This simple and hence, by definition elegant, theory of creation originated in the mind of ancient Jews but is now owned, defended and often celebrated by Christians of all shades. All but the most rabbid rabbi cares a hoot what you think about the creation as conceived by the original Jew, the duplicate Christian and the further pirated copy in Quran.
James Ussher (1581 –1656), Anglican Archbishop of Ireland calculated that Creation began at 9 AM on Sunday, October 23, 4004 BC – some 6012 years ago. With such precision in the calculation, one could hardly go wrong.
- Day one (Sunday, Oct 23, – 4004) : God created the heaven and earth; divided light from the darkness
- Day 2, Oct. 24: Built a firmament in the middle of the waters, and let it divide the waters from waters – under the firmament (sea) and above the firmament (source of rain?)
- Day 3, Oct. 25: Dry land was named earth; Water under the heaven was gathered together into one place and called it the seas. Earth brought forth grass, the herb-yielding seed, tree yielding fruits of its kind
- Day 4, Oct, 26: Lights (sun and moon and the stars) in the firmament of heaven dividing day and night and be signs for seasons, for days and years, and to give light on earth.
- Day 5, Oct. 27: Waters brought forth moving creatures, fowls that may fly above earth in the open firmament of heaven and told them to multiply.
- Day 6, Oct. 28: Earth brought forth living creatures of their kind and everything that crept on earth. God created man in his own image, male and female, to replenish earth and to multiply, and to have dominion over the fowl of the air and everything that moves on earth Every fruit of a tree yielding seed, every fowl of the air, everything creeps upon earth and every green herb for meat.
- On day 7, Oct. 29. God decided to take rest. (Having discovered that rest is good), God later made that day holy, named it Sabbath, and ordered that none of his human creations would do any work on that day.
Note: Dates month and year may be different or insignificant to Jewish and some other Christian beliefs.
Bishop Ussher, who calculates that by a day God meant a day by our reckoning, did his calculations from the genealogy of all patriarchal generations starting with Adam and ending at Jesus. I am not sure whether he placed the birthday of Jesus on 25th December or January 1, and also whether he used the Julian Calendar which started the dates 45 years before.
Ussher lived at a time when those asked questions were had their tongue pulled out and their butt placed on a burning stake. Much to the chagrin of the priests and preachers, some people began to ask questions. Evidences in the form of fossils lie spraling all over and under ancient rocks to laugh at the idea that the earth (and hence the universe, of which Bible makes no mention) are only 6000 years old. Some evangelical creationists are in full agreement with the 6000-year life span of earth which will soon perish when Christ comes down to take the faithful ones to heaven and to send the rest of us to hell.While evangelical creationists like Ken Hovind (b. 1953), quite agree with this date, and the second coming of Christ, there are other Christians, seeing that there is no way possible that a 6000-year period could be right, who argue that a day in the Bible did not mean a 24-hour period, but several years. For instance, God planted seeds on the third day and had tree come up in due course, which meant the third day should have lasted several years. Fair enough; all those years the trees and plants had no way to make their food with photo-synthesis because God ordered the sun to appear in the sky those many years later. People of faith have a way of getting themselves tied up in a tight knot. As you keep listening to them, you come to the view that Christian apologetics have a lot to apologize for.
God created Adam in his own image, shaping him in clay and blowing 
His breath into him. A little while after Adam stood up as a full-grown man evidently with a naval that served no purpose and all the other paraphernalia and genitalia (unless God lacked male genitalia and invented it in situ) in God’s own image. That God made Adam in his own image is well known, and was recently certified by Pope Francis, the most liberal Pope in History. He said:
Well, that’s clear enough since it is already in the Bible. So the Pope who also said that God did not use a magic wand for creation, further clarified :” “First of all, He gave us his dna, that is, he made us his children; he created us in his image, in his image and likeness, like him”. And, the Pope added, those “who resembles him a lot or a little are his children: they have received this identity”.
The Pope did not clarify who exactly resembles God with 99.9999% of God’s DNA – the white man, the black man, brown man, ‘yellow’ man or the pigmy. Since Pope made this statement that He made us (February 7, 2017) to a largely white audience, we should conclude that God made white people with his DNA in the first place, and the rest of us got it in lesser degrees. Just as significantly, the Pope decrees that God functions by the dictates of his DNA, just as we all do. Who coded God’s DNA shall for now hang overhead like a trillion-dollar question.
Subsequently God decided that Adam needed a companion to while away his time. So He put Adam to sleep and removed a rib of his to create the woman, but not exactly in his own image. We do not know why God formed this companion with different sexual endowments. Certainly sinful sex was never in God’s mind, nor did the Omniscient one anticipate that Eve would be tempted by the snake in Adam’s tree.
God also made cherubs or cherubims, winged and baby-faced tough cookies. Some of them guard the tree of eternal life lest a modern medical graduate finds it while researching for his PhD. There are angels – all winged but neutered males – who do small chores for God and man. a few, Seraphim their name with six wings each, position themselves around God’s throne to hide His face and feet with spare wings and to generally serve as body-guards (Isaiah, 6: 2-4). Another two of these winged angels provide the motive force to make the throne fly. Job of another couple of these winged guards is to keep chanting ‘Holy, holy, the whole earth is full of glory‘ when God flies while sitting on his throne, the train of his robe filling an entire temple (Ibid).
When God made all the grass, plants and trees on day three, even before he created the sun, the Garden of Eden must have come into being which was where Adam and his companion were created. In that garden, there were two fruit-bearing trees – one had aphrodisiac fruits while the other had fruits that gave one eternal life. Being a jealous God (whose name was ‘Jealous’ – Ex. 34:14)), He warned Adam not to eat from the tree of Kamasutra knowledge. If you ate its fruit, God lied, you’d die. Actually it was not an entire lie because Adam did die some 900 years later. Since females are insignificant, We are not told when his female companion – whom he subsequently named Eve – died.
Of the tree of life, God wisely refrained from saying anything for fear that Adam would become equal to Him. To be doubly sure, He put cherubs on guard around the tree of eternal life which presumably still stands unnoticed somewhere in the Middle East.
Now they were naked, and being feminine with that special set of genitalia that God equipped her with for whatever reason, Adam’s surgically created ‘sidekick‘ was filled with curiosity. She set her eyes on this allegorical snake. Being the first woman on earth, she neither knew nor cared about death.
“You won’t die, the Old Man was lying,” said the snake, by now erect and standing. Adam too was tickled by the situation. So they ate the fruit of sin. Stripped of the allegory, they screwed and loved it. As it was to happen forever in future, they dressed after eating the proverbial fruit of sin.
This leafy apparel that they wore gave them away when God arrived in the garden to enjoy the cool breeze. (Apart from loving a walk in the garden, God also loved to smell burning flesh and the smell of incenses, wanted gold decorations on his tabernacle, and hated all other gods whose existence He recognized by sitting in judgment over them). God, being a jealous God (whose name was Jealous) immediately knew from the hurried dressing that the original sin had been committed. He threw the couple out of Eden, cursing the man to work hard, and the woman to bleed and to suffer pain before, after and during child birth. The snake was told to eat and crawl on dust and to be enemies with the descendants of the woman and be stamped to death by her sons (Gen 2:14-15)
Now whether eating and sharing an apple or the nefarious and urgent concupiscence – for employing the biological equipment provided by God himself constituted the original sin shall remain an indeterminate factor in Judaic-Christian history. The punishment for the original sin, however, shall keep visiting the descendants of the original sinners – Adam and Eve – till eternity.
Having not read the Bible, nor being unable to hear anything unless it came as a vibration on earth, snake cared a hoot for God’s command and has since then been eating frogs and rats instead of dust. Offspring of women have reconciled their enmity with snakes; many believe that killing a snake would affect the ecological balance. Huge snakes called Anna Conda do roam the wild, and have known to be dangerous. At least one Anna Conda is known to have swallowed a man without bothering to persuade him to sin. In the souther part of India where I come from, king cobras bite and kill unsuspecting farmers walking in their fields without even giving them time to go home and commit the original sin with their wives.
Man and woman, of course, heard and understood the command (Gen 2: 14- 19). Till recently, women have been suffering the terrible pangs of child birth. Now priests and Pastors curse the doctors who give them spinal injections to relieve the pain. Men have been working hard just as God had cursed them – some breaking stones in the baking sun, some toiling in dangerous coalmines and many others blabbering away in boardrooms and yet others hitting golf balls on soothing green fields while lesser humans carry their clubs for them. One curse that man and wife could not escape is that of death. We do not know why animals, of whom concupiscence was not forbidden and were also told to go and multiply, still suffer death.
However, you cannot say that Biblical creation is a myth, it is a living ‘history’ whose credibility to old women and children has been boosted greatly by preachers, pastors, Bishops, writers, radio jockeys and movie makers. A very impressive ‘The Bible: In the Beginning’ extravagantly created with stunning effects in the pre-digital era of 1966 was preceded and followed by several other movies and videos in several languages. The sex content implicit in the story of Creation was exploited in a Malayalam movie Adhya Papam (The Original Sin – 1988) by a little-known director and even two lesser known actors who played Adam and Eve, naturally in the nude. This was one movie that was loved by the pious and the connoisseur of the lurid. Needless to say, the producer made money and the actress went on to get a role in a hundred soft-porn movies in South Indian languages.
One way to escape death in which you’d roast alive in hell till eternity on account of sexual crime by Adam and Eve is to trust the person who alone was born without his parents committing the heinous and despicable original sin, the act of making love. Such a person was Jesus Christ, a product of what is known as Immaculate Conception. In this mode of conception – which took place only once in human history – God sent his spirit (also known as Holy Ghost) to impregnate an innocent virgin named Mary, already betrothed to a young carpenter named Joseph. To ensure that her virginity remained intact, this ghost entered Mary’s womb through an unknown alternative route and lodged God’s seed therein. It is not clear by what passage the baby took birth without disturbing the lady’s hymen, but it’s not polite to ask. The lady is still known as Virgin Mary, as if the undisturbed hymen in her vagina is a matter of great significance.
Not being born of sin, Jesus became the redeemer of all those who were born from the original sin. Thus all those who put their faith in Jesus and believe this cock-and-bull
story escape death and hellfire.
If you carry the impression that this Biblical story of creation is no longer believed in this age of science and reasoning, you couldn’t be more wrong. Thousands of preachers, pastors, Bishops and Evangelists in the United States demand that Creation be taught in schools. ACE (Accelerated Christian Education) group of schools teach it in the United Kingdom. In 2004, a teacher in Grace International School (which was graceful enough to warn me that they teach Christian principles when I went to enrol my child) angrily forced my six-year old grandson to retract his first project – a half-page scribble on Dynosaurs.
“Do not bring such nonsense to class,” the teacher warned him. “There never was any such thing as dynosaurs which finds no mention in the Bible.”
Scientists in general say that a theory to be elegant, it has to be simple and compact. The Biblical theory of the origin of the universe, known as Creation, is simple; easy enough for a child to understand, and compact – packed and shipped in six days flat. Einstein said that a theory should be as simple as possible, but not simpler. There is nothing simpler than : God said let there be, and there was, and good saw it was good (since God did not know that it would be good).
Nobody says that a theory should be intelligent, reasonable or testable – at least in a mathematical or empirical model. There lies the success of Biblical creation, supported by at least three major religions and their hundreds of break-away sects, albeit with minor variations.
Who created God? If there has to be a cause behind everything and every being, what was the cause beind God? Kent Hovind had a smart answer for this question that won much applause. Hovind pointed out that the Bible began with “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” which means time, space (heaven) and matter (earth) were created together, and the God of the Bible exists outside all the three. Like man who created the computer does not exist within the computer, nor is he a part of the computer, so does God exist outside time, space and matter.
Good argument. Never forget for a moment that Hovind is talking specifically about the God of the Bible. He quotes the Bible verbatim because that is the authority, full and final. There is no allegory here, just a statement of divine truth. God created the heaven and earth, which is the same as space and matter, and therewith began Time. Just as, to repeat, a person could create a computer its software and built-in calendar, but would remain outside all the three.
“Outside space time and matter” is a phrase stolen from modern science that virtually denies God. Let us say Bible did mean the entire space by heaven and all the matter by earth. Let us pretend there is no matter outside the earth and for the moment take sides with the evangelist,
Now, God of the Bible had the shape of man, for it was in his form that he made man.
Gen 1:27 . So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
So God has nose, which couldn’t be for a show -but to smell (a sweet aroma of burnt flesh – Ex 29:18) and needs fresh air to breathe. He cannot bear anything unwashed or unhygienic – or even malformed like a hunchback or a dwarf near his altar. For whatsoever man he be that hath a blemish, he shall not approach: a blind man, or a lame, or he that hath a flat nose, or any thing superfluous. God has eyes, so he has to have matter to see and to discriminate the perfect from the defective and the good from the bad (Lev. 21:16–23). Unlike a pagan god who might have eyes all around his head, this god has the same kind of eyes as man has – and hence can’t see behind him or beyond his line of vision – which is why he didn’t notice Eve being tempted. He actually fashioned man from dust like a piece of sand-art, and breathed into his nostrils (Gen 2:7), again showing that God has lungs, windpipe and a mouth; thus he breathes, hence needs air from this space. This has to be so because God has the same image of man.
God of the Bible surgically fashioned the woman from one of the man’s ribs, so he has hands to work with matter. He worked for six days, which means he was not outside of time because work is a function of time. There was no one out there to count the number of days; even the sun and the moon were created on the fourth day only although time came into being on day one. God counted the days abstractly without the movement of the sun for a benchmark. On the sixth day, just after ordering things around He created man with his own hands and blowing breath into him, and surgically implanting a woman by his side. He made them both stark naked and ignorant. God got so tired that he had to take rest and decided that, as a strict norm at the risk of immediate murder, no man will work on that day. When God rested, he wanted man to rest and called the day the Sabbath. When an ignorant villager picked up sticks for firewood on a Sabbath, He had him killed for the crime (Numb. 15:32–35). You cannot find a more material God than the God of the Bible.
God also decided that man should have no knowledge of good and evil.
“ Gen 2:17 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”
God lies that they would die when they ate the fruit of knowledge, or perhaps He had not dared to try out the fruit himself. A wily serpent knew for sure that they would not die ‘if they ate the fruit of knowledge’. Alternatively, God exaggerated about the consequence being death because He was so jealous and possessive of his own knowledge of sexual pleasure. Why else would he furnish differential but complimentary and simultaneously excitable genitalia to Adam and Eve?
God knew, or at least believed, that man would become equal to him if he acquired:
- The knowledge of good and evil.
- Ate the fruit from the tree of eternal life.
Genesis 3:22 And the LORD God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.”
Note the words””like one of us.” Who are us? Did God mean us as the royalty addresses itself? If that’s what God intended, then what did he mean one of us? God was one of the many Gods of his time. This God, tells the Holy Book, also had sons. (Gen.6: 1–4). That by sons Bible meant angels or some other entities wouln’t wash: nowhere else in the Bible are angels or anyone else addressed as sons of God in the O.T. In the New Testament, Jesus says God is the father of all, but refers to himself Son of Man. Jesus is the Son of God from Joseph descended by 75 generations from Adam (Luke 3:22–38).
God needed space and time for his movements. He discovered the disobedience of Adam and Eve only when he came to the garden of Eden to enjoy the cool breeze and found them decent. To protect his soldiers, he needed to patrol the surroundings of their camp to deliver them and to defeat their enemies – he couldn’t do it while sitting in his throne in the sky. God is prone to making mistakes (as creating man which he regretted – Gen 6:6, and then cursing the ground on account of man, which he promised never to do again Gen 8:22.
God is not above stepping on shit while he walks on night patrol like any human guard(Deut: 23–13).
Deuteronomy 23:11. As part of your equipment have something to dig with, and when you relieve yourself, dig a hole and cover up your excrement.
12. “You shall also have a place outside the camp and go out there, 13. and you shall have a spade among your tools, and it shall be when you sit downoutside, you shall dig with it and shall turn to cover up your excrement. 14. “Since the LORD your God walks in the midst of your camp to deliver you and to defeat your enemies before you, therefore your camp must be holy; and He must not see anything indecent among you or He will turn away from you.
All these sacred passages show that the God of the Bible has his limitations within space, matter and time. He was walking in the evening cool of the day in the garden of Eden (Gen 3:8) when he discovered that the duo had acquired the knowledge of good (nudity) and evil (sex). Incidentally, God is susceptible to the ecological elements – he loved the cool breeze in the garden he created.
Gen. 3:22 . And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.”
The man that God created within time and space with matter, according to the Bible, lacked just two characteristics to be equal to God – knowledge of good and evil, and eternal life. In this sacred passage we do not see an alien God from outside space matter and time, but a man-God with just two superior qualities from the ordinary man at the time of creation. We also notice that He was one of the worst preceptors that one could ever expect. This God was not just jealous, being which is a very earthly vice, but also utterly loathful of his own creation. I do not know of any computer designer who would get jealous if his computer gets too much memory or processing power, or acquires an operational life that would even exceed his own.
God loved food, and till the day he got his own secretly begotten Son killed as a cannibal offering, he wanted goats, oxen and other animals fed to him as burnt offering and piece offering. Burnt offering is a sweet savor to God ((Num. 29:2) He appreciated Abel’s supply of butchered goods, but disliked Cain’s healthy and ethically produced vegetables and fruits. God is a carnivore (Gen 4: 3–5) who needed matter (meat) for his gourmet pleasure. God of the Bible is just a carnivorous glutton, a very earthly being.
God of the Bible, who is supposed to have dictated his own eulogies and the history of man to Moses never mentioned the millions of galaxies, of the difference between stars and planets or anything beyond the sun and the moon which He hung up in the sky for light in the day and night respectively. God threatened that stars would fall on earth (Mark 13:25) (like so many LED bulbs shattering) when the end time comes; so he was woefully ignorant of the relative size of stars and our little planet. God was not aware that it was microbes that caused most diseases. God thought that the sky is a hard firmament and put his throne and 24 Elders above this sky (Revelation 4:4) , and actually rides astride a winged Cherub (Psalms 18:10). He did not even know that there was little or no gravity for him to sit firmly on his golden throne, nor air to breathe in the sky above – all of which, I’m sorry to say, are the signs of a primitive ignoramus who belongs to this very earthy matter and primitive time.
No, God of the Bible is not identical to the man who made a computer and lived outside it. He was one who is supposed to have built a house (earth) with a ceiling (heaven above) and lived on top of it, proudly proclaiming that “I’m a jealous God, my name is Jealous” (Ex. 34:14).
A God outside time space and matter could be the ‘formless, devoid of attributes and emotions” god of ancient Hindu philosophers who, for a living, soon yielded this concept to those who built and worshiped thousands of gods and goddesses.
If there is one god, there is no reason why there can’t be several – the job of creation, maintenance and replacement should be unimaginably huge. The sole advantage of Monotheism – one lonely jealous God – is that, as Richard Dawkins once famously quoted, you need to knockout just one God and not too many gods to get at sensible, scientific and humanistic atheism.
Vishumenon's Blog 