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Mrs M Recommends - Regrets, Reminisces, Remembers, Revisits, Rants & Raves
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| HERE BE MONSTERS |
| Written by Atticus | |||
| Monday, 12 October 2009 09:30 | |||
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A Dutch academic has just announced that, in fact, God was not the creator – or, at least, he was not mentioned as such in the Bible. Professor Ellen van Wolde, a respected Old Testament scholar, believes that the sentence, "In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth" is an incorrect translation of the original Hebrew, says Atticus.
According to Professor van Wolde this means that, before God separated heaven from earth, land from water and sea monsters from birds, there was a vast expanse of ocean filled with monsters. The Bible only covers the story from the time of this separation. Does this mean that – as with director George Lucas’s pronouncement prior to the release of the new batch of Star Wars prequels in 1999 that "The real story is yet to be told" – there's a lost biblical prologue somewhere that details the creation of this vast body of water filled with monsters? Or does it mean that there was no creation – that there was always something there? Of course, according to someone like Richard Dawkins, this is all a load of old bunkum anyway. But having watched Dawkins in action on his current Channel 4 series on evolution, I find his atheistic fervour positively religious: “We, alone on Earth, have evolved to the extraordinary point where we can understand the selfish genes that shaped us. Because we are conscious of these forces, we can work towards taming them…we can overthrow the tyranny of natural selection. Our evolved brains empower us to rebel against our selfish genes.” This feels like a religious espousal of free will over the blind processes of evolution to me. The political philosopher John Gray has some interesting things to say about the misconceptions of atheism in his article The Atheist Delusion for the Guardian. Just as I’m not sure that the Bible can adequately explain where we’ve come from, I’m not certain that Richard Dawkins can truly claim to know where we’re going. 
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