Genesis 2: Humans are Created

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The Seventh Day, God Rests (v. 1-3)

God had finished creating the heavens and earth and everything in them, and he rested. Then he tells us three times that the reason he was resting was because of all the work he had done.

This redundant book is really redundant, God seems to like to say the same thing over and over because he is a redundant god of redundancy.

The Creation of Man and Woman (v. 4-25)

God created man out of dust and breathed life into his nostrils.

This whole this has got to be really interpretive anyway, why can't people say this is God describing abiogenesis? I'll admit that it is a somewhat silly argument, but yesterday we say Guzik make the claim that light is partly supernatural. Given that baseline why not just say this is evidence from God of abiogenesis?

Out of the ground God made every tree which looks nice and is good for food, as well as the tree of life, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Why would God make the tree of knowledge of good and evil? What purpose does it have other than to set Adam and Eve up to fail? 

Guzik says that the tree was there as a temptation tree. Again, why would God put that there?

Matthew Henry says that the tree did not grant the knowledge of good and evil, but rather it is a way for God to test Adam to see whether he was morally good or evil. Of course he then defines good and evil to be following God or not. Seems like a pretty crazy explanation to me. Why does God need to test Adam if he is all knowing? And the tree of life gives life, you would think the tree of knowledge would give knowledge.

Jamieson, Fausset & Brown also say it is just a test of obedience. That really does seem to be the one thing God cares about.

I have a minor anecdote here, when I was leaving Christianity I remember focusing on the tree of knowledge pretty intensely and being disgusted that the biggest sin ever committed was to gain knowledge. It's actually pretty significant symbolically.

We get way too much detail about some rivers that keep Eden watered, then God tells Adam that he can eat anything he wants except for the tree of knowledge. The day he eats it he will surely die.

I didn't realize that God told Adam not to eat the forbidden fruit before Eve was created. I will be interested to see if he tells them again not to eat that fruit. Also, as we are presumably all familiar with the broad strokes of this story, we know that they don't die the day they eat the fruit. So what's up with that?

From Guzik

The presence of this tree - the presence of a choice for Adam - was good because for Adam to be a creature of free will, there had to be a choice, some opportunity to rebel against God. If there is never a command or never something forbidden there can then never be choice. God wants our love and obedience to Him to be the love and obedience of choice.

If Adam has yet to eat from the tree, then he doesn't understand good an evil. So when God tells him not to eat he is really telling him that eating from the tree is bad, and Adam doesn't understand what that means. No, Adam is being set up to fail here, which is also evident by the fact that God forbids the eating of the fruit before Eve is there, which Guzik also mentions

God made this command originally to Adam, not to Eve; God had not yet brought woman out of man.

Right, I'll be interested to see if god makes this proclamation again when Eve is around, I guess I'll see tomorrow. And one more thing from Guzik

God not only made His command clear to Adam, but He also clearly explained the consequences for disobedience.

Yeah, except that doesn't happen. I suppose they will try to spin that as mercy. 

God brought forth all of the animals to try to find Adam "a helper fit for him". Adam "gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field"

Let's stop there for a minute, I'm not exactly sure what animals fit into this, what counts as livestock and what counts as "beast of the field"? but it certainly says that he named every bird. How many birds are there? This would have taken a long time, although I guess there is no death yet, so it could have taken 100 years *shrug*

More from Guzik, he's a treasure trove today

For the first time, God saw something that was not good - the aloneness of man. God never intended for man to be alone, either in the marital or social sense.
i. Marriage, in particular, has a blessed “civilizing” influence on man. The most wild, violent, sociopathic men in history have always been single, never under the plan God gave to influence men for good. This is not good!

There's no way this is true. A very quick google search got me to John Wayne Gacy who was married when he committed at least some of his crimes. I love the internet, it's so easy to call people on their bullshit.

My comic archive [edit - d'oh, forgot to sign this one]

No helper was found among all of the animals (shocking) so God put him to sleep and created woman out of one of his ribs.

If man was created out of dust why did God need one of Adam's ribs?

Guzik claims that God had Adam name the animals to see that they came in pairs and show him that he needed a mate. Seems to me that he is reading something that isn't there, unless I'm missing something. It doesn't say anything about the animals coming in pairs.

It is important to realize that there are not two beginnings to the human race, one in Adam and one in Eve. There was one beginning of the human race in Adam.

Didn't take too long to get to the sexism inherently in the bible did it?

So a man shall leave his father and mother and become one flesh with his wife.

So what, this is the moral of the story? Clearly this is a fairy tale of an ancient primitive group of people. If this was really the account of the creation of man and woman, why would this line be in there?

More from Guzik:

They shall become one flesh: This passage forms the foundation for the Bible’s understanding of marriage and family. Both Jesus (Matthew 19: 5) and Paul (Ephesians 5:31) quoted it in reference to marriage.

Just like I was complaining about yesterday with creationism and evolution, the basis for this stuff is practically nothing. It's so short and there is almost nothing here. Is this really what we should base marriage on?

The man and his wife were both naked and not ashamed.

Why would they be ashamed? I never thought about this before, but why would they be ashamed? Why would a husband and wife be ashamed of being naked?

And one more from Guzik

Before the fall, Adam and Eve were both naked . . . and not ashamed. The idea of “nakedness” is far more than mere nudity. It has the sense of being totally open and exposed as a person before God and man. To be naked . . . and not ashamed means you have no sin, nothing to be rightly ashamed of, nothing to hide.

Again, when it comes to just a husband and wife, I think it is totally normal to be completely "exposed as a person" to each other. There's no reason for 2 married people to be ashamed of their nakedness, even this expanded definition of nakedness.

For the Verses of Note page:

--Abiogenesis--

Genesis 2:7 God creates life from non-life

"then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature."

--Knowledge--

Genesis 2:17 God threatens death to learning

"but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die."

--Marriage--

Genesis 2:24 Supposedly this is the basis for marriage

"Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh."

--Women--

Genesis 2:21-22 Women are less than men

"So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man."

No Obvious Line

(Note: for a non-colorized version of this post, click here)

I was listening to a debate on abortion recently, and it got me thinking about the whole idea that life begins at conception. As far as I can tell, the whole idea of claiming that life begins and conception is to draw a line in the sand as to where abortion is permissible. If we declare the fetus to be alive, then aborting it is tantamount to murder. On the other hand, if it is not alive, we are merely performing a medical procedure. I would argue that there are a number of spots during the pregnancy where we might consider claiming life. Perhaps it is the moment of birth, perhaps it is once nervous system can feel pain, there are probably several level of brain development that would make a certain amount of sense, perhaps it is when the heart has reached a certain level of development, maybe it is just the moment of conception. How do we choose where to draw the line?

I would argue that it is really not obvious where this line should be drawn, it seems like it should be somewhere in the middle, but I have no idea exactly where. If we think about the 
extremes it seems pretty obvious, a single cell, or just a handful of cells, no big deal, clearly not murder. You are not talking about a life, you are talking about a little lump of practically nothing. On the other hand, consider a fetus that is almost ready to be born, is aborting that baby murder? It certainly feels like it to me. Does something magical happen when it is born? Not really, it's essentially the same the day before and the day after birth, and it seems obvious that late-term abortion is a thing to be avoided. Put another way, what is the difference between a baby that was born 2 days early and another baby that is 2 days late, on the day they were expected to be born, is it moral to abort one, but immoral to kill the other? They should be treated the same right? I would argue that the point where abortion should no longer occur is somewhere in the middle, but it's not really a line, there's a sort of moral grey scale. The farther along the pregnancy gets, the 
more uneasy the idea of an abortion makes me. But my understanding is that this is reflected in how abortions are performed in practice, getting an abortion early on is no big deal, and late term abortions really don't happen unless there is something severely wrong (like if the baby didn't develop correctly). If we have to draw a line somewhere legally, it seems to make the most sense to me to put it at the point of birth.

But this is the kind of thing we should be used to, we see it all over the place. What happens the day you turn 16 that makes it reasonable for you to get a drivers license? Why is it that we are wildly irresponsible when we are 15 years and 364 days old, and yet when we turn 16 we can drive safely? Obviously nothing, but legally we have to draw the line somewhere. Some kids would probably be great drivers at 12, while other probably shouldn't be allowed to drive until they are 20, somehow the law wound up at 16. The same thing is true for drinking, the day we turn 21 we can drink ourselves into a stupor, but one day earlier a single drop touching our lips is illegal. It's kind of silly, but it's just the way we have to write the law.

It also reminded me of assigning grades for a class. Why is an 89.99% a B while a 90% is an A? To think about how fair this is, 80% is also a B, so the 80% and 89.99% students are counted as having equal mastery of the material. We can help this a bit by adding pluses and minuses, but you still have 82% and 87.99% being the same grade. For practical purposes, we have to draw these lines in the sand somewhere, but no matter what you do you get these jumps that don't seem quite fair.

Another big place this shows up is in evolution, if we say that X evolved into Y, it's not like there are a bunch of species X around, and then suddenly the next generation is a bunch of Ys. It's gradual change over time, that's really the point of the whole thing. There's no obvious point where the changeover happens, it's just that if we look at a line of descendants it's obvious that at the beginning we have a bunch of species X, and at the end we have a bunch of species Y. The organisms in the middle will look like a mixture of the two species, the closer you are to the start the more it looks like X, while the closer you are to the end it will look like Y. Unfortunately, we are used to looking for a place to draw a line and it even permeates our language, when a new species is created we call it a speciation event, this suggests there is a moment when a new species is created. Of course the reality is much more muddy than that. Abiogenesis has the same problem, we talk about the origin of life and the way people talk about it, it seems that in one moment there is just mud, and the next moment there is life. Really there are some things that we would probably call proto-life which have some properties that we would require of something we would call alive which gradually assembled into life. Pointing to a single moment where you have the first thing ever that is alive would be impossible, there is no obvious first life-form.

And of course there is the color thing. The first word of this post we can all agree is red and the last one is blue, and the middle is somewhere in between. Identifying the first blue word or the last red one is pretty difficult. We could each pick a word, and if we compared we would probably be in the same ballpark, but I'm pretty sure we would not all pick the same word. That's because there is no obvious line between red and blue here, the change is gradual and differentiating between them is messy, like so many other things in life.

Is Abiogenesis necessary to accept Evolution?

Evolution is the change over time of populations of organisms, is it how we account for the great biodiversity on our planet. Abiogenesis on the other hand, is how life came from non-life. It is not uncommon for a theist who doesn't believe in evolution to claim that it is illogical to accept the theory of evolution until we have a complete picture of abiogenesis as well. The argument being that without a beginning, it doesn't matter what else we know, we can't accept the theory. This argument is rubbish, and I aim to demonstrate this with a hypothetical. (I originally made this argument earlier this year, but I can't find it, I assume that means it was in the comments section of someone else's blog)

Suppose there was an alien race who had some scientists watching our planet since it formed. They are meticulous record keepers and are interested in how life could evolve. They were able to record every life form and all of their offspring in immense family trees. For our first exercise, let's assume that in addition to every life form, they were able to observe how the simplest life forms were able to form from non-life. Although the aliens have kept their presence secret all this time, tomorrow they decide that it is time to make contact and give us access to this database. We now have access to the complete lineage of every living thing that ever lived on this planet. If you wanted you could follow a line from yourself all the way to an original single celled life form on this planet. We could also, of course, take any particular organism in the past and look forward at all of it's descendants, you could see which lines went extinct, and which moved forward all the way to current day. Let's assume after examining this evidence, we discover that evolution happened according to the way our current scientists think it happened (naturally we will be wrong on some details here and there, but the overall picture is correct).

In this situation, we have complete information. Anyone who is even remotely reasonable must at this point accept that evolution happened. We were able to connect organisms from today all the way back in time as far as you wish to go, and we can even see how the first organisms arose out of non-life. But was the abiogenesis part of this really necessary? Let's change this up ever so slightly and see what happens.

Suppose we have the same aliens who are observing our planet, but their ridiculously awesome technology is slightly weaker than described above. It will be unable to detect abiogenesis this time, in fact, it is only able to reliably detect a life form if it is of a certain size, let's say at least 1000 cells. Other than that, the situation is exactly as previously described. You can look at the database and track your ancestors all the way back to a being that consists of 1000 cells. You can look at the gradual change, you can see how within a few generations anywhere along the chain your ancestors look about the same, but if you take a long view you can see the gradual changes produce one species after another.

In our second situation, since we have zero information about abiogenesis, would it be reasonable for us to dismiss the idea of evolution? Of course not! We have proof of change over time, we have speciation events, we have a full family tree of every life form on this planet of at least 1000 cells. To claim the lack of information about the start invalidates the rest would be dishonest in the extreme.

Of course, in reality we don't have any where near this much information about the history of organisms on the planet, but that's not really the point. The point is that I want to decouple the idea of abiogenesis and evolution. It is possible to have enough information to know that evolution happened without knowing how abiogenesis worked, this example proves this assertion. And pretty much every reputable scientist that works in an area that relates to evolution will state that evolution has been proven. If you try to counter such a statement by stating we don't know how life came from non-life, you are changing the subject. Understanding abiogenesis is not necessary to an understanding of evolution