Robert J. P. Lyon, CD MA MDiv
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and Biblical and theological studies
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BETWEEN MOSES AND DARWIN A DIALOGUE
The Scene:
Thursday 12 February 2009.
At a coffee shop of unknown brand, somewhere in the afterlife,
Moses has invited Charles Darwin for latte and a piece of birthday cake.
Darwin -- Good afternoon, Moshe.
Moses -- Good afternoon, Charles. Happy 200th!
D -- Thanks. But it doesn't seem right to be celebrating a birthday when I'm dead.
M -- Dead? Just a state of mind, old fellow. Wrong mind, at that.
D -- Yeah, well, never mind that. But it's jolly decent of you to wish me anything after the damage that my book did to yours.
M -- Actually, old fellow, it didn't. Except in the minds of a bunch who weren't likely to believe me, anyway. But as for your stuff, I've never had any quarrel with it.
D -- Really? But everybody said I'd taken God out of Creation. I'd even come to think that way myself. It made my Emma so distressed.
M -- Well, blame Bishop Ussher. 4004 BC, indeed! What humbug!
D -- Humbug, to be sure. But I don't know how you can say that. You're the one who gave Ussher the tales out of which he invented that humbug.
M -- Sorry, old fellow. It's not my fault he had no literary sense. Surely by 1658 the Church ought to have known better than to let bishops exposit Scripture, anyway.
D -- Hold on! What's that you slipped in? "No literary sense"?
M -- No, none at all! Hadn't a clue where those "tales", as you call them, came from, nor why I used them.
D -- So now I suppose you're going to explain it to me? Don't forget, there's a one-hour limit on coffee drinkers here. If we run out of time, you'll have to buy me supper.
M -- The birthday's yours. The treat's on me. You see, Charles, Ussher missed the fact of where I was coming from. Literally. That crew that followed me out of Egypt, what a bunch of wooses! Complained about the lack of meat. Complained about the lack of water. Complained about tramping around the desert for 40 years. So I go up the mountain to get some answers, and when I come back down they've got a party going on a religious party, mind you, but they'd made a forbidden image. Even my kid brother and my big sister got into it. I was furious!
D -- What did you do?
M -- Let's just say it wasn't a pretty scene. But after my time with Him up the mountain, I mean I knew what they needed: a theistic political philosophy.
D -- A what?
M -- A the.... Oh, yes, you dropped out of seminary, didn't you? Before you joined THE BEAGLE.
D -- Yeah. So?
M -- Never mind. They wouldn't have understood "theistic political philosophy" either. That's why I had to work with stuff they knew. So you see, when Avram Avenu left...
D -- Who?
M -- Avram Avenu. Abraham our ancestor. When he left Mesopotamia 400 years earlier, he brought with him the family records genealogies, mainly (Oh, the Mormons would have loved him!) and a bunch of yarns that got passed down orally about mythic characters with names like Tiamat and Enkidu and Gilgamesh and Humbaba.
D -- The stuff Layard dug up in Ashurbanipal's library about the time I was writing?
M -- Right. But earlier versions of it. Anyway, that stuff was polytheistic, and parts of it were pretty gross. Not at all like Him. Not like Him whom I met at the Burning Bush. No, not like Him whom I met on the mountain, or later in the Tabernacle. Not like Him who followed us everywhere we went, like a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. None of those tales were anything like Him. They don't even come close.
D -- So you're saying that Abraham brought written records and oral traditions with him from Ur to Egypt and they got passed down through 400 years until you got your hands on them. And they had survived intact for four centuries.
M -- Right. Ancient cultures, as you know, were pretty static. Read Qoheleth ah, that's Ecclesiastes in your Bible and see how he describes the age-old frustration of same-stuff-different-day". Qoheleth wrote a thousand years after I did, but that much hadn't changed.
D -- OK, so is there any reason why Bishop Ussher ought to have twigged to the fact that you were using extant traditional tales?
M -- Well, maybe. In my book, "history" as you understand that word starts with Abraham. Everything before him is prologue. Of course, when I say "history", I mean the history of my people, and their place in His world.
D -- So it's history from a skewed perspective.
M -- What history isn't?
D -- Touchι. So what about the prologue?
M -- That's the first eleven chapters. Chapters! Hmph! Didn't need any chapters in my day. Didn't need punctuation, neither. Not even vowels. Just consonants. Strung one letter after another and one word after another without any spaces in between and it all made perfectly good sense. Couldn't afford to waste parchment, you understand. Anyway, as I said, much of that prologue depends on written sources. You may have noticed that seven times in those first eleven chapters I use the line, "These are the generations of...." In one instance, I even say, "This is the book of the generations of...."
D -- And by "book", of course, you mean "scroll".
M -- Right. Nowadays that recurring line is called a "colophon". A title, so to speak, written at the end of a scroll, so that the librarian can find out what's in it without having to unroll the whole thing. So the good Bishop might at least have figured out that I was citing sources.
D -- But that wouldn't....
M -- No, that wouldn't have given him any literary sense. For that he would have had to recognize my Sitz im Leben.
D -- Your what?
M -- That's "higher critical" jargon for knowing what was going on when I wrote the stuff.
D -- Ah! So what was....
M -- Well, try to get the big picture. There we were having just crossed a river that swallowed up our pursuers. Then I met Him on that mountain, and He gave me a covenant that we had to keep, in gratitude for His rescuing us from Egypt. And why did He want to rescue us, you ask? Not because we were better than anybody else. But because the whole world was, as you English like to say, going to hell in a handbasket. If He hadn't rescued somebody, if He had given us all our just desserts, there'd be nobody left.
D -- I notice that you spent five of those eleven chapters on the Noah story. Must have been a big deal. But needing more space than the Creation story?
M -- Certainly bigger in the minds of that lot that crossed the Red Sea with me. Try to imagine what they felt passing through the shallows, and then watching the tide change just as the Egyptian chariots rolled down the West bank.
D -- Scary stuff. So the rescue of Noah reflects their rescue at the Red Sea?
M -- Right, again! You would have done well if you had stayed in seminary, Charles.
D -- But the Noah story was just a myth all along?
M -- Not at all! The Noah story is not only true, but true on several levels at the same time. First, there really was a flood. Several of them, actually, but one that stood out in the popular memory. Certainly in Mesopotamia, maybe farther afield. If it didn't cover all the world, at least it covered all the known world. There are so many flood myths hundreds of them, like Gilgamesh, like Deucalion and Pyrrha they can't all be idle tales. But that was before my time. Perhaps around 3000 BC.
D -- I remember about fifteen years after I published Origin of Species a German chap named Schliemann discovered Troy, and....
M -- Actually, eleven Troys, each one built on the ruins of the one below.
D -- Yes, and between levels two and three he found a layer of flood silt.
M -- So maybe The Flood involved not only the Tigris and the Euphrates but extended as far as the Black Sea.
D -- OK, so we're agreed that there must have been a flood of sizeable proportions. How else is the Flood story "true" besides the fact that one or more floods actually happened?
M -- Well, the stories that I knew portrayed it as a punishment by the gods....
D -- But you didn't believe that stuff.
M -- Well, not exactly. Or at least, not the gods. But Him. Oh, Him! What He did to those Egyptians was a judgment, to be sure. Plague after plague, and they still wouldn't listen. Then, "Pharaoh's chariots and his host hath He cast into the sea." And a well deserved judgment it was after the way they treated us in Egypt.
D -- So the Noah story not only reflects an historic flood or perhaps we should say, a prehistoric flood but it also helped the escaping Hebrews to understand that they were being rescued as Noah had been.
M -- Oh, well done, Charles!
D -- What about the rainbow?
M -- Ah, the sign of the covenant.
D -- "Covenant" means a contract. Yes?
M -- So it does. But a contract with Him is unlike any other. He sets the terms. You don't get to vote on them. He is not a Democrat.
D -- Nor a Republican, neither, I hope?
M -- How could the King of Eternity be a Republican? Forced to relinquish the throne of heaven after two four-year terms? So that we could elect a replacement deity more to our liking?
D -- But what about the rainbow? Surely there were rainbows before the flood?
M -- Of course there were. That's precisely the point. Whenever you can see raindrops after a rain, you'll see a rainbow. Happens without fail. Because He made a law-abiding universe. A reliable universe. Just as He is reliable. So in the Flood story he can invest the rainbow with new meaning for the survivors: As reliable as the rainbow after the rain, so is His promise not to destroy the known world with another flood.
D -- Yeah, but so what? The prospect of another global flood is just a straw man
unless global warming takes hold with a vengeance.
M -- The meaning of the story is not in the rainbow, Charles. That's just the symbol of the meaning. The meaning of the story is in the fact that He made a covenant. Just as the Flood reflects what happened at the Red Sea, so the rainbow reflects the covenant that He gave me on the mountain.
D -- So you were trying to show that there's a pattern: that He forms relationships with his creatures by way of a covenant.
M -- Spot on!
D -- But a single instance of a covenant has no statistical value, and two instances that's all we have adduced could be mere coincidence. You need at least one more instance to establish a pattern.
M -- Well, Jeremiah quotes Him as saying, "Behold the days are coming when I shall make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah...." That prophecy, as you know, wasn't fulfilled until 1400 years after my time. But in the meantime, it's your book and my book not the New Covenant book that we're discussing here.
D -- Right, we're getting off track. Specifically, then, it's your prologue that's the bone of contention. So what about the two Creation stories and the Tower of Babel? They seem to be the other focal points in that section.
M -- Well, since the Creation stories are our real concern, let's deal with the Tower of Babel and save the best for the last. About 40 years after you arrived here....
D -- You mean "died".
M -- If you insist. Anyway, about 40 years later, a fellow named Wooley excavated the Great Ziggurat of Ur, where Abraham came from. You can still see nearly three dozen of those things throughout what are currently called Iran and Iraq. Great stepped towers, they are like pyramids, but with no caverns inside. The so-called Tower of Babel was likely still standing in my day, though I never saw it. I couldn't afford a sabbatical in Ur. In your day, it was buried and had to wait another 40 years for excavation. Seems like just about everything takes 40 years, doesn't it?
D -- OK, so we have a thing still standing that's called a ziggurat, that would have been familiar to Abram when he lived in Ur. Why did you include it in your prologue?
M -- Y'know, Charles, if I could do as well at biology as you're starting to do with this Biblical interpretation, we could make a team. Well, I included it because the confusion of languages at Babel reflected what we experienced with the tribes that lived in Sinai and Canaan. Their languages and customs were strange to us, and we were strange to them, so they became pretty hostile. We found much the same thing everywhere we went, and whenever you can catch a bit of Earth news up here you can see that it still hasn't changed. I'm not sure it ever will. But it affects more than just competing tribes and languages; it's at work everywhere, even inside the most religious households. I tell you, Charles, there were days when Zipporah and I could not speak a civil word to each other. When we got like that, whatever one of us said, the other could turn into a quarrel. The theologians called it our "fallenness". The 20th Century called it "alienation". Either way, it means we're not in touch with one another because we're not in touch with Him.
D -- The selfish gene?
M -- Ah, I see you keep your reading up to date. No, I don't think Dawkins got it right. Maybe that works for dogs, but Zip and I knew we were expected to do better. Genetics may account for "do" and "don't do", but I don't think it can account for the urge to "do better".
D -- So the Babel story portrays not just an incident in time past but a present state of affairs.
M -- Exactly. It portrays the state of affairs that Abraham needed to get out of; it portrays the state of affairs that we faced in Egypt and after we left Egypt; and it portrays the state of affairs that has prevailed in varying degrees in every part of the world ever since.
D -- Which takes us, I suppose, back to Adam and Eve.
M -- Yes, indeed. Adam and Eve. "Earth-Man" and "Life-Giver". Bearers of the divine image.
D -- But surely you never intended us to buy that apple nonsense? Or the talking snake?
M -- Actually, Charles, I never said "apple". I wrote about "forbidden fruit". The bad apple got in there through mediaeval Latin as a kind of theological pun. Long-a malum, pronounced mahlum, means an "apple". Short-a malum, rhymes with "pablum", means "evil". But it's a good pun, if you think about it. After all, how many things that look "pleasant to the eyes" turn out in the end to be a snare? And how often, after we have succumbed to such a snare, do we hide from Him, knowing that we are naked?
D -- And how often did I complain unfairly about Emma, the way Adam complained that "the woman whom You gave me she gave it to me"?
M -- And Zip would undoubtedly have excused herself with, "The serpent tricked me...."
D -- So Adam is Everyman.
M -- And Eve is Everywoman.
D -- And the story is psychologically true.
M -- Profoundly so. And if psychologically, then also historically. Not just at one point in time, but at all points in time.
D -- And that, I suppose, is what makes it His truth?
M -- Just so. And when you follow that same thread of an idea through the Noah story and the Babel story, and a couple of the smaller anecdotes in between, you can see how things could get so bad that Abraham had to get out of Ur, and that we had to get out of Egypt.
D -- OK, I follow your pattern. But in Chapter 1 He says He saw everything He had made and it was "very good".
M -- So it was. Until we screwed up. But you have to understand that what I was describing, even in the Adam and Eve story, is an etiology, but not just an etiology it's also a present general condition.
D -- Not just an et-what?
M -- An etiology. An etiological tale is a tale that purports to explain where something comes from or why something is the way it is. But usually what such a tale really does is describe a present and ongoing state of affairs.
D -- "It is a people that do err in their hearts, for they have not known my ways"?
M -- Careful, Charles, your Anglicanism is showing.
D -- "Unto whom I sware in my wrath that they should not enter into my rest." Emma knew that stuff by heart. I never understood why she found strength in it.
M -- Because it's true, Charles. It was as true of my crew in the desert as it was of the Egyptians and the heathen tribes that plagued our exodus. And it's equally true of the modern church in its modern desert. Of course, the Anglicans removed those lines from later versions of Morning Prayer. Said they didn't want to recite words that might offend the Jews. Frankly, I think the words hit too close to home for their own people.
D -- So what about the "very good"? And the six days? And the talking snake? And while you're at it, the change in the divine Name from Chapter 1 to Chapter 2?
M -- At least you didn't ask me where Cain got his wife.
D -- Married his sister, of course!
M -- Whew! OK, let's start with the divine Name. You've noticed, as Astruc did a century before you, that in Chapter 1 I refer to Him by the generic Elohim, while in Chapter 2 I refer to Him by the personal name YHVH.
D -- Which, they say, shows that we have two separate Creation stories by two different authors.
M -- Not quite. You see, I was the sole author of Chapter 1, but I inherited the material in Chapters 2 to 11, so I had to edit and sanitize them before they could become His word. But it's not really two stories, or at least not anymore. In Chapter 1, I give the "big picture"; in Chapter 2, I zoom in specifically on His image-bearers. The two stories are rather like a set of carved Russian dolls: you open up one and find another inside. You'll find extensive use of the same technique in the Apocalypse that John wrote 1500 years later.
D -- We're getting off track again. What about the names?
M -- Well, the stories I inherited had all sorts of names not names that He would ever own. But on the mountain oh, my, on the mountain, He revealed to me the Name that is above every name. Who are you? I asked Him. I am who I am. Tell those Egyptians that "I am" sent you. That "I am" took some thinking about. If He can say "I am", Egypt's gods "am not". Might also mean "I will be who I will be" the self-determined One. Anyway, I held off using His personal Name until Chapter 2, where He has personal dealings covenant dealings with His human image-bearers.
D -- In science, we sometimes feel awe at the majesty of what we come to know. You feel awe at having caught a glimpse of the Unknowable.
M -- Thou art not far from the Kingdom.
D -- What about The Snake?
M -- Read D. H. Lawrence.
D -- But he....
M -- I know. But he also understood what a powerful symbol it is and what a range of meaning it's capable of.
D -- And the six days?
M -- Another etiology. They already had a seven-day week in Ur long before Abraham. So it was a simple enough matter for us to set aside one of those days for holy things as He showed me on the mountain so I patterned Chapter 1 accordingly.
D -- Then the question, "How long was a Creation day?" has no scientific answer?
M -- How many foot-pounds of thrust can you get out of eight flying reindeer?
D -- And all the efforts to rationalize your sequence of events with modern science?
M -- Don't even bother.
D -- Because?
M -- Because that's not what it's about. I didn't set out to tell How, but Who.
D -- So He doesn't mind my telling How?
M -- Doesn't mind? He encourages it! "It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honor of kings is to search out a matter."
D -- But my How seems to exclude Him.
M -- Not at all. As long as you fellows are describing the How of a thing or, in Aristotle's material or instrumental sense, the Why of a thing, you're doing Science. It's when you venture into agency and teleology that you're out of your depth.
D -- Why out of our depth?
M -- Because you can't fit Him, the Agent, into a test tube or under a microscope. Because you can't you compel Him to replicate experimental results. Neither the Red Sea nor the Resurrection is a parlor trick to be repeated on demand. And the fact that you, or we, can't fathom his purposes what we call "teleology" doesn't mean that those purposes don't exist. It just means that His ways are higher than our ways, and His thoughts than our thoughts.
D -- So if I get your drift, science can carry on doing its thing oblivious to the existence of, ah, Him, because He is somehow outside it.
M -- But outside it remembering that an analogy is only an approximation in the way that an envelope is outside a letter. You can read the letter without referring to the envelope, but the letter didn't get delivered by itself. And you may need to keep the envelope to confirm the Sender's address. Remember when Paul was preaching on the Areopagus, he quoted Epimenides: "In Him we live and move and have our being."
D -- Which means that, as a scientist...
M -- ... you have no more grounds on which to discuss the existence of Him than has a Hottentot bushman. But once you decide as a man, not as a scientist that He does exist, or to be more precise, that you exist in Him, then as a scientist as someone who understands the How you have infinitely more grounds on which to marvel at the brilliance of his craftsmanship.
D -- But, Moshe, as brilliant as it is, it's a flawed craftsmanship. Nature is "red in tooth and claw".
M -- Yeah, that's a problem. The old legends spoke of a golden age, followed by a silver age, and a bronze age, and finally an iron age. Genesis 1 portrays the golden age. Was it just a myth? I don't think so. Else how could we be accountable for a standard that never was?
D -- Entropy, old chap. The battery runs down; the spring unwinds. It happens in the moral realm as in the physical.
M -- Havel havelim; kol havel.
D -- Eh?
M -- I said, Mataiotes mataioteton; ta panta mataiotes.
D -- OK, I'm lost.
M -- Vanity of vanities; futility upon futility; Murphy's Law of Murphy's Laws; the bread always lands jammy side down.
D -- Got that right!
M -- For the Creation was subjected to mataiotes to futility to Murphy's Law to entropy, if you prefer not of its own will but by the will of Him who subjected it in hope; because the Creation will itself one day be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of Him.
D -- That's the "thorns and thistles" in Genesis 3 you're talking about, right?
M -- Right. And how we are now must be either normative, or not. If it's normative, then we have no prospect of anything better. But if it's an aberration even a humanity-wide aberration then there may be a chance that it's not forever. And that's why the golden age, whether historical, or mythic and hypothetical, is so important. You can't remember Woodstock, because it happened about a hundred years after you came here, but those hippies got it right even if they didn't understand what it meant when they sang, "We've got to get ourselves back to the Garden."
D -- But, Moshe, getting ourselves back is the very thing we can't do!
M -- Oh, very good, Charles. That's very good, indeed. That's precisely what my book or His book, if you will was meant to say.
D -- I sure wish we had had this talk before I started writing.
M -- I understand what you mean. But, actually, it shouldn't have mattered. Because if you scientists would confine your efforts to writing about science instead of drawing inferences about topics for which you have no data and if those of us who write about Him would resist the temptation to pronounce on matters on which we have no expertise then together we might proclaim that every truth is consistent with every other truth, because all truth is His truth.
Waiter -- You've been here over an hour, gentlemen. May I take your order?
D -- Burger platter, please.
M -- Do you serve kosher here?