The Creation Continued

After creating the heavens and the earth from the deep which was void and without form, God sets to the task of creating the world. Between Genesis 1:3-25 there is a lot going on and most of it is quite subtle. It will bear careful consideration before we get to the creation of man.

The first thing I want to point out is that the creative act which God is engaged in is, in the beginning, always done through articulation of the word — the logos. There is something about speech which is world creating that the authors of the oldest stories in the Bible wanted to get at. There is a chaotic mess of unstructured potential and it is structured through articulation. It bares pausing on this for a moment to think how long it must’ve taken man to figure out that the manner in which the world is created isn’t power but articulation. It’s clear that the Genesis stories are the next evolutionary step from the Mesopotamian ones, but these stories date back thousands of years even before that. It must have been through great suffering and trial and error that humans came to the understanding that the thing which creates the world and structures chaos is truthful speech.

The second thing I want to point out is that here, in the creation story in Genesis, we have the transmission of some seriously important discoveries. Keep in mind that agriculture emerges around 12,000 BC. I want to point out Genesis 1:14. In it God says  “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night;

and let them be for signs and seasons, and for days and years.” I really want you to stop and reflect on this. Imagine the importance of the discovery of seasons. More, imagine the amount of careful observations, of looking up at the stars, at looking at the face of God for all intents and purposes, and figuring out seasonal patterns in such a way that makes agriculture possible. These books are written by absolutely geniuses who, over a vast stretch of time, figured out things that the last five hundred years have made us quite blind to. Yes, since the scientific revolution we have learned things that our ancient ancestors could scarcely imagine but we also lost so much. The biblical library is a lot of things, but it is important to remember that one of those things is a way for our most ancient ancestors to reach across millennia and share wisdom with us that we have lost. Should we be able to put aside our current epistemic framework, our hubris and our belief that all knowledge is empirical knowledge and really listen to what they are telling us we may learn something very valuable which was discovered and transmitted over an unimaginable amount of time and with great pains.

The third thing I want to point out is that the creative act is one of separation. First the heavens and the earth are separated. Then the light is divided from darkness, firmament from waters, dry land and sea, herb and fruit, sun and moon, day and night, creatures of the sea and creatures of the air, creatures which walk upon the land and creatures which crawl across it. There is a sense of some kind of undifferentiated state of the world with God, using the word, creates order out of by differentiating separate parts. We will bring this up again with the second creation of Adam and Eve as early traditions hold that the original human created in that story was hermaphroditic and, like all the other parts of the world in creation, the male and female binary were separated out by the creative activity and word of God.

Furthermore, there is a sense that in the creation itself the primary separation was in the undifferentiated nature of God. There is no reason to create anything without there being a lack and by definition God is all powerful, all knowing, all present and all good. So what is it that a being like this lacks which might motivate a creative act? The answer is that God lacked limitation so in the process of separating the world he in essence divides himself as well. By setting up a limitation for himself there are ways in which God is self-creating inasmuch as God is now pure being but with restrictions…self imposed no doubt, but restrictions nevertheless.

Further, for each creation, each separation, there is a proclamation that its being is “good.” That God’s fundamental pronouncement and judgmenet on existence as such is that it is good becomes a major theme which is threaded through all of the books of the Bible straight through to Revelation. There will be much more on this to come later this week, again when we talk about Cain and Able and continue through the death and resurrection of Christ. God does not merely create the world, but proclaims that the world existing is a good thing. You may think that is obvious, but in life as well as art for as long as there have been people there has been a proclivity towards a view of the world that says it would be better had it never existed. We will discuss this in detail in this week’s Analogismoi article.

With the chaotic void given structure and order and the natural undifferentiated space separated into a habitable and ordered world that we could recognize today, the creation is nearly complete.

With this I want to briefly take a look at the ancient cosmology of the Hebrews and before them of the Babylonians and I want to do this to bring back a reminder of the phenomenological nature of the books we are dealing with.

If we look at the cosmology of our ancient ancestors we see that the earth is a disk of land under a dome of sky. The dome has water above it. You can tell it has water above it because it rains through the holes in the sky. Underneath the disk there is also water. You can tell this because if you dig you will find water. Beneath that, if you can tell on this picture, is tehom, the dragon of chaos in the great deep which God subdues in the first line of Genesis. It is important to remember that, unlike with Marduk and Tiamat, God structures the chaotic deep yet it lingers just below the surface. This is an important caveat as the biblical library will go to great pains to constantly remind people that when the normative world is shattered the dragon reemerges and needs to be dealt with and the pattern God sets at the beginning of time is the proper manner in which we ought to deal with it.

At  the edge of the disk there is salt water which is also obvious as you can walk to the edge of the disk of earth and you will find salt water. There is a sun and a moon which go up and go down because of course they do. What kind of lunatic would think that we are on a ball spinning at over a thousand miles an hour on its axis while simultaneously orbiting the sun at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour? That’s nonsense, the sun comes up and the sun comes down. Any idea to the contrary seems functionally absurd even if it is empirically true. We are playing around with the mechanics of the universe, with the mind of God, try not to limit your understanding of truth and reality to rulers and calculators.

Is this an accurate depiction of the world? From the materialist empirical scientific level of analysis, no. This is incorrect. But it is possible that we need a more nuanced version of what constitutes reality or truth here. From the phenomenological perspective, the perspective which takes into account truth that is meaningful for people and not merely objective facts separated from our subjective conscious experience of them, this is an accurate, functional and meaningful cosmogony.

I recently discussed this very issue with a friend of mine who is teaching a class on the letters between Paul and Peter and how the debate over whether Christianity was primarily for the Jews or if it was a universal religion and how the question was eventually settled by the Romans when they razed Jerusalem. Having mentioned the chaos dragon of nature he was quick to point out to me that I myself acknowledge the ancient understanding of the deep patterns and order in nature (signs and seasons). It took me a while before I was able to give him a satisfactory response.  When we read these ancient stories it is important for us to always remember that it is not the objective facts, but their subjective meaning which is important to the authors of the bible. The knowledge of the earth spinning on its axis and orbiting the sun is absolutely meaningless to our ancient ancestors. It’s not true and it’s not false. Those are not the standards we are holding. The standards are whether they are meaningful or not.

The way I explained it to him, in short, was that yes, with the right knowledge of the laws of nature and enough information about the placement of particles and enough horsepower to process it every future state of a tsunami can be mapped and predicted because it is that patterned. That said, that map is absolutely meaningless to you if you are in a row boat in a tsunami. The idea of fractal geometry, whether it is “true” or not, is useless to a man in a boat facing down a tsunami. If there is valuable information that a man in a boat facing a tsunami needs it is not going to be how fractal geometry can be used to predict motion. The authors of the Bible, using this example, are not interested in how a tsunami happened they are interested in what the hell we are supposed to do when the tsunami comes. This is something that is crucial to remember both for the authorship and the meaning of the biblical stories. If we try to read them through lenses that were millennia away from even existing we do a disservice to the text and to ourselves.

This is the story of how the world was created. Whether is is true or not is simply not a relevant question. The only question that is relevant here is whether or not it is a meaningful description and, without hesitation, it is easy to say that it is.

Over the rest of the week we will primarily be focused on God’s proclamation that the order which he created is good and then, at long last, next week we will get to the origin of man and how the world of science may one day finally catch up with the story of Adam and Eve for an accurate understanding of humanity.