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.
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.