TL:DR: The Genesis Question part eleven

Hi, Everybody!

Sunday:

1 April 18

Hi Matt!

You must be running out of my Biblical commentaries along about now. So…

6 April 14
 Hi Troy and Mia!
 Okay, getting back to chapter three.  When Mr. Ross writes
 However we must at all times remember  that we remain limited in our knowledge and understanding, so our interpretations will continually fall short of perfection.  Thus, we must always be willing to adjust and fine-tune. Conclusions can never become rigidly fixed I definitely agree with him.  However, my own view is that the limited nature of our knowledge is too extensive and too fundamental so that falling short of perfection dramatically understates our situation.  A willingness to "adjust and fine-tune" is certainly beneficial, but only if adjustment and fine-tuning is all that's required -- we're close to The Truth and just need a few tweaks to get there.  To cite the obvious example: if God and the YHWH are two different beings that's definitely going to throw pretty much all suppositions and "evidence" into doubt which are based on the idea that God and YHWH are just two different names for the same being.
 It's rather -- it seems to me -- like the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change).  They've been predicting an ecological dystopia for decades now and a dramatic hockey stick curve in rising temperatures that will leave all coastal areas flooded and the polar ice cap melted and the evidence just isn't there to support it after 1998.
 But the adherence to their fallacy is not under discussion as far as they are concerned just as I'm the only monotheist who sees merit in the idea that God and YHWH are two separate beings.
 It seems to me a self-evident fact attached to the scientific method that -- given a choice between evidence-based conclusions and adherence to ideology in defiance of evidence -- human beings, scientists and laypeople alike will always opt for the latter.
 "Conclusions can never become rigidly fixed".  Conclusions SHOULD never become rigidly fixed but conclusions USUALLY become rigidly fixed, whatever the subject under discussion, in my experience.  Few people adhere to my own view that -- once you get outside of Newton's Laws of General Motion and how they apply ONLY to our unique circumstance as physically incarnated beings here in planet earth -- pretty much all views need to come with "as I see it" and "in my opinion" attached but seldom do.
 Mr. Ross goes on: "For this reason the scientific method is best practiced repetitively".  Well, yes, it certainly is but, again, to cite the IPCC as the most public face of science in our present age, if you don't revisit FOUNDATIONAL precepts -- like exponential warming -- as givens based on new evidence which refute your precept then it seems to me you aren't actually practicing science or the scientific method. What you are doing is repeating past errors by putting ideological blinders on.
 And well, here we are in 2014.  We believe, as a civilization, in man-made global warming even though the evidence doesn't support it and hasn't supported it for some time.
 My own view is that this is a general condition.  We mistake cause for effect in any situation where the data will support either one -- even in those situations where the data points in a more likely direction -- if we don't favour that "most likely" conclusion and have to fudge our "experiments" to maintain our scientific mythology: the ideology we -- and the government funding for that theory -- favours. 
 The problem (in my IPCC example) isn't climate, in my view, the problem is weather which is always unpredictable.  No matter the extent of our scientific advances, we still know close to zilch about the fundamentals of weather prediction, but we behave as if we are never wrong about predicting weather…or climate.
 This time of year in Canada, the record high temperature and the record low temperature on any given date will be 30 degrees celsius apart.  You can assert -- and the IPCC has asserted and does assert  -- that this indicates that man is causing wide fluctuations in general temperatures by polluting the environment.  That doesn't alter the fact that what they are doing is looking at evidence which supports the conclusion:  "weather varies widely" and changing that to "man-made changes to the earth are causing dramatic climate change which will destroy life on this planet as we know it.".   Two very different conclusions calling for two very different responses.
 Returning to Chapter Three:
 FROM THE HEAVENS TO EARTH'S SURFACE
 This is a good example of what I'm talking about right here.  Mr. Ross has Genesis 1:2 as
 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters while the KJV has it as
 And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness upon the face of the deep: and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters See, in my opinion, the punctuation in the KJV is wrong -- which is what's led whoever has done the translation for Mr. Ross' Bible to basically rewrite the text.  We have, collectively, since 1611 chosen to put form and void together to describe the earth and we seem to be stuck with that interpretation in perpetuity.  In my view, the earth wasn't void, but the earth was without form.
 That's the reason that I called my book of Hemingway's misapprehensions FORM AND VOID.  I don't think "form" and "void" belong together.  It makes more sense -- or, rather, supports my own interpretation, a "non-void earth" -- if the concept expressed is:  "the earth was without form" which is then supplemented by "and void and darkness were upon the face of the deep".
 My inference is that this explanation is directed at human beings, but mostly directed at the earth, the YHWH.  God, represented by the "void and darkness" remembers when the YHWH was "without form", before he/she/it was a planet and was just a swirling mass of oxygen-rich, hydrogen-rich raw materials and that's what God is expressing here, it seems to me:  His pre-existence.  He remembers creating the earth and this is how the earth was created.
 In Genesis 2 and 3, the earth gets his/her/its chance to do the same thing: to explain how YHWH created the earth.  Needless to say it doesn't have the same plausible structure that Genesis 1 does.
 Back to Genesis 1:2 to explain what I see:
 There are two "faces" here, which I think is critically important to understanding the text.  Which you can't do with Mr. Ross' Bible because the two faces have disappeared.
 "The face of the deep" and "the face of the waters".  Are "the deep" and "the waters" the same thing?  Well, yes and no, would be my guess.  They're analogous, so the answer is yes.  They're very different so the answer is no.  As fundamental a schism as the difference between male and female, the earth and the seas, grass and trees, the similar-but-different-dichtomies-yet-to-be.
 The "faces" prefigure "the waters above the firmament" and "the waters under the firmament" of 1:7.  "The face of the deep" is, I think, the Face of God. Void and darkness.  God is pure spirit, so there is nothing, physically, to see.  Physically, God is "not there" anywhere you look.
 "The face of the waters" is the face of God's creation, the face of the proto-earth which already exists -- that is, has physically incarnated into its own context which is not God's "void and darkness" context -- but is presently (quite literally!) underwater at this point in the narrative.  God has a face. The earth has a face. Human beings have faces.  That doesn't mean that human beings or the earth are God.
 God himself doesn't (I don't think) "move upon the face of the waters", God's spirit does, just as the text says.  This is, I believe, the Christian "Father". 
 (the capitalization in the KJV could be blasphemous -- if there is only one God, His spirit is just his spirit, not His Spirit. If you capitalize it, you Deify it.  On the other hand, if the Synoptic Jesus is right and this is the Holy Spirit of the Christian trinity -- or, as Christians would have it, Trinity -- then it is is blasphemous to suggest that the Spirit should not be capitalized.  Of just so many perilous dichotomies is monotheism composed.)  

With our severely limited understanding -- at the time that the story was revealed to us -- there would be no real point in addressing the fact that the narrative is billions of years old and was first enacted at the Big Bang.
 Not even the earth, I would suggest, was aware that it was just this unexceptional little chunk of water-covered rock way out in the cosmological boonies.  The earth thought it was God, as, I suspect, every little pile of raw materials in the universe -- suns, galaxies, solar systems, asteroids -- thinks that it is God.
 "Break it to them gently" is the idea behind Genesis 1, I would theorize, once a sufficient number of epochs have enacted themselves on the earth and we have finally arrived at an epoch whose inhabitants, starting with A Dam and Chauah, is sufficiently lucid to bother explaining it to them:
 Here's how creation actually took place/takes place.  "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth".  In the larger context which is not addressed: "This is what happened before the Big Bang which led directly to the Big Bang.  It keeps getting repeated with the same basic structure over and over so that's how it is being explained to you, YHWH.  Here is how you came to be, structurally."
 With those qualifications, I can accept pretty much the balance of what Mr. Ross is saying in Chapter Three:
 The six days of creation (as opposed to Creation:  I don't believe the universe or any part of it is a Deity, it's just the universe) are not necessarily six 24-hour periods, although I would guess that there is probably a subatomic and near-atomic or quasi-atomic context in which that is true.  That is, that "the face of the waters" and the "face of the deep" exist also in "extreme microcosm" just as the creation of the earth is a microcosm of the creation of the sun and the creation of the sun is a microcosm of the creation of the solar system and the creation of the solar system is a microcosm of the creation of the Milky Way and so on, back to the seminal Giant Stars and back from there to the Big Bang and down through every enactment of the Big Bang we see around us -- and can't see around us because it's enacting itself at subatomic, non-physical levels of reality.
 The Koran refers to "a day whose length is fifty-thousand years as you reckon them".  If you think about it, what we think of as a "day" is a single pirouette of the earth in space, so a Biblical day, I would infer, is a single pirouette of -- something.  How long it takes the sun to orbit the point that it's orbiting within the Milky Way?  Or perhaps a more esoteric pirouette in the realm of spirit of which we're not aware?
 I would infer, at any rate, that the "days" as cited in Genesis 1 are universal constants.  In any context in which the enactment of life begins to take place -- where the raw material "waters" of the context-to-be are "without form" and "void and darkness are upon the face of the deep" and "the spirit of God moves upon the waters", I suspect -- from the seminal giant stars after the Big Bang to subatomic levels inaccessible to us -- the six days enact themselves in comparable fashion.
 And that this is happening constantly at a subatomic level in our own context -- an entire microcosmic God and YHWH context coming into being in the length of a work week and then enacting itself over the course of a decade or so before expiring in a comparable fashion to the way we will ultimately expire billions of years from now.  So that the enactment has the appearance of a rehearsal of the events which will transpire in the larger context.
 It would seem to me not to make sense for it to be otherwise.  If you were God, and particularly if you were the YHWH, you wouldn't want any available context for enactment to go to waste given that our context -- where water is able to exist naturally in solid, liquid and gaseous form -- is, quite possibly, exceptional in the context of the universe.
 I'll start on the balance of Mr. Ross' Biblical citations for Chapter Three next week.  There's a BUNCH of them so it might take me a couple of weeks to address them all.
 Best,
 Dave    

Next Time: Ditko and Dave's letters? (What!?!)