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.)
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.)