THE RANDLE REPORT

GOD THE BUILDER – What took him so long?

Raquel Welch, 1,000,000 years BC.

The Old Testament description of building our world in a week is regularly invoked by lazy pundits, and swallowed by lazier listeners, as not only ridiculing the Christian godhead, but as a justification for dispensing entirely with Man’s rich spiritual heritage.

In its own way though, it is no more absurd than any other attempt to explain or rewrite history.

Nowadays it would be told in a different way – by one of those earnest historians who have spent so much time gazing at bygone times that they have loosed their moorings and now speak of the past in the present tense. Accompanied by as many flashes and crashes as can be contrived, and waving their arms frantically to gain our notoriously fickle attention, they would say something to the effect of: ‘So Jehovah is out on his own. Genetics tell us that his father was probably a mason, and his mother a flower-arranger. He’s looking at the empty firmament, and he wants to interact with it; to have a creation event.’

But the author of Genesis and the TV pundit are both imposing their concepts, their mores, and their second-hand ideas in the name of reporting or analysis.

If Jehovah was a god in the terms in which he is described elsewhere, he wouldn’t have needed nearly as long to do the job. He could have said, ‘Let there be whatever’ on the Monday and lo, he could have putteth His feet up for the rest of the week. The time period was put in there to sex up the document; to overwhelm the reader with the sheer number of things brought into being at one celestial throne-sitting.

People always ask creative types: ‘How long did it take you to do that?’ He knew no good would come of telling them it was done in the twinkling of an eye. The time put in is what gives it its value.

And time is at the heart of the dilemma here – the great debate between the creationist and the already-there-ist. If he built the place in a week and put the first people in it by Friday, how do you explain the fact that, between the formation of the Earth and the arrival of Raquel Welch in a rudely fashioned Mesozoic bikini, dinosaurs had been roaming the place for donkey’s years unmolested by anything even vaguely humanoid?

Rather than dismissing it out of hand, there are a number of ways you could come at this. For example, if Jehovah brought time into being when he was doing all that other stuff, then the whole frame of reference changes.

Maybe, on the other hand, the Earth didn’t get up to speed straight away, allowing for much longer days in which he could not only get the work done here but take time off to quote for other jobs. If Adam was on his own for much of that time, it’s not unlikely that the trilobites, dinosaurs and scary-toothed tigers failed to run across him. He might well have cleaved to Raquel, given half a chance, but the fact is that the whole story is being intentionally misinterpreted by both sides for their own ends.

A mere couple of thousand years ago you couldn’t move for gods − plural, specialised, all-powerful and not. Old Jehovah, as his name suggests, was what he was, but he was not what he was later cracked up to be.

Just as the gods on Mount Olympus concerned themselves with the beings and the doings of Rome, so he was the god-in-chief of the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers at the period under discussion. To the people living therein he was the lord their god, and he never claimed any other wasness.

Then the Jews, the Mohammedans and the Christians went over to the new-fangled idea of a single God in charge of everything and, in the ensuing muddle, Jehovah ceased to was what he was, becoming what he was not, first in his own land and later, thanks to a confection dreamed up in Rome, all over the world. An easy mistake to make since, like Jehovah, the Christian god is what He is, but what He is is not so jealous or bad-tempered as his namesake, but rather more all-seeing, all-knowing and all-forgiving, at least up to a point. It’s likely this case of mistaken identity has had much to do with the disappointment that has caused the falling off in congregations in recent times.

It’s all you can do to get Him to smite anyone, and He lets people get away with murder, while keeping the faithful under uncomfortable and unwarranted surveillance; God the builder become God the chief-constable.

The worldwide dissemination of the New Testament inevitably caused numerous confusions, with or without the tinkering and mistranslations with which it has been plagued. As it was, people set its stories and parables in landscapes of their own experience. But the biggest confusion came from combining the Old and New Testaments together as if the former had any part in Christianity beyond being the foundation from which Jesus Christ was to break away.

He wanted everyone to ‘turn the other cheek’. It was some kind of Middle-Eastern Mr Angry  who demanded an eye for an eye. There’s no conflict until you try to reconcile the non-Christian Old Testament with the more or less entirely Christian New.

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository