GOD - AND THE GREAT GOD CHANCE - PART II
Consider the common authorities for answering the origin question.
Some years ago we visited beautiful Smokey Mountain National Park with friends. In the Visitor Center they had displayed huge photos of the natural grandeur of the Park. Underneath each photo was a quotation from an American Indian tribe. Each quotation was a creation story or origin myth. They were ways of explaining how things came to be.
Jews and Christians share a dramatic creation story as given in the Bible’s book of Genesis which means “origins”. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was waste and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Then God created light, divided it from darkness, designated light Day and darkness Night. And God did this work on the first of the creation week because in those days God worked on Sundays!
In the second Genesis creation story, the first man, Adam, is lonely. So from a rib from Adam’s side God fashioned the first woman, Eve. And when Adam woke up in God’s recovery room he saw Eve standing there in the altogether and exclaimed, “Wow”, (well not quite. In the Bible he says, “this is at last bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh,” a Biblical way of saying, “Wow!”) Then Adam stood up and sang the entire “Hallelujah Chorus” without taking a breath!
That was Friday afternoon of creation week and God sighed a sigh of relief and said, “Thank God (I mean me) it’s Friday.” And started a chain of restaurants by that name! He further decided he would take a day off on Saturday and call it the Sabbath for the sake of the Jews and the Seventh Day Adventists who were looking for a holy day!
Many Christians and some Jews believe in the literal truth of those stories – meaning the “letter by letter”, inherent accuracy of these stories to explain our origins. What they have failed to notice is that some aspects of the Genesis stories are “revised standard versions” of ancient Babylonian and Sumerian creation stories. And many have failed further to notice that these stories were not intended to be “scientific” stories in the modern sense of “scientific”.
That they are dramatic, who can deny? That they are embedded in our consciousness, there can be no doubt. That they address the question of where everything came from, most all would admit. Everything came from God. That’s it. End of story.
Not so fast, say the contemporary atheists. Your sacred texts, be they Jewish, Christian or Muslim or whatever, do not accurately tell the story of origins. In fact, they dramatically deceive the human race on the origin question.
Furthermore, say the atheists, our sacred institutions and their priests, ministers, rabbis and mullahs have been grossly mistaken in their interpretation of these texts on the origin question. We appeal to science and human reason to lead us away from these devious and destructive interpretations.
(to be continued)
