Why doesn’t Christianity hinge on their being talking snakes? The snake is part of their origin story, a core element in their belief system. Without it, what happens to original sin? And you will also have to question if not everything else in the bible is also just stories. If it’s not the revealed truth of God, why should any of the other stories be real—such as the ones about how Jesus was god’s son?
And, if I am wrong in that Christianity doesn’t need that particular story to be true, then there is still a weaker form of the argument. Namely that a large percentage of christians believe in this story, and two hundred years ago I’d guess almost every christian believed in it, but you cannot find any leading evolutionist who claims that monkeys gave birth to humans.
Why doesn’t Christianity hinge on their being talking snakes?
A bit of googling on the Vatican website turned up this document, from which I quote:
The account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man. ^264 Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents. ^265
So, the official position of the Vatican is that Genesis uses figurative language; that there was a temptation to disobey the strictures laid in place by God, and that such disobedience was freely chosen; but not that there was necessarily a literal talking snake.
In other words, the talking snake is gone, but there is still original sin.
And you will also have to question if not everything else in the bible is also just stories.
As to the question of disagreement between the discoveries of science and the word of scripture, I found a document dated 1893 from which I will quote:
If, then, apparent contradiction be met with, every effort should be made to remove it. Judicious theologians and commentators should be consulted as to what is the true or most probable meaning of the passage in discussion, and the hostile arguments should be carefully weighed. Even if the difficulty is after all not cleared up and the discrepancy seems to remain, the contest must not be abandoned; truth cannot contradict truth, and we may be sure that some mistake has been made either in the interpretation of the sacred words, or in the polemical discussion itself; and if no such mistake can be detected, we must then suspend judgment for the time being. There have been objections without number perseveringly directed against the Scripture for many a long year, which have been proved to be futile and are now never heard of; and not unfrequently interpretations have been placed on certain passages of Scripture (not belonging to the rule of faith or morals) which have been rectified by more careful investigations. As time goes on, mistaken views die and disappear; but “truth remaineth and groweth stronger for ever and ever.”
And, if I am wrong in that Christianity doesn’t need that particular story to be true, then there is still a weaker form of the argument. Namely that a large percentage of christians believe in this story, and two hundred years ago I’d guess almost every christian believed in it, but you cannot find any leading evolutionist who claims that monkeys gave birth to humans.
It’s only fair to compare like with like. I’m sure that I can find some people, who profess both a belief that evolution is correct and that monkeys gave birth to humans; and yes, I am aware that this mean they have a badly flawed idea of what evolution is.
So, in fairness, if you’re going to be considering only leading evolutionists in defense of evolution, it makes sense to consider only leading theologians in the question of whether Genesis is literal or figurative.
That text is actually quite misleading. It never says that it’s the snake that should be thought of as figuratively, maybe it’s the Tree or eating a certain fruit that is figurative.
But, let us suppose that it is the snake they refer to—it doesn’t disappear entirely. Because, a little further up in the catechism they mention this event again:
391 Behind the disobedient choice of our first parents lurks a seductive voice, opposed to God, which makes >them fall into death out of envy.
The devil is a being of “pure spirit” and the catholics believe that he was an angel that disobeyed god. Now, this fallen angel somehow tempts the first parents, who are in a garden (378). It could presumably only be done in one or two ways: Satan talks directly to Adam and Eve, or he talks through some medium. This medium doesn’t have to be a snake, it could have been a salad.
So, they have an overall story of the Fall which they say they believe is literal, but they believe certain aspects of it (possibly the snake part) isn’t necessarily true. Now, Maher’s joke would still make sense in either of these two cases. It would just have to change a little bit:
″...but when all is said and done, they’re adults who believe in a talking salad.”
″...but when all is said and done, they’re adults who believe in spirits that try to make you do bad stuff.”
So, even if they say that they don’t believe in every aspect of the story, it smacks of disingenuousness. It’s like saying that I don’t believe the story of Cinderella getting a dress from a witch, but that there were some sort of other-wordly character that made her those nice shining shoes.
But, they don’t even say that the snake isn’t real.
I don’t see what your second quote shows about my argument that if they don’t believe in the snake, what keeps them from saying that anything else is also figuratively (such as the existence of God).
It’s only fair to compare like with like. I’m sure that I can find some people, who profess both a belief that >evolution is correct and that monkeys gave birth to humans; and yes, I am aware that this mean they have a >badly flawed idea of what evolution is.
So, in fairness, if you’re going to be considering only leading evolutionists in defense of evolution, it makes >sense to consider only leading theologians in the question of whether Genesis is literal or figurative.
I agree there is probably someone who says that evolution is true and that people evolved from monkeys. But, to compare likes with likes here, you would have to find a leading evolutionists that said this, to compare with these leading christians that believe the snake was real:
But the serpent was “clever” when it spoke. It made sense to the Woman.1 Since Satan was the one who >influenced the serpent (Revelation 12:9, 20:2), then it makes sense why the serpent could deliver a cogent >message capable of deceiving her.
… the serpent is neither a figurative description of Satan, nor is it Satan in the form of a serpent. The real >serpent was the agent in Satan’s hand. This is evident from the description of the reptile in Genesis 3:1 and >the curse pronounced upon it in 3:14 [… upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy >Life ].
Maybe it is wrong to label these writers as leading christians (the latter quoted is a theologian, though). So, let’s say they are at least popularizer, if that seems fair to you? If so, can you find any popularizer of evolutionary theory that says that man evolved from monkeys?
That text is actually quite misleading. It never says that it’s the snake that should be thought of as figuratively, maybe it’s the Tree or eating a certain fruit that is figurative.
True—any part of the described incident (more likely, all of it) could be figurative.
The devil is a being of “pure spirit” and the catholics believe that he was an angel that disobeyed god. Now, this fallen angel somehow tempts the first parents, who are in a garden (378). It could presumably only be done in one or two ways: Satan talks directly to Adam and Eve, or he talks through some medium. This medium doesn’t have to be a snake, it could have been a salad.
Not necessarily. Communication does not need to be verbal. The temptation could have appeared in terms of, say, the manipulation of coincidence. Or, as you put it, a spirit that tries to make people do bad stuff.
But yes, there is definitely a Tempter there; some sort of malign intelligence that tries to persuade people to do Bad Stuff. That is a fairly well-known part of Catholic theology, commonly known as the devil.
But, they don’t even say that the snake isn’t real.
The Vatican tends to be very, very, very, very cautious about definite statements of any sort. As in, they prefer not to make them if there is any possibility at all that they might be wrong.
And hey, small though the probability appears, maybe there was a talking snake...
I agree there is probably someone who says that evolution is true and that people evolved from monkeys. But, to compare likes with likes here, you would have to find a leading evolutionists that said this, to compare with these leading christians that believe the snake was real:
Would I need to find leading evolutionists, or merely someone who claims to be a leading evolutionist? The second is probably a lot easier than the first.
If so, can you find any popularizer of evolutionary theory that says that man evolved from monkeys?
My googling is defeated by creationists using the claim as a strawman.
...to be fair, I didn’t really look all that hard.
The snake is part of their origin story, a core element in their belief system.
Ultimately, outsiders cannot define the content or centrality of parts of a belief system. If believers say it is a metaphor, then it is a metaphor. In other words, if believers retreat empirically to the point of invisible dragons, you can’t stop them. Invisible dragons aren’t incoherent, they are just boring.
a large percentage of christians believe in this story,
That large sub-groups of Christians believe something empirically false does not disprove Christianity as a whole, especially since there is widespread disagreement as to who is a “true” Christian.
and two hundred years ago I’d guess almost every christian believed in it.
I meant that the origin story is a core element in their belief system, which is evident from every major christian religion has some teachings on this story.
If believers actually retreated to the position of invisible dragons, they would actually have to think about the arguments against the normal “proofs” that there is a god: “The bible, an infallible book without contradiction, says so”. And, if most christians came to say that their story is absolutely non-empirically testable, they would have to disown other parts: the miracles of jesus and god, the flood, the parting of the red sea, and anything else that is testable.
That large sub-groups of Christians believe something empirically false does not disprove Christianity as a >whole, especially since there is widespread disagreement as to who is a “true” Christian.
I didn’t say it would disprove christianity—I said it was a weaker form of the argument: there is an asymmetry between the beliefs of christians and evolutionists. But, most christians seem to believe that there is magic in this world (thanks to god). Sure, if they didn’t believe it, they could still call themselves christians, but that type of christianity would probably not get many followers.
I would say CarlJ is right about general Christian belief in the past from Historical Theology by Gregg R. Allison
Protestant theologians in the post-Reformation period exhibited the tendency … to adhere closely to biblical teaching on the doctrine of angels, Satan, and demons.
For how this would apply to the snake in the garden see this: Jamieson
And also correct that the doctrine is important to many Christians today from Systematic Theology by Wayne Grudem
It is important to insist on the historical truthfulness of the narrative of the fall of Adam and Eve. … The serpent was no doubt, a real, physical serpent, but one that was talking because of the empowerment of Satan speaking through it.
So I think a successful attack on this point would be significant.
But I think Eliezer is correct there isn’t extra improbability in the snake than in other elements of the creation story. I don’t think most people would find absurd the possibility that an engineer could build a snake like robot that you could use a radio link to speak through, so, given the creation of entire planets and all the plant and animal life, someone talking through a snake in not an additional stretch.
But I think Yvain is getting at something additional here. The reason the snake in particular seems absurd is that talking animals pattern match to things like Kipling’s Just So Stories and Aesop’s Fables. But that connection is in the map, not the territory. Using that as your leading argument against Christianity makes it sound like you’ve used a lazy and flawed heuristic to dismiss the religion, rather than actually considered it rationally and found it wanting.
Thank you for the source! (I’d upvote but have a negative score.)
If you interpret the story as plausibly as possible, then sure, the talking snake isn’t that much different from a technologically superior species that created a big bang, terraformed the earth, implanted it with different animals (and placed misleading signs of an earlier race of animals and plants genetically related to the ones existing), and then created humans in a specially placed area where the trees and animals were micromanaged to suit the humans needs. All within the realm of the possible.
But, the usual story isn’t that it was created by technological means, but by supernatural means. God is supposed to have created the world from some magical ability. So, to criticize the christian story is to criticize it as being magical. And if one finds it difficult to believe one part of that story, then all parts should be equally contested.
Regarding Yvain’s point—I think it is true that one could just associate “stories about talking animals” with “other stories about animals that everyone knows are patently false” and then not believe in the first story as well. But, it is not just in the mind’s map of the world that this connection occurs, because the second story is connected to the world. That is, when one things about Aesop’s Fables you know (though not always consciously) that these stories are false.
So, to trigger the mind to establish a connection between Eden and Aesop, the mind makes the connection that “Stories that people believe are false”, but the mind has good arguments to not believe in Aesop’s fables, because there aren’t any talking animals, and if that idea is part of knocking down Eden, then it is a fully rational way to dismiss Christianity. Definitely not thorough, and, again, it’s maybe not a reliable way of convincing others.
Biologically speaking humans are animals and we talk. And since evolution resulted in one type of animal that talks couldn’t it result in others, maybe even other that have since gone extinct? So there has to be an additional reason to dismiss the story other than talking animals being rationally impossible. You mention that the problem is the “magical” causation, which you see as a synonym for supernatural, whereas in Christian Theology it is closer to an antonym.
So let me tell you a story I made up:
Thahg and Zog are aliens in a faraway solar system study species of other planets. One day Thahg shows a pocket watch to Zog and says “Look, I think a human made this.”
Zog says, “What’s a human?”
“A human is a featherless biped from Earth”
Zog thinks about what animals come from earth and the only one he can think of is a chicken. He laughs and says, “You think a plucked chicken made that? Boy, are you nuts!”
And of course Thahg would then look at Zog like he was nuts, because the absurdity Zog is seeing is coming from Zog’s own lack of appropriate reference categories rather than an actual problem with Thahg’s conjecture.
For another example suppose the Muslim woman Yvain was talking to had said “I don’t believe that evolution could work because alleles that sweep through populations more often then not reduce the kolmogorov complexity of the genes’ effect on phenotype.” Yvain may still think she is just as wrong, but she has demonstrated intellectual engagement with the subject rather then just demonstrating she had no mental concept for genetic change over time, like the ‘monkeys give birth to humans’ objection demonstrates.
So the problem is saying that talking snakes are magical and therefore ridiculous sound more like “My mental concepts are too limited to comprehend your explanation” than like “I understood your explanation and it has X, Y and Z logical problems.”
First: does saying “hahaha, these guys believe in talking snakes, how ridiculous” sound like it demonstrates a lack of understanding and engagement? I think the answer to that is clearly yes, at least if you say it to thoughtful people with some understanding of this stuff. (But maybe not if you say it to people who are already convinced or to people who haven’t given serious thought to these questions at all; so maybe Maher was preaching to the choir[1] and/or trying to shock unthinking believers into questioning their beliefs for the first time.)
[1] A curious phrase, that. Some Christian churches—I’m thinking e.g. of Anglican cathedrals and Oxbridge college chapels, where the music is a Big Deal—have quite a lot of people in their choirs who are there only for the music and might be perfectly reasonable targets for preaching.
Second: does saying “hahaha, these guys believe in talking snakes, how ridiculous” actually demonstrate a lack of understanding and engagement? I think it clearly does in some cases (and suspect Bill Maher is one), but I think (1) there really is an argument against (some versions of) Christianity based on the silliness of believing in talking snakes, and (2) some (rude) people may choose to express it in simple in-yer-face terms even though they’re capable of making a more sophisticated version that isn’t so liable to look like lack of understanding and engagement.
The sophisticated version I have in mind, which I’ve sketched elsewhere in this thread, goes something like this.
The story in Genesis 3 doesn’t in any way suggest that the talking snake is an incarnation or avatar of, or being remote-controlled by, or otherwise magically influenced by, any supernatural evil being. It’s introduced by saying “Now the serpent was more subtle than any of the other animals God had made” or something of the kind; when God is pronouncing his sentences on the guilty parties, what he says to the snake is (1) clearly addressed to the snake and not to some other being that controlled it and (2) clearly addressed to it as a snake rather than as some kind of incarnation of a vastly powerful spiritual being.
I understand that—especially within the theologically-conservative-Protestant tradition—many Christians do take the snake in the story to be, or to be controlled by, the devil. But it seems to me very unlikely that it was originally intended this way, and as I say there’s nothing in the story to suggest that understanding. I suggest that this interpretation of the story may in fact be largely motivated by a wish to make the story less silly :-).
So the people who created and spread this story, at least if they intended it to be understood as an account of something that actually happened, evidently didn’t find anything unreasonable in the idea of a “natural” talking and thinking snake.
But that idea is “silly” in the following sense: given some things we now know with great confidence about how the natural world works, we can see that a talking, thinking snake is not the kind of thing that could actually happen. A snake just doesn’t have space for enough brain to think and use language.
Of course if you fill the space not with ordinary biological brain-stuff but with some sort of nanotechnological AI hardware, it might be perfectly possible; or if there is magic and the snake talks and thinks by magic; or if there are gods and devils and one of them is animating it; etc. But, again, that isn’t the story being told here.
Accordingly, the presence of the talking snake in the story really is an extra piece of evidence against the story, even given the other “magical” elements in the story—not because talking snakes would require magic, but because the story shows every sign of being about a non-magical talking snake. (I am using “magic” and “magical” here in a broad sense, to include the exercise of divine or diabolical powers, even though believers in such powers will for good reason generally want to distinguish between those and “magic” as generally understood.)
And if some religious tradition embraces the story as historical fact, that really is an extra piece of evidence against that religious tradition; against its general reliability (because if the story is wrong then the tradition is unreliable) and against that of its present-day advocates (because they really ought to be able to see how implausible the story is).
I personally think that saying “hahaha, talking snake” is counterproductive as well as rude, and I agree with Yvain that if you find a lot of smart people apparently believing in talking snakes then you should very seriously consider the possibility that (1) they don’t believe quite what you think they do and/or (2) their beliefs are more defensible than they sound. But I also think—and my impression from the note at the end of the OP is that Yvain does too—that someone saying “hahaha, talking snake” may actually have a pretty good understanding of the issues and be making (or at least gesturing towards) a reasonable argument.
[EDITED to acknowledge that the devil-snake interpretation is quite widely believed and comment on that, and to tweak some wording a bit elsewhere.]
I would agree that there are some Christians whose belief set could be vulnerable on the point of talking snakes. I can think of several different arguments depending on what other ideas they were holding in conjunction with their interpretation of Genesis. Using a blanket dismissal would have the advantage that you wouldn’t have to figure out which one would work on your target. But I think we would both agree it could also potentially backfire.
Concerning the issue you presented, that ”natural” snakes just can’t work like that. I think you have considerably underplayed your hand. Consider Gen 1:29-30:
Then God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you; and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to every thing that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food”; and it was so.
That’s right, in the Garden of Eden every single animal was vegan. And ecosystems just don’t work like that. And I would go further and say that all these animals had the capacity at this time to live forever. Death didn’t enter the world till the fall. Rom. 5:12-14:
Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned— for until the Law sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over those who had not sinned in the likeness of the offense of Adam, who is a type of Him who was to come.
So we are dealing with quite a big discrepancy from known biology here, and that would be a problem if I were a (Uniformitarian.)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniformitarianism] But fundamentalists tend to be much less Uniformitarian than main stream society. So the idea that God had a different biological system set up initially, and He changed the rules as part of the curse, seems not only plausible, but a nature part of the story.
Also it sort of seems you might be unconsciously assuming the traditional pictorial representation of a small to medium snake wrapped around a tree branch. But the text doesn’t say the serpent was in the tree or give any other reference to size. I tend to picture something more like a Chinese dragon standing on all fours, shoulder to shoulder with Eve. So I don’t get the “brain box obviously too small for speech” effect from my mental picture.
(Note on the preferences for Satan controlling the snake showing an awareness that the talking snake is silly, I think this is more about emphasizing Gen. 3:15 as a Christological prophesy and generally framing the whole story as part of a Christological arch where the first Adam brings san and death and the second Adam (Jesus) brings salvation and life. Having the Devil tempting Adam and Eve here makes a parallel with Christ’s temptation in the desert and with Judas Iscariot’s temptation to betray Jesus. Finding Christological interpretations is a big motivator of Christian Theology.)
fundamentalists tend to be much less Uniformitarian
That’s a fair point. But it seems to me that it amounts to saying that nothing in the stories in your scriptures could count as much evidence against their accuracy. (Suppose it said “And Adam, when he heard the sentence that the LORD God had passed upon him, knelt down upon the red grass and laughed for sorrow and shame”—well, it’s only uniformitarianism that entitles us to expect the grass to have been green or laughter to have been an unlikely response to sorrow and shame. Etc.)
In which case, you’re also awfully limited in what conclusions you can draw from anything in those stories. “Genesis 3 indicates that God greatly values obedience to his commands.” No, it indicates that he did; for all we know, he might want something very different from us now. “The story of the Great Flood indicates that God has authority over the weather on earth.” No, it indicates that he did; for all we know, he might have somehow given up that authority since then. Do these stories actually have much value, if everything they describe might have changed utterly?
(You might say that God’s character and values are known to be stable, unlike the laws of physics or anything in biology. But the sources that tell you that are 2000 years old! That’s, like, 25% of the entire age of the universe! If God’s character and values were changing on that sort of timescale, it’s perfectly possible that these ancient texts might declare them to be stable even though they aren’t.)
a small to medium snake wrapped around a tree branch
I don’t think I was consciously or unconsciously assuming that. But I was assuming something that’s recognizably the same sort of animal as today’s snakes—God says “upon your belly shall you go”, etc., not “I shall replace you with something 1⁄4 the size which shall go upon its belly”. I think I agree, though, that the Chinese-dragon interpretation is at least kinda tenable.
Christological interpretations
OK, that’s a good point. (In terms of what it says about where Christian interpretations of Genesis 3 come from; I don’t think the Christian tradition of finding prophecies and parallels everywhere in the OT is actually intellectually healthy, but it’s certainly a real thing.)
But … how good is that parallel, actually? I mean, Judas is not (so far as I can tell) in any way usefully parallel to either Adam or Eve, and the temptation of Jesus seems very different in kind from that of Eve, and most of the actual opposition Jesus is reported to have had comes from very human sources.
I think if you’re looking for a parallel to the temptation-and-disobedience of Adam and Eve, through which sin and death enter the world, the place you need to look is for some temptation-and-obedience of Jesus through which sin and death are conquered. And there is indeed an obvious such thing, which takes place in the (aha!) garden of Gethsemane, where he is clearly at least considering the possibility of saying “no” to what he has to do but goes ahead with it (“not my will, but yours, be done”). But this temptation is, so far as the stories say, entirely endogenous; we’re shown no tempter, whether human or animal or evil spirit. So I’m not really seeing how any parallel between the Adam&Eve story and the Jesus story is made closer by having the snake in Eden be possessed by, controlled by, or an incarnation of, the devil.
That doesn’t mean that the tradition that says the snake “was” the devil doesn’t arise from a desire to find such parallels, of course. But it doesn’t seem to me so obviously well explained in those terms as to make me abandon my more cynical theory :-).
True enough. I meant that there’s no external tempter in the garden of Gethsemane. I’d already remarked that the temptation of Jesus (as found in Matthew 4) “seems very different in kind from that of Eve” and was proposing a better parallel.
Fair enough. The way I see it, there are some themes that are paralleled in Gethsemene, and some themes that are paralleled in the forty days and nights in the desert. They’re both parallels, but in different ways.
I agree that not being a Uniformitarian makes the makes the evidence harder to deal with and is generally a headache for everyone. But it should not be used to let a historical theory get away with anomaly without any hit to its plausibility, it should just reduce the size of the plausibility hit. Also several anomalies that are being explained by the same rule change only make up one plausibility hit rather than being additive.
On Christological interpretations, I agree it can get out of hand, and I’m not sure they are very valid here, But if “and He should crush your head” is going of be a prophesy about Jesus, well there isn’t a story of Him dramatically crushing a snake’s head, so it’s got to a general stamina out His victory of death, sin, and the devil, so I do think people are using that frame to identify Satan and the serpent.
(Sorry, this is rather long and I fear less clear than I would like.)
Uniformitarianism
We are in agreement that uniformitarianism is a matter of degree and that it’s the complexity of the “rules” that matters, rather than of what happens. The most popular formulation of this idea around these parts is “Solomonoff induction”: suppose that everything you observe is generated by a computer program, give higher initial probability to shorter programs, and then just do Bayesian inference as new observations come in. Aside from being totally uncomputable in theory and infeasibly expensive in practice and depending (finitely but hugely) on exactly what language you write your programs in and how you encode your observations, this is a really good way to decide what to believe :-).
So you’re probably right that you can avoid taking an extra plausibility hit from talking snakes as such, if instead you say something like “around the time of creation, living organisms worked by divine magic rather than biology” or ”… living organisms were based around completely different biology”. That sort of proposition generally incurs a really big cost in plausibility, for two reasons.
If you’re aiming for a theory that says “before, the rules were X; after, the rules were Y” then the problem is that now your program needs to contain both sets of rules. If you’re never intending to go beyond “before, the rules were different; after, the rules were Y” then the problem is now your program needs to describe what happened “before” without the compression enabled by having those rules—this is the “a witch did it” problem.
(How big a problem the latter is depends on how much you observe actually depends on what happened “before”.)
It seems to me that “biology used to be completely different, in such a way as to make talking snakes not a problem” is obviously no improvement on “there was a (naturally) talking snake”. And I think it is, actually, worse than just “biology used to be completely different”—when a single rule change has to explain multiple anomalies, the more specific anomalies it has to explain the more constrained the rule change is.
Parallels
OK, so the idea is that you want to find a specific prophetic point of reference for the “he shall crush your head” thing (because obviously the idea that it might refer to people actually killing snakes is completely ridiculous, I guess) and that has to be Jesus because everything has to be Jesus[1], and then the only animate thing whose head Jesus can reasonably be said to have crushed is the devil. But, again, it doesn’t seem to me that there’s anything internal to the story calling forth such an interpretation, and I’d have thought there’s an obvious completely straightforward way to understand the bit about crushing snakes’ heads (especially as it comes right alongside something about snakes biting people’s feet, which also seems like a fine example of something that doesn’t require overinterpretation) -- so, again, this seems like something being imposed on the text from outside, and therefore not a good explanation for why (some) Christians take the snake to be / be controlled by the devil.
[1] Sunday school teacher: “OK, children, can you tell me what’s small and brown and furry, with a big fluffy tail, and really likes nuts?” Child: “I’m sure it’s Jesus, but it sounds a lot like a squirrel.”
Sorry to be so long answering this. Not only was work busy but my husband was going through withdrawal again and that is always an all consuming time sink.
On Solomonoff induction: If we take a look at one of the facts this story proposes to explain, - We live in a world of decay, where humans and other animals have death as their destiny and the universe itself tends to disorder and destruction, but that this is bad and wrong and against the harmonies of logic and lawfulness and the timelessness of truth. This story’s proposal that the original and good state of the world was without any need for death, but that at one point one fundamental change was made, perhaps tweaking a law of conservation of information just enough so that its practical consequences are an ever increasing disorder, i.e. entropy, seems as elegantly simple answer as I can think of. This one rule change is more what I was thinking of, rather than swap out of the entire rule set, basically because it’s lower complexity. Yes, I am expecting that God re-cons the plant and animal world so that you get stable biology and ecosystems under this new rule, but i already had a sufficiently intelligent and powerful agent, with an established interest in having a sustained ecosystem, who could implement the needed changes. So I don’t see any new rules there. Nor do I think it should be surprising that quite a lot of surface changes could be occasioned by even a small change of one rule that was so fundamental.
On parallels: I can think of lots of reasons to give why Satan controlling the snake in called for by a Christological interpretation and other reasons, like dualism, that could also lead to the idea this was a good interpretation, but I’m getting the internal feeling that I’m starting to treat my arguments like soldiers on this one. People are influenced by the culture around them so I can see how a culture that finds the idea of talking snakes silly would be one of the contributing factors to the general theological preference for Satan as an external control on the snake. But this is such a subtle thing with so many dependencies that it will be hard to get even someone who has this assumption to focus on questioning the one dependency you want, the inerrancy of the Bible, rather than some other dependency, especially if you are trying to avoid a feeling of personal hostility that tends to harden people positions.
Slowness not a problem. (You wouldn’t believe how long I’ve sometimes taken.) I hope your husband is OK.
You say “one fundamental change”, but I’m pretty sure there is no way to fill in the details of that story so that it actually works. Increasing entropy is a consequence of the fundamental form of the laws of physics, plus the world being in a low-entropy state at the big bang. Make a small change to that and you get not a perfect world with no death and corruption, but a world where physics doesn’t work.
I don’t think you get to call something “elegantly simple” just because you haven’t thought about the details and therefore can’t see how messy they are :-).
(Maybe God designed a lawful universe where entropy increases, and then set Eden up with a hacked version where entropy doesn’t increase because of constant divine intervention, and then just stopped doing that when Adam and Eve didn’t obey his command. That would suggest that A&E were intended to fail all along, an idea that maybe gets some support from e.g. Revelation 13:8 and which strengthens my sense that in the standard Christian interpretation of the Eden story God is the bad guy.)
You might have the impression (given certain things in that Wikipedia article; not everything there is entirely accurate) that uniformitarianism is a premise which is used to interpret the world. Historically, that’s inaccurate. Geologists were young earth creationists in the first place, but changed their minds and adopted uniformitarianism as a conclusion, not as a premise, because the facts on the ground did not fit with creationism, not even if the rules have changed.
Not sure where to start regarding the oddly-named “Occam’s Razor”—though we can immediately dismiss the idea that one could do Newtonian Science without it. Possibly we’ll discuss this, and modern attempts to formalize simplicity, some other time.
Let me quickly note that the Chinese dragon interpretation would make God’s curse on the serpent even weirder.
It seems to me that one change at a fundamental level could have less Kolmogorov complexity then several special case exceptions at a surface level. And that is what the bringer change sounds like to me, something at a deep level, connected to death, propagating all through the system.
Since we are already talking about going from a legged animal to a legless one, I don’t see that doing it on a more massive animal can make a significant change in the complexity penalty.
Your approach is wrong, and I don’t know how it went wrong. (I assume the problem is deeper than “bringer change” being unknown to Google.) If you know what “Kolmogorov complexity” means, maybe think about how you would program a simulated world that allows such a change to be “fundamental” and yet produces the evidence that scientists continually find.
On the much less important issue at hand: you seem to have skipped the question of why this God would take legs away from any “snake,” and precisely what that entails. (Should I ask how many Chinese dragons or “seeds” thereof were affected? Or would that distract from the why?)
This is one problems with the absurdity heuristic. Because of deliberately starting at a point with such a long inferential distance, It can be hard to see where the error has taken place.
Believers can say “we’ve chosen to take it as a metaphor now”.
But if the believers make statements referencing the past or other believers, they can’t say that any more. And typically they do.
I believe you are making a charge (which I have heard made before) that the claim that some scriptural passages were intended as metaphors is a relatively recent innovation among believers to accommodate religion to modern scientific discoveries, and that it breaks with the traditional, literal interpretation of those passages. In fact, there is a long tradition among theologians to recognize that much of scripture should be interpreted metaphorically and/or allegorically rather than literally. Examples include Origen of Alexandria (late second—early third century CE) who took much of the Garden of Eden story to be allegorical, Augustine of Hippo who stated (in a work entitled The Literal Interpretation of Genesis from the early fifth century) that much of Genesis cannot and should not be interpreted literally, and Irenaeus of Lyons (second century CE) who interpreted the Garden of Eden story allegorically (in Against Heresies).
While it is certainly the case that some believers traditionally interpreted Genesis literally (and some still do), it is also the case that there is an ancient tradition of interpreting Genesis metaphorically/allegorically and so modern believers are by no means breaking with tradition if they interpret the serpent metaphorically.
Pretty much every variation on a religion you can think of has been thought up by someone, at some time in the past. You can’t use that as your criteria for “ancient tradition” without making the whole concept of “ancient tradition” meaningless because now everything is one. How mainstream was the belief that Genesis is not literal?
For that matter, since religion is supposed to provide eternal truth, the idea of having a minority tradition in sometinng seems problematic. If a religion has multiple traditions at once, how do you decide which one counts as the “real” one that nonbelievers should be criticizing? And if the ancients had beliefs A or B, but moderns only have A, how do you decide that that counts as the ancients believing A (so you can claim that moderns are following tradition) rather than as the ancients believing B (which means that moderns are breaking with tradition)?
How mainstream was the belief that Genesis is not literal?
Well, the three authors that I listed are among the most influential early doctors of the church, so their views are definitely mainstream (albeit not universally held).
You can’t use that as your criteria for “ancient tradition” without making the whole concept of “ancient tradition” meaningless because now everything is one.
I don’t know about that. I listed three very influential early Christian theologians who took much of Genesis to be non literal.
how exactly do you figure out which tradition is the “real” one
Your point that there are divergent views on the matter of how literally to take Genesis is certainly true and not in dispute. I alluded to that fact in my post when I said:
it is certainly the case that some believers traditionally interpreted Genesis literally (and some still do)
However, I don’t see how that conflicts with my point that one can interpret the serpent story metaphorically without breaking with early mainstream Christian traditions. Moreover, you wrote:
For that matter, since religion is supposed to provide eternal truth, the idea of having a minority tradition in sometinng seems problematic—how exactly do you figure out which tradition is the “real” one...?
I don’t see how the fact that there are divergent interpretations of some scriptural stories is particularly surprising or problematic, unless you are trying judge ancient religious texts against the stylistic standards of modern historical or scientific writing (which presumably most people would not recommend doing).
I don’t see how the fact that there are divergent interpretations of some scriptural stories is particularly surprising or problematic
It’s problematic because it provides a ready-made excuse to deny having changed when you get something wrong and you’re forced to change. “Oh, we didn’t really change anything, look, we’re following this old tradition”, even though you could have decided any one of several mutually exclusive things and still been able to claim you’re following a tradition.
Beliefs about whether or not the snake is literal are not, and never were, “core beliefs” of Christians. Core beliefs are the things that are contained in the creed, like that Jesus rose from the dead and so on.
If you found conclusive scientific proof that Jesus did not rise from the dead, very few Christians would accept that. The reaction to that, no matter how strong the proof, would be very different from the reaction to evolution.
I suspect that two hundred years ago, most scientists believed that human beings were not descended from monkeys. That does not make evolution denial a “core belief” of science, nor do the beliefs of Christians two hundred years ago automatically constitute the beliefs of Christians today.
The attitude of science to its past and the attitude of Christianity to its past are very (and relevantly) different.
In science, everything is meant to be revisable in the light of new evidence; authority is always supposed to be subordinate to reason and experimental results; there’s a reason why the motto of the Royal Society is nullius in verba.
Christianity, on the other hand, has authorities up the wazoo. (Different authorities for different sects.) The Bible (held by many to be perfectly free from error). The Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church (held by many to be perfectly free from error, subject to certain conditions). The ancient creeds (held by many to be perfectly free from error). The Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican Church. The Apostolic Fathers. Luther. Calvin. Aquinas. Augustine. Accepted as authorities (in so far as each one is, by any given Christian) not in the way that someone might appeal to, say, Murray Gell-Mann (“he’s incredibly smart and has been very reliably right before—but of course whatever he says can be checked by other people and anyone can make mistakes”) but simply because they’re Known Authorities.
In science, a discovery from 200 years ago may be admired as an impressive piece of work, but the assumption is usually that since then we’ve improved our techniques, done more careful analysis, and superseded it.
In Christianity, all the central ideas are centuries old, they are explicitly passed down the generations, and they are believed largely because there is a tradition (etymology: a thing handed down) saying that one should believe them—and, in many cases, because it is thought that they originally—centuries ago—entered the world at the command of God.
The best reason for accepting any given scientific theory is generally that there is good experimental evidence that it describes the world accurately. In principle, anyone—at least anyone with the right skills and equipment—can repeat the experiments and redo the mathematical analysis and arrive at the same conclusions. (Or, in some cases, arrive at different conclusions and show that everyone’s been wrong.)
The best reason for accepting the central doctrines of Christianity is that there is a ~2000-year history of other Christians accepting those doctrines and believing that they derive from the all-knowing all-good creator of the universe.
(Of course the above is a bit too black-and-white. In practice most scientists believe a lot of what they do because they heard it from other scientists whose judgement they trust. Some Christians believe some of what they believe because it just feels right to them, or because they consider that God told them directly. But the difference I describe is there and it’s a big deal.)
So, if it turns out that until 200 years ago all the scientists were wrong about something important, we should re-check any bits of their work that we’re still depending on, but science is a largely self-correcting enterprise and it’s probably no big deal. And our scientific opinions now are not supposed to—and generally genuinely don’t—depend on the judgement, or the character, or the rightness-about-any-particular-issue, of those scientists 200 years ago and more.
But if it turns out that until 200 years ago all the Christians were wrong about something important, it’s a really big deal. Because so much of what defines Christianity is what Christians of past ages have handed down, and because so often the case for believing X is something like “all the earliest Christians believed X”.
I agree with this, although I do not think it is a sufficient argument to prove that Christianity is false if taken alone, and I think it is inappropriate to criticize Christians both for refusing to update on evidence and for changing their minds when they are mistaken (not that you did this here, but I frequently see it.) People certainly should change their minds when they are mistaken, and yes this makes it more likely that they are also wrong about the other things that they haven’t changed their minds about yet.
I agree that it is nowhere near enough on its own to refute Christianity.
If someone (or some institution) has been wrong then they will be criticized for refusing to update if they stick to their old wrong position, and for inconsistency if they change; the fact that they are faced with these two opposite complaints doesn’t mean that their critics are unreasonable, it means that once you’ve done something wrong it’s too late for any course of action to render you immune to criticism.
Inconsistency isn’t really the right thing to complain about if they change; but, actually, I think the usual complaint made by skeptics about the less-traditional sort of Christian isn’t “boo, you changed and that’s not allowed”; it’s more like “you call yourself a Christian and offer your reasonableness as evidence that the Christian tradition is reasonable; but your position is very far from representative of the Christian tradition and your reasonableness doesn’t negate its flaws”. (With, perhaps, a side order of “you’re adopting a position that’s basically indistinguishable from ours, while wrapping yourselves in the apparel of the more popular other guys; that makes arguments with you frustrating and rather unfair”.)
Why doesn’t Christianity hinge on their being talking snakes?
Because if you replace the talking snake with, say, a monkey which gave Eve the apple and indicated by gestures that Eve should eat it, nothing much would change in Christianity. Maybe St.George would now be rampant over a gorilla instead of a dragon...
True, there would only be some superficial changes, from a non-believing standpoint. But if you believe that the Bible is literal, then to point this out is to cast doubt on anything else in the book that is magical (or something which could be produced by a more sophisticated race of aliens or such). That is, the probability that this books represents a true story of magical (or much technologically superior) beings gets lower, and the probability that it is a pre-modern fairy tale increases.
And that is what the joke is trying to point out, that these things didn’t really happen, they are fictional.
the probability that this books represents a true story of magical (or much technologically superior) beings gets lower
If you actually believe that the Bible represents a true story about a magical being or beings then the obvious retort is that there is no problem at all with talking snakes. A talking snake is a very minor matter compared with, say, creating the world. Why wouldn’t there be one? Just because you find the idea ridiculous? But it is NOT ridiculous conditional on the existence of sufficiently strong magic.
It’s not impossible conditional on the existence of strong magic. I’m not so sure it’s not still ridiculous even conditional on the existence of strong magic. Especially as, in the story, the snake doesn’t appear to be magically talking, it’s just “more cunning than any of the other creatures YHWH had made” or whatever exactly the text says.
We now know that talking requires a big fancy brain, such as humans have and snakes conspicuously don’t (and don’t have room for), and the right sort of vocal apparatus, ditto. Back in 2000BCE or whenever it was, of course it was well known by observation that snakes don’t talk, but it presumably wasn’t understood that they can’t and why. And when we see an old story featuring a talking snake, which doesn’t present it as able to talk on account of some sort of magic or divine intervention but just oh, hey, a talking snake, I think it’s reasonable to say to ourselves “See, the people who wrote that story just didn’t understand how implausible that bit of it is”. And I think it’s reasonable to see the talking snake as making the story less plausible than it would have been without it. And also, I think, less plausible than if its talking had been explicitly explained by magic or divine/diabolical intervention. Not because those are plausible explanations otherwise, but because the rest of the story is already committed to the sort of world in which such things might work, and in such a world a magically or divinely talking sheep is more plausible than an “ordinarily” talking sheep.
It’s not impossible conditional on the existence of strong magic. I’m not so sure it’s not still ridiculous even conditional on the existence of strong magic.
“Ridiculous” implies a context and the usual dismissive context here would be “Ha-ha, talking snakes, like in fairy tales for little children?” But that’s not the context in Genesis.
We now know that talking requires a big fancy brain
You probably have a small box in your pocket or nearby. That box can not only talk, but even show moving pictures, from another side of the world, even. And yet, it doesn’t seem to have a “big fancy brain”.
I think it’s reasonable to say to ourselves “See, the people who wrote that story just didn’t understand how implausible that bit of it is”.
I think it’s quite unreasonable. People who told that story were, of course, well aware that garden-variety (heh) snakes don’t talk. Clearly, that particular serpent was not one of those.
I am not sure, but I think that the conventional Christian interpretation is that the snake (which might have been a dragon) has been possessed by Satan and was no more than a remote-controlled drone, so to say.
In any case, I find the focus on talking snakes in a story which mentions things like “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” to be somewhat misguided :-/
You probably have a small box [...] People who told that story were, of course, well aware that [...] snakes don’t talk
I think you’ve missed a central point of my argument. (So I wasn’t clear enough. Sorry.) Of course they were well aware that ordinary snakes these days don’t talk. But reading the story, it seems to me clear that they thought it perfectly reasonable that once upon a time the smartest non-human animals might have talked, and that snakes might have been the smartest non-human animals.
In other words, it seems to me that this is not a story about a snake given special powers by magic, or sufficiently advanced technology, or devil-possession. And that’s exactly why the fact that the snake talks indicates a deficiency in their understanding. If the story had said “Now, an evil spirit had entered into the serpent, and it spoke: …” then it wouldn’t have had been evidence of that deficiency.
the conventional Christian interpretation
Christian theology isn’t homogeneous enough for there to be such a thing as the conventional Christian interpretation, but here are some comments from a few different sorts of fairly-mainstream Christian sources.
The NIV Study Bible (conservative evangelical, fairly lowbrow, creationist) takes basically the position you describe. “The great deceiver clothed himself as a serpent, one of God’s good creatures”.
The New Jerome Biblical Commentary (liberalish Catholic, middle-high-brow) takes a precisely opposite view. “The snake is not Satan, though later traditions so interpreted it [...]. He is simply a mischievous creature made by God, dramatically necessary [...] he recedes into the background when his narrative function is accomplished.”
“The theology of the Book of Genesis” by R W L Moberley (liberal Anglican, accessible academic) concurs. “So, although the serpent is clearly not identified with Satan, as in much subsequent construal of the story, the implied reader has good reason to be wary about words from an archetypal ancestor of enmity—indeed, potentially deadly enmity—against humanity.” (He is referring here to nothing more theological than the fact that snakes and humans don’t tend to get on.)
He is referring here to nothing more theological than the fact that snakes and humans don’t tend to get on.
To be fair, in the Genesis story, God cursed both the snakes and the humans to forever more not get along with one another. That’s a bit more theological.
it seems to me clear that they thought it perfectly reasonable that once upon a time the smartest non-human animals might have talked, and that snakes might have been the smartest non-human animals.
That is not clear to me at all. In fact, I am tempted (hiss!) to characterise this as a wild flight of fantasy. I see no reason to believe ancient Hebrews thought that long time ago animals talked—or considered snakes to be the smartest animals. AFAIK animals don’t talk in the Old Testament with two exceptions: the serpent in the Garden of Eden and Balaam’s donkey (which was able to talk by an explicit act of God).
But in any case—“indicates a deficiency in their understanding”, so what? It is very obvious there were a lot of deficiencies in their understanding, and..?
takes basically the position you describe
You misunderstand my position. It is not that Satan became the serpent, but that Satan possessed the serpent. Incarnation vs remote teleoperation.
I see no reason to believe ancient Hebrews thought that long time ago animals talked—or considered snakes to be the smartest animals.
I suggest that Genesis 3 is actually some (admittedly weak) reason to believe that. But, for the avoidance of doubt, my conjecture is not that they thought all animals talked, and I am not suggesting that they thought any non-human animals talked post-Eden.
According to this, at least some ancient-ish Hebrew commentators thought that “The snake from creation was an intelligent animal that talked, thought, and walked upright like a human”. This is already long after when Genesis 3 was written, of course, but it does at minimum make it clear that this was by no means an unthinkable thought.
“indicates a deficiency in their understanding”, so what?
So that’s exactly the point of people saying “ha ha, your religion has a talking snake in it”, and they need not be making an error in going from “this religion’s holy book has a story with a talking snake in it” to “this religion is less likely to be right than if it didn’t have that story”. And the fact that magic or divine intervention could obviously (if either existed) make snakes talk doesn’t invalidate that.
You misunderstand my position.
No, actually I wondered about saying “except that it’s more like incarnation than possession” but decided that was unnecessary nitpicking. So yes, rather than “of my sample of three, one basically agrees with you and two flatly disagree” it would be more accurate to say “of my sample of three, one kinda agrees with you and two flatly disagree”.
The sample, by the way, consisted of the books I happen to have on my shelves that I could tell from the titles were likely to express some opinion about the question. I looked in one other but it turned out not to. So no cherry-picking here.
(But I should add that I would not expect randomly chosen Christians to be much like random samples of those three, because most Christians are theologically unsophisticated; so some version of the serpent=Satan theory might well be more popular than that sample would suggest.)
Yes, Lumifer’s objections—based on a character who does not appear in Genesis at all—seem silly to me. On the other hand, if God made the world, he could have used unnecessary magic on any number of animals in the ‘natural’ course of creation. (As I’m sure we all know, a god of divine rank 16 could make a talking snake much more easily than he could make a planet!) So this is a weak argument.
Josephus believed that there was a talking snake, and that this was merely an example of the fact that all animals could talk. I have a blog post about that here..
However, I am skeptical that the original intention of the story is to make such claims. I think that whoever first came up with the story, whether that was written or oral, and even if it was based on other accounts, must have known that they were creating a story. But given the lack of context that ancient accounts used to have, it was difficult for other people to know what was a story and what wasn’t, when the account was received from hundreds of years ago.
I am skeptical that the original intention of the story is to make such claims.
I’m not sure the original intention is quite what matters.
Suppose a religion is made up by outright fraudsters. If someone says “look, this religion says X and Y and Z, which we know are not true”, is it any refutation of that argument to say “well, sure, but the original authors of that story knew X and Y and Z weren’t true”? Of course not.
If the story in Genesis 3 was deliberately made up by people who did not believe there had ever been a talking snake, with the intention that subsequent readers or listeners would take it as historical, then the situation is the same as in the previous paragraph.
If it was made up with the intention that readers or listeners would treat it as fiction (or perhaps I should say fable or myth), then indeed their epistemic situation was just fine and I have no particular objection to it—at least not on these grounds. But if (as I think likely, and it sounds as if you agree) subsequent readers or listeners ended up treating it as history or something like history—why, then, that indicates that those subsequent readers or listeners had terrible epistemic hygiene; isn’t that highly relevant in evaluating other parts of the belief system those people have handed down to us?
I don’t know of any large populations with non-terrible epistemic hygiene.
The relevant issue is not the epistemic hygiene of the populations, but of (so to speak) the process by which any given body of ideas reaches us. In the case of the Bible, on entirelyuseless’s (plausible) hypothesis we find that at least some of it reached us (in its role as Sacred Scripture, no less) by being treated as reliable history by people who had no good reason to think of it as more than a fable.
Not every body-of-ideas exhibits such crass indifference to truth in its history, though of course it’s by no means only religious ones that do.
find that at least some of it reached us (in its role as Sacred Scripture, no less) by being treated as reliable history by people who had no good reason to think of it as more than a fable.
So the presence of the talking snake in the story is evidence against the rightness of the religion, for reasons that can be (albeit needlessly rudely and uninformatively) expressed as “ha ha, your religion has talking snakes, how ridiculous”.
Just to be clear, what exactly is your point in this thread?
So the presence of the talking snake in the story is evidence against the rightness of the religion, for reasons that can be (albeit needlessly rudely and uninformatively) expressed as “ha ha, your religion has talking snakes, how ridiculous”.
I don’t see how that follows from your previous comment. And in any case, I continue to disagree with that statement.
what exactly is your point in this thread?
Let’s go upthread. That was my first comment and I still stand by it.
While we’re restating our positions: I (1) agree that the talking snake is a long, long way from being the best reason for thinking that Christianity-as-traditionally-understood is badly wrong, but (2) think “conditional on sufficiently strong magic” misses the point, because the talking snake is not portrayed as talking on account of any sort of magic.
And I suggest that we leave it there rather than engaging in further rounds of clarification and/or nitpicking.
If the story in Genesis 3 was deliberately made up by people who did not believe there had ever been a talking snake, with the intention that subsequent readers or listeners would take it as historical, then the situation is the same as in the previous paragraph.
That assumes that it’s always the goal of an author to tell the average reader the truth. As early as the 12th when Maimonides writes his Guide there’s the idea that the Torah is purposefully written in a way that the average reader doesn’t get it’s secrets. Only wise people are supposed to understand it. If a story successfully throws off a reader that isn’t wise it might have done it’s job.
Yes, that’s true, it might. Someone who embraces an esoteric version of (say) Christianity that takes all the silly-sounding things in it to be coded messages designed to be mostly misunderstood does indeed hold a position that isn’t vulnerable to attack on the basis of how silly the stories sound.
I don’t think that was the sort of scenario entirelyuseless had in mind, though.
If a story successfully throws off a reader that isn’t wise, but people who aren’t wise still get to go to Hell based on not acting as demanded by the story they don’t understand, then the writer is being a major jerk.
I agree about the case of deliberate fraud. For example it seems likely to me that Joseph Smith knew that he was inventing the Book of Mormon, and the fact that he knew that is not a defense of Mormonism; if anything it makes things worse.
Genesis and similar things seem a bit different to me, in at least two ways: 1) having no access to the origin in that case, I don’t have any particular reason to suppose dishonest motives, and 2) there are many aspects of the accounts that look idealized, in a way that isn’t terribly reasonable for someone who is trying to delude people. In other words, I suspect something like this: the author thinks, “Of course no one knows what really happened. But I’m guessing it was something like this. And of course everyone else knows that no one knows, so they’ll know that this is a guess.”
But if that’s the case, historically those authors were mistaken. People didn’t just know they didn’t know, but assumed the accounts were accurate even in a detailed way, for the most part, even if there were exceptions to that kind of interpretation even e.g. in the early church.
I agree with the last point, that these facts are highly relevant. As I said e.g. about the resurrection, Christians definitely distinguished all along between beliefs about the interpretation of Genesis and actual creedal beliefs. But that doesn’t change the fact that they were very certain about the Genesis story, for the most part, nor the fact that their certainty was religiously motivated. And that is prima facie a pretty good argument that the whole religion is false. I didn’t say that there aren’t arguments like that, just that this does not account for everything.
I think that whoever first came up with the story, whether that was written or oral, and even if it was based on other accounts, must have known that they were creating a story.
That isn’t necessarily true. The story could have been created by a process such as channeling that’s believed by the author of the story to produce reliable wisdom.
In Buddhism there’s historical “knowledge” coming from past-life memories.
According to this, at least some ancient-ish Hebrew commentators thought
According to your own link, some commentators thought that the snake was an intelligent humanoid, some thought it was Satan in the flesh, and some thought that Genesis was… mistaken about the snake speaking.
All it shows is that the variety of interpretations is wide. “Not an unthinkable thought” is a remarkably low bar, at this level pretty much anything goes.
So that’s exactly the point of people saying “ha ha, your religion has a talking snake in it”
That’s a stupid point, of the same kind as “the Pope wears a silly hat, ha-ha, he must be really dumb”. It’s just agitprop. I don’t see any reason to pay attention to such “points”, do you?
“Not an unthinkable thought” is a remarkably low bar
For sure. My point is that the culture Genesis 3 came out of was one that had at least some inclination to accept the idea of talking snakes, which makes it more plausible that the talking snake in Genesis 3 was intended to be understood as, well, an actual talking snake (which is how, at face value, the story describes it) rather than a puppet of the Devil, or a metaphor for human curiosity, or whatever.
We now know that talking requires a big fancy brain, such as humans have and snakes conspicuously don’t (and don’t have room for), and the right sort of vocal apparatus, ditto.
I’d need to see a sample size bigger than 1 to be sure that Alex’s (prima facie very impressive) achievements weren’t exaggerated. And it’s clear that he was a long, long way from the level of understanding shown by the snake in Genesis 3.
But you and DanArmak are right to point out that birds’ brains do seem to achieve more understanding per unit size than primate brains.
We now know that talking requires a big fancy brain, such as humans have and snakes conspicuously don’t (and don’t have room for)
Nitpick:
Talking the way we do maybe requires a big brain. We have no reason to think talking in general requires one. AFAIK, there’s no consensus on when language evolved, but many or most scientists seem to think it was after the human brain grew to its present size, not before.
New Caledonian crows have intelligence generally comparable to that of chimpanzees; not as great as, but not much less than either. Yet their brains weigh only 7-8 grams. Large snakes can have much larger brains than that. Anyway, brain size is relative to body weight; EQ is a better measure.
Why doesn’t Christianity hinge on their being talking snakes? The snake is part of their origin story, a core element in their belief system. Without it, what happens to original sin? And you will also have to question if not everything else in the bible is also just stories. If it’s not the revealed truth of God, why should any of the other stories be real—such as the ones about how Jesus was god’s son?
And, if I am wrong in that Christianity doesn’t need that particular story to be true, then there is still a weaker form of the argument. Namely that a large percentage of christians believe in this story, and two hundred years ago I’d guess almost every christian believed in it, but you cannot find any leading evolutionist who claims that monkeys gave birth to humans.
A bit of googling on the Vatican website turned up this document, from which I quote:
So, the official position of the Vatican is that Genesis uses figurative language; that there was a temptation to disobey the strictures laid in place by God, and that such disobedience was freely chosen; but not that there was necessarily a literal talking snake.
In other words, the talking snake is gone, but there is still original sin.
As to the question of disagreement between the discoveries of science and the word of scripture, I found a document dated 1893 from which I will quote:
It’s only fair to compare like with like. I’m sure that I can find some people, who profess both a belief that evolution is correct and that monkeys gave birth to humans; and yes, I am aware that this mean they have a badly flawed idea of what evolution is.
So, in fairness, if you’re going to be considering only leading evolutionists in defense of evolution, it makes sense to consider only leading theologians in the question of whether Genesis is literal or figurative.
That text is actually quite misleading. It never says that it’s the snake that should be thought of as figuratively, maybe it’s the Tree or eating a certain fruit that is figurative.
But, let us suppose that it is the snake they refer to—it doesn’t disappear entirely. Because, a little further up in the catechism they mention this event again:
The devil is a being of “pure spirit” and the catholics believe that he was an angel that disobeyed god. Now, this fallen angel somehow tempts the first parents, who are in a garden (378). It could presumably only be done in one or two ways: Satan talks directly to Adam and Eve, or he talks through some medium. This medium doesn’t have to be a snake, it could have been a salad.
So, they have an overall story of the Fall which they say they believe is literal, but they believe certain aspects of it (possibly the snake part) isn’t necessarily true. Now, Maher’s joke would still make sense in either of these two cases. It would just have to change a little bit:
″...but when all is said and done, they’re adults who believe in a talking salad.”
″...but when all is said and done, they’re adults who believe in spirits that try to make you do bad stuff.”
So, even if they say that they don’t believe in every aspect of the story, it smacks of disingenuousness. It’s like saying that I don’t believe the story of Cinderella getting a dress from a witch, but that there were some sort of other-wordly character that made her those nice shining shoes.
But, they don’t even say that the snake isn’t real.
I don’t see what your second quote shows about my argument that if they don’t believe in the snake, what keeps them from saying that anything else is also figuratively (such as the existence of God).
I agree there is probably someone who says that evolution is true and that people evolved from monkeys. But, to compare likes with likes here, you would have to find a leading evolutionists that said this, to compare with these leading christians that believe the snake was real:
Shouldn’t the Woman (Eve) Have Been Shocked that a Serpent Spoke? | Answers in Genesis
Who was the Serpent? | creation.com
Maybe it is wrong to label these writers as leading christians (the latter quoted is a theologian, though). So, let’s say they are at least popularizer, if that seems fair to you? If so, can you find any popularizer of evolutionary theory that says that man evolved from monkeys?
(Apologies—accidentally double posted)
True—any part of the described incident (more likely, all of it) could be figurative.
Not necessarily. Communication does not need to be verbal. The temptation could have appeared in terms of, say, the manipulation of coincidence. Or, as you put it, a spirit that tries to make people do bad stuff.
But yes, there is definitely a Tempter there; some sort of malign intelligence that tries to persuade people to do Bad Stuff. That is a fairly well-known part of Catholic theology, commonly known as the devil.
The Vatican tends to be very, very, very, very cautious about definite statements of any sort. As in, they prefer not to make them if there is any possibility at all that they might be wrong.
And hey, small though the probability appears, maybe there was a talking snake...
Would I need to find leading evolutionists, or merely someone who claims to be a leading evolutionist? The second is probably a lot easier than the first.
My googling is defeated by creationists using the claim as a strawman.
...to be fair, I didn’t really look all that hard.
Does Wikipedia count?
It would indeed, if it said that. The page you linked plainly doesn’t.
You don’t think that the creature Wikipedia refers to as CHLCA was a monkey?
Depends on what you mean by “monkey”. IIRC the “standard” definition is paraphiletic as it excludes apes.
In the context of “did man evolve from monkeys” the definition clearly includes apes. In casual language, too, a chimpanzee is a monkey.
That all is rather peripheral to the main point, though.
On rereading the thread it was CarlJ who replaced the “monkeys gave birth to humans” in CCC’s comment with “man evolved from monkeys”, FWIW.
Ultimately, outsiders cannot define the content or centrality of parts of a belief system. If believers say it is a metaphor, then it is a metaphor. In other words, if believers retreat empirically to the point of invisible dragons, you can’t stop them. Invisible dragons aren’t incoherent, they are just boring.
That large sub-groups of Christians believe something empirically false does not disprove Christianity as a whole, especially since there is widespread disagreement as to who is a “true” Christian.
Citation needed. You sound overconfident here.
I meant that the origin story is a core element in their belief system, which is evident from every major christian religion has some teachings on this story.
If believers actually retreated to the position of invisible dragons, they would actually have to think about the arguments against the normal “proofs” that there is a god: “The bible, an infallible book without contradiction, says so”. And, if most christians came to say that their story is absolutely non-empirically testable, they would have to disown other parts: the miracles of jesus and god, the flood, the parting of the red sea, and anything else that is testable.
I didn’t say it would disprove christianity—I said it was a weaker form of the argument: there is an asymmetry between the beliefs of christians and evolutionists. But, most christians seem to believe that there is magic in this world (thanks to god). Sure, if they didn’t believe it, they could still call themselves christians, but that type of christianity would probably not get many followers.
I would say CarlJ is right about general Christian belief in the past from Historical Theology by Gregg R. Allison
For how this would apply to the snake in the garden see this: Jamieson
And also correct that the doctrine is important to many Christians today from Systematic Theology by Wayne Grudem
So I think a successful attack on this point would be significant.
But I think Eliezer is correct there isn’t extra improbability in the snake than in other elements of the creation story. I don’t think most people would find absurd the possibility that an engineer could build a snake like robot that you could use a radio link to speak through, so, given the creation of entire planets and all the plant and animal life, someone talking through a snake in not an additional stretch.
But I think Yvain is getting at something additional here. The reason the snake in particular seems absurd is that talking animals pattern match to things like Kipling’s Just So Stories and Aesop’s Fables. But that connection is in the map, not the territory. Using that as your leading argument against Christianity makes it sound like you’ve used a lazy and flawed heuristic to dismiss the religion, rather than actually considered it rationally and found it wanting.
Thank you for the source! (I’d upvote but have a negative score.)
If you interpret the story as plausibly as possible, then sure, the talking snake isn’t that much different from a technologically superior species that created a big bang, terraformed the earth, implanted it with different animals (and placed misleading signs of an earlier race of animals and plants genetically related to the ones existing), and then created humans in a specially placed area where the trees and animals were micromanaged to suit the humans needs. All within the realm of the possible.
But, the usual story isn’t that it was created by technological means, but by supernatural means. God is supposed to have created the world from some magical ability. So, to criticize the christian story is to criticize it as being magical. And if one finds it difficult to believe one part of that story, then all parts should be equally contested.
Regarding Yvain’s point—I think it is true that one could just associate “stories about talking animals” with “other stories about animals that everyone knows are patently false” and then not believe in the first story as well. But, it is not just in the mind’s map of the world that this connection occurs, because the second story is connected to the world. That is, when one things about Aesop’s Fables you know (though not always consciously) that these stories are false.
So, to trigger the mind to establish a connection between Eden and Aesop, the mind makes the connection that “Stories that people believe are false”, but the mind has good arguments to not believe in Aesop’s fables, because there aren’t any talking animals, and if that idea is part of knocking down Eden, then it is a fully rational way to dismiss Christianity. Definitely not thorough, and, again, it’s maybe not a reliable way of convincing others.
Biologically speaking humans are animals and we talk. And since evolution resulted in one type of animal that talks couldn’t it result in others, maybe even other that have since gone extinct? So there has to be an additional reason to dismiss the story other than talking animals being rationally impossible. You mention that the problem is the “magical” causation, which you see as a synonym for supernatural, whereas in Christian Theology it is closer to an antonym.
So let me tell you a story I made up:
Thahg and Zog are aliens in a faraway solar system study species of other planets. One day Thahg shows a pocket watch to Zog and says “Look, I think a human made this.” Zog says, “What’s a human?” “A human is a featherless biped from Earth” Zog thinks about what animals come from earth and the only one he can think of is a chicken. He laughs and says, “You think a plucked chicken made that? Boy, are you nuts!”
And of course Thahg would then look at Zog like he was nuts, because the absurdity Zog is seeing is coming from Zog’s own lack of appropriate reference categories rather than an actual problem with Thahg’s conjecture.
For another example suppose the Muslim woman Yvain was talking to had said “I don’t believe that evolution could work because alleles that sweep through populations more often then not reduce the kolmogorov complexity of the genes’ effect on phenotype.” Yvain may still think she is just as wrong, but she has demonstrated intellectual engagement with the subject rather then just demonstrating she had no mental concept for genetic change over time, like the ‘monkeys give birth to humans’ objection demonstrates.
So the problem is saying that talking snakes are magical and therefore ridiculous sound more like “My mental concepts are too limited to comprehend your explanation” than like “I understood your explanation and it has X, Y and Z logical problems.”
I think there are two separate questions here.
First: does saying “hahaha, these guys believe in talking snakes, how ridiculous” sound like it demonstrates a lack of understanding and engagement? I think the answer to that is clearly yes, at least if you say it to thoughtful people with some understanding of this stuff. (But maybe not if you say it to people who are already convinced or to people who haven’t given serious thought to these questions at all; so maybe Maher was preaching to the choir[1] and/or trying to shock unthinking believers into questioning their beliefs for the first time.)
[1] A curious phrase, that. Some Christian churches—I’m thinking e.g. of Anglican cathedrals and Oxbridge college chapels, where the music is a Big Deal—have quite a lot of people in their choirs who are there only for the music and might be perfectly reasonable targets for preaching.
Second: does saying “hahaha, these guys believe in talking snakes, how ridiculous” actually demonstrate a lack of understanding and engagement? I think it clearly does in some cases (and suspect Bill Maher is one), but I think (1) there really is an argument against (some versions of) Christianity based on the silliness of believing in talking snakes, and (2) some (rude) people may choose to express it in simple in-yer-face terms even though they’re capable of making a more sophisticated version that isn’t so liable to look like lack of understanding and engagement.
The sophisticated version I have in mind, which I’ve sketched elsewhere in this thread, goes something like this.
The story in Genesis 3 doesn’t in any way suggest that the talking snake is an incarnation or avatar of, or being remote-controlled by, or otherwise magically influenced by, any supernatural evil being. It’s introduced by saying “Now the serpent was more subtle than any of the other animals God had made” or something of the kind; when God is pronouncing his sentences on the guilty parties, what he says to the snake is (1) clearly addressed to the snake and not to some other being that controlled it and (2) clearly addressed to it as a snake rather than as some kind of incarnation of a vastly powerful spiritual being.
I understand that—especially within the theologically-conservative-Protestant tradition—many Christians do take the snake in the story to be, or to be controlled by, the devil. But it seems to me very unlikely that it was originally intended this way, and as I say there’s nothing in the story to suggest that understanding. I suggest that this interpretation of the story may in fact be largely motivated by a wish to make the story less silly :-).
So the people who created and spread this story, at least if they intended it to be understood as an account of something that actually happened, evidently didn’t find anything unreasonable in the idea of a “natural” talking and thinking snake.
But that idea is “silly” in the following sense: given some things we now know with great confidence about how the natural world works, we can see that a talking, thinking snake is not the kind of thing that could actually happen. A snake just doesn’t have space for enough brain to think and use language.
Of course if you fill the space not with ordinary biological brain-stuff but with some sort of nanotechnological AI hardware, it might be perfectly possible; or if there is magic and the snake talks and thinks by magic; or if there are gods and devils and one of them is animating it; etc. But, again, that isn’t the story being told here.
Accordingly, the presence of the talking snake in the story really is an extra piece of evidence against the story, even given the other “magical” elements in the story—not because talking snakes would require magic, but because the story shows every sign of being about a non-magical talking snake. (I am using “magic” and “magical” here in a broad sense, to include the exercise of divine or diabolical powers, even though believers in such powers will for good reason generally want to distinguish between those and “magic” as generally understood.)
And if some religious tradition embraces the story as historical fact, that really is an extra piece of evidence against that religious tradition; against its general reliability (because if the story is wrong then the tradition is unreliable) and against that of its present-day advocates (because they really ought to be able to see how implausible the story is).
I personally think that saying “hahaha, talking snake” is counterproductive as well as rude, and I agree with Yvain that if you find a lot of smart people apparently believing in talking snakes then you should very seriously consider the possibility that (1) they don’t believe quite what you think they do and/or (2) their beliefs are more defensible than they sound. But I also think—and my impression from the note at the end of the OP is that Yvain does too—that someone saying “hahaha, talking snake” may actually have a pretty good understanding of the issues and be making (or at least gesturing towards) a reasonable argument.
[EDITED to acknowledge that the devil-snake interpretation is quite widely believed and comment on that, and to tweak some wording a bit elsewhere.]
I would agree that there are some Christians whose belief set could be vulnerable on the point of talking snakes. I can think of several different arguments depending on what other ideas they were holding in conjunction with their interpretation of Genesis. Using a blanket dismissal would have the advantage that you wouldn’t have to figure out which one would work on your target. But I think we would both agree it could also potentially backfire.
Concerning the issue you presented, that ”natural” snakes just can’t work like that. I think you have considerably underplayed your hand. Consider Gen 1:29-30:
That’s right, in the Garden of Eden every single animal was vegan. And ecosystems just don’t work like that. And I would go further and say that all these animals had the capacity at this time to live forever. Death didn’t enter the world till the fall. Rom. 5:12-14:
So we are dealing with quite a big discrepancy from known biology here, and that would be a problem if I were a (Uniformitarian.)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniformitarianism] But fundamentalists tend to be much less Uniformitarian than main stream society. So the idea that God had a different biological system set up initially, and He changed the rules as part of the curse, seems not only plausible, but a nature part of the story.
Also it sort of seems you might be unconsciously assuming the traditional pictorial representation of a small to medium snake wrapped around a tree branch. But the text doesn’t say the serpent was in the tree or give any other reference to size. I tend to picture something more like a Chinese dragon standing on all fours, shoulder to shoulder with Eve. So I don’t get the “brain box obviously too small for speech” effect from my mental picture.
(Note on the preferences for Satan controlling the snake showing an awareness that the talking snake is silly, I think this is more about emphasizing Gen. 3:15 as a Christological prophesy and generally framing the whole story as part of a Christological arch where the first Adam brings san and death and the second Adam (Jesus) brings salvation and life. Having the Devil tempting Adam and Eve here makes a parallel with Christ’s temptation in the desert and with Judas Iscariot’s temptation to betray Jesus. Finding Christological interpretations is a big motivator of Christian Theology.)
That’s a fair point. But it seems to me that it amounts to saying that nothing in the stories in your scriptures could count as much evidence against their accuracy. (Suppose it said “And Adam, when he heard the sentence that the LORD God had passed upon him, knelt down upon the red grass and laughed for sorrow and shame”—well, it’s only uniformitarianism that entitles us to expect the grass to have been green or laughter to have been an unlikely response to sorrow and shame. Etc.)
In which case, you’re also awfully limited in what conclusions you can draw from anything in those stories. “Genesis 3 indicates that God greatly values obedience to his commands.” No, it indicates that he did; for all we know, he might want something very different from us now. “The story of the Great Flood indicates that God has authority over the weather on earth.” No, it indicates that he did; for all we know, he might have somehow given up that authority since then. Do these stories actually have much value, if everything they describe might have changed utterly?
(You might say that God’s character and values are known to be stable, unlike the laws of physics or anything in biology. But the sources that tell you that are 2000 years old! That’s, like, 25% of the entire age of the universe! If God’s character and values were changing on that sort of timescale, it’s perfectly possible that these ancient texts might declare them to be stable even though they aren’t.)
I don’t think I was consciously or unconsciously assuming that. But I was assuming something that’s recognizably the same sort of animal as today’s snakes—God says “upon your belly shall you go”, etc., not “I shall replace you with something 1⁄4 the size which shall go upon its belly”. I think I agree, though, that the Chinese-dragon interpretation is at least kinda tenable.
OK, that’s a good point. (In terms of what it says about where Christian interpretations of Genesis 3 come from; I don’t think the Christian tradition of finding prophecies and parallels everywhere in the OT is actually intellectually healthy, but it’s certainly a real thing.)
But … how good is that parallel, actually? I mean, Judas is not (so far as I can tell) in any way usefully parallel to either Adam or Eve, and the temptation of Jesus seems very different in kind from that of Eve, and most of the actual opposition Jesus is reported to have had comes from very human sources.
I think if you’re looking for a parallel to the temptation-and-disobedience of Adam and Eve, through which sin and death enter the world, the place you need to look is for some temptation-and-obedience of Jesus through which sin and death are conquered. And there is indeed an obvious such thing, which takes place in the (aha!) garden of Gethsemane, where he is clearly at least considering the possibility of saying “no” to what he has to do but goes ahead with it (“not my will, but yours, be done”). But this temptation is, so far as the stories say, entirely endogenous; we’re shown no tempter, whether human or animal or evil spirit. So I’m not really seeing how any parallel between the Adam&Eve story and the Jesus story is made closer by having the snake in Eden be possessed by, controlled by, or an incarnation of, the devil.
That doesn’t mean that the tradition that says the snake “was” the devil doesn’t arise from a desire to find such parallels, of course. But it doesn’t seem to me so obviously well explained in those terms as to make me abandon my more cynical theory :-).
There’s one in Matthew 4 verse 1 to 11, in which Jesus spends forty days in the desert, fasting, and then is visited (and tempted) by the Devil.
True enough. I meant that there’s no external tempter in the garden of Gethsemane. I’d already remarked that the temptation of Jesus (as found in Matthew 4) “seems very different in kind from that of Eve” and was proposing a better parallel.
Fair enough. The way I see it, there are some themes that are paralleled in Gethsemene, and some themes that are paralleled in the forty days and nights in the desert. They’re both parallels, but in different ways.
I agree that not being a Uniformitarian makes the makes the evidence harder to deal with and is generally a headache for everyone. But it should not be used to let a historical theory get away with anomaly without any hit to its plausibility, it should just reduce the size of the plausibility hit. Also several anomalies that are being explained by the same rule change only make up one plausibility hit rather than being additive.
On Christological interpretations, I agree it can get out of hand, and I’m not sure they are very valid here, But if “and He should crush your head” is going of be a prophesy about Jesus, well there isn’t a story of Him dramatically crushing a snake’s head, so it’s got to a general stamina out His victory of death, sin, and the devil, so I do think people are using that frame to identify Satan and the serpent.
(Sorry, this is rather long and I fear less clear than I would like.)
Uniformitarianism
We are in agreement that uniformitarianism is a matter of degree and that it’s the complexity of the “rules” that matters, rather than of what happens. The most popular formulation of this idea around these parts is “Solomonoff induction”: suppose that everything you observe is generated by a computer program, give higher initial probability to shorter programs, and then just do Bayesian inference as new observations come in. Aside from being totally uncomputable in theory and infeasibly expensive in practice and depending (finitely but hugely) on exactly what language you write your programs in and how you encode your observations, this is a really good way to decide what to believe :-).
So you’re probably right that you can avoid taking an extra plausibility hit from talking snakes as such, if instead you say something like “around the time of creation, living organisms worked by divine magic rather than biology” or ”… living organisms were based around completely different biology”. That sort of proposition generally incurs a really big cost in plausibility, for two reasons.
If you’re aiming for a theory that says “before, the rules were X; after, the rules were Y” then the problem is that now your program needs to contain both sets of rules. If you’re never intending to go beyond “before, the rules were different; after, the rules were Y” then the problem is now your program needs to describe what happened “before” without the compression enabled by having those rules—this is the “a witch did it” problem.
(How big a problem the latter is depends on how much you observe actually depends on what happened “before”.)
It seems to me that “biology used to be completely different, in such a way as to make talking snakes not a problem” is obviously no improvement on “there was a (naturally) talking snake”. And I think it is, actually, worse than just “biology used to be completely different”—when a single rule change has to explain multiple anomalies, the more specific anomalies it has to explain the more constrained the rule change is.
Parallels
OK, so the idea is that you want to find a specific prophetic point of reference for the “he shall crush your head” thing (because obviously the idea that it might refer to people actually killing snakes is completely ridiculous, I guess) and that has to be Jesus because everything has to be Jesus[1], and then the only animate thing whose head Jesus can reasonably be said to have crushed is the devil. But, again, it doesn’t seem to me that there’s anything internal to the story calling forth such an interpretation, and I’d have thought there’s an obvious completely straightforward way to understand the bit about crushing snakes’ heads (especially as it comes right alongside something about snakes biting people’s feet, which also seems like a fine example of something that doesn’t require overinterpretation) -- so, again, this seems like something being imposed on the text from outside, and therefore not a good explanation for why (some) Christians take the snake to be / be controlled by the devil.
[1] Sunday school teacher: “OK, children, can you tell me what’s small and brown and furry, with a big fluffy tail, and really likes nuts?” Child: “I’m sure it’s Jesus, but it sounds a lot like a squirrel.”
Sorry to be so long answering this. Not only was work busy but my husband was going through withdrawal again and that is always an all consuming time sink.
On Solomonoff induction: If we take a look at one of the facts this story proposes to explain, - We live in a world of decay, where humans and other animals have death as their destiny and the universe itself tends to disorder and destruction, but that this is bad and wrong and against the harmonies of logic and lawfulness and the timelessness of truth. This story’s proposal that the original and good state of the world was without any need for death, but that at one point one fundamental change was made, perhaps tweaking a law of conservation of information just enough so that its practical consequences are an ever increasing disorder, i.e. entropy, seems as elegantly simple answer as I can think of. This one rule change is more what I was thinking of, rather than swap out of the entire rule set, basically because it’s lower complexity. Yes, I am expecting that God re-cons the plant and animal world so that you get stable biology and ecosystems under this new rule, but i already had a sufficiently intelligent and powerful agent, with an established interest in having a sustained ecosystem, who could implement the needed changes. So I don’t see any new rules there. Nor do I think it should be surprising that quite a lot of surface changes could be occasioned by even a small change of one rule that was so fundamental.
On parallels: I can think of lots of reasons to give why Satan controlling the snake in called for by a Christological interpretation and other reasons, like dualism, that could also lead to the idea this was a good interpretation, but I’m getting the internal feeling that I’m starting to treat my arguments like soldiers on this one. People are influenced by the culture around them so I can see how a culture that finds the idea of talking snakes silly would be one of the contributing factors to the general theological preference for Satan as an external control on the snake. But this is such a subtle thing with so many dependencies that it will be hard to get even someone who has this assumption to focus on questioning the one dependency you want, the inerrancy of the Bible, rather than some other dependency, especially if you are trying to avoid a feeling of personal hostility that tends to harden people positions.
Slowness not a problem. (You wouldn’t believe how long I’ve sometimes taken.) I hope your husband is OK.
You say “one fundamental change”, but I’m pretty sure there is no way to fill in the details of that story so that it actually works. Increasing entropy is a consequence of the fundamental form of the laws of physics, plus the world being in a low-entropy state at the big bang. Make a small change to that and you get not a perfect world with no death and corruption, but a world where physics doesn’t work.
I don’t think you get to call something “elegantly simple” just because you haven’t thought about the details and therefore can’t see how messy they are :-).
(Maybe God designed a lawful universe where entropy increases, and then set Eden up with a hacked version where entropy doesn’t increase because of constant divine intervention, and then just stopped doing that when Adam and Eve didn’t obey his command. That would suggest that A&E were intended to fail all along, an idea that maybe gets some support from e.g. Revelation 13:8 and which strengthens my sense that in the standard Christian interpretation of the Eden story God is the bad guy.)
You might have the impression (given certain things in that Wikipedia article; not everything there is entirely accurate) that uniformitarianism is a premise which is used to interpret the world. Historically, that’s inaccurate. Geologists were young earth creationists in the first place, but changed their minds and adopted uniformitarianism as a conclusion, not as a premise, because the facts on the ground did not fit with creationism, not even if the rules have changed.
Not sure where to start regarding the oddly-named “Occam’s Razor”—though we can immediately dismiss the idea that one could do Newtonian Science without it. Possibly we’ll discuss this, and modern attempts to formalize simplicity, some other time.
Let me quickly note that the Chinese dragon interpretation would make God’s curse on the serpent even weirder.
It seems to me that one change at a fundamental level could have less Kolmogorov complexity then several special case exceptions at a surface level. And that is what the bringer change sounds like to me, something at a deep level, connected to death, propagating all through the system.
Since we are already talking about going from a legged animal to a legless one, I don’t see that doing it on a more massive animal can make a significant change in the complexity penalty.
Your approach is wrong, and I don’t know how it went wrong. (I assume the problem is deeper than “bringer change” being unknown to Google.) If you know what “Kolmogorov complexity” means, maybe think about how you would program a simulated world that allows such a change to be “fundamental” and yet produces the evidence that scientists continually find.
On the much less important issue at hand: you seem to have skipped the question of why this God would take legs away from any “snake,” and precisely what that entails. (Should I ask how many Chinese dragons or “seeds” thereof were affected? Or would that distract from the why?)
This is one problems with the absurdity heuristic. Because of deliberately starting at a point with such a long inferential distance, It can be hard to see where the error has taken place.
I hope you’re familiar with Clarke’s Third Law?
Believers can say “we’ve chosen to take it as a metaphor now”.
But if the believers make statements referencing the past or other believers, they can’t say that any more. And typically they do.
I believe you are making a charge (which I have heard made before) that the claim that some scriptural passages were intended as metaphors is a relatively recent innovation among believers to accommodate religion to modern scientific discoveries, and that it breaks with the traditional, literal interpretation of those passages. In fact, there is a long tradition among theologians to recognize that much of scripture should be interpreted metaphorically and/or allegorically rather than literally. Examples include Origen of Alexandria (late second—early third century CE) who took much of the Garden of Eden story to be allegorical, Augustine of Hippo who stated (in a work entitled The Literal Interpretation of Genesis from the early fifth century) that much of Genesis cannot and should not be interpreted literally, and Irenaeus of Lyons (second century CE) who interpreted the Garden of Eden story allegorically (in Against Heresies).
While it is certainly the case that some believers traditionally interpreted Genesis literally (and some still do), it is also the case that there is an ancient tradition of interpreting Genesis metaphorically/allegorically and so modern believers are by no means breaking with tradition if they interpret the serpent metaphorically.
Pretty much every variation on a religion you can think of has been thought up by someone, at some time in the past. You can’t use that as your criteria for “ancient tradition” without making the whole concept of “ancient tradition” meaningless because now everything is one. How mainstream was the belief that Genesis is not literal?
For that matter, since religion is supposed to provide eternal truth, the idea of having a minority tradition in sometinng seems problematic. If a religion has multiple traditions at once, how do you decide which one counts as the “real” one that nonbelievers should be criticizing? And if the ancients had beliefs A or B, but moderns only have A, how do you decide that that counts as the ancients believing A (so you can claim that moderns are following tradition) rather than as the ancients believing B (which means that moderns are breaking with tradition)?
Well, the three authors that I listed are among the most influential early doctors of the church, so their views are definitely mainstream (albeit not universally held).
I don’t know about that. I listed three very influential early Christian theologians who took much of Genesis to be non literal.
Your point that there are divergent views on the matter of how literally to take Genesis is certainly true and not in dispute. I alluded to that fact in my post when I said:
However, I don’t see how that conflicts with my point that one can interpret the serpent story metaphorically without breaking with early mainstream Christian traditions. Moreover, you wrote:
I don’t see how the fact that there are divergent interpretations of some scriptural stories is particularly surprising or problematic, unless you are trying judge ancient religious texts against the stylistic standards of modern historical or scientific writing (which presumably most people would not recommend doing).
It’s problematic because it provides a ready-made excuse to deny having changed when you get something wrong and you’re forced to change. “Oh, we didn’t really change anything, look, we’re following this old tradition”, even though you could have decided any one of several mutually exclusive things and still been able to claim you’re following a tradition.
Beliefs about whether or not the snake is literal are not, and never were, “core beliefs” of Christians. Core beliefs are the things that are contained in the creed, like that Jesus rose from the dead and so on.
If you found conclusive scientific proof that Jesus did not rise from the dead, very few Christians would accept that. The reaction to that, no matter how strong the proof, would be very different from the reaction to evolution.
I suspect that two hundred years ago, most scientists believed that human beings were not descended from monkeys. That does not make evolution denial a “core belief” of science, nor do the beliefs of Christians two hundred years ago automatically constitute the beliefs of Christians today.
The attitude of science to its past and the attitude of Christianity to its past are very (and relevantly) different.
In science, everything is meant to be revisable in the light of new evidence; authority is always supposed to be subordinate to reason and experimental results; there’s a reason why the motto of the Royal Society is nullius in verba.
Christianity, on the other hand, has authorities up the wazoo. (Different authorities for different sects.) The Bible (held by many to be perfectly free from error). The Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church (held by many to be perfectly free from error, subject to certain conditions). The ancient creeds (held by many to be perfectly free from error). The Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican Church. The Apostolic Fathers. Luther. Calvin. Aquinas. Augustine. Accepted as authorities (in so far as each one is, by any given Christian) not in the way that someone might appeal to, say, Murray Gell-Mann (“he’s incredibly smart and has been very reliably right before—but of course whatever he says can be checked by other people and anyone can make mistakes”) but simply because they’re Known Authorities.
In science, a discovery from 200 years ago may be admired as an impressive piece of work, but the assumption is usually that since then we’ve improved our techniques, done more careful analysis, and superseded it.
In Christianity, all the central ideas are centuries old, they are explicitly passed down the generations, and they are believed largely because there is a tradition (etymology: a thing handed down) saying that one should believe them—and, in many cases, because it is thought that they originally—centuries ago—entered the world at the command of God.
The best reason for accepting any given scientific theory is generally that there is good experimental evidence that it describes the world accurately. In principle, anyone—at least anyone with the right skills and equipment—can repeat the experiments and redo the mathematical analysis and arrive at the same conclusions. (Or, in some cases, arrive at different conclusions and show that everyone’s been wrong.)
The best reason for accepting the central doctrines of Christianity is that there is a ~2000-year history of other Christians accepting those doctrines and believing that they derive from the all-knowing all-good creator of the universe.
(Of course the above is a bit too black-and-white. In practice most scientists believe a lot of what they do because they heard it from other scientists whose judgement they trust. Some Christians believe some of what they believe because it just feels right to them, or because they consider that God told them directly. But the difference I describe is there and it’s a big deal.)
So, if it turns out that until 200 years ago all the scientists were wrong about something important, we should re-check any bits of their work that we’re still depending on, but science is a largely self-correcting enterprise and it’s probably no big deal. And our scientific opinions now are not supposed to—and generally genuinely don’t—depend on the judgement, or the character, or the rightness-about-any-particular-issue, of those scientists 200 years ago and more.
But if it turns out that until 200 years ago all the Christians were wrong about something important, it’s a really big deal. Because so much of what defines Christianity is what Christians of past ages have handed down, and because so often the case for believing X is something like “all the earliest Christians believed X”.
I agree with this, although I do not think it is a sufficient argument to prove that Christianity is false if taken alone, and I think it is inappropriate to criticize Christians both for refusing to update on evidence and for changing their minds when they are mistaken (not that you did this here, but I frequently see it.) People certainly should change their minds when they are mistaken, and yes this makes it more likely that they are also wrong about the other things that they haven’t changed their minds about yet.
I agree that it is nowhere near enough on its own to refute Christianity.
If someone (or some institution) has been wrong then they will be criticized for refusing to update if they stick to their old wrong position, and for inconsistency if they change; the fact that they are faced with these two opposite complaints doesn’t mean that their critics are unreasonable, it means that once you’ve done something wrong it’s too late for any course of action to render you immune to criticism.
Inconsistency isn’t really the right thing to complain about if they change; but, actually, I think the usual complaint made by skeptics about the less-traditional sort of Christian isn’t “boo, you changed and that’s not allowed”; it’s more like “you call yourself a Christian and offer your reasonableness as evidence that the Christian tradition is reasonable; but your position is very far from representative of the Christian tradition and your reasonableness doesn’t negate its flaws”. (With, perhaps, a side order of “you’re adopting a position that’s basically indistinguishable from ours, while wrapping yourselves in the apparel of the more popular other guys; that makes arguments with you frustrating and rather unfair”.)
Because if you replace the talking snake with, say, a monkey which gave Eve the apple and indicated by gestures that Eve should eat it, nothing much would change in Christianity. Maybe St.George would now be rampant over a gorilla instead of a dragon...
True, there would only be some superficial changes, from a non-believing standpoint. But if you believe that the Bible is literal, then to point this out is to cast doubt on anything else in the book that is magical (or something which could be produced by a more sophisticated race of aliens or such). That is, the probability that this books represents a true story of magical (or much technologically superior) beings gets lower, and the probability that it is a pre-modern fairy tale increases.
And that is what the joke is trying to point out, that these things didn’t really happen, they are fictional.
If you actually believe that the Bible represents a true story about a magical being or beings then the obvious retort is that there is no problem at all with talking snakes. A talking snake is a very minor matter compared with, say, creating the world. Why wouldn’t there be one? Just because you find the idea ridiculous? But it is NOT ridiculous conditional on the existence of sufficiently strong magic.
It’s not impossible conditional on the existence of strong magic. I’m not so sure it’s not still ridiculous even conditional on the existence of strong magic. Especially as, in the story, the snake doesn’t appear to be magically talking, it’s just “more cunning than any of the other creatures YHWH had made” or whatever exactly the text says.
We now know that talking requires a big fancy brain, such as humans have and snakes conspicuously don’t (and don’t have room for), and the right sort of vocal apparatus, ditto. Back in 2000BCE or whenever it was, of course it was well known by observation that snakes don’t talk, but it presumably wasn’t understood that they can’t and why. And when we see an old story featuring a talking snake, which doesn’t present it as able to talk on account of some sort of magic or divine intervention but just oh, hey, a talking snake, I think it’s reasonable to say to ourselves “See, the people who wrote that story just didn’t understand how implausible that bit of it is”. And I think it’s reasonable to see the talking snake as making the story less plausible than it would have been without it. And also, I think, less plausible than if its talking had been explicitly explained by magic or divine/diabolical intervention. Not because those are plausible explanations otherwise, but because the rest of the story is already committed to the sort of world in which such things might work, and in such a world a magically or divinely talking sheep is more plausible than an “ordinarily” talking sheep.
“Ridiculous” implies a context and the usual dismissive context here would be “Ha-ha, talking snakes, like in fairy tales for little children?” But that’s not the context in Genesis.
You probably have a small box in your pocket or nearby. That box can not only talk, but even show moving pictures, from another side of the world, even. And yet, it doesn’t seem to have a “big fancy brain”.
I think it’s quite unreasonable. People who told that story were, of course, well aware that garden-variety (heh) snakes don’t talk. Clearly, that particular serpent was not one of those.
I am not sure, but I think that the conventional Christian interpretation is that the snake (which might have been a dragon) has been possessed by Satan and was no more than a remote-controlled drone, so to say.
In any case, I find the focus on talking snakes in a story which mentions things like “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” to be somewhat misguided :-/
I think you’ve missed a central point of my argument. (So I wasn’t clear enough. Sorry.) Of course they were well aware that ordinary snakes these days don’t talk. But reading the story, it seems to me clear that they thought it perfectly reasonable that once upon a time the smartest non-human animals might have talked, and that snakes might have been the smartest non-human animals.
In other words, it seems to me that this is not a story about a snake given special powers by magic, or sufficiently advanced technology, or devil-possession. And that’s exactly why the fact that the snake talks indicates a deficiency in their understanding. If the story had said “Now, an evil spirit had entered into the serpent, and it spoke: …” then it wouldn’t have had been evidence of that deficiency.
Christian theology isn’t homogeneous enough for there to be such a thing as the conventional Christian interpretation, but here are some comments from a few different sorts of fairly-mainstream Christian sources.
The NIV Study Bible (conservative evangelical, fairly lowbrow, creationist) takes basically the position you describe. “The great deceiver clothed himself as a serpent, one of God’s good creatures”.
The New Jerome Biblical Commentary (liberalish Catholic, middle-high-brow) takes a precisely opposite view. “The snake is not Satan, though later traditions so interpreted it [...]. He is simply a mischievous creature made by God, dramatically necessary [...] he recedes into the background when his narrative function is accomplished.”
“The theology of the Book of Genesis” by R W L Moberley (liberal Anglican, accessible academic) concurs. “So, although the serpent is clearly not identified with Satan, as in much subsequent construal of the story, the implied reader has good reason to be wary about words from an archetypal ancestor of enmity—indeed, potentially deadly enmity—against humanity.” (He is referring here to nothing more theological than the fact that snakes and humans don’t tend to get on.)
To be fair, in the Genesis story, God cursed both the snakes and the humans to forever more not get along with one another. That’s a bit more theological.
That is not clear to me at all. In fact, I am tempted (hiss!) to characterise this as a wild flight of fantasy. I see no reason to believe ancient Hebrews thought that long time ago animals talked—or considered snakes to be the smartest animals. AFAIK animals don’t talk in the Old Testament with two exceptions: the serpent in the Garden of Eden and Balaam’s donkey (which was able to talk by an explicit act of God).
But in any case—“indicates a deficiency in their understanding”, so what? It is very obvious there were a lot of deficiencies in their understanding, and..?
You misunderstand my position. It is not that Satan became the serpent, but that Satan possessed the serpent. Incarnation vs remote teleoperation.
I suggest that Genesis 3 is actually some (admittedly weak) reason to believe that. But, for the avoidance of doubt, my conjecture is not that they thought all animals talked, and I am not suggesting that they thought any non-human animals talked post-Eden.
According to this, at least some ancient-ish Hebrew commentators thought that “The snake from creation was an intelligent animal that talked, thought, and walked upright like a human”. This is already long after when Genesis 3 was written, of course, but it does at minimum make it clear that this was by no means an unthinkable thought.
So that’s exactly the point of people saying “ha ha, your religion has a talking snake in it”, and they need not be making an error in going from “this religion’s holy book has a story with a talking snake in it” to “this religion is less likely to be right than if it didn’t have that story”. And the fact that magic or divine intervention could obviously (if either existed) make snakes talk doesn’t invalidate that.
No, actually I wondered about saying “except that it’s more like incarnation than possession” but decided that was unnecessary nitpicking. So yes, rather than “of my sample of three, one basically agrees with you and two flatly disagree” it would be more accurate to say “of my sample of three, one kinda agrees with you and two flatly disagree”.
The sample, by the way, consisted of the books I happen to have on my shelves that I could tell from the titles were likely to express some opinion about the question. I looked in one other but it turned out not to. So no cherry-picking here.
(But I should add that I would not expect randomly chosen Christians to be much like random samples of those three, because most Christians are theologically unsophisticated; so some version of the serpent=Satan theory might well be more popular than that sample would suggest.)
Yes, Lumifer’s objections—based on a character who does not appear in Genesis at all—seem silly to me. On the other hand, if God made the world, he could have used unnecessary magic on any number of animals in the ‘natural’ course of creation. (As I’m sure we all know, a god of divine rank 16 could make a talking snake much more easily than he could make a planet!) So this is a weak argument.
Josephus believed that there was a talking snake, and that this was merely an example of the fact that all animals could talk. I have a blog post about that here..
However, I am skeptical that the original intention of the story is to make such claims. I think that whoever first came up with the story, whether that was written or oral, and even if it was based on other accounts, must have known that they were creating a story. But given the lack of context that ancient accounts used to have, it was difficult for other people to know what was a story and what wasn’t, when the account was received from hundreds of years ago.
I’m not sure the original intention is quite what matters.
Suppose a religion is made up by outright fraudsters. If someone says “look, this religion says X and Y and Z, which we know are not true”, is it any refutation of that argument to say “well, sure, but the original authors of that story knew X and Y and Z weren’t true”? Of course not.
If the story in Genesis 3 was deliberately made up by people who did not believe there had ever been a talking snake, with the intention that subsequent readers or listeners would take it as historical, then the situation is the same as in the previous paragraph.
If it was made up with the intention that readers or listeners would treat it as fiction (or perhaps I should say fable or myth), then indeed their epistemic situation was just fine and I have no particular objection to it—at least not on these grounds. But if (as I think likely, and it sounds as if you agree) subsequent readers or listeners ended up treating it as history or something like history—why, then, that indicates that those subsequent readers or listeners had terrible epistemic hygiene; isn’t that highly relevant in evaluating other parts of the belief system those people have handed down to us?
Translation: they were human.
I don’t know of any large populations with non-terrible epistemic hygiene.
The relevant issue is not the epistemic hygiene of the populations, but of (so to speak) the process by which any given body of ideas reaches us. In the case of the Bible, on entirelyuseless’s (plausible) hypothesis we find that at least some of it reached us (in its role as Sacred Scripture, no less) by being treated as reliable history by people who had no good reason to think of it as more than a fable.
Not every body-of-ideas exhibits such crass indifference to truth in its history, though of course it’s by no means only religious ones that do.
And..? So what? I am not sure I see the point.
So the presence of the talking snake in the story is evidence against the rightness of the religion, for reasons that can be (albeit needlessly rudely and uninformatively) expressed as “ha ha, your religion has talking snakes, how ridiculous”.
Just to be clear, what exactly is your point in this thread?
I don’t see how that follows from your previous comment. And in any case, I continue to disagree with that statement.
Let’s go upthread. That was my first comment and I still stand by it.
While we’re restating our positions: I (1) agree that the talking snake is a long, long way from being the best reason for thinking that Christianity-as-traditionally-understood is badly wrong, but (2) think “conditional on sufficiently strong magic” misses the point, because the talking snake is not portrayed as talking on account of any sort of magic.
And I suggest that we leave it there rather than engaging in further rounds of clarification and/or nitpicking.
That assumes that it’s always the goal of an author to tell the average reader the truth. As early as the 12th when Maimonides writes his Guide there’s the idea that the Torah is purposefully written in a way that the average reader doesn’t get it’s secrets. Only wise people are supposed to understand it. If a story successfully throws off a reader that isn’t wise it might have done it’s job.
Yes, that’s true, it might. Someone who embraces an esoteric version of (say) Christianity that takes all the silly-sounding things in it to be coded messages designed to be mostly misunderstood does indeed hold a position that isn’t vulnerable to attack on the basis of how silly the stories sound.
I don’t think that was the sort of scenario entirelyuseless had in mind, though.
If a story successfully throws off a reader that isn’t wise, but people who aren’t wise still get to go to Hell based on not acting as demanded by the story they don’t understand, then the writer is being a major jerk.
The average person isn’t supposed to get his knowledge by reading himself but by listening to his rabbi/priest.
I agree about the case of deliberate fraud. For example it seems likely to me that Joseph Smith knew that he was inventing the Book of Mormon, and the fact that he knew that is not a defense of Mormonism; if anything it makes things worse.
Genesis and similar things seem a bit different to me, in at least two ways: 1) having no access to the origin in that case, I don’t have any particular reason to suppose dishonest motives, and 2) there are many aspects of the accounts that look idealized, in a way that isn’t terribly reasonable for someone who is trying to delude people. In other words, I suspect something like this: the author thinks, “Of course no one knows what really happened. But I’m guessing it was something like this. And of course everyone else knows that no one knows, so they’ll know that this is a guess.”
But if that’s the case, historically those authors were mistaken. People didn’t just know they didn’t know, but assumed the accounts were accurate even in a detailed way, for the most part, even if there were exceptions to that kind of interpretation even e.g. in the early church.
I agree with the last point, that these facts are highly relevant. As I said e.g. about the resurrection, Christians definitely distinguished all along between beliefs about the interpretation of Genesis and actual creedal beliefs. But that doesn’t change the fact that they were very certain about the Genesis story, for the most part, nor the fact that their certainty was religiously motivated. And that is prima facie a pretty good argument that the whole religion is false. I didn’t say that there aren’t arguments like that, just that this does not account for everything.
That isn’t necessarily true. The story could have been created by a process such as channeling that’s believed by the author of the story to produce reliable wisdom. In Buddhism there’s historical “knowledge” coming from past-life memories.
According to your own link, some commentators thought that the snake was an intelligent humanoid, some thought it was Satan in the flesh, and some thought that Genesis was… mistaken about the snake speaking.
All it shows is that the variety of interpretations is wide. “Not an unthinkable thought” is a remarkably low bar, at this level pretty much anything goes.
That’s a stupid point, of the same kind as “the Pope wears a silly hat, ha-ha, he must be really dumb”. It’s just agitprop. I don’t see any reason to pay attention to such “points”, do you?
For sure. My point is that the culture Genesis 3 came out of was one that had at least some inclination to accept the idea of talking snakes, which makes it more plausible that the talking snake in Genesis 3 was intended to be understood as, well, an actual talking snake (which is how, at face value, the story describes it) rather than a puppet of the Devil, or a metaphor for human curiosity, or whatever.
How big and fancy a brain does a parrot have?
I’d need to see a sample size bigger than 1 to be sure that Alex’s (prima facie very impressive) achievements weren’t exaggerated. And it’s clear that he was a long, long way from the level of understanding shown by the snake in Genesis 3.
But you and DanArmak are right to point out that birds’ brains do seem to achieve more understanding per unit size than primate brains.
Nitpick:
Talking the way we do maybe requires a big brain. We have no reason to think talking in general requires one. AFAIK, there’s no consensus on when language evolved, but many or most scientists seem to think it was after the human brain grew to its present size, not before.
New Caledonian crows have intelligence generally comparable to that of chimpanzees; not as great as, but not much less than either. Yet their brains weigh only 7-8 grams. Large snakes can have much larger brains than that. Anyway, brain size is relative to body weight; EQ is a better measure.