An Unconventional Theology - Chapter 2

Chapter 2 – Creation, Humankind, and Hamartia

In this chapter I want to discuss in succession the events described in the first three chapters of Genesis. These events can be divided between the general creation of the earth, the creation of humankind, and the introduction of Hamartia or “sin” into the world. For my purposes which I shall later go into more detail, I will not be using the word “sin” when describing Hamartia, but rather will use more accurate translations (in my opinion) such as “disorder”, “malfunction”, and “fatal flaw”.

It has often been noted that the Genesis account of creation seems to be in direct opposition to the evidence which modern science has uncovered regarding the age of the earth, and the amount of time creation took from inception up til Moses recorded it approximately 1500 B.C.E. (for the purposes of this writing, I am assuming a traditional Mosaic authorship for the Book of Genesis). For the person who accepts the Book of Genesis as being divinely inspired, this presents a fundamental problem of logic. Either the Genesis account is telling the truth, or it is not. If it is telling the truth, then why does the scientific evidence suggest a much older origin point for the Earth? If animals and humans were directly created within days, why does the fossil and DNA evidence suggest a process of evolution from a common ancestor? It is my opinion that both the Genesis record and the scientific evidence discovered are describing the same events and are not at odds with one another. Rather, it is the traditional interpretation of the Genesis account which is at odds with the scientific evidence.

To give credit where credit is due, I was first introduced to this new way of looking at Genesis by the writings of Dr. Hugh Ross, PhD., an astrophysicist who came to faith in Christ from atheism, not in spite of the Genesis account, but because of it. In his writings, without any real former Sunday School or theological education, he describes the Genesis account as the only ancient account of creation which fully lines up with what is scientifically known about the evolutionary process. This may sound incredible given the traditional interpretation of a literal six days, but Dr. Ross, with his background, looked at it, not from a God’s eye planetary perspective, but from the perspective of an observer on the ground watching these events.

First, let’s look at the viewpoint of Genesis 1 in particular. Upon a re-examination, it’s not written from a God’s eye view. Instead the language suggests the first person viewpoint of a person at ground level watching these events as they unfold. Literally it reads, “In the beginning, Elohim fashioned the skies and the ground. And the ground was wasteland and emptiness.” Translating “aretz” as “Earth” in twenty-first century English suggests a view of the entire planet because we do not generally refer to the ground under our feet as “earth” unless we refer to the planet as a whole, or in poetic usage. This understanding however would have been a foreign idea to Moses who would not have understood the idea of a globe hurtling through space around a giant flaming ball of gas. The same with translating “shamayim” as “heavens” (which is an Anglo-Saxon leftover for sky/skies anyway). The language being used to describe the viewpoint is local to the observer on the ground in between the two.

Second, let’s look at the division of the creation event into six twelve hour and not twenty four hour time periods. Specifically, the text implies that these creative events occurred for the observer between morning and evening as there is an end to them each day and an implied period of inactivity between evening and morning. Why is this? The change between morning and evening and vice versa is observed local to the individual and itself changes based on where you are on the planet’s surface. From a God’s eye view, that the sun rises and sets in one location should have no bearing on what happens on the rest of the Earth’s surface. None of this makes any sense if we are attempting to force a 144 hour creation event into this passage. It does however make sense if it is a human being recording what he is seeing from a fixed position on the Earth’s surface during a twelve hour duration of time.

So then, what are we looking at here? The only hypothesis that I believe explains the language used in Genesis 1 is that Moses is here describing exactly what he saw as he saw it, but that he himself, being a man of the fifteenth or sixteenth century B.C.E., did not fully grasp what he was being shown. How could he have? Put yourself in Moses’ spot. For six days, from sunup to sundown on Mt. Sinai (possibly see Exodus 24:15-16), God is showing him four billion years of creation event right up until the advent of modern humans like a VHS cassette tape on fast forward. The images are moving fast for him because of the necessary speed and compression that they are flowing in a blur from one to the other. He writes down what his very human brain was able to process just as he understood it to have happened. God Himself makes Moses take a break for twelve hours every day to rest, sleep, and try to absorb what he had just seen.

Thus you have the formation of the earth itself around him, the surface ground and primeval oceans still being covered in thick, Venus like clouds that don’t permit light to pass through. The first thing he sees in this is the dense vapor clouds thinning out to allow the all important sunlight through activating the day/night cycle for the Earth’s surface. In successive days he sees the upheavals of land and ocean as continental plates shift and change; the growth of plant life activated by the energy introduced into the system by the new sunlight; the final thinning of the vapor clouds until the sun, moon, and stars can finally be seen; the evolution of animal life from the seas out onto the land and into the air (incidentally, it’s been demonstrated that many of the creatures we call dinosaurs were in actuality prehistoric, feathered and warmblooded, ancestors to modern birds both flightless and flying sharing similar DNA. A recent experiment which involved a single genetic switch in a chicken embryo’s DNA transformed the beak which should have formed into a fanged snout more at home on a velociraptor); and on the sixth day of revelation the final evolutionary stretch which resulted in modern mammals, reptiles, and of course, modern human beings.

The evolutionary history of modern humans, homo sapiens, fascinates me, especially as it relates to the rather swift account of our creation found in Genesis chapters one and two. From Moses’ perspective, watching our creation on the sixth day of this revelation, it must have looked like we and all other mammals emerged directly from the dirt. Of course, modern research into our origins tells a more detailed story from both the study of fossilized bones of our ancestors and nearest relatives, as well as the study of human DNA and comparing with our closest living cousins, chimpanzees and bonobos, who share 98.3% identical DNA with us.

The process of human evolution took place over a period of approximately two to three million years localized to what is now sub-Saharan Africa from a common ancestor which we shared with the chimpanzee. I won’t go into all of the “transitional forms” except to say there is a good amount of evidence to suggest that by the time home sapiens emerged roughly three hundred thousand years ago, there were several species of human living on Earth including home sapiens, homo neanderthalensis, and homo erectus. It should be noted that, as one scientist observed, we are neither more nor less evolved than the chimpanzee or any other of the “great apes.” Rather, we both evolved in different climates and habitats, and under different conditions. There is evidence to suggest humans evolved for lightly wooded savannah, grasslands and during several climactic upheavals where the other “great apes” evolved to survive in densely forested areas.

Given this, I would like to focus on the Biblical “Adam” himself. One of the things about the word 'adam in Hebrew is that it literally means “human being”. In every case where the word “man” can be understood to mean “human beings in general” in the Hebrew Bible the word is 'adam. When the Bible says God created man male and female, it is literally He created 'Adam male and female. In the first four chapters of Genesis, the word 'Adam is used almost exclusively when translated as “man” or “the man” with only about three apparent exceptions (Genesis 2:23, 24; 3:6, 4:1). For this reason, and following the logic of the preceding argument, I would present the hypothesis that the creation and person of “Adam” in the account was also an amalgam of at least one offshoot or family grouping of homo sapiens.

There are several points to consider here. As previously stated, from modern science, we know that we share 98.3% identical DNA with the Chimpanzee, and their related cousin, the Bonobo. From modern science we also know that there were other species of homo both before, and concurrent with what we now call modern humans. Also according to recent studies, we know that the 1.7% of difference between humanity and our hairier cousins developed relatively recently and at a rapid pace. Over the course of about a million years or so, recent studies seem to indicate that there was a definite and rapid increase in brain mass from the original primate ancestor. It can be seen today in the size differences between the chimpanzee and a human being. Still yet another observation comes from a relatively recently published study indicating that modern humans are the offshoot of the genetic tree and not the direct line. A group of scientists studying hominids along the family tree indicated, by forty or more minor points of change, in comparing Neanderthal skeletons and modern human skeletons to the previous “generation” of hominid that Neanderthal was, in actuality, the “expected” branch of evolution, while the modern human is a “freak,” or offshoot from the branch that should not have occurred naturally.

The Genesis record then explains that God removed the human being from where he had been initially created and set him in a garden to the east in a place called “Eden”. According to modern science, the earliest ancestors of human beings arose in Africa and then migrated eastwards. The first of these migrations took place approximately two million years ago with Homo Erectus. This was followed by further migrations not long afterwards both within Africa and out of Africa 300,000 years ago and the last major migration 70,000 years ago. It is my opinion that this description of “’adam” being moved to this garden may reflect what Moses saw regarding these migrations, .

Genesis gives a fairly specific location for this first garden home for human beings and describes it as being east of where four rivers meet at their headwaters, which then became a river which flowed through the garden. These rivers were the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Gihon (Gaihun Aras), and the Pishon (Uizon). All four of these rivers converge more or less in northern Iran around the valley of Tabriz. What is interesting about this location is that it is central to the emergence of human civilization in the ancient world with ancient Sumer and Babylon to the south and the Georgian caucasus to the north where evidence of the first domestication of livestock, agriculture, metalsmithy, and other foundations of human technologies has been found. It is also very close to the Black Sea which was essentially a valley which experienced a catastrophic flooding from a breach in a natural sea wall from the Mediterranean Sea around 5600 B.C.E. which could be the source of the universal deluge narrative found in almost every human culture.

Here in Genesis chapter two is also found the express prohibition by God of eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, upon pain of death. I will treat this subject in more detail further on.

Where the account of the creation of the first woman in Genesis chapter two is concerned, the Biblical account tells us that after the first, male human being’s creation, there wasn’t a compatible mate available at the time. After seeing that there wasn’t, God put this first human being to sleep and took a rib from him to fashion a fully compatible female for him. Put in other terms, while this first human male was asleep, God took DNA from this person and made a reproductively capable female clone. We know from modern science that cloning human beings is possible, and we also know that the difference between a male and a female is a matter of chromosomes and reproductive organs.

Consider this, on the one hand, if the first “Adam” was born as some kind of an evolutionary positive mutation, then, in order to ensure the perpetuation of that “new” species, you would have to have a female of the same kind. As the odds against it occurring again in nature contemporaneously are beyond astronomical, to ensure the continuation of the species one would have to be formed from scratch and quickly. On the other hand, if Genesis is to be taken traditionally, you still run into the same problem. One “Adam”, one human being with no appropriate mate of the same species, does not make a world spanning population. We know that even if there existed a species of human close enough, but not exact, for him to reproduce, then the offspring would most likely have been sterile due to a difference in number chromosomes. This is the case with the mule (horse/donkey), the liger (lion/tiger), or other hybrid offspring. It would also, for immediate example, most certainly be the case with a human/chimpanzee hybrid (which is, though unethical, theoretically possible).

That Genesis records Moses as having seen God respond in such a way suggests, possibly, that the very first human being as such was in fact male, and was reproductively incompatible with the rest of the family grouping he was born from. It also suggests that God took a special interest in this single, unique individual and in preserving his genetic line. The natural question which accompanies this observation is, “why?”

This first human being, it is recorded in Genesis, could use spoken language. Genesis records that he began giving names to animals. That is, he began associating distinct vocalized sounds with individual species of animals he saw. Furthermore, he did the same thing with the female God had fashioned for him, calling her “woman”, “’iyshah”, which in the original Hebrew is simply the feminine form of the word for male/man, “’iysh”.

Human use of spoken language, as modern science tells us, is largely derived from our unique variant of the FOXP2 gene which developed approximately 4-500,000 years ago and is found in both modern human and Neanderthal DNA suggesting it developed in an earlier, common ancestor to both such as late Homo Erectus or Homo Heidelbergensis. Chimpanzees also have this gene, but it differs in our closest cousins by two amino acids. That tiny difference however is the only apparent reason why human beings can use the extent of vocalic speech we are capable of and chimpanzees cannot. Their relative level of intelligence has a lesser role to do with it than is often thought. As has been repeatedly demonstrated through numerous examples, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans are all fully capable of not only expressing their wants, needs, and emotions intelligibly through sign language when taught, but passing on the knowledge of sign language to the next generation which then, learning it in infancy, is capable of more complex “speech” using sign. Given this information, I would offer the hypothesis that this first, unique human male, though not probably homo sapiens, was also the first to carry this FOXP2 mutation. And if so, in order to ensure the continuance of it, a female with the same gene mutation would have been necessary as, even if there was a reproductively compatible mate from the preceding evolutionary generation, there would be no guarantee of the passing of this gene unless that mate also carried it.

This brings us up to Genesis chapter three. Before I directly discuss Genesis three and the introduction of Hamartia, I would like to introduce several more things to consider which are pertinent to this discussion as I hope you will see.

First, according to modern science, human beings started wearing clothing roughly about 100,000 years ago. This has been determined by examining the DNA of body lice which hides in clothing rather than human body hair because there isn’t enough of it. Second, as I briefly mentioned earlier, you don't see the beginnings of human technology until between seven to ten thousand years ago, and it began in what is now Northern Iran or Southern Georgia (the former Soviet Republic, not the American state). Third, as previously mentioned, Anatomically Modern Humans (homo sapiens) arose approximately three hundred thousand years ago, and their brain sizes and shapes did not differ from those of human beings today. This would indicate that they probably had the same level of intelligence that human beings are capable of today (not the same amount of knowledge, mind you, but the same intellectual capacity). Fourth, it can and has been repeatedly observed and demonstrated that no other animal on Earth distinguishes between or are obsessed by right and wrong, or good and evil, like human beings do and are. We see compassion and empathy being demonstrated between animals. We see various levels of intelligence, communication, and even rudimentary tool making being demonstrated. We also see emotional expression such as joy as well as intense grief depending on the species. But we do not see anything resembling moral distinction in animal psychology.

So, all of those things taken into consideration, as far as modern research knows, for at least two hundred thousand years, anatomically modern humans (homo sapiens), not to mention all of our evolutionary ancestors, were as naked as every other animal on Earth, and they had no discernible technology for almost three hundred thousand years in spite of having the same intellectual capacity as we do today (there is evidence that Neanderthals wore clothing, had art, and buried their dead contemporaneously with our own ancestors as well).

This begs the question once more, “why?” If they were intellectually identical to us today, and had the capability for spoken language, why did it take almost three hundred thousand years for them to begin to develop the rudiments of civilization when we have gone from those hunter-gatherer roots to exploring other planets within our solar system within the span of about ten thousand years or so? Also, why did we peacefully coexist with everything and everyone else on this planet for at least two hundred thousand years, when in the space of ten thousand years we are on the verge of catastrophic, human induced climate change, and are personally responsible for the total extinctions of hundreds, if not thousands of other animal species including, possibly, other species of human such as Neanderthal (circa 35-40,000 years ago).

I believe that Genesis chapter three offers us the answer to this question. In this chapter is recorded the temptation by the snake to the woman to eat of the fruit of the tree which God had expressly forbidden. She does, gives it to the man, he does and thus we have recorded the first “sin” by human beings brought about by disobeying a simple command. And we also have the first record of a human being arbitrarily declaring something to be morally “wrong,” in this case the natural nudity to which every other animal on the planet subscribes without a thought.

The word “sin” which is most often used in the New Testament (and rarely actually used in the Old Testament) is the Greek word “Hamartia”. It is a term which comes largely from Greek philosophy and theater and means “fatal flaw”. It was originally an archery term which meant “to miss the target”. Hence, a better and more accurate translation is “error”, but also “malfunction” in the sense that something went wrong or something happened which wasn’t supposed to happen. Thus, I believe it can also justifiably be rendered as “a disorder” in the sense of a mental or medical disorder.

St. Paul in his letter to the Romans says two things about Hamartia. The first is in Romans 5 where he declares that the first human being, “Adam”, brought Hamartia into the world, and death through Hamartia (more on what is meant by death in a little bit), and that through this one human being death spread through all human beings because all have malfunctioned because the one human being malfunctioned. So, what does this tell us about Hamartia, especially if we are to look at it as a disorder? This tells us that it is hereditary. It is passed down through our very genes and doesn’t skip any generations. The second thing of interest St. Paul says is in Romans 7 where he declares, “for I know that within me, that is, within my flesh, nothing good dwells.” So what is he saying? That Hamartia is not only hereditary, it is biological in nature.

So, how can Hamartia be hereditary and biological? That is, how can eating a piece of fruit induce not only a mental disorder or imbalance in one human being, but pass that disorder or imbalance on to every succeeding generation? Well, actually, that’s not all that unbelievable. We know from countless examples that the consumption of certain toxic substances by a pregnant woman can lead to many different kinds of developmental and psychological disorders. Consumption of alcohol while pregnant, for example, can lead to Fetal Alcohol Syndrome which can affect intellectual ability, empathy, moral comprehension, etc. Consumption of a particular medication (whose name escapes me) can lead to a child being born without arms or legs but just hands and feet connected directly to the torso. And consumption of other drugs, doses of radiation, and other external factors can cause severe damage to sperm production and birth defects even long after the man stops being introduced to them. And once that offspring has that particular genetic mutation or defect, it is more than likely that it will be passed on to all succeeding generations.

So, in this chapter, here is one possibility of what Moses saw as an amalgam. There was a particular family grouping of modern humans, maybe several hundred individuals, at some point in time approximately one hundred thousand years ago residing in what is now northern Iran or Southern Georgia. They had been explicitly warned by God to not gather from a particular tree or grove of trees. Their women went out to gather fruit as is common in most hunter gatherer societies for women to be the gatherers and not the hunters. The Bible records a snake intervening by speaking their language. Either this is literal, or it is figurative of them observing other animals eating the fruit from these trees without repercussions. (Traditionally, this is one of the best ways for someone to determine if a fruit or berry is safe to eat. Watch and see if other animals eat it. The danger here however is that there are certain substances which are toxic to one species and harmless to others. Cocoa is a good example. It’s harmless to humans but toxic to dogs.) I personally believe either to be possible. Perhaps they were observing the animals eating the fruit and a metaphorical snake in the person of the devil put the idea in their minds that it was okay to ignore the command. They then went ahead and picked the fruit, ate some of it to test it for immediate ill effects, sensed nothing obvious, and then brought it home to their men who also ate it after their wives told them there was nothing wrong with it.

Here’s the problem. Changes to brain chemistry aren’t immediately discernible by the person to whom they are happening. That person’s progress, either negative or positive, generally has to be observed and monitored by someone else who can discern the changes in behavior. Changes to DNA and genetics are impossible to detect until a child is born with birth defects or psychological problems. In the case of this family grouping, the psychological effect was seen in the (moral) need to cover themselves.

So, why would this be an immediate effect? This would actually make the most sense with a group of people rather than two individuals. With two mated individuals, why would they see the need to cover themselves from one another? But with a group of people, men and women but especially the men who are sexually aroused on sight alone, who suddenly find themselves desiring mates that aren’t theirs to desire and empathizing with how that might emotionally hurt others connected to both of them, covering themselves to attenuate the previously controlled drive would be one reasonable solution. They know it would hurt possibly another family member or friend, but that isn’t enough anymore to stop them from wanting it. Even if this didn’t occur in the first generation that actually ate the fruit, as an amalgam of this family grouping (‘adam), it could have happened in the succeeding generation and the preceding generation might not have known how to deal with their psychologically damaged offspring.

Suddenly, because it was uncomfortable to one’s self and damaging to others, nudity became “wrong”.

So, what kind of changes to the human brain chemistry and possibly to its function could that fruit have incurred? Every other mammal on Earth appears to have a strong ability to empathize within its own species as well as with other mammals. Human beings have this ability to a lesser extent as well. This is due to a special network of neurons within the brain called “mirror neurons” that function exactly as they sound. These neurons are the reason why smiles and yawns can be infectious, and why when someone else gets hurt there’s a chance someone observing will feel it too. This empathetic ability is so strong that they appear even to be able to communicate effectively to coordinate hunts and govern family groups without the use of spoken language. Furthermore, this empathetic ability appears to extend to where other mammals don’t generally kill others of their own species unless they see them as a direct threat to themselves or their family group in some way. It is the total lack of this ability to empathize which also defines clinical, psychological sociopathy and/or psychopathy.

It is my hypothesis that originally, and for over two hundred thousand years, human beings had that same animal strength empathetic ability on top of their ability for spoken language. It was this much enhanced ability to sense what the other person was feeling which kept human beings, like other animals, from intentionally harming one another unless the other was a direct threat to themselves or their family group. It is also my hypothesis that the toxic substance found in this particular fruit (and who knows how long this family group went on consuming it until God put a stop to it) damaged this network of mirror neurons within the human genome so that successive generations were born with weaker versions of it which caused an innate and inbred mild psychopathy among all further human beings descended from this family group. Judging by the way “typical” human beings behave, I believe that it also might have predisposed human beings to paranoia and delusional behavior. In addition, when comparing the human amygdalae to a chimpanzee brain’s amygdalae, proportionately speaking, the human amygdalae are much larger. This is significant because when one lies, as has been shown by brain scans, the amygdalae in the brain light up during the test, but the more one lies the less they respond, thus connecting the function of the amygdalae to the human conscience.

It was the observation of St. Augustine that evil, as such, does not actually exist. When God created the world in Genesis, after each day of revelation, he pronounced it good. It can justifiably be said that evil, as such, does not enter the world until the event in the garden which led to the human psychosis called Hamartia. Human beings, after this event, began declaring certain things “evil” and certain things “good”, and these things were usually marked by whether the observer believed them to be either advantageous to himself, or disadvantageous or harmful to himself. In other words, after the garden event, evil entered the world because evil is a product of the psychotic human mind which resulted from the damage done by the toxic fruit which our ancestors ate. You remove the psychotic humans, and there is no evil.

When God does intervene, He immediately removes this family group from the region around where the toxic fruit grows and posts a guard. He tells them that as punishment, they would have to work hard, and eventually die, and that their women would go through painful childbirth (possibly another result of the fruit’s toxicity?). Not long after these events, Moses records what he believes to be the first intentional murder, the killing of another human being for no justifiable reason. The victim wasn’t a real threat to the murderer’s person or family group, but was seen as such by the murderer’s delusional thinking.

From this point on, it appears as though the descendants of this family grouping began to interbreed with other, non-affected, humans. That there were other, non-affected, humans is indicated by Cain’s fear that, because of his murder, anyone else who saw him would kill him. This would be a natural response of other non-affected humans to a human they might sense was deranged or a threat to them much like other mammals would respond in a similar fashion to a deranged or murderous member of their own species, as I have previously stated. The mark God put on Cain, out of mercy to him, ensured that wouldn’t happen. From there on in, having been removed from their garden home environment, it appears that this affected family group was allowed to interbreed with the rest of the world’s human population. There is also good evidence to suggest that those they didn’t interbreed with they conquered and killed until there was only the affected human population left.

So, why did God then tell the first human being he warned about the tree that he would die the day he ate of it?

First, it is my belief that God told “’adam” that “’adam” would die. That is, God told that first family group He settled in the garden they would die.

Second, even in the Biblical account, Adam appears to understand what God means. This should be no big surprise. Death is a natural part of life. A plant must die in order to feed an animal. The animal must die in order to decompose and be absorbed into the ground to feed the plant. In this context, death is a part of the whole system which perpetuates and sustains life. Death itself is a part of life, and, as a part of the creation up until the poor choices made in the garden, it too was very good as God proclaimed.

Third, the literal Hebrew text gives God’s warning as something like, “dying you will die”. Since it is clear that the eating of the toxic fruit did not result in immediate fatalities, it is my belief that something else was meant.

So, what else could have been meant? As was previously mentioned, within a relatively short amount of time in comparison with our species total length of existence (the blink of an eye in comparison), we have pushed not only ourselves, but almost every other species to the brink of extinction due largely to human selfishness, greed, and lack of empathy. Abandoning the previously sustainable hunter gatherer, probably egalitarian subsistence, we developed agriculture, animal husbandry, and large settlements which became ecologically damaging cities. We hunted animals, and other humans, to extinction. And eventually, if left completely unchecked, we as a species will destroy not only ourselves, but everything else living on this planet. Through a long process of dying, we will in fact die as a species.