There are too many flawed, naïve ideas about an ancient god in these pages
In my article I posted here a few days ago, I described a few of the problems posed by the first few chapters of Genesis 1-11. The most horrifying of which is Yahweh’s genocide designed to kill off all human and animal life on the earth—well, the earth as it was understood at the time. Only Noah’s family, and the animals he had collected in the ark survived. This is extraordinarily bad behavior on the part of this god. How can modern devout folks brush it off, overlook it—or pretend it wasn’t so bad?
After Yahweh’s crime was over, Noah built an altar to burn a few animal bodies, so that Yahweh could savor the aroma of charred animal flesh. That is a primitive idea indeed, and certainly does not align well with what we know of the cosmos today. As far as the Genesis authors were concerned, the earth was flat, and the world of the gods was just a few miles overhead. That concept has been thoroughly discredited in the last few hundred years. Galileo (1564-1642), using a telescope explore the night sky, found that there are other planets orbiting the sun. Hence the sun orbiting the earth could not be the truth, and a divine realm just overhead was hard to defend. The church placed him under house arrest.
It was only in 1923 that Edwin Hubble demonstrated that our galaxy is not the entire cosmos, which was a common opinion among astronomers at the time. Using the telescope on Mt. Wilson, Hubble was able to determine that an impressive swirl of stars (thought to be in our galaxy) is indeed the Andromeda Galaxy, about 2.5 million light years away. We now know that there are billions of other galaxies. If there is a creator god managing this vast cosmos, how likely is it that such a god is pleased by the aroma of burnt animal flesh? And that he changed his mind when he smelled it?
A slight digression here:
It was in 1950 that Pope Pius XII announced the Dogma of the Virgin Mary’s bodily assumption to heaven—less than thirty years after Hubble’s discovery, and three hundred years after Galileo’s insights about how our solar system functions. Was Pius XII counting on the ignorance of the faithful about these developments? Did he assume/hope that most of the devout would take for granted the biblical view of heaven and earth? Probably very few would wonder if Mary is somewhere in orbit between Earth and Venus—or Earth and Mars.
“The Noah built an altar to the LORD and took of every clean animal and of every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And when the LORD smelled the pleasing odor, the LORD said in his heart, ‘I will never again curse the ground because of humans, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done. As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease.” (Genesis 8:20-22)
In other words, Yahweh’s genocide didn’t cause humans to reform their behavior: “…the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth…” How can we avoid the conclusion that this god’s big mistake when he created humans could not be corrected? “I really screwed up—but just deal with it as best you can.”
Just how smart, how all-knowing, was Yahweh if he needed a reminder not to commit genocide again? “I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh, and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.” (Genesis 9:13-15) Clearly, this ancient author had no clue that a rainbow is a natural phenomenon, not requiring any god to set it.
When devout readers come to Genesis 10, they must wonder what’s going on. The ancient author was focused on boosting Noah’s reputation. But this is a lost cause, because Noah is a folklore character. There is no evidence whatever that Noah was a real person—and so many of the details in the flood story are farfetched, to say the least. But the author was convinced that Noah alone, of all the people at that time, was righteous in Yahweh’s sight. After the flood was over, Yahweh issued this command to Noah: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth,” (Genesis 9:1) echoing the original command to Adam and Eve.
So in Genesis 10 we find the tedious recital of the descendants of Noah and his sons, concluding with verse 32: “These are the families of Noah’s sons, according to their genealogies, in their nations, and from these the nations spread abroad on the earth after the flood.” Most readers won’t bother to wonder how any of this data about descendants can be verified.
Even when I was a teenager, I learned what an etiological myth is. It is a story designed to explain the origin of something, and it can be purely the product of human imagination. We find this kind of myth in Genesis 11:1-9, namely, the account of the Tower of Babel.
“Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as they migrated eastward, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, ‘Come let us make bricks and fire them thoroughly.’ And they had brick for stone and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.’ (Genesis 11:1-4)
But Yahweh was not pleased.
“The LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And the LORD said, ‘Look, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.’ So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.” (Genesis 11:5-8)
How is this such a bad thing? “…nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.” How is “confusing their language” a good thing? We can suspect that the creator of this story was a product of a rural culture, and looked with disfavor upon cities. And he had no idea whatever as to how so many different languages evolved. Truly this qualifies as goofy folklore/mythology.
The rest of the Book of Genesis doesn’t get much better in rising above bad theology, as I will discuss in articles to come.
David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. He is the author of Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith, now being reissued in several volumes:
• Guessing About God (2023)
• Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also available.
His YouTube channel is here. At the invitation of John Loftus, he has written for the Debunking Christianity Blog since 2016.
The Cure-for-Christianity Library©, now with more than 500 titles, is here. A brief video explanation of the Library is here.
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