It isn't easy to read a book like the Bible, literally, because...
It's full of literal contradictions.
And whatever it is, especially the really archaic stories in Genesis,
whatever it is...it's not...
It's not history the way we think of history.
And so that's hard for people.
It's hard for people to see how that might still be true.
If it's not literal, how can it be true?
And this is a discussion that I tried to have with Sam Harris, a lot,
because the atheist types, the rationalist types, there's something they miss.
And what they miss is that fiction isn't false.
It's not a lie, right?
It's not literal... But it's not a lie.
And great fiction is true, but it never happened.
So how can it be true?
And the answer to that is something like,
well, there are patterns in things, deep patterns, deep, recurring patterns.
Human nature, the fact that we're human,
the humanity itself is a recurring pattern.
It has characteristic shape,
and great fiction describes the shape of that pattern.
And the greatest of fiction,
the greater fiction becomes, the more it is religious in nature.
And that's not even a claim about the nature of truth.
It's more a claim about the nature of experience.
When we say something is profound,
what we mean is that it's moving and that it has a broad influence...
It's capable of having a broad influence on the way we think and see and act.
So if you read a profound book,
like one of Dostoyevsky's books, you could say of that book,
and people often do, that it changed my life when I read that book.
And a story that can change your life
has a power that is best described as religious.
And so religious is a kind of experience, in some sense,
(rather) In addition to a claim about what constitutes truth.
Then those stories in Genesis,
Cain and Abel, I think, and the story of Adam and Eve,
because those stories are so deep that it's almost unfathomable.
They get at the most profound of patterns.
And so to say that they're literally true
is actually to massively underestimate how true they are.
Because you could tell me what you did this morning.
Now, it would be literally true, but, who cares?
Whereas if you read the story of Adam and Eve, it's so true
that it applies to everyone, always.
And mere literal truth can't do that.
And we don't have a good language as scientists,
let's say a psychologist, or even as citizens.
We don't have a good language for that kind of truth.
So the first thing about the Bible is
that it's a comedy, and a comedy has a happy ending, right?
So that's a strange thing,
because the Greek God stories were almost always tragic.
Now, the Bible is a comedy.
It has a happy ending.
Everyone lives. There's a heaven.
Now, what you think about that is a completely different issue.
I'm just telling you the structure of the story.
It's something like there was paradise at the beginning of time,
and then some cataclysm occurred and people fell into history,
and history is limitation and mortality and suffering and self consciousness.
But there's a mode of being or potentially
the establishment of a state that will transcend that.
And that's what time is aiming at.
So that's the idea of the story.
Now, it's a funny thing that the Bible has
a story because it wasn't written as a book, right?
It was assembled from a whole bunch of different books.
And the fact that it got assembled
into something resembling a story is quite remarkable.
The question is then, well, what is that story about?
And how did it come up as a story?
And then I suppose as well, is there anything to it?
It constitutes a dramatic record of self realization or abstraction.
We already mentioned that.
It's like the idea, for example,
of the formulation of, let's say the image of God is an abstraction.
That's how we're going to handle it to begin with.
I want to say, though,
because I said I wasn't going to be any more reductionist than necessary.
I know that the evidence for genuine
religious experience is incontrovertible, but it's not explicable.
And so I don't want to explain it away.
I want to just leave it as a fact.
And then I want to pull back from that and say, okay, well,
we'll leave that as a fact and a mystery,
but we'll look at this.
We're going to look at this from a rational perspective and say
that the initial formulation of the idea of God was an attempt to abstract out
the ideal and to consider it as an abstraction outside its instantiation.
And that's good enough.
That's an amazing thing if it's true.
But I don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, let's say.
It's a collection of books with multiple redactors and editors.
So what does that mean?
Many people wrote it.
There's many different books.
And they're interwoven together,
especially in the first five books by people who, I suspect,
took the traditions of tribes that had been brought together under
a single political organization and tried to make their accounts coherent.
And so they took a little of this and they took a little of that,
and they took a little of this,
and they tried not to lose anything because it seemed valuable or it was
certainly valuable to the people who had collected the stories.
They weren't going to tolerate too much editing,
but they also wanted it to make sense to some degree,
so it wasn't completely logically, contradictory and completely absurd.
And so many people wrote it,
and many people edited and many people assembled it over a vast stretch of time.
And we have very few documents like that.
And so just because we have a document like that
is a sufficient reason to look at it as a remarkable phenomena,
and try to understand what it is that it's trying to communicate, let's say.
And then I said it's also the world's first hyperlink text,
which is that again and very much we're thinking about for quite a long time.
There's four sources in the Old Testament
or the Hebrew Bible, four stories that we know came together.
One was called the Priestly. There's a source called the Priestly,
and it used the name Elohim or El Shaddai for God.
And I believe El is the root word for Allah, as well.
And that's usually translated as God or the gods,
because Elohim is utilized as plural in the beginning books of the Bible,
and it's newer than the Yahwist version.
Now, the reason I'm telling you that is
because Genesis 1, which is the first story, isn't as old as Genesis 2.
Genesis 2, the Yahwist version, contains the story, for example,
of Adam and Eve, and that's older than the very first book in the Bible.
But they decided to put the newer version first.
And I think it's because it deals with more fundamental abstractions.
It's something like that. It's like it deals with the most basic
of abstractions, how the universe was created and then
segues into what the human environment is like.
And so that seems to be the logic behind it.
The Yahwist version uses the name YAWH, which apparently people didn't say,
but we believe was pronounced something like Yawa.
It has a strongly anthropomorphic God, so one that takes human form.
It begins with Genesis 2:4.
This is the account of the heavens and the earth when...
And it contains the story of Adam and Eve,
and Cain and Abel, and Noah, and the Tower of Babel, and Exodus, and Numbers,
along with the Priestly version.
It also contains The Law, in the form, just the form of the Ten Commandments,
which is like a truncated form of The Law.
There's the Elohist source.
It contains the stories of Abraham and Isaac.
It's concerned with a heavenly hierarchy that includes Angels.
It talks about the departure from Egypt, and it presents the Covenant code,
which is this idea of that the society is predicated.
This was Israeli society.
It was predicated on a Covenant with God.
And that's laid out in a sequence of rules, some of which are
the Ten Commandments, but many of which are much more extensive than that.
And then the final one is the Deuteronomist code,
and it contains the bulk of the law and what's called the Deuteronomic history.
And it's independent of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers.
And so, we know that at least... Now there's debate about this
like there is about everything.
So I'm brushing over a very large area
of scholarship, but people generally assume
that there were multiple authors over multiple periods of time.
And the way they've concluded,
that is by looking at textual analysis, trying to see where there are chunks
of the stories that have the same kind of style or the same reference and people
argue about that because obviously it's difficult to recreate
something ancient, but that's the basic idea.
So it is an amalgam of viewpoints about these initial issues,
and that's important to know...
So it's like a collective... It's a collective story.