S2E2: Creation - Why it is true for the ancients, us, and the E.T.s

The Creation narrative in Genesis, according to biblical scholars, is based on the ancient Middle Eastern cosmology held by the Hebrews when it was written.   Then, how is Genesis true for us living in the modern age? In this first part of exploring the opening creation narrative of Genesis, we will consider how Genesis presents significant ideas that were true for the ancient Hebrews, are true for us, and will even be true for extraterrestrial visitors from another planet.  (Genesis 1)       
              
01:33 -  How people in the ancient Middle East saw the world     .
08:11 -  We can only reach truth we are ready to reach        .
14:55 -  What different parts of the world represent for the ancients       .
17:34 -  Genesis Creation account revisited  (1st ~ 3rd day)       .
24:51 -  What the Genesis Creation account is telling us       .
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Transcript

S2E2: Genesis Creation account for the ancients, us, and the E.T.s

The opening of Genesis presents us with the account of God creating the world—a foundational narrative for Christianity. However, biblical scholars caution us that Genesis was written for people who lived twenty six hundred years ago or more in ancient Middle East, and its account closely follows what people in those days believed about the world—how it was formed and how it is structured. But, if that’s so, how is Genesis any more true to us now than a… very influential… fairy tale?

Yet, I think we’ll fail to recognize the significance of the powerful ideas that the opening of Genesis presents, if we don’t understand how the people in those days saw the world. Because that means we won’t understand how these narratives are grappling with timeless, foundational truths that are far larger in scope than we can imagine—insights that are just as true to us now, as it was to the ancient Hebrews, and will be, even when we are travelling to the stars.   

[ music / ]   

Welcome to "What do you mean, God speaks?" where we explore important ideas, insights, and stories in Christianity, for the skeptics who want to understand religion, to the Christians who have questions about their own beliefs. And everyone in between.

I am Paul Seungoh Chung, and this is our second episode of the second season, "The Genesis Creation account, for the ancient Hebrews, us, and the E.T.s" 

[ / music ]

Imagine yourself as someone living in the ancient Middle East 3000 years ago— give or take 500 years or so—and seeing the world through their eyes. 

What you would see will be very different from our world; after all, we’re rewinding 3000 years of exploration and discovery. The contemporary Big Bang cosmology that explains how the universe came to be was developed during the 20th century; our view that physical things, like stone or water, are made up of tiny particles we call atoms was established in the 19th century along with modern chemistry, and only after going through earlier theories of phlogiston, alchemy, and the elements. Our evolutionary accounts of Life were proposed in the 1800s; microscopic life, such as bacteria, was discovered by the early-1700s after microscopes came into use in the mid-1600s. It was in the early-1600s when we began to use telescopes to study the stars, while most people still dismissed this new idea that the Earth orbited the sun. The first voyage that sailed around the Earth that we know of was completed in 1522, though the West has known that the Earth was spherical since the ancient Greeks calculated that from the records of travelers in faraway lands.  

And you, as an ancient Hebrew, reading the book of Genesis, would’ve lived long before all of that. You and your neighboring peoples of Mesopotamia and Levant were by no means ignorant or irrational. They had the ingenuity and the skills to build the great pyramids and the Hanging garden; they measured the movements of the sun, moon, and the stars with remarkable accuracy, without any telescope, and produced calendars that precisely predicted the seasons. Modern knowledge of the world is founded upon the insights and works of the previous generations, going back to the time of the ancient Hebrews and before. But, in each generation, people held views that made the most sense to them, given what they could know at the time. Here’s a case in point. As far back as the medieval era, or the classical Greek antiquity, philosophers and theologians—often they were the same—have proposed prototype versions of many of our modern scientific ideas, like the Big Bang, evolution, atoms, microbes, or that the Earth orbits the sun. But, back then, people dismissed these views because they outright contradicted common sense, or presented no compelling reason to believe them; after all, the Earth certainly does not feel like it’s moving, and we couldn’t see atoms or microbes, and rats give birth to rats, not cats. And aside from the Bible, there was no reason to think that time and space didn’t always exist.

So, what world made sense to you, as someone living in the ancient Middle East? Well… you know that if you travel far enough on land, you will reach the sea, the vast expanse of water that goes on forever as far as you can tell; you know there’s water above you, beyond the sky, because of the rain; you know there’s water deep below the earth, because of groundwater and springs. And so, you believe that the earth sits amidst an endless expanse of water, above, below, and around you. You believe that the water above does not fall upon you all at once because it is held up by the sky, which you think is a clear, crystalline dome, and this dome has windows, through which the rain falls. The earth below that sky is obviously flat, though specifically, you think that the earth is a round disk, like a dinner plate, because of the round shadow it casts on the moon. The earth does not move, and you believe its foundations are fixed upon the waters below like enormous roots delving deep into its fathomless depths. The sun, moon, and the stars traverse across the domed sky above, following their own courses, and then go below the earth to rise from the other side.  

For you, the world is not made up of atoms. So, water is not H2O—made up of one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms. Water is an element of its own, formless, fluid, yet flowing within all moving, and living things. So, you believe that water is the primordial substance of things, before the world was given form. Earth is another element, a solid substance that gives form and shape to things. And without earth, things can’t hold shape; it wouldn’t be anything—just formless, fluid water. And when you gaze into the sky on a clear day or night, with that shining, yet endless expanse stretching above you, you feel that this has to be where the powers that govern this world reside. There, a great fiery light traverses from east to west during the day, and during the night, the lesser lights—the stars and the moon— move in orderly sequence. You know they have done so long before you, and will do so long after, for these lights are the unchanging order of the world.

But, beyond the boundaries of this world, is water—waters of the sea, waters of the heavens… and far beneath the earth, beyond the lights of the sky, is the dark waters of the deep, which fully retain its primordial nature. There, you believe, the great monsters dwell—the embodiment of chaos before the world. The peoples neighboring the ancient Hebrews, believed that the world was borne out of the battle between their gods and these great monsters of chaos that arose from the primordial waters. In Babylon, its chief god, Marduk, slew Tiamat, the dragon of the sea, and made the current world out of her body. In Egypt, the Sun-god Ra descends each night to battle with Apep, the serpent of Chaos that lurks beneath the earth, before rising again in the morning, to begin a new day. 

With all this, we can continue from where we ended in the previous episode. It is to the people living in this world that I’ve just been describing, that the Genesis narratives were first told. It is these people that God is speaking to, and it is to their beliefs and level of understanding that God is accommodating. 

[ pendulum ]

But, why does God accommodate to those people? If God indeed spoke to the Hebrews living in the ancient Middle East, why speak at their level of knowledge, instead of correcting their views of the world? 

Now, I’m going to assume that you’ve already listened to the first season of this series—at least all the main episodes from one to thirteen, which presented the basic framework for understanding what it means to believe that God speaks. Either way, let’s get into it. For Christianity, our relation to God is our relation to Reality as a whole. And all of us are engaged with Reality at all times; and hearing God speak, in the most basic sense, is this engagement. This is why every truth is God speaking—every truth that we reach as we engage Reality. Every truth that people reach in every age—whether it is people living in the biblical times, or those living long before that in the stone ages, or us living long after that in our scientific, digital age, or even those living in some distant star-faring future. 

So, our question is too narrow. It should be: if God is speaking to everyone, why does God accommodate at all to anyone? Why not correct the views of those living in the stone ages? Or why not correct our views today? 

Yet, there’s a hard limit on how we reach any truth, or even recognize something as true, in any age. And it’s something we’ve already touched on earlier in this episode. Each generation believes what make the most sense to them, based on what they can know at the time. This is why so many theories or ideas that we now know to be true were rejected when they were first proposed; they just didn’t seem true at that time. Another way to say it is this: we can only reach the truth that we are ready to reach. Any truth that we are not ready for, will seem like nonsense or incoherent babble to us. Go read any advanced-level journal article on a subject you never studied, like say, immunology, and you’ll see what I mean. To discover a truth, we need to become ready to discover it. Big Bang cosmology needed Einstein’s theory of relativity, which needed Newtonian physics, which needed the invention of calculus, and the astronomical works since Copernicus, and on it goes, to the times of the pyramids. We cannot skip this process. 

And so, every truth is God speaking, but we only hear the truths we’ve become ready for. And this is the case even if God personally speaks to us. After all, when God speaks to us, it is usually not obvious to us that it is God speaking. And if what God seems to be saying to us is something we believe to be patently false, then our most likely response would be to simply conclude that God isn’t speaking. And even if we were to believe that God spoke to us, other people would not. This is a problem that occurs frequently in the Bible; people often disbelieve God, or those who heard God speak. In each case, those that God speaks to, undergoes a training of sort, to become ready to hear God speak. For example, the ancient Israelites living under the yoke of slavery in Egypt, repeatedly disbelieved what God spoke to Moses—that they’d be freed from their slavery, be led safely across the desert, and win a land for themselves where they could live freely. Then, some of what this voice of God said to Moses happened as it said. And eventually, over the years, they became ready to recognize God speaking to them through Moses … at least in regard to the truths of these promises. 

But, that leads us to the next question; what truth is Genesis is trying to convey? What kind of truth were the readers of Genesis ready to learn? 

Scholars often point out that the Bible is not a scientific treatise. And it’s not just because modern science did not exist when the Bible was being written. Even back then, there were writings about the heavens, or animals, or plants, or math, or medicine. Few centuries later, comprehensive treatises on these subjects by philosophers like Aristotle, would form the foundation from which natural science would eventually emerge. Yet, consider this. The Creation account takes up about 1 chapter in the book of Genesis, while there are 50 chapters in Genesis. Genesis in turn is 1 book, out of 66 books in the Bible—39 just counting the Hebrew Bible. Of course, there are other discussions about the cosmos woven into the biblical narratives elsewhere, but never as the main topic in itself. 

Remember that analogy in the previous episode? The one about the child asking her father what he’s doing, when he is coding the A.I. for a computer game. Now, he could tell her about coding languages, or machine-learning algorithms—or perhaps the new deep-learning neural networks. But, he does not. Firstly because his child is not ready for that; what he says might as well be incoherent babble to her. But, more to the point, that’s not what she’s really asking for—she’s asking what her father is doing, not what tools and methods he’s using to do his job. So, he says, “I’m teaching the computer how to play a game.” This answer is one that his child is really asking for, and one that her mind is ready for. But, it is also true. Now, he’s not teaching the computer in a way he would teach his child, but, even when she grows up to program her own A.I., she’d know that his answer was true; if anything, she’d then understand in what ways it was true.

So it is, with the opening of Genesis. The truth that the Creation account presents is God’s relation to everything that exists, and the language, images, and concepts that Genesis draws upon to do so, is that of the ancient Hebrew cosmology. It is what the people of that age and generation was ready to understand, yet the main idea that it conveyed is true for the ancient Hebrews, for us, and beyond.

[ pendulum ]

If we just ended that, we’d be doing a great disservice; the images and ideas that Genesis draws upon is far more than just an outdated cosmology held by people who lived long ago. More to the point, there would have been no reason for us to explore at the start of this episode how people in those days saw the world. 

One key point we need to remember is that what the ancient Hebrews meant by things like, “water,” “earth,” “sky,” “sea,” “land,” or “plants,” is not quite what we mean by them. To be sure, we would be pointing to the same things when we say those words. For example, “water” would be what we’d find in rivers, lakes, and seas, and what we’d drink if we’re thirsty. But, for us, water is H2O, made of one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms. For the ancient Hebrews, “water” is a primordial element, formless, life-giving, chaos before a thing becomes something with form. The expanse of water, the sea, is thus where ships sail, but its depths are also the primordial realm of chaos before the world became what it is. 

Thus, in ancient Middle Eastern cosmology, physical things were also symbols of deeper concepts about reality—chaos, order, form, and so on. Not that people in those days would have thought of it that way. Their cosmology is from a time when physical science, philosophy, ethics, drama, and the arts, were still largely one thing, whereas we live in a time when these disciplines have diverged from one another. So, back then, a physical thing could also be artistic symbol, an ethical principle, and a philosophical concept. And this is why in later generations, when philosophy became its own discipline, Jewish and Christian thinkers revisited the Genesis account and drew from it philosophical ideas, or allegories for spiritual and ethical living—as we’ve seen in our previous episode. They were parsing out different threads of ideas that had been woven together into a single strand when it was first written. But, this raises an important point. If for the ancient Hebrews, a physical thing, like say, land, represented many other related things, or concepts, or principles, then for Genesis to say that God created “land,” is also to say that God created everything “land” represents. 

So, let’s explore the first chapter of Genesis briefly, to take a glimpse of just what that would mean. 

In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. For the ancient Hebrews, the heaven and earth does mean the physical sky above and the ground we stand on, but it is not planet Earth. For us, Earth is a planet, amidst uncountable number of stars and other planets in the universe. But, for the Hebrews, there is no other world—no other heaven and earth. Their heaven and earth is all the heavens and all the earths there can ever be. This is why to say, God created the heavens and the earth, is more than the creation of our world, but every world there ever is.

Then, Genesis describes the world as formless and void, with “darkness” upon the fathomless depths of “water,” with the Spirit of God blowing upon that water. We will have to leave aside the idea of the “Spirit of God,” for another episode—for now, we can only say it depicts the power of God’s Creation about to unfold. But, what about this “darkness,” and “water?” The imagery here is an abyss of water, so fathomlessly deep, that there is no light. Darkness is, physically, an absence of light; it’s not a thing in itself. But, it also represents, even now, deceit, or the lack of truth. This is because darkness hides things; we see and know things when there is light; in darkness, we can no longer perceive what’s there. But, in Genesis, there is not yet anything that darkness hides; there is nothing there. 

Nothing but water, that is. But, this “water” is not yet anything—it is an endless expanse of formlessness, which is yet to become something. In our day, we’d call that possibility. Not just any possibility, but every possibility there is—an infinite possibility. And here’s where the imagery of darkness upon the water becomes important. The possibility that this primordial expanse of water represents, cannot be discerned or perceived; the infinity of possibilities expand beyond the reach of what our mind can know or imagine. Trying to think about it is like peering into the fathomless abyss. Yet, it is still, nothingness. And, just to make our head spin, let me remind you that according to the other passages in the Bible, as well as many commentaries by church fathers, this dark abyss of water, which represents infinite possibility, which has yet to become anything, is also created by God. 

Let’s continue. God speaks, “Let there be Light.” Amidst the unfathomable, infinite possibility, God speaks, so that it becomes something. Light is that first something. This of course is reminiscent of the initial event in the Big Bang cosmology, and light is inseparably linked with measuring time in contemporary physics. But, there’s far more to the creation of Light than these eerie links with modern science.  God then separates the light and darkness, calling the light, “day,” the darkness, “night,” so that there is now one day. To put it in other way, Light is not simply a first thing. It is the first event. And with that comes time. This is what figures like Augustine was pointing out; time only exists when things happen—specifically, when there is change, when one event that happens is different from what was before. In this case, light and darkness, day and night. So, what God created from the infinite possibilities was a world where there is time—where things happen. 

There’s more. “Light” has represented in numerous cultures, “consciousness,” and “truth.” Even in our culture, someone realizing something, is depicted as a light bulb turning on, and waking up from a long sleep is depicted in the first person perspective as light in our visual field. With consciousness, things can be perceived, defined, and known. With consciousness, things exist. Thus, to create Light is to create a world where things can be perceived by consciousness.  

On the second day, God speaks, bringing forth the sky that separates the expanse of water into “below,” and “above.” This means there can now be different things at the same time; and with that comes “space”—physical and conceptual. God has created a new dimension to the world; it is now where things happen, and different things can exist. But, for the ancient Hebrews, the sky and the expanse above was different from the expanse below for another reason. Above was where the lights shone, and they could gaze into its boundless expanse; below was the depths where lights did not reach, and great monsters lurked. The sky above was the realm of order, ideals, and knowledge; the fathomless depths below was the realm of chaos, fear, and the unknown. The water above is the endless possibilities our consciousness can peer into, and the watery abyss below are the possibilities we cannot know, and the terrors we feel confronting it. Yet, Genesis proclaims, God created both; God speaks in both.    

On the third day, God speaks, and the water gather into one place to form the sea, and earth, the dry land, emerges. Again, earth is what has shapes and forms. If water is the primordial, formless, possibility; earth is the tangible, actual world. If the sea and the sky is a realm beyond our reach, land is the realm we can grasp and touch, where we can stand on and live. Genesis proclaims that God created all these realms; God speaks through them all. 

God then speaks so that earth, the realm that has form and shape, bring forth seed-bearing plants. Again, for the ancients, it isn’t just plants that have “seeds.” They reasoned all life, has “seed” of some kind. This is why the descendants of human individuals are also called their “seeds” in the Bible. The closest scientific analogue in our day would be something like the DNA, but the term, “seed,” means something broader, like whatever it is that can propagate itself. Seed, and seed bearing plant and tree, thus was not just tree, but represented Life itself. And what is even more interesting is that God speaks so that earth, the physical, tangible world becomes able to bring forth Life.

[ church bells ]

What the opening of Genesis is narrating is the creation of the physical world as the ancient Hebrews imagined it in their cosmology. But, it means much more than that, because each part of that world represents something far greater in scope. They represent, for the lack of better words, aspects of reality. They are: Possibility. Existence. Event. Time. Space. Form. Matter. Life. They are: chaos, order, the known and the unknowable. Things to aspire, things to fear.

[ closing music ]

And the truth that Genesis was trying to convey through these ideas in ancient Hebrew cosmology was this: God created all of that; all of that is God speaking. Whatever it is, whichever aspect of reality, in whichever world, it is what God spoke, and created. Any world where things happen, where different things can exist, where there are possibilities that can be realized, where things have forms, or are formless, where there is Life of any kind—any such world—is the world in Genesis that God spoke into being. And so, God speaks in every possible world, every possible realm. The boundless reaches of possibilities that you can imagine —that’s the realm of God; the dark, fathomless depths of inconceivable and unknowable possibilities—that’s also the realm of God. Seas and skies beyond your reach, God is there; earth and land you live, and Life that abounds around you, God is there. 

So, whether you are in the biblical times, or in the stone age, or in the computer age, or zipping about in a flying saucer from outer space, the world before you is still that world of Genesis that God speaks. And this will be true for the ancient Hebrews, us, or the extraterrestrials visiting us from the other side of the universe. 

Thank you for listening, and please support this series, by following, subscribing, and sharing. 

And join me next time as we finish our exploration of the Genesis Creation account, to ask, what is the purpose of it all? And the answer may surprise you.

Until then, I will be waiting, here.