CREATION of EARTH and MAN?

CREATION of EARTH and MAN?

This blog does not espouse any particular philosophy or belief system. It's a look at how ideas of the gods and man came into being. The biblical references are only there to be examined, not swallowed whole.

Since we still know little of how everything came to be, there have been many attempts to explain creation. The result is oral and written traditions which are garbled.

The Bible, for example, refers to the creation of the 'heavens' in Genesis 1:1. They seem to have consisted of water. And we learn in Genesis I:6//7/9 that there are in fact two lots of water. Between the two God created what he called 'Heaven'. We don't hear any more about the waters above Heaven, but those below contained also dry land.

Not for some while later did God start to create life.

'So God created man in his own image.' (Genesis I;27). Patterns repeat - isn't creation what our geneticists are working on now? As Huxley pointed out in 'Brave New World', this will lead to designed levels of man.

'And God said: Let us make man in our image, after our likeness' (Genesis I;26). So there must have been more than one god. 'So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him.' (Genesis I;27). If God created only Adam, some other god(s) must have been in the creation game too.

There are several points here:-

1. God is a physical person – in the image of man. 'And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh' Genesis VI;3. 'And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.' (Genesis 3:8)

2. The Bible ignores the parallel creations of other gods. The Old Testament is only interested in promoting the offspring of its particular Jewish god. For there must have been other creations. 'And Cain knew his wife and she conceived' (Genesis IV;17). 'Adam begat a son in his own likeness, after his image; and called his name Seth' (Genesis V;3). 'And Seth begat Enos' (Genesis V;6). Where did they get their wives from?

Only Adam, Cain and Seth produced offspring. Abel was killed by Cain, his brother. God had warned Cain about Abel - 'And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him' (Genesis IV;7) – the first instance of homophobia?

Cain’s wife was probably his sister. This was quite normal in the ancient world. Pharaohs married their sisters to keep the bloodline pure. Adam would have had to do so to keep the Jewish line pure. Some traditions hold that Adam's wife was 'Awan', his sister, though she is not mentioned in the Bible. Jewish tradition gets round this with the creation of Eve.

Eve of course was produced from Adam himself. '...and thy desire shall be to thy husband' (Genesis III;16) Even closer than incest. How pure can you get? Taken from Adam's rib, Eve would have had the same DNA as Adam. She would therefore have been male!

But the Awan tradition is quite conceivable. Genesis 5:4 says 'And the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight hundred years: and he begat sons and daughters'.

Josephus, the Jewish historian, wrote, “The number of Adam’s children was thirty-three sons and twenty-three daughters.” Since Adam lived for 930 years (Genesis 5:5), he must have done something to pass the time.

Only the descendants of Adam, tainted by Original Sin,can be saved. What about people not descended from Adam? If God created only Adam, some other god(s) must have been in the creation game too.

3. If there can be more than one creation of man, why not of other life? There was life on earth in the PreCambrian, but it all perished. (the Bible writer didn't know about that). After the Great Unconformity, no life had survived. This meant a second flowering of different forms of life – a second creation? If one god could do it, the others could too.

Tower of Babel

The Jewish story is that eventually God got scared of his own creation. He was/is a physical manlike being, capable of walking in the Garden with Adam. He told the other gods:- 'Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: (Genesis 3;22).  

The Popul Vuh from the Amerindians has a similar story:- 'And their great clear eyes swept rapidly over all, for they saw all things, both great and small, in heaven and on earth. But this was not pleasing to the gods -- heaven had overshot the mark. "What shall we do with man now?" said they. "These are as gods; they would make themselves equal with us; lo, they know all things Let us now contract their sight."

And Adam was expelled from the garden. After they had spread widely, his progeny were to prove God right.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hindi god and the flood

God heard what the children of men were doing - building a tower to reach to the heavens -so he went to see. 'And the Lord said “ Behold the people is one and they all have one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do' (Genesis XI:6). It wasn't just that they were hard-working: the problem was that they were showing signs of creativity – God's own province. So he decided to destroy them.

The story of the Flood is found in similar wording in Islamic, Hindu, Greek, Jewish, American Indian, Sumerian and Mesopotamian traditions. Since these traditions are similar, their civilisation must have been similar. So it must be based on fact and it must have been catastrophically extensive, caused by the melting of the ice sheet around 6000BC . This must have been fairly rapid and resulted in the destruction of a great many people.

What was the civilisation before the Flood?

Ubi occisa est tertia pars hominum