Divinity of Doubt

And the claim of Moses’ authorship of Genesis is further weakened by the fact that he doesn’t appear to have authored the next three of the four Torah books either. Throughout Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers are the words “The Lord said to Moses,” suggesting that, unless Moses wrote in the third person, which is rather unlikely, some unknown author of these books was writing about Moses. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, and the presence of only conjecture that Moses wrote in the third person, the words “The Lord said to Moses” should be given their conventional interpretation: that Moses was not the author. And unless Moses wrote about his own death, which would be no small achievement, we certainly know he at least never wrote the complete last book of the Torah, the Book of Deuteronomy. The unknown author writes an account of Moses’ death, even saying, “Since then, no prophet has arisen in Israel like Moses” (Deuteronomy 34:10–11).¹ (See endnote discussion for multiple-author theory for the Torah.)

I think we can conclude that Judaism has failed to meet its burden of proof that Moses wrote Genesis. So who wrote it? Who was the person God supposedly inspired?

Since billions of humans down through the centuries have actually believed the words of Genesis (e.g., that God created the universe and man, and that Adam and Eve caused the fall of man), and they are at the core of Judaism and Christianity, two of the most powerful religions in the world, and because the lives of untold numbers of people have been greatly affected for good and for bad by them, aren’t we entitled to know who wrote them? I mean, if in our everyday lives someone presented, let’s say, a book to the masses urging them to accept and believe its contents, wouldn’t everyone ask, “Who wrote this book? If you want us to believe what’s in this book, we want to know who its author is to help us assess its credibility.” Of course, the author of a book, let’s say, of ethics, would not truly be relevant if everything contained therein made immense sense and was overflowing with self-evident truth, reason, and common sense.

But the Book of Genesis is not a book of ethics, mathematics, economics, or any subject whose author is theoretically irrelevant to the viability of the book’s contents. It’s a book purportedly written by someone who is giving witness to what he claims happened either by his own observation or by what he learned from others. Therefore, his identity and background are relevant to the credibility of what he wrote. Moreover, the Book of Genesis, unlike a book of self-evident verities, is the precise opposite. Yet there are hundreds of millions of people who believe they are born sinners because according to some completely anonymous author, aeons and aeons ago someone ate some fruit they weren’t supposed to.

It is quite remarkable how very poorly put together this short story is, the most important short story in the history of mankind. I mean, Genesis can’t get through more than its first four paragraphs without looking foolish. In the fourth paragraph, God creates the sun to “light the earth during the day” and the moon “to preside through the night.” Together, they “separate the light from the darkness.” But the first paragraph of Genesis already has the “light of day” and “the darkness of night” (Genesis 1:1–5, 14–18).

There is an internal logic even in the world of insanity—that is, one can have a perfectly intelligent conversation with an insane person if you start out from his or her insane premise. Likewise, there should be an internal logic to fairy tales, as Genesis obviously is. Genesis means to tell a logically chronological story (“The basic arrangement of Genesis is chronological,” says Dr. Everett Fox in his book In The Beginning ), but it stumbles very badly right off the bat. Chapter 1 of Genesis says that God created men and women to populate the earth. (“So God created man in his own image. God patterned man after himself. Male and female he created them. God blessed them and told them ‘Multiply and fill the earth’” [Genesis 1:27–28].) But when we progress, supposedly chronologically, to Chapter 2, we find God creating Adam and Eve (Genesis 2:7, 22), presumably the first man and woman in human history. But they couldn’t be because God had already populated the earth with men and women before this in Chapter 1. As if this isn’t bad enough, in Chapter 1 God created man and woman on the sixth day (Genesis 1:26, 31) after every other form of life, such as animals, fish, and birds, had already been created. But in Chapter 2, the first form of life he created on earth was Adam. The other forms of life followed (Genesis 2:7, 19–20). At worst, this alone shows Genesis to be a fairy tale. At best, it’s extremely sloppy writing, hardly what one would expect of writing supposedly inspired by God.

As the story goes, God told Adam not to eat any fruit (legend has it, apples) from a particular tree in the Garden of Eden, and warned that he would die (from the context, damnation, not physical death) if he did, an injunction and admonition Adam passed on to Eve. But a serpent (Satan) convinces Eve, who apparently is not taken aback that a snake is talking to her, that no harm will come to her if she eats the fruit, which she eats some of and then gives to Adam, who also partakes (Genesis 2:15–17 and 3:1–6).

One doesn’t have to go too much further in Genesis to read this delightful exchange. After Adam and Eve, the biblical parents of mankind, ate the apple in the Garden of Eden that God had told Adam not to do, they felt shame. Genesis says that toward evening “they heard the Lord God walking about in the garden, so they hid themselves among the trees. The Lord God called to Adam, ‘Adam, where are you?’” You see, God, who is all-knowing and also omnipresent (everywhere) doesn’t know where Adam is hiding. Coming out from his hiding place, Adam replies to God, “I heard you so I hid.” God proceeds to ask Adam, “Have you eaten the fruit I commanded you not to eat?” (Genesis 3:8–12). Again, God, all-knowing, didn’t know whether Adam had eaten the fruit. In other words, God didn’t know any more than you or I or Yogi Berra would if we were in his place. (Is it too far-fetched to speculate that the game of hide and seek may have come from Genesis, the first book to ever be widely circulated? It would be a very fitting place of origin for the most popular children’s game ever. What we do know for sure is that the biggest game of all, organized religion’s God Game, started here.)

Christianity, as well as Judaism, believes that God is all-knowing (omniscient). But if we’re to believe God himself, he says he’s not. Not only does he say in Genesis that he didn’t know for sure where Adam was hiding and didn’t know if Adam had eaten the fruit; just pages later in Genesis, he decides to test Abraham’s faith and obedience to him by commanding Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, to him “as a burnt offering” on a mountain. When Abraham had the wood and the fire ready to go and was about to kill Isaac with his knife, God said to him, “Lay down the knife. Do not hurt the boy in any way, for now I know [Now? He didn’t know before?] that you truly fear God. You have not withheld even your beloved son from me” (Genesis 22:1–12). And earlier, he said to Abraham, “I have heard that the people of Sodom and Gomorrah are extremely evil. I am going to see whether or not these reports are true. Then I will know” (Genesis 18:20–21).

I don’t get it. Is God admitting he’s not God? Or did God, at some point after Genesis, develop the ability to be all-knowing? Apparently not. After Genesis, he’s still pulling into gas stations asking for directions. In Exodus 12:13, he tells the Jews in Egypt to smear blood on their front doors so he’ll know not to kill the occupants. And in Zephaniah 1:12, after the stations are closed for the night, he says, “I will search (search?) with lanterns in Jerusalem’s darkest corners to find and punish those who are indifferent to the Lord.”

Most importantly of all, Genesis 6:5–7 says that God felt the people of the earth he created were wicked and evil and he was sorry he ever made them, and this is why he decided to kill everyone on earth except Noah and his family. But since God is omniscient, which includes having foreknowledge, why did he create them in the first place?

Unless one really loves fiction, it is very difficult to continue reading something like Genesis. It doesn’t even rise to the dignity of being called insane. Insanity at least has its roots in known realities, and the afflicted person loses contact with these realities somewhere along the way. But the Garden of Eden story isn’t even a good fairy tale for children, too ludicrous for refutation, even if we only consider it allegorical, which most true believers do not.

As indicated, we are constantly told that the bible (from the Greek word biblia, meaning “books”) is “the word of God” (Hebrews 4:12, John 10:35, 2 Timothy 3:16). Either the bible is or is not the word of God. If it is not, we can all agree it should have no weight, and, much more importantly, the Judeo-Christian religions that are based on it should be treated as a tremendous, devastating hoax or joke. Can we not all agree on that? But if the bible is the word of God, and God is supreme and all-intelligent and all-perfect, how does one account for all the incredible absurdities and inanities in the bible, so silly they would make the cat smile?

Despite what I have just written and without retracting one word of it, strangely, one could say, I still feel obliged to add that, although one can challenge the alleged divine inspiration of the bible, and fault the bible, as atheists have scaldingly done through the years, for its many absurdities, contradictions, and inconsistencies, it nevertheless has to be acknowledged that the bible is the most important single book, by far, in history, one that tells the greatest story, fictional or otherwise, ever told. And it does so with an unprecedented power and majesty that has resonated down through the centuries. The bible is also a document of enormous wisdom and profundity, and with all of its imperfections, on the whole it is remarkably cohesive and harmonic on any given subject from beginning to end (e.g., the prophecies of the Old Testament fulfilled in the New Testament).

Since the time Johannes Gutenberg got his six presses going in 1452, the bible’s collection of seventy-three books (Catholic bible; the Protestant bible has sixty-six; the Hebrew bible, only twenty-four) has been translated into more than one thousand languages and has sold, like no other book, hundreds of millions of copies all over the world, its bound words found from the icy igloos of the Arctic to the steamy shanties of the tropics. The bible has been studied and scrutinized by scholars far, far more than any other book in history. It has also been quoted thousands of times more than any other book. Moreover, although one can legitimately question the truth of what is on the bible’s pages, one cannot reasonably question the book’s integrity. To do so would be to imagine one of the biggest undetected conspiracies known to man, a virtual impossibility given the great number of necessary members of the conspiracy, particularly since we know from our own human experience the immense difficulty of keeping a secret, even for the smallest of matters. As I once told a jury in London when my opponent raised the specter of a vast conspiracy whose existence would tend to exonerate his client of murder, but about which not one credible word or syllable had leaked out in close to twenty-five years, “I’ll stipulate with you folks that three people can keep a secret. But only if two are dead.”

Though, as indicated, the bible has been assaulted and maligned by countless people through the ages, it remains today undiminished, as popular and important to the world’s culture and thought as ever.

In a word, the bible is not to be ignored.