A handbook of Freethought

by Unknown

“And God made two great lights, and the greater to rule the day and the lesser to rule the night; and he made the stars also.”

The creation of the sun and the moon was on the fourth day. But it is not made clear how there could have been a morning and an evening of three previous days, in the absence of the sun. Then again there is no possible explanation for the existence of vegetation without sunlight.

Grasses, trees, and plants will not grow without sunlight. And still another difficulty meets us in the same passage. The writer says God made two great lights, the greater to rule the day and the lesser to rule the night. And this also is lacking in harmony with “strict philosophical truth,” for there is only one great light; the moon has no light, but merely reflects the sun’s rays. It is true it seems to be a light, and as “the writer describes things as they appear rather than as they are,” we can hold him responsible only for the revelation he makes as a matter of inspiration and not for its truth.

Before the sun was created, the writer gives us to understand that the dry land appeared—or to put it more definitely, God commanded saying, “Let the dry land appear.” But to whom was it to appear when there was no eye yet created to look upon it, and if there had been, there was no sunlight, and therefore if the world had been full of eyes the land would not have appeared! This is a problem. Did the waters lie on the mountain tops, and refuse to run down to the valleys, until they were commanded?

For how was it possible for a writer who describes things as they appear, to attempt to give us a glimpse of things which certainly could not have appeared, only to a mind diseased? But not wishing to appear captious we will let this pass, only however with the explicit understanding that the writer, in this case certainly attempted to describe things as they could not appear.

We find our perplexities increasing as we proceed. Especially when we attempt to read the stone book of geology in company with the Hebrew book of Genesis.

Whoever he may have been, and there can be no doubt of the sex of the writer, as the book everywhere betrays the spirit of the “lord of creation,” man, he seems to think that the earth was created before the sun, when the truth is the earth is the child of the sun. One could as well speak of a son being older than his father as to talk of the creation of the sun, after the earth had been created.

Thus, statement after statement of the story about creation falls for lack of support—and like bubbles the airy word pictures burst at the first touch of science.

What gross ignorance the writer betrays in speaking of the vast universe. It is nothing; it needs no extended description, five words are enough to describe the creation of an infinite universe, and hence to the writer it was quite sufficient to merely say, “He made the stars also.” And two of these words are supplied by the transcribers. As it seemed to this original cosmogonist the work of getting up a universe was not a matter of very great importance.

We are not disposed to credit this story for the reason that, the author makes it necessary for God to take five days to create the solar system, but for the infinite universe beyond, he needed less than one day. The Mosaic cosmogonist had no soul for astronomy or he would have seen the necessity of more time in the creation of the starry systems. We could have no patience with his description if it were not for the fact of which we are so well assured by Smith’s Bible Dictionary, that he is not giving us matter of fact but is “describing things as they appear rather than as they are.”