Many people, especially Americans, believe that the creation story in the first chapter of the Bible, the Book of Genesis, is literally true. Dr. Michael Shermer looks at the story and interprets it in the light of current scientific knowledge.
Dr. Michael Shermer is a well-known historian and intellectual who has written several books on why we believe the things we shouldn't and who is also very active as a noted sceptic.
In Genesis Revisited, Michael Shermer undertakes a re-write of the beautiful creation myth of the Bible with words of today, or as he puts it:
To convey the logical absurdity of trying to squeeze the round peg of science into the square hole of religion, I penned the following scientific revision of the Genesis creation story. It is not intended as a sacrilege of the poetic beauty of Genesis; rather, it is a mere extension of what the creationists have already done to Genesis in their insistence that it be read not as mythic saga but as scientific prose. If Genesis were written in the language of modern science, it would read something like this.
This re-creation is now available as a video on YouTube. Most of it is a re-wording of the original story, but there are a few additions as well, such as why God created theologians and anthropologists.
This rewrite of the Biblical myth is not merely a rewrite but more like a re-creation of the myth. It starts thusly:
In the beginning, specifically on October 23rd, 4004 BC, at noon, out of quantum foam fluctuation, God created the Big Bang, followed by cosmological inflation and an expanding universe.
The story then goes on saying that God commanded hydrogen atoms to fuse and become helium. He also ordered them to release light in the process. Since God could now see what he was doing, he created earth.
The second day, God gets himself in trouble because he creates sky light makers. That's no problem, were it not that they seem to be so far away that their light needs more time to arrive on earth than the universe is old. But God is omnipotent and omniscient, so he devises a solution for that problem.
On the third day, God brings all the waters together and then allows the continents to drift apart using plate tectonics. He also causes subduction zones to create mountains and to cause earthquakes. God creates volcanic islands in weak spots of the crust and astutely places organisms on them that are similar but not quite identical to the ones on the mainlands in order to confuse humans.
The next day, God creates animals that bear their own kind and he then declares a very important law, discovered by Creationists:
Thou shalt not evolve into new species, and thy equilibrium shall not be punctuated.
God also places fossils in the rocks to confuse humans into thinking that they are older than 4004 BC.
The fishes were created on the fifth day, together with the whales. Furthermore, he declared that microevolution was permitted, but not macroevolution, another law discovered by Creationists.
The sixth day, God created the pongids (not pongidids as said in the video) and the hominids. He made them 98% similar, and two of them he named Adam and Eve (1). In the book God wrote about it all, this is explained one way in one chapter and another way in another chapter. God understood that this is confusing, so he created theologians to figure it out.
God also placed an abundance of teeth, jaws and other bones of transitional fossils from pre-Adamite creatures in the ground. One of them could walk upright like a human but had a brain as small as an ape. Since that is confusing, God created palaeoanthropologists to find an explanation.
While God was wrapping it all up, he realized that:
Adam’s immediate descendants would not understand inflationary cosmology, global general relativity, quantum mechanics, astrophysics, biochemistry, paleontology, and evolutionary biology, so he created creation myths.
There are so very many of them, and God realized that this was confusing as well. So, he created anthropologists and mythologists to make sense of it all.
The video ends by explaining that God was now very tired and that he needed a rest, so he proclaimed "Thank Me It's Friday" and thus the weekend was created.
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(1) The attempt at confusion worked, since Michael Shermer has it wrong: the Bible actually says that God called them both Adam and that Adam named Eve:
Genesis 3:20.
