There are a few things that need to be said in an overview sort of fashion before I dive in.
The mantra of the student of the Bible is "context, context, context..." It's always important to remember to look at the context before criticising any Bible passage. One of the most important contexts is the somewhat obvious and overlooked fact that what you are reading is part of a book that's about "God", and all that entails.
I've heard it said many times that if you can believe Genesis 1:1, the rest is easy. Indeed, one of the most important things to remember about just about anything you read in the Bible is that this is the story of a being supposedly omnipotent, omniscient, and completely good. The question should rarely be, "How could that have happened?" but occasionally, one might be fair in asking, "Why would something else not have happened?" While I don't know that one can effectively second-guess God, I don't think it's wrong to intellectually question things that God does. That's straying from my main point a bit, but it's important because I don't want to fall into the pattern of "God said it, I believe it, that's all there is to it." There is a level where a Christian has to just accept, but if you aren't a believer in the God of the Bible, this will be wholly unsatisfying; and even as a believer, one runs the risk of committing intellectual suicide, which opens the door for many things, most notably heresy.
Getting back on track to the point I wanted to make at the beginning though, there are more than a few moments in the Bible where something absolutely bizarre happens, and a casual unbelieving reader is likely to shake their head in disbelief. One of the biggest ones in the book of Genesis is actually the story of Noah, which I have had various skeptics point out to me as a story that's physically impossible on numerous levels. Frankly, I think Bible believers largely miss the absurdity of the story, and envision it as a simplistic children's Sunday school tale, with a cute little boat having animals standing two by two on the deck with smiling faces--and invariably giraffes with their heads stuck through a window towering over the rest. Well, that's unkind of me, but I do think many people simplify almost to that level, when truthfully the logistics are a nightmare. The thing for the skeptic to remember is that this story is one of the works of God.
The Bible reads a lot like science fiction in a way, especially to the non-believer. It's my view that in a good science fiction story, the reader is often presented with a specific item about which to suspend their disbelief, and after they've done that, the story should flow naturally. In the movie "The Terminator", the item is that a cyborg has been sent to the present from a nasty dystopian future. If you can buy that, the rest of the story makes sense and flows pretty well. In the case of the Bible, whether you believe it as true in real life or not, you have to accept that this is a story about "God", a being as described above. Once you accept (if only for the sake of following the story) that there is a "God", the rest should make sense. Thus when we come to Noah, the answer to most of the problems comes down to, "God did it." Maybe you don't buy that God exists, but but you need to accept it as a major part of the context of the story for it all to make sense.
Friday, July 29, 2005
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3 comments:
Interesting comments about Noah and the Flood, but I've noticed in the past that many of the problems skeptics have with that particular story are self-generated and not inherent in the text.
As you note in a separate post, it's incredibly ethnocentric to insist that a taxonomy that doesn't match ours is scientifically flawed and without merit. Yet this is what many people seem to do when they discuss the account of Noah's flood; i.e., they assume that two of every kind of animals, as defined by our taxonomical heirarchy, were present on the Ark, and that Noah gathered them up.
Not so; first, the text indicates that two of every animal came to Noah, except for the sacrificial animals, which he was told to gather (the verbs are very different). Additionally, we assume that two of every animal means two tigers, two lions, two cheetahs, two leopards, two ocelots, two jaguars, two pumas ... when all these animals can be interbred and produce viable, fertile offspring. Our own modern taxonomy in this case is based partly on geography rather than on a by-the-book definition of species. When you consider the number of interbreedable species, discount the aquatic species that would have been better off outside an ark, and remind yourself that a Noah or an Utnapishtim would not have had to worry about microscopic, parisitic or plant and fungi species, the unmanageability of the job is quickly reduced. Once the ark lands and life begins to disperse, speciation sets in as descendants of the Cats adjust behaviorally to their new haunts, and also shed undesirable physical characteristics through the thoroughly demonstrable process of natural selection.
Interestingly, analysis of human DNA samples from around the world has shown that there is only a very slight variation in our DNA, much less than scientists had expected, given evolutionary data and models. One of the scientists studying the samples came to the conclusion that our hunter/gatherer ancestors reached a point of near-extinction; i.e., the human race came within a hairsbreadth of dying out at one point in the past, although the survivors evidently have proved prolific enough to spread out across virtually every terrain imaginable.
All this of course means nothing to the skeptic wishing to disbelieve the Bible's claims of divine inspiration; and to be sure, the lengths many Christians have gone to to find scientific justifications for their faith have been absurd in many instances.
In the end, I choose to believe in the origins that I do because they fit my paradigm better than the alternatives, but anyone who chooses to insist on the early chapters of Genesis as a history textbook is surely missing the point. Rather than a blow-by-blow account of the technique, methodology and sequence of God's creation, the early chapters of Genesis are an account of God's majesty, man's culpability in sin, the grief our sin has caused for God, and his earnest desire to restore creation to its pre-Fall state, with as many of us with him who will come.
And now I think I'll steal these comments of mine for my own blog.
Thief. ; )
When I get to Noah, I'll talk a bit about how speciation is only one of many problems. The acquatic species problem is itself more complicated than you think, as, taking the story at face value, you'll find that really the ark was the *only* inhabitable place in the whole world for a brief period of time.
Thanks for commenting, though; I was wondering if anyone ever would.
I'm not sure about that; the Bible records that the fountains of the deep broke forth (presumably some sort of seismic activity, if we want to pursue a somewhat literalist meaning), but verses 20-22, while they're quite emphatic about the death toll, make no reference to the creatures that live under the sea.
But as you say, we can dicker about that when the time comes.
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