The Garden of Eden and other truths.
by Eric Blair (3/01/98)
The difference between Man and other animals has nothing to do with
tools. Not in any fundamental sense, at any rate. Many
animals, from apes to sea otters use tools. Then there is the matter
of walking upright, on two legs. Name a bird that does not.
(Some dinosaurs walked on two legs!) Are we the only creature that
makes complicated living structures? Tell that to a bee or an ant.
Tell it to the larvae of the caddis fly. Tell it to the birds!
Here's the truth of it. The prime difference
between Man and other animals is exhibited in some famous caves in France.
Man is the only animal that draws pictures. To say it in another
way, Man is the only animal capable of abstract thinking.
Everything accomplished by our species is the result
of that one, single aspect.
You have seen photographs of these ancient cave
paintings. The buffaloes don’t look like buffaloes even to us, who
have never hunted a buffalo, or in some cases even seen a live buffalo.
Can there be any question that the men who hunted them every day knew what
they looked like? Of course not. And, so, there can be no question
that they knew that those childish wall scrawls simply represented a buffalo.
Modern derision of Genesis is based on an idiotic
premise: that the Garden of Eden wasn’t a real place. What a tired
conclusion that is. The buffalo on the cave wall wasn’t real, either,
but the cave man, obviously a damn sight brighter than most modern people,
understood that the great mystery of all things, including himself, was
an abstract.
All language comes in two forms. Animals use
the primitive form all the time – for attracting a mate, locating a youngster,
warning off enemies and crying out in distress. Pre-Man had that
sort of language all along. Almost all creatures have that
sort of language. Whales whistle around the world. Bats echo-locate.
Octopi flash skin colors and patterns. Even plasmoids communicate!
(With chemicals, if I remember my highschool biology correctly.)
But there is another level of language.
Animals do not posses it. Man didn’t have it for most of his existence,
either. Then, somehow, abstraction came to the mind of Man
and, unlike all the other creatures on the planet, he began to talk about
things that were not there.
The past, the future, the mystery of it all.
That was the beginning. .
Then came an even higher level of abstraction.
This new gift allowed him not only to imagine things that were not there,
but to seriously consider a physical way to bring them about! (Airplanes
look like birds. No natural example of an animal going into orbit
has ever existed, yet we dreamed up and built rockets.)
Snails have homes, as do turtles. They are
born with them. Birds use natural materials to construct a home,
and will even modify some of the components to enhance the structural value
of the nest. But Man, with his new level of abstract ability, visualized
a cathedral! Not a home like a nest, but a place to contemplate,
even worship, the abstract!
(Assign a grunting sound to a cave wall painting
of a buffalo, and a squeak to a cave wall painting of a mouse, and you
have a uniquely human language – sounds that represent paintings
held in storage inside a human mind. Once you’ve achieved that, the cathedral,
cannot be far behind.)
How ridiculous, in this light, are criticisms of
Genesis.
Abstract representation was the quality that lifted
us from the level of the beast and is taking us to the stars. All
human understanding is filtered (this is for the nerds) through myth --the
Basic Internal Operating System of the brain. Without myth, we could
not intrepret the world around us, or communicate our complex knowledge
to others.
Myth is the original programming language.
There isn't a high order function the human machine could perform without
it! Of course Genesis is myth. It's the only window through
which truth can shine. The only tongue that every human, no matter
what his experience and capabilities, can understand.
What other language would God utilize?
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