Let us recap where we are to this point.
We know that humanity appeared 250,000 years ago, by the study of human genetics.
A closer look at the human genome shows a couple of striking phenomena.
We see that our closest evolutionary ancestors have 24 pairs of chromosomes while we have only 23 pairs, and yet none of the D N A was lost in the transition because 2 of the chromosomes were fused.
The amount of defects and genetic disorders in our species far exceeds what naturally would occur in a process of mutation;
Which demonstrates that our genome was manipulated to add genetic material from a source that contained those defects already.
or,
The process of manipulation itself did some or all of the damage that created these defects.
The inescapable conclusion is that we are the product of genetic manipulation about 250,000 years ago.
That is really as far as the science can take us in the big picture. But that much is a massive pill to swallow for most of us, who have been raised in the science and religion of the west.
Once we absorb this information as it is, we then can take the time to process what it means.
And so we pause.
The first thing we do is ask if this is scientifically possible. Of course it is.
We ourselves have learned the technique of manipulating D N A.
If we clear away our own prejudices, one thing that we notice is that this description of human origins draws together two elements that have been at war, so to speak, for approximately the past 100 years.
The strict evolutionists on the one hand will only countenance a gradualist approach, theorizing the morphing of primates into humanoids over an extended period, through the process of evolution.
The strict creationists on the other hand will only countenance the direct hand of an outside force, that not only created human beings out of nothing, but the entire world as well.
Yet here we have evidence, overwhelming evidence in our opinion,
that evolution was well on its way when someone interfered and created us. The human race.
So we have a combination of both processes.
Here I would like to stop, and take a look at one aspect of human nature.
Perhaps most of us have heard of the Cargo Cult phenomenon.
It can be explained simply this way.
During World War Two there were islanders in the Pacific who had never seen outsiders before.
Their living conditions were primitive and when planes arrived with westerners bearing all manner of goods,
The striking difference in cultural and technological advancement caused those people to presume that those visitors were not human like themselves but “gods”, in a manner of speaking.
They spiritualized those events and visitors, and a religion was born.
Before we condescend to those people, we should remember that as human beings we would likely do the same thing if we were brought forward suddenly from say, medieval times,
to our current world of planes, trains, and automobiles.
What is the point of this story?
250,000 years ago the first human beings were brought into being. Their first knowledge of anyone else, would be whoever it was that did the genetic work, and quite literally created them.
Would it be any wonder that those human beings would consider their creator or creators as gods?
It would be simply shocking if they did not.
And, regardless of who or what they were, would not those beings who created the human beings take on the role of gods, almost by default?
Of course they would.
Let us remember, the first human beings would have no continuity of history or thought beyond themselves, and nothing to compare and contrast with their world.
They were the first to experience what we call, WYSIWYG. What you see is what you get.
As we sit and think about this, we can easily see how our present day concepts of God, and worship, and all of that, are light years away from the simplicity of human beings who actually physically interacted with their creators, their gods.
One idea in particular that has arisen long since those early days of humanity is the spiritualized monotheism that we know in Christianity and Judaism and Islam today.
This is an interesting phenomenon which will require some deeper exploration. Suffice to say, at this point in our discovery, some of the most vociferous opponents of our narrative here will be those from that monotheist perspective. And there are a lot of them, when all the Jews, Christians and Muslims are accounted for. The one question we need to ask them today is, why would they object to this narrative.
On what grounds would they object.
And they object. Absolutely they do. I have heard some of the objections already.
It seems to me that distilled down, the main source of the objection is scripture. The written record.
That is the other side of the equation that we have acknowledged as a reliable source of our understanding of history, in particular our own history.
So by all means let us look at the record. As we have said before, there are those in the archeological community that will go directly to mythology. That is also the way they treat the scriptures of the so-called Abrahamic religions.
Leaving aside the question of divine inspiration for the moment, we can acknowledge that there are many parallels between the history as recorded in the Torah and other sources of contemporary history, with respect to places and events after Abraham. As time goes on, discoveries are made in archeology, and in linguistics as well, that confirm and corroborate descriptions in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible.
If we are then to go back to the pre-Abrahamic history as given in the Bible, back to Adam and Eve, back to the story of creation itself, the territory gets more murky.
However, since the middle of the nineteenth century there have been a series of discoveries in the region of Mesopotamia that began to unearth written history that stretched back, into an ancient civilization called, Sumer. In fact, when all is said and done to this point, the records take us back before the writing of the Hebrew Torah.
We have the story from before the Bible was written, and when we consider the events of the descendants of Abraham we find that their accounts of the beginnings of time were, in fact, taken from the histories of those who came before them.
Without travelling down the rabbit hole of the history of Abraham and his descendants it is obvious that the descriptions of the creation of the world and of mankind are a severe conflation of the narratives that had come before, and from which they were taken.
This is most obvious in the example of the creation of mankind; God created man in, “our”, image and likeness. It seems the plural possessive got passed down without an explanation of that plural.
Christians like to springboard here into a discussion of their doctrine of the Trinity, but the people that wrote down the narrative of creation had no such doctrine.
In fact, when full records from Sumer have been deciphered, translated and laid out end to end, so to speak, we find that there is another complete history prior to human beings and prior to the Sumerian civilization itself.
And, although distorted in the Book of Genesis, there is a cosmology that goes back to the origins of the earth itself.
We also find that the six days of creation goes back to a cultural celebration that took the full six days to describe the early days of the earth and was never a literal description of the time span of the forming of the earth and the universe that surrounds it.
Before we go further let us stop, once again, and allow the information to settle a bit. We could summarize this way.
We know we have been on this earth 250,000 years as human beings. We now realize that there is a written record of what came before the most ancient civilization that we currently know of on earth. We have lived with, in the last 4000 years, the narrative that we were created by a God, the one God, even though in our source text there is mention of other Gods.
How then would it be a stretch to examine the existing record, if that record gives us a direct description of who and what was done to create this human race and moreover, why it was done.
This is what we have before us now.
We have plenty of hardy souls who like to posture against the ancient teachings of creation. Here is the opportunity to mend the giant holes in your alternate theories and watch the narratives come together in a rational manner.
All that is required is to suspend the anthropocentrism that has permeated the vaunted halls of science in our age.
Next we will start with that question.
Who did this.