WTH
Everything before Genesis 12 is oral tradition pieced together from the poeples of the fertile cresecent and augmented by Abraham's descendants. Is it wrong? I think that taking a timeline constructed from books on cosmology and evolution I can show enough similarities to Genesis 1-11 to suggest that the people who wrote it were in touch with some pretty amazing info for their time (even if it is not divinely given). And that if one thinks of Genesis 1-11 as covering a time span of billions of years and accounts for the way ancient people thought about things, the simlairities between our modern scientific view and Genesis 1-11 are striking.
The flood narrative is now known to be a common theme among peoples from across the globe and in each place it occurs there is some geologic event that scientists can show occured in the area. Most correspond to the end of the last ice age 12K years ago. A notable example is recent work in the Black Sea that also involved Bob Ballard.
The ancient peoples did not have the view of the cosmos we have (some say they had a better view but certainly details were not always accurately reported). If the land for as far as they can see and a couple miles past the horizon floods, well then the whole damn thing is flooded.
As time goes on the stories take on a life of their own and in the case of the Jews that form had to have something to do with Jehovah being the one true God. Taken in this more anthropological light Genesis 1-11 is quite an amazing and some would say a reasonable document for its time.
Anyone interested can ask me about certain passages and I will point out how it might actually be poor science rather than great truth.
Am I saying there is no God? No I can't say that, no tool at my disposal can expose God or prove his existence. Only one thing could do that and that would be an appearance of the Almighty, whoever He, She or It might be.
They say that anatomically modern humans were present almost 150,000 years ago. These poeple were largely the same as us. And yet somehow within the last 10,000 years human knowledge and society have developed at amazing speeds. There is almost a power rule going on. It seems we could argue that as much has been accommplished in the last 100 years as in the previous 1000 as in the previous 10,000 as in the previous 100,000 years. This suggests that human gains in knowledge and power have not yet been slowed by the physical universe. We are still experiencing an exponential increase in knowledge and power due to our intelligence.
Those familiar with power laws know that such a trend has never been observed to continue indefinitely, but if it has even one more cycle then the breakthroughs of the next few decades will be truly mind blowing. The other side of this growth can be understood from the logistic model. Eventually the pace of new knowledge will ebb and mankind will reach a state of equilibrium with the surrounding universe (there are many other possibilities).
What will we have become at this point? Well now that is a question of much speculation. It's likely that we will never find out unless we can get off this rock, or learn to live here in a way that does not leave the place a smoking ruin.
Have fun!
EJ
