The following is a guest post by OpenDiary blogger Atheist Under Ur Bed. This is part of an ongoing series that will be posted each Monday. You can read the introduction to this series by clicking here.

Welcome once again to Monday School – “The Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense You Learned Yesterday!” Past lessons have pointed out the many general problems we immediately encounter when we attempt to reconcile the concept of a perfect God with the very imperfect Bible as the means He chose to get His message out.

In today’s lesson I shall attempt to point out some of the additional, specific problems that pop up when we open that Bible and attempt to read it as the word of an actual God.

Please try to contain your excitement as I plunge right into…

It seems that virtually every culture has its creation myth. Most seem to involve strange, supernatural beings and actions which very few people outside that culture ever took seriously. Over time, the vast majority of these creation myths seem to have withered and died away. The Biblical account of Creation, however, seems to still be accepted as literally true by many Americans. According to a 1998 Gallop poll, 33% of those surveyed said they believed that the Bible is the actual word of God while only 17% believed it to be nothing more than a book of legends and fables.

(For more on this, see http://www.gallup.com/poll/releases/pr000615b.asp )

Does a literal belief in Creation by God as described in Genesis make any sense at all?

Consider:

1. The Problem Of Where & When

The Bible opens with the words “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Where was God before this? Where could He have been if He created everything and every place? When could He have been there if the beginning was really THE beginning? To say that He stood “outside” space and time is essentially meaningless and an abuse of language akin to saying that He was in a three-sided square or east of the sun and west of the moon. To say that He existed in time and/or space seems to say that these things are somehow bigger than He is, or exist independently of Him.

Bottom line: It seems impossible to reconcile our abstract concept of God with other concepts we have which are clearly grounded in reality. The only way to reconcile this basic conflict seems to be to reject either the concept of God or our concept of reality. To reject the concept of God seems the reasonable choice; to reject reality, on the other hand, seems to be the essence of madness.

2. The Problem Of Why

If God is in fact infinite, all-powerful, and all-knowing, why did He create anything at all? What could the heavens and the earth give Him that He didn’t already have?

3. The Problem Of How

If God is all-powerful, why did He create things in phases (just like the lesser gods of so many creation myths)? Why did it take Him six days? Why didn’t He create everything all at once in a single instant? Either God isn’t all-powerful and required six days, or He used a less efficient means of creation when He could have used a better one (that is, He made work for Himself unnecessarily) and so He isn’t perfect.

4. The Problem Of God’s Performance Review

Why does the God of Genesis need to see that things are good after He creates them? Didn’t He know beforehand that what He was about to create was going to be good? Did He really have to stand back and evaluate His work exactly like an ancient Mesopotamian potter examining his wares before offering them for sale? (See Myth, Legend, and Custom in the Old Testament by Theodor H. Gaster, p. 6.) Does an all-knowing, all-powerful God really need the feedback provided by His senses to know the quality of what He does? If you’re all-knowing, what do you even need senses for? Was there a chance that a perfect God would look and see that His creation was bad?? If so, He’s not a perfect God; if not, looking and evaluating is an utterly pointless act. Do perfect beings engage in pointless acts?

5.The Problem Of Evil

At the end of six days in Genesis, God looks and declares that everything He made was very good. Did He overlook the serpent destined to corrupt Adam and Eve? Or was this serpent very good, too? If He overlooked the serpent, God isn’t all-seeing or all-knowing; i.e., not God. If the serpent was very good, however, how could it ever go so very bad? (Did God, perhaps, make the serpent later? Exodus 20:11 says no – everything was made in those first six days. Sorry.)

6. The Problem Of The Unclean Animals

Genesis 7:2 quotes God as telling Noah to take more clean animals aboard the ark than unclean animals. If everything God created was very good, how can some animals be unclean?

7. The Problem Of The Food Chain

Apparently one of the other things which God created in those first six days was the food chain in which the very existence of animals depends upon the eating of other animals. Did God overlook this system at the end of day six, or did He really see all the violence, pain, and death essential to that system and declare it “very good”? If this system didn’t exist before the serpent corrupted Adam and Eve, aren’t these animals suffering unjustly because of the actions of people with which they had nothing to do? In any event, it seems that God either gave predators their deadly teeth and claws when He created them or He found it necessary to go back and modify His work later. If He designed them that way from the start, He seems a cruel, sadistic being. If He had to go back and modify His work, it obviously wasn’t perfect and He seems a flawed designer. Thus, the God of the Bible seems either to be cruel and sadistic or imperfect; i.e., not God at all.

8. The Problem Of The Seventh Day

The Bible tells us that God rested on the seventh day. How is it possible that an all-powerful God needed to rest? This seems to make about as much sense as a car with an infinitely large fuel tank having to go to a gas station once a week.

9. The Problem Of Plagiarism

Once again, the writers of the Bible seem to have been less inspired by God than by another, older culture.

“[T]he creation tale received its present shape after the Babylonian Exile [i.e., 6th century B.C.] and was, in fact, a version of the Babylonian creation myth, purified of its polytheism and grossness….” Asimov’s Guide to the Bible: A Historical Look at the Old and New Testaments

“A comparison with Near Eastern cosmogonies shows the degree of indebtedness of the Israelite version to literary precedent….” Understanding Genesis (The Heritage of Biblical Israel), Nahum M. Sarna, p. 4.

“Biblical scholars trace elements of the Mosaic account back to the Babylonian creation epic (Enuma elish), which was current in the 22nd century BC.” The Encyclopedia Britannica, “Earth Sciences: Foundation In Myth And Legend”

Once again, the Bible seems to be an altered re-telling of somebody else’s story. I choose to reject that story as myth, no better or worse than all the other creation myths which recount very different stories. If others choose to embrace this particular myth as truth, why don’t they embrace the oldest, truest version of it they can find rather than the corrupt version found in Genesis? Because the Genesis version is the one they’ve been given all their lives? Because our Judeo-Christian culture has made obtaining and reading Babylonian holy books difficult and socially unacceptable? Sorry, those aren’t good reasons if the goal here is to discover and embrace the truth rather than to “go along to get along.”