of the creation sequence. I, too, have no argument with the first 25 verses of the Bible, but find that it soon departs from rational thought, beginning with Genesis 1:26. From then onwards, one must read the Bible with caution; it is history wrapped up in veils of religious fiction. Before I discuss Genesis 1:26-29 and 9:1-3 in detail, I must state that I am convinced that everything in the Bible was written by men for men, and that God had nothing to do with the writing of it. All you "God's stenographers," from Moses to Mohammed, please hold your temper. The Bible was written by men of more than average intelligence. They wrote it with a dual purpose in mind: the first one was to produce a historical record of the life of their people; the second was to cloak the historical record in religious fiction. The first one was directed at the intelligent and educated few -- those who had "eyes to see and ears to hear," and the second at the ignorant and gullible majority of people whose simple minds are too fragile to face the harsh truths of reality and must instead be comforted with religious myths. Obviously, the book of Genesis, like all other books of the Bible, was written with this dual purpose in mind. I am equally convinced that it is only natural that when writing the Bible men put their own self-interest first, just like they do with everything else they do. One of the most important components of self-interest for the gullible mass of people is that they be assured of approval, or of absolution, by a higher power (i.e. a deity) for all their actions. Therefore, I will look at the verses in Genesis 1 and 9 in question with the qui bono aspect in mind. Specific Comments Genesis 1:26-29 and 9:1-3 contain several unabashedly self-serving assertions of a rather wicked nature. To begin with, verses 26 and 27 in Genesis 1 make a monumentally self-serving assertion (in my opinion, at once most contemptible and demented) that God first decides (in verse 26), and then proceeds (in verse 27), to create man in his own image and likeness! Of course, this assertion means that one could not tell by appearances alone the Creator from a member of Homo sapiens, if the two happened to stand side by side. God is thus made the same as man, and man the same as God! Many serious thinkers understand God to be the Creator of everything, the Supreme being - "that which no greater can be thought of, or conceived." It is an absolutely insane idea to anthropomorphize God, who we cannot possibly even conceive of and describe by mere human intelligence! Yet, that is exactly what Moses (or whoever wrote Genesis) has done. In Genesis 1:28-29, and in Genesis 9:1-3, God actually talks to human beings. Now, for the same reason as above, which is that God is "that which no greater can be thought of, or conceived," a rational person knows for a fact that God cannot possibly have ever spoken to any human being, nor commanded any human being to record his spoken words on stone, tablet, papyrus, or what have you. Verse 28 of Genesis 1 and verse 1 of Genesis 9 makes another self-serving and utterly selfish assertion, which is cleverly put into the mouth of God: It is man's right to unconstrained and unlimited insemination of the female of the species; it is self-serving because the sexual act is, of course, most pleasurable, and it is selfish because a forever-increasing human population comes at the cost of first a decrease in, and finally the extinction of, other free-ranging species on earth. Another assertion, also cleverly put into the mouth of God, is the most wicked and ominous of all. It is stated in Genesis 1:26-29 and in Genesis 9:1-3 that every beast, bird, fish and all other living things on earth are to be food for man. That, on its face, would not be an unreasonable assertion were it also to call for restraint and temperance in man's consumption of them, which it sadly does not. Instead, verse 2 of Genesis 9 promises that all other creatures will fear and dread man; and that man will determine their ultimate fate: that's what "into your hands are they delivered" means. This assertion mocks the Creator, because it claims that he has abandoned the most glorious part of his creation here on earth -- the myriad of living things -- to the mercy of man; to be abused and destroyed by man at his pleasure. This assertion rivals in wickedness the first one which claims that God created man in his own image. There is another aspect about the Genesis statements which aroused my suspicion that there might be a strong qui bono factor hidden within them. The act and sequence of creation in Genesis 1 would be just as completely described if verse 26 said only something to the effect that "last of all God created man," and then were to go directly to what is now Genesis 1:31, which states: "And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good." In other words, verses 27, 28, 29 and 30 of Genesis 1 are not essential to the story of creation. Obviously, they have been added for another reason. I was naturally led to ask what that reason might be, suspecting that it must be, as usual, a very human reason. Strikingly, this curious feature in Genesis 1 recurs in Genesis 9 which is part of the story of Noah and the great flood. Here again, verses 1 to 3 do not belong in the story about the flood, but essentially repeat what has already been said in Genesis 1:26-30. I naturally became convinced that the assertions concerning man's god-like status and ownership of the planet Earth had, in the view of the author, a great importance all their own. These assertions are strangely out of context in both the story of creation and the story of the great flood. I am compelled to ask: Why, then, were they inserted in such ill-fitting manner, not once but twice? What did Moses know? By the time Moses wrote Genesis (circa 1420 B.C.E.), men had already been living for some two thousand years in developed civilizations of considerable size, sustained largely by agricultural food production. In Genesis 1 Moses describes the creation of man -- an event that occurred at some moment long before his time. According to anthropologists, the date of the appearance of man depends very much on which of our ancestral species one chooses to regard as having the characteristics that define it as being a creature worthy of the name "man". In SHP it states that: . . . we now know that we are the remote descendants of apes who lived in Africa about 5 million years ago. Modern apes, which are also descended from the same original stock, are kin, not ancestors. [p.30] Homo sapiens sapiens is also known as the Cro-Magnon man, who appeared about 130,000 years ago, at the same time as the Neanderthal man. We can safely assume that the "man" that Moses says God created in his own image is the modern man - Homo sapiens sapiens -- the only kind of man Moses could have been aware of. Yet, as is stated above, this modern man was already ten to twenty times older than the civilization Moses was living in. Before I proceed further, I must pose a question, the importance of which will become apparent in due course: Did the civilization in which Moses lived have any memory, written or word-of-mouth, of the history of mankind in the many centuries that preceded their own times? I want to propose a "what-if" theory: What if Moses (or whoever wrote Genesis) had at least some sense, or inkling, of the huge span of human history that must have elapsed from the moment, postulated by the author of Genesis, at which God created man in his own image to the time when Genesis was written. Moses himself had seen the Egyptian pyramids and had lived in that already highly developed civilization. Surely, Moses was an educated man, one who could read and write. Without knowledge of the history of the ancestors of his people - of Terah, the father of Abraham, who was born in Ur, of Noah who was flooded out of Eden - Moses (or perhaps his educated scribes, if such was the case) could not have related the events in the book of Genesis in the way that he, or they, did. And finally, surely reason, if nothing else, would tell him that man could not have progressed from the moment of his creation to a civilized state in one leap. Reason would tell him that much time must have elapsed just to satisfy God's command to "be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth," if for no other reasons. Let us now go to SHP to see what it tells us about the times and places that are recounted in Genesis, having recourse to today's large store of scientific knowledge on the subject: The earliest [civilization] of all was Sumer, in what is now southern Iraq. The Sumerians, whose own ethnic and linguistic stock is unclear, set a pattern that Semitic cultures and others in the Old World would follow. They came to exemplify both the best and the worst of the civilized life, and they told us about themselves in cuneiform script on clay tablets, one of the most enduring mediums for the human voice, a writing like the tracks of trained birds. They set down the oldest written stories in the world, a body of texts known as The Epic of Gilgamesh, compiled in "strong-walled Uruk, the city of great streets" around the time that Stonehenge and the first Egyptian pyramids were being built. Legends we know from the Hebrew Bible -- the Garden of Eden, the Flood -- appear in Gilgamesh in earlier forms . . [p.65] Had Moses and his contemporaries read The Epic of Gilgamesh? Did he perhaps have knowledge, passed on by word-of-mouth in the from of legends, of times even more ancient, of the first permanent human settlement at Jericho some 6500 years before his time, and perhaps of the cave-dwelling hunter-gatherers, the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons, who inhabited the region we now call the Middle East even before Jericho - a place that figures prominently in the Bible - became a permanent settlement? SHP tells us what devastation men wrought in the place called in the Bible "the Garden of Eden", and in Sumer -- the ancestral home of Abraham: . . it's a mistake to assume that the Fertile Crescent, for all its natural endowments, its plants and animals suitable for domestication, developed quickly or easily. Even after several thousand years of farming and herding, the biggest Middle Eastern settlements -- Jericho (near the Dead Sea) and Catal Huyuk (in Anatolia) -- were still tiny, covering only ten acres and thirty acres, respectively. In short, today we understand that it was man who destroyed the place called "Eden" and also the Sumerian civilization. Both were destroyed by reckless deforestation and soil erosion due to intensive farming, in order to meet the insatiable demands of a growing population. In Sumer there was also soil contamination through irrigation which delivered the coup de grace to this civilization Archeological evidence suggests that "Eden" was abandoned by 5500 B.C.E., having been reduced to the "thorny scrub and semi-desert" that Moses could observe with his own eyes in his own time. The "Noah" flood probably occurred prior to that, because SHP infers that the people who settled in Mesopotamia "in effect followed their old fields, which had been washed from the worn hills by the great rivers flowing, as the Bible says, out of Eden." [p.68] Best guesses, based on written records and archeology, estimate the time of the Gilgamesh flood to be around 3000 B.C.E. Thus, the "Noah" flood probably preceded the one in Sumer, although there is much controversy about both dates. In any case, the point I want to make here is that Moses probably knew not only about the two catastrophic floods but also that they were caused by men's abuse and misuse of the land. Certainly, The Epic of Gilgamesh records in writing the fate of the Sumerian civilization in unmistakable terms. All human civilizations, from the most ancient to the most modern, have been based primarily on agriculture; and all of them have committed nearly identical degradation of the land that sustained them. SHP documents the degradation which led up to the ultimate demise of many by-gone civilizations, and foretells the probable collapse of our own. Moses, of course, could have had an inkling only of the reasons for the collapse of a couple of such civilizations -- Sumer, and possibly "Eden." He also had witnessed in person the periodic afflictions that visited the Egyptian agricultural civilization which was entirely dependent on the good behavior of the Nile river. The Nile was a not-so-obvious blessing for the Egyptian civilization; it was the Nile which in effect kept it in check, preventing it from over-populating itself. As described in SHP: Egypt's farming methods were simple -- as conservative as the culture itself -- and worked with, rather than against, the natural water cycle. The Nile valley's narrowness and drainage slowed the salt build-up that poisoned Sumer; and . . . ancient Egyptians generally knew better than to build on farmland. Finally, Moses probably knew from stories and legends about the many kinds of wild animals that had once been plentiful in his region of the Middle East and were now scarce or absent. He must have known of the exotic creatures the Egyptian rulers liked to import, for show and amusement, from distant regions of Africa. Perhaps he understood that men had eradicated these animals from regions where they now cultivated their fields of crops and grazed their herds of domesticated creatures. But, we can be quite sure that Moses did not feel, or think, that there was anything wrong with this picture. Animals had no other value except for the use by man. After all, Moses was a Cro-Magnon man, the one he believed was created in God's image. He had the same innate primordial instincts and cravings of the Cro-Magnon man that still lurk inside all of us humans today.
Questions/Comments? Post them in The Radical Academy Forum Mr. Irbe's Website: Classical Liberal George E-mail Address: George J. Irbe |
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