CREATION

Human societies always have creation stories. I like the Norse myth, where a god goes walking along the beach and finds some pieces of driftwood that look like people, whittles them down a little, and breathes life into them. Sure, why not.

And it makes perfect historical sense that our Middle Eastern God should be walking around one day and decide to make a man out of clay. For one thing, there's a great shortage of driftwood in the Middle East. For another thing, clay was being used for building a lot of things back then: bricks, houses, pots, and even cuneiform writing tablets. It even makes sense that Eve was created later. In a paternalistic society in which women occupied a level lower than men but higher than camels - her comparison to the noble horse was a continuing controversy - it made sense to the author of the creation story that women should be made as an afterthought, as helpers. Subservient by God's will, so there.

But there is something very interesting here, and by here I mean in the Bible, in the story of Genesis.

You might not realize that the Bible has not always been a book. Books as we know them didn't exist until some time in the 1400's when Johannes Gutenberg invented a printing press. At the time the Bible's creation story began, books didn't exist. Even writing was a highly specialized skill not available to the general public, somewhat like Java programming or tax accounting are today. People communicated by talking, not by writing, and for many, many centuries after the creation story first appeared it was handed on from one generation to the next by word of mouth.

Now just imagine this. Imagine that you are Moses. You are an intelligent, educated person raised in the Pharoh's court. You know as much as anyone in the world knows about history and literature and science.

But you don't know about atoms or subatomic particles or nuclear reactions or chemistry or ..., well, let's just say that anyone who got a decent grade school education these days knows a hell of a lot more than you do. You don't even know how to name big numbers. Arabic numerals will be invented - by Arabs, of course - in the first millenium, but you don't even have words in your vocabulary for a million or a billion.

And now God comes to you to tell you the story of Creation.

He comes in a dream one night, and the story he tells is a dream, with images, without words.

And you see it all.

There is the Big Bang, where the universe is so dense at the beginning that light cannot pass through. After some millions of years of expansion, light appears for the first time and particles of matter begin to condense out of the pure energy. As matter collects in some regions, stars ignite, producing new elements in their cores to be blasted back into space when the stars die. Billions of years later, our own Solar System forms. The Earth, at first, is a hot rock produced by countless impacts and collisions of smaller objects. But at some point, vaporized ice from cometary collisions begins to condense, and a steady rain begins to fall. Oceans form and primitive forms of life appear in the oceans. Over time, new life forms evolve: sea creatures, fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, men.

And now you must tell others. Would you say something like this:

"In the Beginning, there was nothing. And God decided to create something from nothing. And he said, Let There Be Light, and there was light! And then, He created the firmament, making the stars in the heavens and the vast spaces in between. And then he made the Earth. But the Earth had no oceans; next he made the land and the seas. And in the oceans, he made fish. And next he made primitve creatures like amphibians and reptiles. And finally, he made the animals of the Earth."

And that gets us back to the original Hebrew creation story, the one that they made up for themselves years before, with God walking along a riverbank and making a man out of clay.

It's very strange.

Human science didn't think of evolution until the 1800's. The Big Bang was talked about in the 1920's, when astronomical observations found red shifts to indicate expansion of the universe, and was confirmed in the 1960's when Bell Lab workers started measuring background microwave radiation coming from space. But in the Bible, in the Creation story of Genesis, all of that was there, already, and it's been there for thousands of years in our past.

Apparently, the Bible has no problem with Evolution, or any other scientific concept mankind has come up with so far.

It's very strange.