Y!A: How do you think the creation account in Genesis would affect a Christian’s Worldview?

From Yahoo! Answers:

How do you think the creation account in Genesis would affect a Christian’s worldview?

My slightly off topic wall of text:

Which creation account? 

Okay, no seriously.  This is a really good question and one I’ve thought about for years.

First of all we have to try to make some sense of the stories.  The easiest to understand in a historical context is, surprisingly, the fall of Adam and Eve.

So the idea of god was created by this one tribe to justify an agricultural regime that dominated neighbouring tribes and lead to the establishment and spread of civilization while this culture assimilated or destroyed all competition.

Consider:

And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” -Genesis 1:28

Genesis 1 basically describes the actions of this fantastic all-powerful god who created everything.  This establishes God’s authority.  The story then goes on to suggest that this all-powerful being anoints us as masters of the earth.  Not only are we allowed to take it over and subjugate it to our whim, it is our duty!

This is not an attitude shared by all of humanity.  This arrogance is not human nature.  This wouldn’t make any sense to the Kalahari Bushmen, the Yanomami or any number of other tribal peoples.  This IS an attitude shared by all the Abrahamic religions.  It is also an attitude shared by all the other cultural descendants of the Agricultural Revolution in the Fertile Crescent.   This attitude isn’t really even shared by descendants of other agricultural regimes.  There is a distinction between Eastern and Western philosophies largely because they are descended from different agricultural regimes.  They certainly influenced each other and they have more in common with each other than either does with the Pirahã, for example.

It is no coincidence that the descendants of the Agricultural Revolution are the people who took over the world and the Pirahã didn’t.  Read “Guns, Germs and Steel” by Jared Diamond.  You won’t regret it.  One thing the Pirahã didn’t have was a sense of entitlement or destiny.

Aspects of the justification for agriculture, an example being the creation accounts, permeate western civilization.

We have a twisted sense of entitlement and an inherent specialness that has enabled us to cause a period of mass extinction not seen since the fall of the dinosaurs.  In my experience, many people, especially Christians, get visibly offended if you say that humans are animals.

Many of us, religious or not, delude ourselves into thinking that civilization IS humanity.  (Islam’s concept of the pride of Adam is a clear example of this) Throughout history, civilization has expanded and conquered through assimilation or destruction.  Soulless savages were considered sub-human and deserving of domination and death and that the land they lived on was free to be taken.  There are countless examples of this in history and its still happening today.  There’s an oil company in Peru that is starting to develop a well in a remote area of the Amazon to great controversy.  Nearby lives one of the last *uncontacted* tribes in the world. This oil company is denying they even exist.

We have an economic system based on the principle of continuous growth.  This is not sustainable by definition.  We’re rapidly converting the world’s biomass into human biomass — us and what we like to eat, the rest of the ecosystem be damned.  There will come a point when there can be no more.  What then?  Why are we seemingly in such a hurry to find out?

There have been Christian politicians in the US that have suggested the environment is not important because good Christians will be raptured long before it ever becomes an issue.  Before?  Another went so far to suggest that it was sacrilege to worry about the environment because that was admitting that God wasn’t taking care of us.  I’m not saying all Christians are this ignorant.  Plenty of Christians recycle and that’s great.  But bandaids don’t heal decapitations and I don’t see them trying to come up with a truly sustainable economic model.  I don’t see them challenging the primacy of civilization or trying to come up with something new.  Instead, I see them challenging scientific concepts like evolution because evolution undermines the authority of the magic being that gives them these delusions of grandeur.

Of course its not just Christians or religious people who share these delusions.  The point is the justification for this aggressive agricultural regime involves many myths and god and creation are just a few examples.  Western philosophy and the Abrahamic religious traditions all share a common cultural ancestry — these early agriculturalists with their excuses.

More evidence of this is that the Abrahamic religions and Western philosophy share a certain degree of eschatology.  Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden and it was assumed disaster would come because of this new attitude.  “Dreams of Millennium” by Mark Kingwell was a really interesting take on Millennial anxiety and examined how we’ve always been obsessed that the end times were coming soon.  Of course, again this is not human nature, this wouldn’t make any sense to the Pirahã.

Sorry for the wall of text but this is obviously something I’ve thought a great deal about and believe in very important.    Congratulations if you made it this far.