How Genesis 1 Should Have Been Written

watched "Waking Life" with me today. Fun and thought-provoking! Of all the people with whom to watch a film composed of interminable lectures full of wise-sounding bullshit, if you select me as your viewing partner, you could do far worse. I will replace them with my own interminable lectures of wise-sounding bullshit. ;)

This reminded me of the following faux-religious text I wrote several years ago. Since then I have gotten much better at keeping my eyes open to the world around me rather than on abstractions. Bear with me in Chapter One-- the territory is guaranteed nebulous and difficult no matter what. Ready to rush in where angels fear to tread?

I've been asked how I would formulate a "creation" story if I did not accept the one in Genesis. First, I do not believe it is "creation," so it is not going to be a creation story. But in the spirit of the question if not the letter, here is an "origins story" I would accept. Several times I am quoting from Douglas Adams, such as most of chapter four.

Chapter 1-- Irreducable Primaries

1. Existence cannot not exist. Therefore existence has always existed. "Nothingness precedes beingness" is a gibberish phrase-- there cannot be "nothing." Therefore there has always been things.

2. Therefore time and space have always existed and must always exist as irreducible primaries, corollaries of irrefutable existence. Matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed, so it is reasonable to conclude they are irreducible primaries as well.

3. Everything that exists, by the fact of existing, has a nature which gives it an identity. This also limits its range of possibilities. Every time something acts in accordance with the restraints inherent in its nature, that cannot be called random chance.

4. What existed was quarks and electrons, the most basic of all things, in the form of atoms.

5. It is fruitless to ask why they existed and not something else, without defining the nature of the "something else" that is being hypothesized as an alternative. The only alternative that has been hypothesized is "god," and unlike atoms "god" cannot even be described intelligibly without self-contradiction. Furthermore one may as well ask why there was such a being and not something else, or ask why it created matter, energy, time and space and not something else. So theists are left with the same problem they posited "god" to solve.

6. Matter and energy, time and space, are known to exist. It is fruitless to explain the known in terms of the unknown.

7. The nature of quarks is the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force. The nature of electrons is electromagnetism. The nature of them both is gravity. Posessing a nature means acting in accordance with those features and no other.

8. The cosmic microwave background, the nucleosynthesis of hydrogen, helium and lithium, and the observed type of expansion of our area of space imply that at one point all the matter in this area of space was compressed into a singularity the size of a dime, which exploded and scattered into space as an inevitable result of quarks and electrons, acting in accordance with the four forces in their nature.

9. This singularity destroyed all forensic evidence of what arrangement the matter and energy were in before. No matter how much we want an explanation, that's too bad.

10. Convenient, I know. Sorry.

Chapter 2-- Cosmology

1. The quarks, in accordance with the features that form their nature, were linked together into subatomic particles.

2. The positrons and neutrons, in accordance with the features that form their nature, were linked together into the nuclei of atoms.

3. The electrons, in accordance with the features that form their nature, were linked onto these atom nuclei.

4. This mass of atoms, through gravity, subdivided into clumps called galaxies which took their shape from the spin of the explosion.

5. The matter in the galaxies gravitated further into spinning disks of matter which gravitated further into planets around a star, called a solar system.

6. There were so many of a certain temperature and size of star, that eventually at least one planet was bound to form at the right distance from such a star to support liquid water.

7. When this inevitably occured, one of the places it happened was in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the spiral arm of one of the galaxies. Here atoms clumped into a small, perfectly common yellow sun and a gas giant, and less than one percent of miscellanious other stuff.

8. One planet included in the other stuff was one that got the golden ticket of ninety-eight million miles from a star of the right temperature 4.5 billion years ago. Therefore the hydrogen and oxygen present on this planet combined into water. Why? Because it was in inevitable accordance with the features inherent to their nature.

Chapter 3-- Life

1. The other elements on the planet washed around in a vast ocean, commingling in every way that was possible within the limits of their natures.

2. They stuck together in accordance with their nature. This was a sorting process, which inevitably formed countless monomers such as amino acids and nucleotides. Why? Because that is the way that carbon interacts with other elements under such conditions.

3. It was just a matter of time before polymers were bound to form from such monomers. Why? As a function of the laws of chemistry and biochemistry, which is decidedly not random.

4. Since each component is formed from smaller components which were steps in the process, the only things that had to come together all at once were the first two atoms in the sequence. That is not improbable-- it was inevitable given the number of them.

5. Step by tiny and inevitable step, polymers then slowly linked into more and more "cooperative" systems, which were able to use polymer chains called RNA to replicate more polymer chains almost like a tape drive. Self-replication is the definition of life.

6. Through self-replication, the alive molecules were around longer and in more quantities. This made them more likely to bump up against molecules that enabled them to be around longer and in more quantities. Repeat that sentence ad infinitum. This exponential increase in advantages utterly and forever disrupted the previous balance.

7. As a result of this whole new level of cause and effect, immediately all heck broke loose.

8. Anything that happens happens. Anything that in happening causes something else to happen causes something else to happen, and anything that in happening causes itself to happen again (self-replication), happens again. Since this is a tautology, no information goes into this. However, this self-evident tautology is unique in that an almost infinite amount of information comes out. Things that cause themselves to repeat make evolution possible.

9. Proteins survived better than other proteins when they combined into protobacteria. These survived better in the form of cells. Cells survived better when they had other cells growing out of them. Billions of such steps took place that increased the adaptation of populations to their environment.

10. This process had no progress or direction. It branched out in countless directions of groping, blind changes. Some branches even sent offshoots back the way they had come.

Chapter 4-- Consciousness

1. One of the types of adaptations that worked the best was to adapt the part of an species that determined its response to stimulus. As a result, a few branches of branches on the "evolutionary bush" meandered vaguely in the direction of having more and more such responses in an ever-increasing repertoire.

2. Eventually one form of life on the then-current tip of one such branch of variation had such a well-adapted mechanism for response to stimulus, that it did not just react to environmental stimulus by taking an action in its environment. This mechanism, the brain, actually responded to itself as a stimulus by modifying itself. This self-awareness is consciousness.

3. Consciousness was a huge advantage for continued existence because it didn't have to always wait around to be changed by its environment.

4. The only members of that form of life who did not like it did not live to reproduce, resulting in an entire species which were able to recognize the benefit of consciousness, and wanted to keep it. Therefore the first mental realities, desire, purpose and morality, existed as a necessary corollary of consciousness.

5. Consciousness resulted in its own self-replicating systems, based not on chemistry but on ideas, called memetics. Just as genes replicate in a physical environment, memes replicate in a mental environment through a process of communication. This is how ideas have evolved and continue to do so.

6. The resulting exponential increase in advantages utterly and forever disrupted the equilibrium once again. Like evolution, consciousness made possible a whole different level of cause and effect than that which had ever come before.

7. As a result, all heck once again broke loose.

8. Using memetic evolution, the humans gave themselves more advantages which were tools.

9. For the first time, through the evolution of ideas, a form of life started adapting its environment to itself.

10. As humans looked around, at the end of a happy day's tool making, they saw a world which pleased them: there were mountains with caves-- those were great because they can go and hide in them and they were out of the rain and the bears can't get them; there was the forest-- it had nuts and berries and delicious food; there was a stream going by, which was full of water-- water was delicious to drink, they could float their boats in it and do all sorts of stuff with it; here was cousin Ug and he's caught a mammoth-- mammoths are great, you can eat them, you can wear their coats, you can use their bones to create weapons to catch other mammoths.

11. I mean this was a great world, it was fantastic.

12. But our early man has a moment to reflect and he thinks to himself, "well, this is an interesting world that I find myself in" and then he asks himself a very treacherous question, a question which is totally meaningless and fallacious, but only comes about because of the nature of the sort of person he is, the sort of person he has evolved into and the sort of person who has thrived because he thinks this particular way.

13. Man the maker looks at his world and says "So who made this then?"

14. Who made this? -- you can see why it's a treacherous question. Early man thinks, "Well, because there's only one sort of being I know about who makes things, whoever made all this must therefore be a much bigger, much more powerful and necessarily invisible, one of me and because I tend to be the strong one who does all the stuff, he's probably male." And so began the idea of a "god."

15. Then, because when we make things we do it with the intention of doing something with them, early man asks himself, "If he made it, what did he make it for?" Now the real trap springs, because early man is thinking, "This world fits me very well. Here are all these things that support me and feed me and look after me; yes, this world fits me nicely" and he reaches the inescapable conclusion that whoever made it, made it for him.

16. In fact, it is the other way around. Before it ever began to adapt its environments to itself, the species of man adapted to fit its environment.

Chapter 5-- Evolution in History

1. This chapter should be interpreted metaphorically.

2. Although memetic evolution symbiotically gave humans an exponential increase in advantages over other genetic life forms, some humans failed to control them, and instead were controlled by them. This happened when the shortcuts and stopgap measures that made man's brain so capable were overused or misapplied.

3. They included trust, blind obedience, and the ability to come to a conclusion in the absence of evidence. These were invaluable because they made the mind's software crash-proof. Instead of freezing in indecision, homo sapiens do the best they can. Hence these techniques are called stop-gap measures. They are something we ought to want to stop needing.

4. But many homo sapiens were lazy and came to rely on them. Ironically, the overuse and misapplication of these very techniques that made homo sapiens so durable started being used by opportunistic meme-complexes with a life of their own. This new form of life acted parasitically to perpetuate and replicate themselves in human minds. Similarly to a jingle that you can't get out of your head, their adaptation to survive and reproduce was based on factors other than truth or falsity. The business of these memes was to make sure they did not face a fair fight, because they would lose. The mind virus was born.

5. (They usually were involved in most forms of religion, politics and family structures-- but not all, then or since. If the shoe fits, wear it. If not, don't.)

6. They evolved features to serve as baits, hooks, threats, and vaccines to improve their infection strategy. At worst, viruses such as "martyrdom" spread by completely destroying their hosts, or viruses such as "holy war" created a monopoly by destroying the brains where superior memes lived, which were too strong to allow them entrance.

7. This was the grimmest and most dangerous time in the story of Man.

8. A few centuries B.C.E. there arose the first opposition to the viruses. Greece evolved the "critical thinking skills" antibody meme-complex. In this system, ideas were made to fight each other to the death in the mind. Those which most accurately represented reality emerged from the arena alive more often than they had before, because the fight was no longer rigged. It was like court reform for memes.

9. The fight for Earth was begun in earnest. For centuries two species grappled to be dominant!

10. In the thirteenth century the fight escalated with the development of a new memetic infection vector: the printing press. Although the viruses spread as never before, they made their hosts oppose mass communication because they could not contain the antibody, and if the Greek antibody spread too far, mind viruses would be doomed. But the cat was out of the bag, and once the antibody got into the printing presses during the Renaissance the only thing the viruses had going for them was their sheer numbers.

11. Thanks to the antibody, "survival of the fittest homo sapiens" was replaced by "survival of the truest ideas." Now only ideas need be judged "fit" or "unfit" to survive. They die in our place.

12. When the antibody finally caught on en masse in the scientific Enlightenment circa 1700 C.E., mind viruses were put on the defensive and have been ever since. Homo sapiens were being freed in record numbers to say to all their mental contents, "pan out or wash out!"

13. A homo sapiens freed from a mind virus no longer believed that truth was caused to be true by the decree of a group or authority. Now to be considered an authority on a subject meant the reverse: that one has met a standard instead of being the standard.

14. It existed in two forms which were two sides of the same coin. Science established accountability on the subject of existence truth claims. Due process law made all authorities accountable to those they governed: this established accountability on the subject of moral truth claims.

15. This antibody improved in sophistication so much that it made its Greek prototype seem primitive by comparison. Once again all heck broke loose! The mind viruses lost so many monopolies only the most sophisticated survived and they were capable of desperate measures!

16. The twentieth century saw mind viruses trigger the memetic equivalent of armageddon. The human mind was their environment; they could not live without it, especially if homo sapiens caught on. But they were willing to show their hand on an unprecedented scale rather than allow the master/slave relationship between the species to be reversed. Things were good for mind viruses in the stone age. Perhaps they figured they had better return to it!

17. The resulting bloodbath gave them away. Totalitarian structures of all kinds, who always made some kind of dependency or conformity their core values, became so obviously self-destructive that many free humans finally realized the nature of the true puppetmasters. The supposed virtues of faith and obedience were revealed in all their abomination as thinly disguised authoritarianism and hatred of reason.

18. There are huge portions of the world in which the only surviving strains of authoritarianism, dependency and misology are permanently crippled and exert most of their effort just barely staving off extinction.

19. Amen to that!

Footnote 1: For more information on the probability of abiogenesis, see Ian Musgrave's essay Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, and Probability of Abiogenesis Calculations.

Footnote 2: Chapter 4, verses 10 through 15 are paraphrased with only minor changes from the speech Is There An Artificial God? delivered by Douglas Adams and published posthumously in The Salmon of Doubt.

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