How I Became A God: Step 1

The process began as most do in the west--brought up in a family of monotheists--people who believe what the King James Bible describes. Of course as a kid I believed whatever the family did. I was singled out at church, said things others wanted to hear, a Jesus Freak at fifteen. Then science turned my head, the truths of numbers and facts were more attractive. I couldn’t look at fossils and geology, obviously hundreds of thousands of millions of years old, then embrace the explanations of King James. I reconciled, saying that just because the Bible and science didn’t square doesn’t mean there isn’t a creator.

Most humans have heard of Genesis and the Creation narrative: the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve; and how they got kicked out because they ate from the Tree of Knowledge; and how they had to go out into the world to live by the sweat of their brow. Not only 2.2 Billion Judeo-Christians know the story, but also 2.1 Muslims, because the same story is part of the Koran. Half the people on the planet today know the Creation story.

It was less than two hundred years ago, in the 1850s, that the Europeans went back to Mesopotamia to excavate the mounds of lost civilizations. They went back through the layers mentioned in the Bible--the Babylonians, Assyrians, Akkadians, all the way to the Sumerians. After we figured out their writing, for a long time we believed they were the oldest known civilization, that they were the ones who first employed writing because every group that followed named them. Their script was a bunch of tiny triangles and arrow points pressed into clay. Sometimes they would fire it, and like pottery the record would last forever. The French, British and Germans brought back tens of thousands of these fired, clay tablets with writing all over them, and to this day they’re scattered about the globe in the world’s finest museums. Besides laws, records of property, trade, marriages and the like, the oldest tablets begin with the original version of the Creation story, the one with the most information. We know the King James’ version can’t be superior to the clay tablets because it tells less and came after the first telling.

If one were to ask for a rough account of the evolution of human beings according to Darwinism and the Theory of Evolution, we might say that sea creatures moved onto land, land animals evolved into apes, and apes into us. Then after awhile we figured how to bang rocks together to make sharp edges. From there, for two million years, from hominids until we arrived on the scene, physical appearances were similar. Then there was an inexplicable progression where brain mass increased fifty-percent, our face became flat, and we slipped into a hairless, modern anatomy, thumbs and all. When framed by the idea of Evolution, it happened in the blink of an eye. Oldest known cave paintings are forty thousand years old. Suddenly we looked like movie stars compared to millions of years of monkeyness. And on top of those sudden changes, suddenly use of fire and art too. The random mutation/natural selection required in that short a period, for us to have become what we are from what we were, cannot be explained by Darwinism and the Evolution story. This doesn’t mean the science of natural selection is invalid, only the notion that we went from monkey to movie star naturally, that there wasn’t some sort of “creation” outside of nature’s process. The takeaway is that the Evolution story and the Creation story both require faith because the explanations don’t square with all we know to be true.

Whether you lean towards one story or the other, or believe something different altogether, it still remains true that Sumerians made use of the wheel, mathematics and writing, agriculture and animal husbandry, poetry and music, beer and wine—laws, sciences, and arts--everything we equate with high civilization existed with them. We still don’t have a clear idea how or why their civilization appeared, but we’ve since discovered it was by no means the first. We’ve since discovered settlements that predate the Sumerian by tens of thousands of years. If that’s true, what does it mean alongside the fact that half the people on the planet today know what’s on those clay tablets? You might say it means nothing--just a bunch of myth and metaphor--but it’s not that simple. This is the first step to becoming a god, you have to become cognizant that there’s the Creation story and the Evolution story, and both have their flaws.