Category Archives: Religion

The Measure of the Year

04 Thursday Jan 2018

Posted by in Religion, Seasons, Titles, Writing

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I am thinking of changing the name of my seasons book. As any reader of this blog knows, my book has long borne the same name as the blog—The Varied God. The name comes from a line of poetry by eighteenth century Scottish poet James Thomson, whose set of poems called ‘The Seasons’ was hugely popular, and had a great cultural influence. Many works of art portrayed scenes from Thomson’s poems, and pieces of music, such as Haydn’s ‘The Seasons’ oratorio, were set to it. To the larger work Thomson appended a short ode, in which he wrote:

‘ . . . these are but the varied god,

The rolling year is full of thee.’

I have used this working title for a long time, and been happy with it for a few reasons. But my thinking is changing for similar reasons.

Thomson was an early Enlightenment man, very interested in science. His admiration for the work of Sir Isaac Newton verged on idolatry, and some of the lines in his seasons poems rework theories about the causes of natural phenomena. But, like Newton, Thomson was also a man of great faith. He believed the purpose of science in these years was to discern the workings of God’s creation, that uncovering the deepest structure of the world was a pious enterprise. Over the course of time The Enlightenment began to challenge the religious stories about the creation of the world, its age, its structure, its mechanics. An invocation such as Thomson’s ‘these are but the varied god’ is historically transitional, and that’s one of the reasons I liked it.

But I am increasingly uncomfortable using anything that invokes superstition. Religion in our society goes from black to blacker, and is the basis for ever-increasing evil, violence, intolerance, and danger. Its adherents are way more interested in gaining political power and forcing their viewpoints on everyone else than on anything having to do with eternity, virtue, or human goodness, and I want nothing to do with it, even as a transitional reference.

This abiding distaste may be one of the reasons I refused, from the get-go, to use the famous lines from Ecclesiastes, ‘to everything there is a season.’ That and the fact that if you study the lines, you realize they have naught to do with the seasons as meteorological, environmental phenomena, merely using the word ‘season’ to mean a set period of time.

I am working now on the chapter in the book about art based on the seasons. There is a lot of it, in painting, sculpture, music, prose, and poetry. I have been reading many hundreds of pages of great nature writing from Hesiod to Annie Dillard. I kept thinking that surely someone, in such a profusion of great writing, would send forth a line that would appeal to me.

Then I revisited a sonnet from one of my favorite poets, John Keats. Keats was a genius, one of England’s greatest poets even though he only lived to be twenty-five. He was also a determined atheist, as testified by his sonnet ‘Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition.’ But he also wrote a lovely sonnet known as ‘The Human Seasons,’ in which he lays out the life of a human in terms of the four seasons—the youth of spring, ripeness of summer, maturity of autumn, and the inevitable death of winter. It’s an old trope, often exercised, but Keats does it beautifully. Who else would give us phrases like ‘Spring’s honied cud of youthful thought,’ or ‘Winter . . . of pale misfeature?’ The sonnet begins with the line,

‘Four seasons fill the measure of the year’

I am thinking now of calling my book The Measure of the Year, both as it says what I want it to say, and because the line comes from a poet who is a much more kindred soul. It is also more to the point of the book—the human experience of the seasons—rather than an abstract representation of them.

Dancing Squirrels

25 Saturday Mar 2017

Posted by in Climate Change, Nature, Religion, Seasons, Spring, Winter

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Yesterday morning I was writing at my desk, but distracted by squirrels running through the trees outside while the Swan Lake Waltz played on the radio. It didn’t take a huge leap of imagination to see a subtle choreography in their scrambling up and down tree trunks, back and forth over outstretched limbs. They all looked fat and healthy, and I thought, Ah Spring! Here at last!

We have had two springs already this year, interspersed with two returns of winter. I have felt rather sad and uncertain about the future since last November, like we are living in the end times for our world: this strange weather does not bode well and feeds the uncertainty.

Human societies have always had tales of the end of the world, and they are so often climatic. There was the great flood of Sumerian literature, as told in Gilgamesh, which was copied and some interesting details added to become the great flood in the Hebrew Bible. Ragnarok–the twilight of the gods in Norse mythology–is preceded by fimbulwinter, an unrelenting three year winter. This all arises from an ancient sense that life on earth is uncertain and is destined to end. People who raised crops for a living came to depend on the cycle of the seasons, and if there was any tardiness or latency in the return of spring it caused anxiety of an existential nature. This anxiety was dealt with mostly by appeals to the god or gods who controlled the season.

Now we understand that the seasons are inevitable cycles of nature, but the thought that the world will end in climatic holocaust is embedded in many religions. The practitioners of those faiths, taken with their own florid scriptures, hold a calm acquiescence, perhaps even an eager anticipation of the end. Evangelical Christianity or some other form of very traditional faith goes hand-in-hand with the kind of conservative political leaning that denies climate change. I don’t know how much of that denial is, at root, a belief that any cataclysmic change to earth’s ecology is part of a long-ordained divine plan, but I do know that Americans decided last fall against a government that might address the impending threat to our planet.

Even though I anticipate the coming climatic holocaust with foreboding, I don’t really spend my days wallowing in dread about it. Not many people do, as far as I can tell. Kind of reminds me of the great book On the Beach, by Nevil Shute, which was made into a movie starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner. It shows people in Australia, the last continent not affected by fallout from the recent nuclear war, going about their business as usual, rarely acknowledging their awareness that the end is coming soon. What else can you do? As the old saying goes, when you don’t know what to do, you do what you know.

And so I spend my time cooking, writing stories, writing new songs, doing the things I’ve always done. Public discourse continues to rant about tax cuts, health care, equal pay, and many other things that will simply not matter in another few years. I am aware that I started writing about the charming image of squirrels dancing in trees, and was quickly diverted to a diatribe on the end of the world.

What are you gonna do? I think it’s likely that the squirrels will survive the coming changes. I don’t think you or I will.

In Which the Seasons Literally Change

23 Friday Aug 2013

Posted by in 4th of July, Autumn, Calendar, Change, climate, Fall, Mythology, Nature, Religion, Science, Seasons, Spring, Summer, Weather, Winter

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My life in the country, for the first several months, was beset by a troubling literalness. Like I was living the pages of a Country Life calendar showing what to expect month by month. We saw a significant thaw towards the end of February. In early spring robins made their appearance with an almost pedantic regularity, and by late spring, does with fawns crept tenuously across the fields. Asparagus jumped up in April, and strawberries too. We ate radishes planted earlier than other crops, and harvested tender lettuce by the middle of May. Throughout the month of May we saw clouds of Mayflies, and I saw my first June bug–literally saw my first June bug–on June first. It’s like these creatures were being paraded out by a stage manager in response to the verses of a song. I almost expected fireworks to spontaneously generate on July 4th.

Then something funny happened. Summer came on, pretty much on cue. But it failed, and continued to fail, in heating up the way summer does. It rained and rained. As a matter of fact, we have only had the hoses out to water our lawn or garden once or twice this year, and everything is as green and ripe as can be. Now we are setting record low temperatures for late July. We have not turned on the air conditioning this week. This morning I am sitting on the porch while a slow drizzle wets the screens, and as the sun comes up, everything in the distance is a blur in thick fog.

People’s reactions to all of this are interesting. Those who claim to doubt the reality of climate change scoff and say, ‘so much for global warming!’–but of course we have seen many record high temperatures broken in the past ten years. This is the first time we have set record lows for a long time. Many people like the lower summer temperatures, but they regard it all warily: ‘We’re gonna pay for this, just wait and see.’

But having spent the past several months researching the myths and the deities who over time have been thought to control the seasons, my thoughts turn to other peoples in other times. What would people three thousand years ago, who counted on a long hot summer to provide bountiful harvests and good hunts to fill larders for the winter months, have thought of all this? What happens if Persephone leaves her mother and returns to assume her throne in the Underworld months too early? Why did it happen? Did we omit some crucial obeisance to Demeter? Did our ceremonies to resurrect Adonis not work?

To me, this is poetic speculation. I know that Canadian cool fronts have been making their way across the American Midwest in response to erratic shifts in the jet stream, and that this pattern will only hold for a while; that summer will return with all its fierce heat and humidity–that we will indeed pay for this. Writers and poets in modern times often evoke myths like Demeter and Persephone or Aphrodite and Adonis, but they are metaphors in their hands, images to enhance poetic vision. There was nothing metaphorical to the ancient people who believed these myths: the winter was quite literally caused by Persephone’s return to the Underworld, and spring by her return to her mother’s embrace. If the spring did not arrive on time, or if signs of an early end to summer were apparent, it was cause for worry. Not knowing the natural causes of meteorological changes, people worked out their own rites and rituals aimed at effecting the desired changes. One can only suppose they approached these rituals with all the fervency of true believers.

Someone (exactly who is still in question) once said that ‘everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.’ This is an ironical acknowledgement of what we knew by the late 19th century, that the weather is ruled by natural forces, that there is nothing you nor I nor any mythical agent can do to change it. The seasons change, they are not changed. We get what we get, even though we expect certain things at certain times, like the pages of a calendar: look it’s April, here are the showers! Look it’s May, here are the flowers!

The Winter that Won’t Go Away?

28 Thursday Mar 2013

Posted by in Anthropomorphism, Autumn, Christmas, climate, Easter, Fall, Halloween, History, Mythology, Nature, Ovid, Puritans, Religion, Seasons, Spring, Summer, Weather, Winter

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Late March and we are still buried in snow here. A March snowfall is not unusual in the American Midwest, but it is usually an unexpected freak of a thing, coming after some lovely springlike days, covering banks of yellow and purple crocus and stands of glowing daffodils. This year we have had none of that. Rather we have had unrelenting cold and gray days and now two major snowfalls in March, this last setting the record for a one-day event.

All of which has led to many references by newscasters and local weather personalities to ‘the winter that just won’t quit’ or ‘the winter that won’t go away.’ It seems a fitting appellation, but I wonder if we know how much cultural perception there is in the idea of winter ‘going away?’ When the seasons change, does one season go away, to be replaced by the next? Actually, seasonal change is mostly incremental. Some people who study this say that it is all a continuum. Scientists, for instance, usually only speak of the extremes, winter and summer, cold and hot, with everything else just a passage between them. But as humans we have a need to segment large swaths of reality to make it more manageable to our limited and easily fooled powers of perception. Landscape, which is also a continuum, becomes forest and field, valley and hill, river and bank, and we are more comfortable seeing things that way.

One of the earliest trends in human culture was to not only strictly segment the seasons, but to personify, even deify them. An example of this comes in the Metamorphoses of the Roman poet Ovid (43 BC–AD 17/18).  In the story of Phaeton and his quest to prove that he is the child of the sun god Phoebus, Phaeton seeks out his father’s palace. There he sees many wonders, such as the Day, Month and Year all personified. And–

There, flower-crowned,

Stood Spring; and naked Summer, wreathed with stalks

of grain; and Autumn, stained with trodden grapes;

and glacial Winter, with his stiff white locks.

For a long time in the history of Western Civilization–particularly European history–the seasons were portrayed either as deities or as persons. Summer tended to be a married couple either tilling their fields or raising children. Autumn was almost always people involved in the harvest, usually of grain or grapes. In paintings, in home decor, on calendars, in poetry, and even in music, when artists and artisans wanted to show the seasons they were usually represented by these standard, anthropomorphic motifs.

This all changed in the New World, particularly in the United States, though nobody is sure why. Some think it’s because of our more intense natural seasons: winter is colder, summer is hotter, spring more gloriously beautiful, and autumn!–well, autumn in America is so thrilling in its multicolored glory that we had to have a second name for it: fall, which is a shortening of the archaic term ‘fall of the leaf.’ So our representations of the seasons have tended to depict natural scenes, not abstract deities or persons. But of course most of Europe is covered in deciduous trees which change color in autumn, and people from Greece to England see the natural changes in their own homelands as stark and varied. Another theory is that our Puritan forebears found the need to purge our national ethos of these vestiges of pagan religion. This goal has been less than successful, given Christmas and Easter observances that are imbued with multiple pagan symbols, and a Halloween which is little more than a pagan Celtic harvest celebration. But at least we have cleared the ancient deities out of our seasonal art and mythology.

This is kind of a shame. When we talk about a winter that won’t go away, it might be helpful for it to have a face, a stubborn old man with ‘stiff white locks’ who refuses to leave and make way for flower-crowned spring. If there’s anyone from that ancient pantheon who deserves the heave-ho right about now, it’s that guy.

Februa

11 Monday Feb 2013

Posted by in Agriculture, Anthropology, climate, Drought, Meteorology, Religion, Seasons, Spring, Winter

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It’s raining today, and cold, though not as cold as it could be for an early February day in the American Midwest. We are due for a string of fairly mild days. The weather personality at one local TV station is enthusiastic about this warm trend, while her counterpart at another station warns that winter’s worst still lies ahead. That’s February. I disagree with Eliot, April is not the cruelest month. It’s this one.

The month was probably named by the Roman king Numa Pompilius, who was not Roman but a Sabine, for the ancient Sabine purification ritual Februa. It was a ritual meant to prepare one’s home and fields for spring. Perhaps there in the Mediterranean climate of the Italian boot, February did signal spring’s onset. Here, not so much. There is the occasional phenomenon, maybe what we are experiencing right now, known as the February Thaw–one of those half-mythological and ill-defined times, like Indian Summer or Blackberry Winter, which many people believe they can define with certainty, only to find that the guy standing right beside them has a different definition. But whatever the February Thaw is, there is nothing certain or lasting about it, and March can find us buried in snow or still scraping thick frost from car windows in the morning.

And that’s what makes February cruel, this flirting with the end of winter, the beginning of spring. I don’t think I used to mind so much. But as the years go on, I find myself longing to spend more time in the sun and the warmth of spring. I also recently moved to a new home that includes several acres of arable land, and I am eager to start planting vegetables. This feeling that it could be any day now, rubbing up against the reality that it’s several weeks away, is frustrating.

Recently I have been studying the various vegetation gods of the old world. One thing that stands out is the violence that pervades almost all their stories. Inanna visits the underworld and is killed and hung on a hook, where she stays until she offers Dumuzi as a substitute. Persephone is raped by her uncle, with her father’s consent. Adonis is gored by a wild boar and bleeds to death. Osiris, not dead enough to suit his wicked brother Seth, is cut into fourteen pieces which are scattered the length of the Nile. And the Phrygian vegetation god Attis, whose cult reigns supreme for gore, castrates himself and bleeds to death, an act which is impersonated by initiates to his priesthood for many generations to follow.

All of these gods have rites which are solemnized by various ancient peoples in the attempt to ensure the coming of a fecund planting season. It seems that the coming of spring (or of the Nile’s flood in the case of Osiris) would be a joyful time, but in the various rites there is much weeping and wailing, not to mention ritual bloodshed. Did ancient people suffer in their desperation to bring on the spring? I long for spring, and find myself frustrated when it seems long in coming, but there are two important things to remember. One is that it doesn’t really matter to me: I do not feed myself by my own effort, or by the produce of whatever little garden patch I may cultivate. And second is the fact that I know the spring will come eventually, as it always does. I understand enough about earth’s transit around the sun to know this.

In a universe driven by superstition, there is always uncertainty. If you believe that your prayers and rituals, your Adonis garden, Corn Osiris, or some other talisman is partly responsible for seasonal transitions, you would tend to be very serious about these things. It is a leap from that kind of earnestness to priests slicing open their own veins and bespattering altars with their blood, but in trying to grasp these things in human terms, I think I get it. I may only feel frustration at the cruel jest of February’s taunts of the vernal season, but other people, in other times, have felt the need to take action. But while I understand this as a human instinct, I think I am too far removed from that time and place (or those times and places) to understand why their various explanatory tales, and in some cases their own rituals, included such a strong dose of graphic violence.

As I finish writing this the rain seems to have stopped. It’s still gloomy out, but that’s to be expected. One of the weather personalities on TV the other night noted that the rain so far in January and February has gotten close to breaking the back of the persistent drought that has dogged our region for a year. That’s good news, and gives me more to look forward to in spring. I can wait, I tell myself, even as the thought throbs at the back of my head that there must be something I can do. I choose to be ambivalent yet about February, but I am learning to live with it.

Turn Turn Turn to Something Else

29 Sunday Jul 2012

Posted by in Ecclesiastes, Folk Music, Joshua, Mythology, Peace, Pete Seeger, Religion, Seasons, The Byrds, War

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Often when I tell people that I am writing about the seasons, they mention the famous lines from Ecclesiastes, which were transcribed into a song by Pete Seeger and made famous by the Byrds. Sometimes they begin humming the tune or even singing the song. Despite these lines being just about the most well-known seasonal reference there is, at least among my generation, I have not written about them in the book, for a number of reasons.

Ecclesiastes is one of the Wisdom books of the Old Testament, which many believe arose from the court of King David (along with Psalms, Proverbs and Song of Solomon). By tradition, this book is attributed to Solomon; the writer introduces himself as a ‘son of King David,’ but in the ancient diction in which it is composed, that phrase could plausibly just mean ‘a descendant of King David.’ Many scholars believe there are two voices in Ecclesiastes, the narrator, who provides autobiographical material and framing narrative, and the actual teacher or preacher implied in the title. In general, the preacher discourses at length about the futility and weariness of life on earth, before reconciling all in the book’s final two verses, which insist that loving God and keeping his commandments is our sole duty.

The verses in question are of course Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, the famous ‘To everything there is a season.’ I don’t count it among seasonal references because it’s not talking about actual natural phenomena, but uses the idea of seasons metaphorically: ‘a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance’ (3:4). These are seasons only in poetic terms. I also think that Pete Seeger’s appropriation of the verses, and his changing the ending line, ‘a time for peace,’ adding ‘I swear it’s not too late,’ lends the words a hopeful meaning that is simply not consistent with the message of Ecclesiastes, or with the Old Testament in general.

One of the few seasonally-based references in the text comes in verse 3:2, ‘a time to plant and a time to uproot.’ That is the translation in the New International version of the Bible. In the King James version, upon which Seeger based his song, the words are actually ‘a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted.’ This is one of the few places he changes the biblical text, rendering it as ‘a time to reap.’ I’m not sure the original text meant to reap, or to harvest, so much as to destroy what has been planted by uprooting or plucking it up. Ruining an enemy’s crops has always been an important tactic in warfare, and this could very well be what the passage is talking about. I know that sounds terrible, but consider the rest of the text.

There is a time to love and a time to hate; a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing; a time for war and a time for peace. It doesn’t say that peace is the natural and preferable state of things, while war is an unfortunate occurrence–it says that there is a time for war. Remember that the ancient Israelites were a warlike, conquering people. The Book of Joshua, for instance, is mostly about wars of conquest in which competing nations were wiped out in veritable orgies of violence. Few people realize that the reason that God made the sun stand still in perhaps the most famous passage in Joshua was so that the Israelites could have an extra long day to slaughter their enemies. King David was a warrior king, famous for slaying ‘his tens of thousands’ (I Samuel 18). War and conquest is so standard a theme in most of the Old Testament that one can grow numb with the thought of the violence being perpetrated.

To take this ethos and try to turn it into a message of hope and peace is laughable. This is especially true when the passage in question comes from a book like Ecclesiastes, which is not about hope, not about peace, but about hopelessness and vanity. Those verses near the end, ‘Fear God, and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man’ (12:13), are the dictum of the jealous, wrathful, vengeful warrior God who animates the entire Old Testament. This is not a book about peace and love, despite Pete Seeger’s best intentions, or those of a whole generation of folk singers who have recorded this song. I will be turning to other texts for inspiration as I write about the seasons.

Keeping Track of Time

18 Sunday Mar 2012

Posted by in Archeology, Birth of Jesus, Calendar, Dates, Dionysius Exiguus, Gregorian Calendar, History, Julian Calendar, Prehistory, Religion, Science, Seasons, Uncategorized

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I was at home one day with my teenaged daughter when she suddenly groaned out loud and tossed a weighty textbook across the room. The book was The Eternal Paradigm or Our Ceaseless Meandering or whatever it is they name AP World History books these days. She does not share my love of history, this child of mine; among many subjects at which she excels in school, it is just about her least favorite. I think a love of our past is something you have to mature into. I recall lots of kids, back when I was young, who loved math or science, literature or art, but I don’t remember anybody who just loved history.

What was giving my daughter fits this day was trying to remember dates, particularly dates before Christ, which, thanks to an almost purposely myopic dating system, run backwards. I couldn’t help but sympathize. How many poor students, scratching their heads over a lesson about ancient Egypt or Babylon, have worked to wrap their heads around how years BC–before Christ–run backwards, while years AD–Anno Domini–run forward. Sure, the birth of Christ was a watershed in the history of Western Civilization, but let’s face it, this numbering system was put in place by people who thought the rapture was imminent, and actually keeping track of the years until then was of minor importance. Dionysius Exiguus, a Scythian Monk born in AD 470 (and whose Latin name means, seriously, something like ‘Little Dennis’) came up with the idea. Accuracy was out the window almost before he got started, since nobody believes any more that they knew the right year for the birth of Jesus back then. Nor did he think to add a year zero between 1 BC and AD 1, so counting the centuries has always been a trial, remembering that AD 2000 was the last year of the 20th century and such.  We now know that the rapture has been–at least–postponed by a few millennia, and we should have tossed  this system out with the theory of spontaneous generation and the earth-centric universe.

More recent scholars have chosen to use the abbreviations BCE, which means ‘before the common era,’ or ‘before the current era,’ and CE, for common or current era, though one can choose to say Christian Era if one is so inclined. Years BC and AD are identical with years BCE and CE. Some people think using BCE and CE smacks of contemporary political correctness, which they hate, since being sensitive to other people’s beliefs is distasteful to Americans. But the fact is, the abbreviations were first used as early as 1856 CE. What I find troublesome about them is that they only deal with the religious issue–they do nothing to make historical dates clearer. They don’t resolve the problem of running backwards then forwards, or of skipping a year zero, which still confuses people all the time. (Here’s a toast to everyone who mistakenly celebrated the end of the millennium in 1999!)

But my problem with historical dates is but the tip of the iceberg: there’s also the problem of scientific dating. In my research for The Varied God I have read a lot of science. Okay, so it has been archeology and anthropology mostly, some geology and geography. As Sheldon Cooper would say with a derisive snort, Not real sciences. But I have become comfortable enough with terms like palynology and osteology, and with techniques like midden floatation and radio-carbon dating that I can read a journal article straight through without running to a dictionary. But one of the most persistent problems for me, and I’m betting for many people who study these sorts of things, is the simple keeping track of time.

While historical years are dated one way, scientific years, measured by radio-carbon dating and dendrochronology and whatever else scientists get up to, have their own confusing nomenclatures. Popular these days is the abbreviation BP, which means ‘before present.’ Present, in this system, is 1950 AD (or CE), since that was the year radio-carbon dating was first used.

When dates get even older, some prefer to use the MYA abbreviation, or ‘million years ago’–as in ‘the Cambrian era ended 488 MYA.’ Sometimes they just use a simple MA, which means the same thing. There is even the use of BYA–and you can guess what that means.

The worst part of this problem comes when scientific dates, those hoary and inconceivably ancient times in prehistory, begin to tickle up against history, as in the times of what we call the Neolithic Revolution. The Neolithic, by many accounts, began around 11,500 BP, an ancient date, to be sure, but it is also perhaps easier to understand as 9488 BC (BCE). 11,500 BP sounds terribly remote, but 9488 BC, not so much. This is the beginning of human cultures and civilizations, just a few millennia short of the inception of Mesopotamian and Egyptian culture, which will be measured in years BC or BCE. Couldn’t we cut out the BPs here so we can wrap our heads more easily around the timeline?

Part of the problem is that the BC and AD dates are usually documented, while the scientific dates are mostly estimates–based on the best science we have, but estimates just the same. Often dates are expressed using the old ‘±’ sign, which means plus or minus a few years. This leads to some confusion, especially when we are talking about fairly recent human developments. They might say ‘samples of emmer wheat show signs of domestication as early as 10,500±.’ It almost becomes meaningless. As someone pointed out recently, we could say ‘McDonald’s restaurants first appear in 1960±,’ and it would look like they were all created at the same time. Do dates expressed this way have any meaning?

I would say that somebody needs to work out a good system that will cover all these things. It can’t be that hard. What is hard is getting everyone to use it. A 1975 law was meant to set the United States on the conversion path to the metric system: you can see how well that worked. The change to digital TV was like pulling teeth. So I don’t hold out much hope that keeping track of dates will get any easier any time soon.

Science, Part II: Controversy

25 Wednesday Jan 2012

Posted by in Mythology, Prehistory, Religion, Seasons, Uncategorized

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(I am nearing completion of Part I of The Varied God–the part that deals with the science and history of early humans and how their development was influenced by life in a world ruled by seasons. My next few blog posts, I don’t know how many yet, will deal with some of the things I’ve learned in that research.)

In any research on the development of our planet or on humanity’s development as a species, there are a number of controversies, not the least of which are the religious objections. Even saying ‘humanity’s development as a species’ evokes evolution and Darwinism. This is not how many religious people choose to see things. To their thinking, the world and all within it was created by a deity, whole in seven days. I’ve never believed this, but my research over the past few years has given me some new insights.

Believers in a literal interpretation of the Bible want creationism to share equal time and space in the public sphere–especially in public schools. Evolution, they caution, is only a theory. They say this all the time: they print it on bumper stickers and T-shirts. But it’s wrong. Evolution is not a theory. Evolution is an observable natural phenomenon, like the rising of the sun or the turning of leaves in autumn. Species change and diversify over time. Every working naturalist has observed this. Charles Darwin’s famous theory is about natural selection–the device by which evolution happens. It is about how evolution happens, not if it happens. Among working scientists there is still much argument about the devices and timetables by which evolution has occurred. But if you’re paying attention, you’ll note that they, too, are arguing about how it happens, not if it happens. As an analog to this, think of the theory of gravity. Newton theorized that there was gravity after seeing an apple fall. But doubters (if there were any) wouldn’t deny the natural phenomenon–that an apple falls. They would deny his explanation, gravity.

What also bothers me about the Biblical explanation of things is how lacking the book is in cosmology. God creates the world in a few verses of Genesis, then we’re off into the history of the Jewish people. The seasons especially get very short shrift. This may be because the areas of the Levant and Mesopotamia where these stories were first told were not significantly defined by seasons. If the seasons are mentioned at all, it’s mostly to reassert God’s dominion over them, not to explain anything about them. At least Classical mythology, Native American mythology and many other world mythologies give us interesting and compelling explanations of the seasons. I don’t believe them either, but at least they involve some good storytelling. For someone who feels an intimate connection to the planet in knowing how things happen, there is great comfort and a wealth of fascination in new advances in understanding. Using an insufficient and unbelievable old legend as the major font of all knowledge will never work.

And finally I come to wonder about the people who first advanced various old creation myths. There is an attitude among many non-believers that the entire religious enterprise has always been about deceiving common people in order to exercise power over them–and of course that has been the motivation of priestly classes in various societies for thousands of years. Religion has been a useful justification for colonists, conquerors and empire builders throughout history, so I understand the deep mistrust of myth felt by non-believers. But I also believe that the earliest people who thought about how the world came to be were likely not interested in empire building; they were interested in how the world came to be. They did not have the scientific method or centuries of natural observation at their command, so they used the best tools they had–imagination and storytelling ability. Most stone age cultures are defined largely by their toolkits. When the tools improve or change, when they go from simple hand axes to delicately flaked spear points, archeologists and anthropologists name a new culture, and recognize the steady advance of humanity. Thinking about where we came from has changed: our intellectual toolkit has improved markedly. We need to recognize this and move on. If you were to hand a Neanderthal hunter a spear that was clearly superior to the one he had been using, he would probably toss his old one aside and take up the new one. So it is with stories of creation. If you were to go back and explain to people who first theorized about the creation of the world that we now have a better understanding of these things, they would likely be the first ones to slap their foreheads and admit that all that God-sitting-on-a-cloud stuff was just guesswork. And being good storytellers, they might weave the Big Bang into a tale worth reciting to a fascinated audience around a campfire at night.