First Things is a monthly journal, published by the Institute on Religion and Public Life, concerned with the interaction of religion with public discourse.  This is a letter to the editor I recently sent. 

The June/July issue of First Things had a kind of synchronicity for Mormons (members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). First, N.T. Wright, Bishop of Durham, responded to Richard John Neuhaus’ comments on his new book, Surprised by Hope, which had included a criticism that its “concrete eschatological expectation” of a physical resurrection on a perfected Earth was “more suggestive of Joseph Smith than St. Paul”, by noting that the Mormons were simply taking seriously the relevant passages in the New Testament at the very time that “the Western Protestant church . . . was eliminating the ancient concrete eschatological expectation.”  

 

Then writer Joseph Stanford, commenting on Robert Louis Wilken’s discussion of Christological interpretation of the Old Testament, noted that the Book of Mormon is replete with the affirmation that the Old Testament prophets actually foresaw Christ.

 

Finally, RJN takes note that the long-held Orthodox doctrine of theosis or deification—paraphrasing Irenaeus, “God became man so that man . . . might become God”, is “getting serious attention from evangelical Protestant theologians” as evidenced by the new book Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions.  “And yes” he says, “Mormons also have what appears to be a version of the idea.”  

 

All three of these ideas—the ultimate possession of the transformed earth by the physically resurrected saints, the explicit prophecies about Christ by pre-Christian prophets, and the deification of man as the ultimate goal of salvation through Christ—are ideas for which Mormons are still roundly criticized as “not Christian” because they are distinct from the teachings of most Protestant denominations.  Yet, as is evident from the pages of First Things, these very “Mormon” ideas are ones with a long Christian pedigree, dating back to the original saints of the New Testament period, a fact which is noted by scholars like Wright, Wilken, and the contributors to the book edited by Christensen and Wittung.  

 

RJN and others writing in the pages of First Things have taken up the question “Are Mormons Christian?” a question which was renewed with the past candidacy of Mitt Romney for the presidency.  Since these three ideas are now identified as within the spectrum of legitimate Christian belief, a Mormon can hope that the next time the question is raised in these pages, these three beliefs held by the Latter-day Saints will be moved from the minus side to the plus side of the answer.  

 

 The following item was a comment on a post at timesandseasons.org.

A big part of us human beings believing something is that we WANT to believe it. We would be happier and more satisfied with the world if that thing were true. It is the motivation that causes us to seek out the truth of the gospel (”Even if you can have no more than a desire to believe”), as well as the motivation for seeking truth in science, history, and other endeavors. There needs to be an adjective that describes things that not only we CAN believe (believable) but WANT to believe, separate from the alleged qualities that we think make it attractive (e.g. stimulating, comforting, original, insightful, etc.). Believattractive? Believlovely? The problem for a lot of us is that it can be a long, laborious and costly process to make a determination of truth after our heads are initially turned by something believattractive. 

We LDS are taught to rely on the witness of the Holy Ghost to confirm the truth of the Book of Mormon, and Moroni goes on to say that it will confirm the truth of all things (presumably, the ones that are true). I think there is a tendency to forget that to get to the point where we ask the Holy Ghost to confirm the truth of the Book of Mormon, we have read most of a 500 page book, spending hours and hours with it. I suspect that a lot of propositions get put to the “just ask God” test without the prelude of intense and sincere investigation and “pondering” that are the conditions precedent for Moroni’s promise. 

The Book of Mormon comes with the testimony of 12 men–Joseph Smith+3+8–and the very explicit endorsement of the Church and its current and past leaders. Actually reading and pondering its message gives us the experience of whether it is good and fruitful or bad and barren, both intellectually and emotionally. If we believe the Bible narrative of Christ, the Book of Mormon affirms the same Son of God seen there, and is thus confirmed by the Bible narrative. It is a book that could be a product of the world that produced the Bible, a world where God rules over all, where he disperses Israel across the world, yet promises to call it back together, where Christ performs an atoning sacrifice that offers a path back to the Father. Even before we get into the evidence of linguistics and Arabian geography, of Hebrew law and custom, the Book of Mormon provides a straightforward case for itself as being legitimate. 

A lot of the speculation that sounds so believattractive to many LDS and gets passed on through the chain of friends and family lacks any logical or rational evidentiary foundation. We need to be more careful about distinguishing what would be NICE to believe from what we have confirmed through study and THEN through revelation.

The example of Lorenzo Snow is also instructive. He received a statement from Joseph Smith Sr. about becoming like God, even before he was baptized. Later, he received inspiration that he formulated in his famous couplet. He wrote that, only after the doctrine was publicly preached in the King Follett funeral discourse by Joseph Smith, did he feel proper in sharing that insight with others.

Those of us who make our living through showing off our intellect have a hard time avoiding logorrhea. I have advised my coworkers that if they want a 10 page legal memo, I can do that in a day, but a one page memo takes twice as long. Showing off our brains with our words is something we are rewarded for in our paychecks and (hopefully) something we got praise for from parents, mentors and peers through our educational experiences, including awards, Phi Beta Kappa keys, scholarships and fellowships, and admission to prestigious institutions. It goes against our grain to be reticent about saying everything we know about anything. Yet we (should) have learned in our academic training and professional experience to avoid making assertions that we cannot back up with acceptable evidence and reasoning. 

Yet one can grow up attending the usual schools and even colleges without learning how to rigorously weigh evidence, construct a defensible argument from verified information, or demolish a poorly constructed argument by someone else. That is the case, I fear, for most people, including those in the Church. My experiences dealing with juries have NOT raised my confidence in the analytical abilities of most Americans, including even the military officers who constitute most members of court-martial panel. (A related observation is that the general American judicial system is not constructed for the purpose of determining truth, but has a philosophical foundation that is derived from trial by combat, mixed with the unrealistic notion that the ideal jury should be uninformed ignoramuses. People walk into juries with their perceptions of the law formed by watching movies and CSI and Law & Order. We are being judged by people who are amateur lawyers. My personal nomination for judicial reform is to put the judge into the jury room to answer their legal questions, and not assume they can correctly understand the often arcane and self-contradictory legal instructions read to them.) 

So we can expect that faith-promoting rumors will be with us for the indefinite future. 

When I discuss something that I think is a logical deduction from the evidence with my Sunday School class, I try to lay out the sources for my information, and identify what is specifically speculation on my part. I try to give a serious hearing to speculations raised by class members, while explaining my reasons for thinking them less likely or not. Yesterday, presenting the same lesson about the reasons Nephi quoted so much of Isaiah, I was interrupted near the start by the visiting stake president asking me to talk about how Joseph did the translation of the Book of Mormon. I discussed the historical statements of his associates and the Critical Text Project and its conclusions. I then identified as my own speculation an hypothesis about the creation of the English language text that Joseph apparently read as he dictated to his scribes. I have discussed my idea with Terryl Givens, John Sorenson and Daniel Peterson, and they could not think of anything about it inconsistent with known facts. But even if I publish it in some forum, it will still be speculation, not something that is entitled to even be the subject of an inquiry to God about its truth or falsity, because it does not affect anyone’s salvation or exaltation in any way. It only squeaks into my lesson because it is part of what I see as I read the Book of Mormon, and as far as I can tell in my over a decade of teaching Gospel Doctrine lessons in California, Utah, Washington, and Idaho, nobody has gone off the deep end as a result of being in my classes. I am not even confident of how much they remember from one week to the next. But while we are in the class, I try to engage the text of the scriptures as much as possible.

What I hope my neighbors take away is a feeling for how truth-filled the scriptures are, not as a reservoir of Oprah-like homilies that appeal to our vanity, but as the challenging voice of God and those who dealt with him directly. I think if they appreciate the scriptures as that, they will find less of a need to make up things, or latch on to things that are shiny baubles compared to the real flinty truths in the scriptures. 

Alma Chapter 32 was a critical part of my gaining a testimony. Unlike anything else I have read in the Bible, or just about any other scripture, it laid out a procedure for moving from a state of ignorance to a state of knowledge. Alma’s path to faith does not involve blind leaps, but careful consideration of the propositions to be tested, a commitment to complete the test, active effort in supplying the obedience and attention and reverence required for the seed to grow, and monitoring of the response of the seed as it grows and over time bears fruit. I loved the whole concept of an “experiment upon the word” and “your mind doth begin to expand.” It sounds like it was written to address those of us in the Boomer generation who lived through the era when drugs were touted as a path to satori (enlightenment). 

One element in the criticism of the Intelligent Design critique of Darwinian evolution is that ID cuts off inquiry, rather than inviting the researcher to explore new ideas, and that the fruitfulness of a theory is considered to be one of the hallmarks of a true hypothesis. I disagree with the criticism of ID, but I find that criterion of fruitfulness to be in Henry Eyring’s statements about both science and Mormonism. He originally pursued his Absolute Rate Theory because it produced interesting and fruitful results, before it had been fully confirmed by experiment and had a theoretical framework explaining why it worked. 

Mormonism is, in my experience, tremendously fruitful in responding to our investment of study, producing intriguing insights about all sorts of things, not just religious ones. The Book of Mormon by itself, seems to me to be generative of all sorts of studies and explorations. I think one of Hugh Nibley’s remarks, and one that I hear from folks at FARMS on occasion, is that the simple fact that there is so much that can be found in the book, that invites exploration in a wide field of knowledge, across many disciplines (not only ancient history, geography, and Egyptology, but also geology [supervolcanoes]), demonstrates that it is far more than a literary creation. You might be able to assemble something similar today with a team of scholars, but how in the world did a farmer in a frontier village do it at age 24 in 1829? One of my speculations is that the Book of Mormon came forward at a moment in time when it was simply impossible to produce such a work through extant scholarship. If it were published in the last century, the critics would be looking for ghost writers all over the world of scholarship, polymaths like Hugh Nibley. But the fact that it was published in 1830 closes that option completely. None of the ways that books are normally written explains it. 

So we Mormons believe all sorts of extraordinary things, but our experience with criticism and even persecution should teach us, of all people, to be skeptical of assertions that lack proper provenance. 

One final note: Mormons are not the only people who are drawn to “faith promoting rumors.” One of the most ubiquitous set pieces in environmentalist popular literature is the denunciation of the wasteful ways of the white man made by Chief Seattle. It is in elementary school textbooks and posters and gets dragged out every Earth Day. The fact that it was written by a white publicist as a well-intentioned fiction makes no headway in quelling the myth, even for people who are told to their face by the author that it is fictional. A little consideration of the language of the text makes the notion that it is inauthentic obvious. But it lives on because it is what people WANT to hear about modern civilization and the crimes of America against not only Native Americans but also the earth itself–never mind that one of the most popular scientific theories is that the megafauna of the Ice Age were wiped out by overhunting by the ancestors of today’s Indians. 

My personal take on the popularity of Global Warming is that it appeals to the same urge to indict mankind for profligacy, regardless of science for or against. This would not be the first time that Congress has acted against an alleged threat that was mostly mythical (e.g. the Edmunds-Tucker Act). Modern educated people laugh about the pious depiction of George Washington by Parson Weems, but the mythologizing about John F. Kennedy and other more recent figures has proceeded apace, with far more distorting effect on our political decisions.

 

 The following is a comment on the timesandseasons.org blog, in which a post raised the question of how to explain to one's children the fact that only males are ordained to the priesthood in the LDS Church:

Having spent 20 years in a real male-dominated power hierarchy (the military), I can affirm that the priesthood in the Church is not such a creature. When a Church leader is operating the way he has been taught to by the scriptures and by the prophets, he is a humble servant who places those he “leads” above his own self-realization and self-aggrandizement.

We should not confuse what it means to be a “priest” in a traditional Christian church with what it means in the LDS Church. A traditional Christian “priest” or pastor has a career, in which his (or her) income (including effective income with the perks that come with an office) depends on popularity with the congregants who donate in response to how pleased they are with the priest or pastor. As a career path and means of supporting one’s self and family, the arguments for equal employment opportunity argue for equality between men and women. But when priesthood is divorced from career, when it is predominantly sacrifice, the career model does not apply. Anyone who wants to serve and make sacrifices on behalf of others can do so with or without priesthood.

The scriptures denigrate “the natural man” as “an enemy to God.” The priesthood and the commitment and covenant to service and self-sacrifice it entails is a structure that helps to provide the discipline so that a “natural man” (AKA beer-drinking couch-potato man) can be transformed into a person with a broken heart and childlike in submitting to God. I am sure many men could achieve that behavior and attitude without the priesthood, but for many men it is an essential structure for making that transition from seeing themselves the way the world sees them, and seeing themselves the way the Lord sees them.

Anyone, man or woman, who wants a leadership position in the Church because it gives the leader power over others is not someone I want in that position. Theories about feminist power versus patriarchy seem to me to have the dominant goal of using power to get more wealth and other gratifications, and to satisfy the ego by dominating others. I don’t see any of those goals as being compatible with the Gospel.

What exactly does a priesthood leader get for himself? A chance to hear himself praised occasionally in public? Beyond basic affirmation that one is being effective, it is pride, which we must not let dominate our attitudes and motives. A chance to sit in the seat on the stand in front of everyone? A position that confers the burden of being a visual example (no nose-pickin’ on the sly). A chance to speak more often to the congregation? If done in turn, and with reliance on the Spirit, and in a spirit of service rather than pride, it is simply an opportunity accepted with gratitude.

In the meantime, there are endless hours of service out of the limelight, bearing the burdens of ward members intensely and with a constant consciousness of one’s own inadequacy.

So my hypothesis is that the conferral of the priesthood is the creation of exactly the situation that Moroni addresses in Ether Chapter 12: Having the priesthood, and callings in the priesthood, are times when we are called to “come unto the Lord” and see our weakness in light of the challenges that come with our callings, and realize the need for us to be humble so that we can be strengthened by God, and “magnify” that calling, making ourselves better in the process. In my own life experience, the process of introspection and self-assessment is more of a natural component of female temperament, but it needs to be enhanced in men through structures like priesthood callings. It is something men need here in a Telestial, fallen world. The example and implication of the Temples is that priesthood is a different creature, with a different character and structure in the Celestial worlds.

 

I am a native of Japan, where my mother grew up in a Russian Orthodox family. About 1% of Japanese are Christians. Unlike Korea, where the trauma of Japanese conquest and then of the Korean War has led to rapid growth of Christian and quasi-Christian (e.g. Unification Church, AKA "Moonies") churches, Japan has a dedicated secularity that has concentrated more on identity as Japanese rather than as Buddhist or Shintoist (native animism akin to Native American religions).

The Japanese Army conducted incredibly brutal violence on people in Korea, China and the Philippines, without religion ever entering into it. Nationalism and a belief in the superiority of the Japanese race, without any specific belief in the afterlife, motivated massacres and kamikaze attacks. No heaven was necessary. Not even an international utopian vision like Communism was needed. Just Japanese people thinking of themselves as the best of all possible nations. Just overweaning pride, hubris without gods.

Looking back, this motive for conquest seems to have been the one that animated Menelaus at Troy, the Greeks and Macedonians under Alexander, the Romans, the Mongols, and the various Germanic tribes that are ancestors of modern Europe. It motivated the Aztecs and the Maya and the Inca.

Neither Christianity, Islam nor Judaism is needed to created conquest and brutality. To the contrary, until those religions began to make inroads on how people behaved, no one thought that the world could or should be different. Are in fact the people who are most obedient to religious belief actually a threat, or is it people who might use a veneer of religion to sanctify their own ambition and tribalism, as the Ku Klux Klan did? Their use of a burning cross was both a mockery of Christianity and an adoption of the same use of the cross as was made by the Romans: to threaten and intimidate. What passage in the Sermon on the Mount tells men to wear masks and murder people of other races? What verse in Paul's epistles invites Christians to give vent to their lusts for power, wealth and sexual conquest?

It is in fact the opposite. It asks Christians to reject the ordinary behavior of the world around them, and become holy, set apart, a slave of God rather than of their lusts and ambition. The short letter to Philemon asks him to lay aside the legal status of his slave, Onesimus, and instead accept him as a brother in the worship of Christ. It exhorts Philemon to love and tolerance, instead of the violence which Roman law said was his right as a master. Jesus spoke about the hypocrisy of those who claim to be more righteous than others, but who disobey God's laws enjoining justice and love, highlighted by the parable of the Good Samaritan. The source of intolerance and violence is in men, without any help. It is their natural state. If we are lucky, they allow religious belief to change their nature.

 

Intelligent Design is an approach to the origins of observed life that does NOT start from the axiom that Genesis is true and accurate, but rather starts with the actual observed facts, and then in an act of philosophical courage, breaks free of the assumption made by Richard Dawkins and Darwin that ONLY material things that we can observe can exist, and that there is no intelligent agent manipulating living matter other than human breeders who do it intentionally, and human land developers, who do it unintentionally by modifying the environment of living species.

There is in fact no scientific reason to insist that there cannot have been an intelligence antecedent to humanity, nor that the intelligence was unable to manipulate living matter. After all, mankind is now cataloguing the individual genes of mankind and other species, and determining their function, and starting to make modifications in order to cure genetic defects that cause disease. In a few hundred years, as any decent science fiction anthology can tell you, we ought to be able to create living things to order, within certain limitations of the existing genes and proteins in living matter.

Since the earth is about 4.2 billion years old, and the universe about 14 billion years old, there is no way to rule out the possibility that a prior intelligence existed that intervened at one or many points in the events that led to the development of life on earth, most of which happened over the last billion years. Such an intelligence would only have to be about as smart as we are, and just a little older in terms of its scientific knowledge. This is the theme of the book and movie "2001".

It is possible that some day mankind could introduce life to the planets Mars or Venus, or moons such as Titan or Europa. Fred Hoyle and other scientists are quite serious in proposing that the essential complex chemical compounds of life get distributed around the galaxy on meteors that have infinite patience until they crash down on a likely world and seed it with life.

ID simply proposes that there are ways to rationally test to see whether evidence for this outside intelligent intervention can be identified in the forms of living molecules now. They look for configurations of molecules in living things that are much more likely to have been created on purpose than by random mutation. Essentially they are making the same argument that an archeologist does when he asserts that a particular flint shard, that is symmetrical and useful, was made for a purpose by an intelligent agent, rather than being a product of natural processes like erosion and seasonal temperature variations. It is the same argument made by a forensic scientist who asserts that the evidence at the scene of a sudden death indicates that the death was caused by a purposive actor, rather than by a random accident. It is the same argument that is made when, after an aircraft rams a building, which could be a highly unlikely but unintentional accident, another plane soon rams into a second building next door, and then a third plane similarly strikes another building hundreds of miles away within an hour. Because these events are very, very unlikely, and their closeness in time is even more unlikely, the most likely and therefore rational explanation for their cause is an intelligent and purposeful, albeit evil, agent as their common cause. As we learn of the communications from passengers in each plane, this direct evidence of hijacking simply confirms what we already have deduced from the closely spaced events themselves.

ID does not attempt to go beyond that to identify characteristics of the intelligent and purposive agent(s) who acted to create certain specific aspects of living things. Those of us who believe in Genesis can start there and accept God's assertion that He is the Creator, which is also confirmed by John 1 and Hebrews 1. We believe the two bodies of knowledge, the Bible and unboxed scientific analysis without the materialistic axiom, logically point to each other, but it is not necessary to accept Genesis before one can accept ID. The vociferous opposition to ID is triggered by its power to persuade people that they don't have to buy into materialism and atheism in order to be, paralleling Dawkins, "a self-respecting scientist."

ID itself does not require the Bible to be true in order to make its assertions and its critique of Darwinism true. The RESULT of ID, as distinguished from its basis and its analysis, is to be open minded about alternatives to the materialist view of creation, which is basically that "stuff happens", without essential cause, in a mystery that is more impenetrable than the mystery of how the Trinity reconciles a unitary, unembodied and passionless God with the Christ who was born, suffered, died, resurrected, and ascended to His father and our Father.

Once a person admits it is possible that all things did not create themselves, then he does not rule out of hand the possibility that the God described in the Old and New Testaments had a hand in the process.

Some Catholic scientists like Kenneth Miller have a very theological view of God as creator, asserting that God put into the first moment of creation, the Big Bang, all of the elements and forces and vectors needed to bring about suns, planets, moons, water, and living plants and animals, and mankind. They also believe that none of the important mutations and selections is truly random, but that God influences the outcome of random events to ensure HIs purposes are fulfilled. Thus they are content to use a narrative that on its surface sounds identical to one written by an atheist, but for them has an extra layer of meaning that affirms God's role as creator.

My personal view is that Genesis, on the one hand, is so short that it seems irrational to assert that this is supposed to be the complete story of creation, either as an observation or an explanation of mechanism or purpose. On the other hand, if one looks at it from the perspective of the specific creation of the earth itself, it matches in major steps the succession of events that the sciences of cosmology, astronomy, geology and finally biology state are the main milestones in the earth's history. It does not correlate so well with the sequence of events that precedes the formation of the solar system and the coalescence of the Milky Way Galaxy. What it seems to offer us is a narrative as if someone is standing off to the side as our own earth and its immediate environs come into being. It is a vision given to Moses by God that Moses then reduces to writing as he writes Genesis.

The insistence by some people that the "day" of Genesis has to be the same as a 24 hour day is not required by the language. The Bible uses the term "day" in all sorts of ways, including referring to entire eras. One variant is to take the verse that says "a day with the Lord is as a thousand years" and then apply that to Genesis and say that the creation took 6,000 years rather than 6 24 hour days, a difference in magnitude of 365,000. When the variation in length of time is that wide, on what basis do we rule out another factor of 1000 or 1,000,000? Somehow God has to work FAST or it's not a miracle? If we note that the galaxy is 100,000 light years in diameter, and then see the vastness of the universe beyond that, we understand that the physical dimensions of God's creation are virtually unimaginable for humans. The Bible affirms that God is eternal, and will continue into the infinite future, as will mankind, resurrected to a positive or negative situation for eternity. With infinity in time going forward, and infinite extent in the three spatial dimensions, why do we insist that the time dimension backward in time must be so short and disproportionate to the other dimensions of creation? What is a billion years to God?

Another distinction between a Darwinian universe and one that is purposeful is that the vast expanse of creation would not go to waste if God made it. If His purposes are advanced by making this earth and its people, why wouldn't it also be advanced by having the same kind of creation on the multiplicity of planets in the galaxy and universe? The role of randomness in Darwinism and materialism is so pronounced that it is not mathematically possible for many worlds to have separate creations of life that attain intelligence. If we are able to continue our project of finding and then examining planets around other stars, it may be possible to detect signs of intelligent life on them, and if we find it to be relatively abundant, that fact will be a strong argument against Darwinism and a strong argument for purposeful creation. A highly populated universe would be a testament to a God who has joy in and loves his creations, and multiplies them not only on earth but everywhere he can.

The atheist claim that belief in religion violates the “Copernican principle of the mediocrity and ordinariness of the earth” has things backward. It is they, with their insistence that life can come about only by chance, who must insist that earth is unique in the galaxy, if not the universe. Darwin does not claim that life is inevitable, but rather that it is random. Stephen Jay Gould asserted that, if you went back in time and restarted the earth's biological development, the outcome would be totally unpredictable due to these random factors, with no guarantee of intelligent mankind being the result. Thus, most other worlds would fail to produce higher order life, let alone intelligence.

On the other hand, those of us who believe in a God who loves to create have every reason to believe that, for most purposes, the earth is absolutely ordinary in relation to the many worlds God has made in the observable universe. If he thought the earth was "good" at creation, there is every reason he would multiply that goodness by creating other worlds and peopling them as well. So earth with its human civilization is quite unexceptional in God's view.

Why do we insist that God cannot work slowly? He seems content with the slow growth we experience as individuals, and the gradual progress that is made in carrying the gospel around the world, which has gone on for 2000 years and is still going on, with millions out of earshot of the good news. Christ's second coming did not happen in 70 AD, or 100 AD, nor in 2000 AD. God has patience, more than we short-lived humans. How do we get off telling Him the schedule for His own work? We should be humble in our interpretation of the Bible and not insist that it must have originally intended a meaning that we apply to it, as much from our own cultural assumptions as anything. To insist on more precision than Moses' original vision had in it is presumptuous of us. It is clearly a summary. The fact that it does not describe the details of planting trees and installing fish in the seas and birds in the air does not mean that there were no details in the original event, and that they all just popped into existence. We are told only a few of the living things that were created. There is not a total catalogue of all the varieties of fish, insects or mammals.

Why then should we insist that the narrative has to be considered complete and definitive in terms of the events that took place? If the bats were created without being specifically mentioned, the way they were created and distributed is also omitted. This indicates that there are omissions from the process as well. Insisting that only those things specifically described as happening could have occurred is not warranted by the nature of the narrative itself.

The Gospel of John says that if all the things Christ said and did were recorded, the whole earth could not contain the books. This is hyperbole, but the gospels clearly contain only a minute fraction of the ministry of Christ, which lasted three years, but the books can obviously be read in a few hours. 99.9% of Christ's actual teaching and other acts are not in the record.

Why then should we insist that Genesis 1 and 2 have to contain all the essential details of the creation? That there is no part of the story that is not there, when the narrative itself does not say that, and we can hardly assert that the Bible gives 100% of details when it plainly says it does not.