[According to Teilhard] the discovery or invention or harnessing of fire was one of the great scientific and technological discoveries in all of human history. Fire to a great extent made human civilization possible. Fire made it possible to cook food and to provide sanitary ways of eating which reduced the spread of disease in its time. Fire made it possible to heat warm environments and thereby made human migration around the world a possibility, even into colder climates. Fire made it possible, there was no Bronze Age without fire, no Iron Age without fire, no industrial revolution without fire.
Fire was indeed a great biocultural development in human evolution, for the apes have neither sufficient brains nor sufficient thumbs to create and control it. The direct ancestors of humans were doing it hundreds of thousands of years ago; we know this because they left us the remains of their hearths.
The Greeks, who knew nothing of
prehistoric archaeology, at least knew where fire came from. It was given to
people by Prometheus, against the wishes
of Zeus, who punished him for the deed in a classically Zeusian way: by
chaining him to a rock and having an eagle peck out his liver on a daily basis.
Ha! Those silly Greeks! But did you
ever wonder what the Bible says about where fire came from?
The answer is easy. Nothing. Fire
was such an obvious part of being human that the Bible doesn’t even have an
origin myth about it. It was just always
there with people. They didn’t have to discover it, or learn to control it. The
Book of Jubilees, which expands on Genesis and figures prominently among the
Dead Sea Scrolls, has a detail that Genesis doesn’t. After getting expelled
from Eden, Adam and Eve make “an offering of frankincense, galbanum, and myrrh,
and spices,” which implies the control of fire, since God generally doesn’t
take raw offerings, only roasted offerings. If we go just with canonical books
of the Bible, the first offerings are those of Cain and Abel.
The anti-intellectualism of the
biblical literalist has tended to be focused on biological narratives, specifically
denying that our species is descended from ape ancestors over last few million
years. But the battleground of archaeology is even more problematic for a 21st
century believer in the inerrancy of the Bible, but one rarely confronts it because
of the blinding light of Darwin and biology.
Now, of course, the discovery and
spread of food production is one of the most fundamental issues in archaeology.
Humans began to transform animals and plants from wild to domesticated forms,
by controlling their breeding, starting around 12,000 or so years ago, thus
ensuring a stable supply of food. The problem faced by scholars in the mid-19th
century is this:
The Lord God took the man and
put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. (Genesis 2:15)
According to the Bible, there was never any hunting and gathering. People were farming from day one; or rather, from Day 6. And the disparity between archaeology and the biblical text created a problem for anyone wanting to understand contemporary foragers in places like Australia and South Africa and America in the 19th century. If farming was invented and learned, then contemporary foragers were just people who hadn’t learned it. If, on the other hand, farming was there from the beginning, then they were degenerates who had abandoned that God-given knowledge. So which was it – were living foragers primordial or devolved? Lyell and Lubbock settled the matter: Hunting-and-gathering was how our ancestors long ago made a living off the land, and only subsequently was agriculture eventually developed. The alternative idea is not only anti-empirical, but also a bit racist.
Moreover, agriculture arose in different parts of the world, using different available wild resources: In one place wheat; in another, rice. And that leads to an important and incontrovertible conclusion from modern archaeology: God did not make corn.
People
made corn. In particular, people of Mesoamerica made corn over the course of a
few thousand years, from a grass called teosinte, which is still capable of hybridizing
with corn. We have their learning curve, in the form of dated ancient cobs. The
learning curve for food production is critical, since the Bible directly
implies that there shouldn’t be one. Moreover, all the evidence for early corn
is in Mesoamerica; there was no corn in the Garden of Eden. (And of course,
wherever the King James Version says “corn,” you should read “grain” – because
what the Bible says and what the Bible means are often not the same. And while
you’re at it, where you encounter the word “unicorns” in the King James, you
might want to read “wild oxen”.)
With both the creationists and evolutionists
transfixed on Darwin, perhaps the scholarly community might take a step back
from apes and DNA, and try attacking biblical literalism/inerrancy on a
different battlefield. Make the creationist explain fire and corn. Any
explanation will necessarily be unbiblical, at the very least, in addition to
being inaccurate.
Then you can share a bowl of
popcorn with your new friend.
