Creation
‘Nothing from nothing leaves nothing.’ Billy Preston
By way of foreword: I have taken the tact that the Biblical creation myth is such a hot mess of balderdash, that I have comingled editorial comments within the unspooling of the myth. This is done in the manner of ‘hot corrects’ to avoid a bundling of remarks at the end of the section. The Biblical creation myths are so familiar that presenting them in a dis-jointed fashion should not be confusing to most readers.
Now, on with the show.
We start with an exchange between a Believer and a sceptic.
How did something come from nothing?
Who said it did? But if one asserts that nothing can’t come from nothing, then where did your ‘god’ come from?
Of course, recent scientific findings have exploded the notion that nothing can come from nothing.
The god of the gaps gasps as the gap gets smaller.
God is eternal. He always was and always will be. He’s outside of time and space.
Well, if he/it is outside of time and space then how could he/it have always been? Being requires time. Creation requires time. Creation requires space. Creation requires ‘something’.
God is all-powerful. He can do anything.
Well, isn’t that convenient. So, as long as you can tweak the definition of ‘god’, that is what he/it is?
Exactly. God is unknowable.
So, how do you know this?
Game, set, match.
To initiate everything, everywhere, Creationists all contest that the almighty, all-knowing magic genie uttered magic words.
Snap! Poof! Presto-change-o: a universe! Made to order.
Bob’s your uncle and there we are - all in one go.
Seven days and dusted.
Next up: creatures and plants and minerals and stuff to put on a specific, tiny blue marble, way off of galactic center of a ho-hum spiral galaxy of billions of planets for whatever reason and no reason whatsoever.
(‘god’ works in mysterious ways, right?)
Booga-booga.
Adam, the first man fashioned by ‘god’ from mud and brought to life with a golem spell by breathing ‘Life’ into its muddy nostrils followed by Eve, the first woman, being jury-rigged from one of Adam’s ribs right into existence in a lovely garden where everything is perfect and the lion lays with the lamb and everything is sustained by the grace and will of the magic genie who is now called ‘Father’.
(The historic vernacular of ‘god’-talk is always gender specific; masculine. We’re dealing with the prevailing patriarchy of the particular tribes who told these stories, after all.)
The creator/father/god then tells Adam and Eve to ‘go forth and multiply’ giving them dominion over all the earth, as this blue marble is now called.
(Why this ‘god’ couldn’t have snapped his cosmic fingers again to populate this tiny iron-cored rock is inconsequential to the absurdity of this story, as is the presumed physical, bodily presence of the creator-god that breathes and speaks and walks around and such other distinctly human stuff.)
Anyway…
Adam says, ‘Cool!’
(Eve already knows her place, it seems.)
“Hold on!” the Father-god says; “The catch is that you can’t eat the fruit off those two trees; one tree yields the fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the other tree bears the fruit of Eternal Life. Clear?”
Well, a challenge made is a challenge met, so a talking snake (!)
(Yes, a talking snake – mysterious ways, again…)
persuades the woman…
(women… am I right or am I right!?)
…to eat the fruit from the first tree cited by ‘Father’.
Oddly enough, the snake convinces the woman (!) to eat the fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil rather than the fruit of the one which would have magically endowed them with Eternal Life. Again, no reason is given.
Well, Eve, the frail woman, seduced by the conniving serpent, eats the fruit of the tree of Knowledge and inveigle Adam to do the same.
(A wimp; p-whipped already! Am I right? And, so, begins man’s downfall).
‘All-Father’ kicks them out of the ‘Garden’ to live lives of hardship and death on this little ball of rock that the ‘Father-god’ made just for them.
(or something…)
Of course, no one ever seems to mention that Adam and Eve – the epitome of naiveté – haven’t got a clue about what god is talking about with Good and Evil or Eternal Life. After all, their fresh out of the box, as it were, and the concepts of good, evil, knowledge, death, eternal or life hold any meaning for them. Death doesn’t even exist in this magic paradise, nor does good or evil, presumably. Additionally, eating the fruit of Eternal Life would’ve given them the power to live long enough to eat the other fruit, but one is well-advised to leave all logic at the door when dealing with this creation mishegas.
…er… the all-knowing all-father-god knew all of this, right?
Then again that talking snake had the gift of gab…
Anyway, after eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, they hide in their shame – evidently a side-effect of this new knowledge - and they hide their ‘naughty bits’. The all-knowing, all-seeing god goes looking for them in the Garden. (Huh?) and finding them in their shame, boots the first couple out of the Garden for defying his/its edit about eating. (The first dietary law?) He/it not only evicts the pair but sentences them to all the strife and trouble which all humans must undergo.
Another ‘Just-so’ story; but one we’re actually to take as ‘gospel’.
LOL!
Later, Cain and Abel, the sons of Adam and Eve show up. Somehow. Cain kills Abel out of rivalry over sacrificial offerings to the ‘Father/god’. So already, these two are squabbling over which one ‘Father’ likes best.
(Sound like a TV sit-com, yet?)
Altogether, from the start things have not gone swimmingly.
(another little detail that the ‘all-knowing Father-god might have fore-seen… ahem)
Eventually, Adam and Eve and Cain populate the earth. Or at least this one dusty corner of the middle-east.
(Various reasons are presented by apologists explaining how such a trio might have loads of off-spring in a rather short period of time, but incest is never mentioned. Nudge-nudge, wink-wink… )
The talking snake, (the baddie in this little screwy tale) gets off scot-free to continue doing mischief at other times. Father-god does curse all snakes to crawl on the bellies as a punishment.
huh? Not only does a snake have no legs and cannot move except by slithering, but the tale reminds one of the goofy ‘Just-so Tales’ of Kipling; ‘How the elephant got its trunk, how the bear lost its tail’. Codswallop! BTW, this herpetological baddie is actually ‘Lucifer’, a fallen angel, now known as Satan. Much more on him later.
Then, ‘he/god/Father’ kicks back and, strangely enough, is heard of no more until a certain, minutely small group of humans living together in tribes on the dusty plains of Palestine – the ones who told this psychotic tale - herding goats and killing neighboring tribes, apparently forgotting that they were all related. (or something…)
This one group, the Chosen People, the Israelites, started getting messages again from the ‘father/god’, now known as Yahweh – a name they were forbidden to utter - along with visions and signs that ‘he’ was back in the game, as it were, and who was not at all pleased with the way things were going.
(Seems this might have been another thing the all-knowing god’ might have foreseen.)
This wacked out nonsense goes on and on with loads of magic and wrath and blood and slavery and bloody sacrifice. (This part would not be in the sit-com). One ‘message’ the Hebrews got was to slaughter first this group and then that group (like the Midianites, the Amalekites, the Canaanites, etc) man, woman, child and live-stock(!)
(Again it slipped the all-knowing god’s mind that they were all kin, or something.)
So, to kind of rectify a problem that he/it should have foreseen, god decides to kill off everything in a world-wide flood; a catastrophe which no other culture even noticed enough to mention.
Anyone else find it a little odd that the all-powerful (blah-blah-blah) god has so little imagination? His/its go-to solution is to kill off everyone and everything?
That, in a mish-mash synopsis, is the ‘creation’ myth of those poor saps who accept this garbage as ‘god-given fact’.
“It’s in the Bible and the Bible is the word of god cuz the Bible says so…”
And in this corner: Science.
Unfortunately, scientific method requires that phenomena are investigated bit by bit. Thus, the whole magic show of ‘poofing’ the universe into existence must become separate from the magic show of ‘poofing’ all life and stuff on the blue marble before science can take a look under the hood. (A very science-y thing to do.)
It’s unfortunate for theists because these two stories (the poofing of the universe and the poofing of all life) – preposterous and disjointed as they are – are interwoven in their minds.
The check list of poofery is:
Day, night, light, water, stars, plants, people;
depending on the various versions of this mind-boggling tale.
Science, on the other hand, separates all this into two basic realms; cosmology and evolution. For centuries, this imbecilic ‘poofing’ myth predominated thought in a tiny section of civilization on the blue marble, actually.
As ludicrous as the story was, it gained more than a fair bit of prominence – in part because the Yahweh/Father bloke was a bit war-like and loved a good dust-up when entire populations were slaughtered. Nothing like a good genocide.
So, dominant was the actually belief in this story that any science or philosophical thought that predated this dominance was destroyed as ‘evil’. All that did not adhere closely to this ludicrous tale was termed ‘pagan’. The findings of Pagans were deemed ‘heresy’ and an affront against the genocidal Father god and his son (?), Jesus.
(It’s complicated. More mystery, you see.)
So, pagan, heretical books were burnt. The Great Library at Alexandria, in Egypt had an estimated 400,000 scrolls (about 100,000 worth of modern books).
Scholars (philosophers, mathematicians and scientists) were murdered for purporting that maybe this goofy story of a magic genie poofing it all into being was a bit daft.
They purported that the earth was a globe, not a disc under a glass dome.
The circumference was estimated.
A heliocentric model of the solar system was proposed along with a nascent theory of atomic structure.
Want more detail? Ask Galileo or Copernicus.
I know they’re dead, but so is Hypatia and Eratosthenes. (Google it)
The scientific side of things was stifled, to put it mildly, until the Enlightenment caused a renewal in the interest in the ancient ‘pagan’ texts. This period is also known as the Renaissance.
Nevertheless, this absurd myth prevailed and dominated the culture of Europe on the Blue Marble. It wasn’t until 2000 years after this Jesus popped up in the story that an all-encompassing scientific theory was thought up; the Big Bang Cosmology. Lots of smart people worked for years, dedicating their lives and brains to supporting this theory. Cutting to the chase, it doesn’t involve a magic genie called Father or Yahweh poofing things into existence.
Uh-oh…
On the ‘life’ side, the theory of evolution has dominated the science side. Darwin and Wallace came up with this idea that all life on earth evolved by a very complicated method of survival of the fittest. The theory was elaborated on and is the foundation of all of the science of biology – the study of life on this blue marble. Once more, no poofing by the Father god, Yahweh, no Garden, no Adam, no Eve, Cain, no Able and no fricking talking snake.
Uh-oh, for sure!
Those who hold to the Magic Genie paradigm are genuinely upset. 1000 years ago these ‘heretics’ would have been murdered with impunity. Bluster, bluster, kvetch, cavil.
The good ol’ days…
Not today, though. Such is the power of the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-present (yadda-yadda) Father/god, the Magic Genie, Yahweh and his son.
'They were forming with created…uh. Uh. Uh with mol’..…uh… dif’rent, uh, …kinds, uh… gasses and uh, different amoebas or whatever…'
Creationists uh, uh, uh
Miller-Urey experiment
The Miller–Urey experiment (or Miller experiment) was a chemical experiment that simulated the conditions thought at the time (1952) to be present on the early, prebiotic Earth and tested the chemical origin of life under those conditions. Chemicals common and plentiful on earth at the time before there was any life on earth; indeed before there was any organic life at all were combined and subjected to the electric charge to simulate lightening – which would have been happening in the atmosphere of that time.
They combined warm water with water vapour, methane, ammonia, and molecular hydrogen and then zapped the atmosphere with electricity.
In the 1950's, biochemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey conducted an experiment which demonstrated that several organic compounds could be formed spontaneously.
Since then, abiogenesis has been considered to be a viable and likely possible beginning of life. In fact, organic molecules have been discovered on asteroids. Life from non-life has yet to be proven but it appears more than likely to account for a ‘kick-starting' of life on this planet.
Abiogenesis; the idea that life arose from nonlife more than 3.5 billion years ago on Earth. Abiogenesis proposes that the first life-forms generated were very simple and through a gradual process became increasingly complex.
SYNTHETIC cells made by combining components of Mycoplasma bacteria with a chemically synthesized genome can grow and divide into cells of uniform shape and size, just like most natural bacterial cells.
Fine Tuning
Creationism v2.0
As Creationism has lost steam and whatever shreds of credibility it once thought itself to have, the notion of ‘Fine Tuning’ has filled the gap in the apologist’s quiver of arguments.
‘Fine Tuning’ is akin to looking at the world through the wrong end of the Teleological telescope. The argument for god and Fine Tuning is essentially if any particular constant or force (such as gravity) were changed by even a slight degree, then all of life and the universe would be changed and we would not be able to exist. Thus, ‘god’ has fine-tuned the universe for us, his ‘children’, to exist within.
Q.E.D.
Perhaps the first thing to come to mind is the Douglas Adams’ parable about the puddle of water. Perhaps, the initial reaction to ‘Fine Tuning’ is to roll your eyes and squint through your skeptic’s goggles.
From that primary point, the ‘Fine Tuning’ argument devolves into palaver about ‘random chance’ and referencing Einstein’s ‘god/dice’ quote or Hawking’s statement about the fragility of the universe – all out of context, of course, and seeking to ascribe the authority of those renown physicists to the ‘god’ problem.
Anyone who understands Adam’s parable or accepts a bit of scientific cosmology would see through the sheer veil of twaddle that is the foundation for ‘Fine Tuning’.
Spoiler alert, many can’t.
The fact is that the constants of the universe are exactly that; ‘constant’. (duh) As such, the universe and all its machinations are based on those constants. As a result of those constants, the universe sprouted galaxies, black holes, planets, and the bio-sphere that produced our species. The randomness that is railed against by Believers as anathema to their Creator god is a bugbear. It is rendered specious by their reliance on ‘constants’ to support the vacuous claim; the post hoc notion of ‘Fine Tuning’.
It’s the old ‘which came first the chicken or the egg’ with god taking the place of the chicken and the universe taking the place of the egg. (Or is it the other way ‘round?)
Also at play is the notion of ‘intention’; did the universe or god intend the human species and earth to be here? Believers assert that we are here by god’s intention; his Great Plan. The evidence is to the contrary; we are here as a result of the constants of the universe and not by intention or fore-thought.
This idea flies in the Believer’s face of being a special ‘child of god’. That narcissism, that egotism lies at the heart of belief in god, I feel.
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