![]() The stories in Genesis 2 are very famous, obviously. As far as I can tell, there's no doubt about that. They have to have the aspect of tools, because we are tool-using creatures. I don't really see the utility in being taught facts that aren’t meaningful, because there's an infinite number of facts, and there’s no way you're going to remember all of them. If you act it out in the world, it should be good for your family, and maybe it should have some significance for the broader community. I don't try to tell people anything that isn’t personally relevant, because you should know why you are being taught something-you should know what the fact is good for, and then it should be good for you personally, at least in some sense. It’s also a method that I use in my speaking. The idea is, the more ways that you can measure it and get the same result, the more confident you can be that you're not just deluding yourself with your a priori hypothesis. It’s called something like Multitrait-Multimethod Matrix, of determining whether or not something is accurate. There’s a technical term for that in psychology. To be able to pull off an interpretation of a story that works at multiple levels simultaneously…With each level, the chances that you’ve stumbled across something by chance have to be decreasing. I also think the chance of managing that by chance is very, very small. Hopefully you find the interpretations functionally significant at multiple levels. At the moment, that's probably good enough. I guess you could say the same thing to the interpretations that might be laid on these stories. Those are the constraints in which we live, so you have some way of determining whether your interpretation is, at least, functionally successful, and that’s not trivial. There’s some answer to that: it’s sufficient if you can act it out in the world and other people don't object too much, and you don't die, and nature doesn't take a bite out of you any more often than necessary. There’s really no answer to that anymore than there is an answer to, how do you know your interpretation of the world is-well, let’s not say correct, but sufficient. That's part of-let’s call it the postmodern dilemma, and fair enough. You could object: well, with these stories, you never know what you’re reading into it, and what’s in the story. That’s a lot for a tiny, one-paragraph story to cover. I think it’s especially true of the story of Cain and Abel because it works on the individual level, and the familial level, and the political level, and the level of warfare, and it works at the level of economics. I'm willing to go with it, but it still never ceases to amaze me how much information such tiny little passages can contain. The rational approach that I’ve been describing to you is predicated on the idea that these stories have somehow encapsulated wisdom that we generated interpersonally and behaviourally, and then in image, over very vast stretches of time, and then condensed into very, very dense, articulated words that are then further refined by the act of being remembered and transmitted over vast stretches of time. Every time I think about it, another layer comes out from underneath it, and I can't figure that out. That story…Every time I read it, it just flattens me, because it’s only like a paragraph long. One of the things that I just cannot understand is how there can be so much information in such tiny little stories, especially the story of Cain and Abel. I’ve been thinking about the stories that I'm going to tell you tonight for a very long period of time-like the ones last week, for that matter, but these even longer. ![]() I don't know if it’s any good, but it’s as good as I can make it. So, yea, it’s done…Except for the moping up, copy editing, and that sort of thing. That’s taken about three years of writing-quite a long time to write something. Hopefully we’re going to get past Genesis 1 today. Biblical Series IV: Adam and Eve: Self-Consciousness, Evil, and Death ![]()
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