Bible Uncommentary: Genesis 2 -- ... And Not a Man to Till the Ground

Title/Preface/TOC

Genesis 1: in the Beginning ...

Bible Uncommentary: Genesis 2

... And Not a Man to Till the Ground

 

Sometimes I think the entire known history of our race on this world is encompassed in the seventh day or phase of the creation, and I think maybe the Gods are now resting and mostly letting their plans play out.

Sometimes. Maybe.

No, there are problems with that idea, especially if taken too literally. But,

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.

There are certain senses in which things were not finished, particularly if we insist on wrapping all the stuff in chapter 1 up in six distinct intervals that are all past and gone when we start chapter 2.

Anyway, we can say that the plans and preparation were mostly finished over the course of the six days or phases, and God rested. And God says rest after work is a good thing. 

How long that seventh phase lasted is another question, and whether Adam and Eve were created within the seventh phase or after, is also not really clear.

Oh, and verse 4 contains a case where a day is most definitely not a 24 hour period, or even a single rotation of any planet:

... in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, ...

If that were "in the days" it would fit more easily into an interpretation of six literal days, but day here is singular. 

I have heard that the word for day here in the original language -- or, rather in the language closest to original that we have -- is different from the word for the six days of chapter 1. But we're getting distracted.

(4) These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, (5) And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.

Look at verse 5:

And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: ...

Here it is.

What can that be that was done in the six days, but talking about laying out blueprints and such? 

Plans. The first six days were planning sessions.

Maybe. It sort-of works for me, although I do have the impression that primitive plants and animals were physically created during the planning sessions. 

Why?

... and there was not a man to till the ground.

I can interpret this to mean that what grew in chapter 1 was wild, and that the plants in chapter 2 are more of the class of plants that might benefit from human attention. 

Maybe.

I'm not sure what the

... for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, ...

is supposed to indicate. Whether the first six days were all 24 hours or not, it doesn't make sense that there had been no rains of any form during the process. Particularly, when the waters below the firmament were separated from the waters above, precipitation of some sort had to have occurred.

So this is a question I put on the shelf. If the time comes that I need to know, I'm going to trust God to reveal it to me. 

But God causes a mist to cover the ground, ...

And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

This verse is one of the places were we can see the usage of the word soul to indicate the spirit and body of man as a single entity.

Dust of the ground?

Carbon, calcium, phosphorus, sulfur, potassium, sodium, chlorine, magnesium, iron, .... These are elements from which our bodies are made. They are also prominent among the elements found in the dust of the earth.

Water, air, and the dust of the earth. What else would we be made of, if we were going to live on the earth and have bodies? Plants grow out of the ground, animals eat the plants and grow bodies out of the elements of the dust of the earth. We eat some of the plants, too, and sometimes we eat some of the animals. Our bodies also are made of the dust of the earth -- indirectly, but of the dust of the ground.

It has been suggested by certain people that the Gods ate of the plants that were growing and then made Adam the same way we make children. I'm not sure I should believe that, but I'm not sure I should not.

We are not Golem, of course.

Consequent to making Adam, they planted a garden of less primitive plants, including plants that produce edible, nutritious, and delicious parts, put Adam in the garden, and let him tend it. Two of the trees mentioned in particular are the tree of knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life.

Adam was told not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, because doing so would make him subject to death.

Certain of our religious philosophers tend to talk about our coming from the presence of God to be born into this world, and they speak as if we were in some state of perfection before we were born. We also talk about the Garden of Eden as if it were a state of perfection.

Some people insist there is only one perfection. Is the absolute perfection of God the only perfection? Or are there lesser perfections?

A number of ancient philosophers and astronomers (astrologers, at the time) perfected a geocentric model that was perfectly self-consistent. It proved not to match the real solar system very well, but it was perfectly self-consistent. 

There are many things that are perfect in a limited sense, even though they do not match reality.

In a similar way, it is my understanding that we each attain a limited, self-consistent sort of perfection as spirits before we are born into this world. It's a limited sort of perfection precisely because we don't have a physical body that can experience the things that would push us past our limits.

As I understand it, the tree of knowledge of good and evil was both a real tree with real fruit, and a physical symbol of what experience does to our limited perfections.

After Adam is placed in the Garden, the less primitive animals are created and brought to Adam, and Adam gives them names. But animals don't provide the company that Adam needs, and the Gods borrow some genetic material from Adam, remove one of the genes (a "rib" in the genetic structure, as I see, but that may be just me) in Adams genetic makeup, and make Eve with the full set of genes. 

This was part of the plan in the first place, but it was also part of what Adam had to experience, perhaps so we could understand how united the spousal union should be -- not just "one flesh", but entirely one in purpose. 

Okay, I really can't justify the genetic theory about the rib business, but I'm pretty sure no one can prove me wrong. Heh.

Again, the record doesn't say how long this takes. For all we know, Adam and Eve might have been in the Garden of Eden for hundreds of millions of years, and plants from the Garden itself might have spread over much of the surface of the earth.

Wait. Can plants spread without dying? Does it matter, outside philosophies derived from the interpretations of mortal humans of limited perfection?

On the other hand, if death truly was not part of the world until after Adam and Eve were sent away from the garden, time in such a world would simply not have the same meaning it has in ours, and attempts to measure geological ages would result in meaningless measurements. 

More to the point, time measured without a mortal observer is still different from time measured by mortals such as we are.

Chapter 2 has something that looks like a discussion of geography, but it does not match any geography I know of, unless, perhaps, the rivers mentioned became oceans after the flood, when the continents split apart. If that were the case, Adam would have been in the Garden of Eden in geologically very ancient times. 

And why not? He was helping with the work of getting the earth ready for us to live on, too.

What Eden was eastward of is something I have not particularly figured out. Perhaps Moses was simply telling the Camp of Israel that Eden was not in Egypt, the wilderness, or Canaan. Someday, I will be able to ask God what the geography of the world before the flood was, and why it mattered to Moses and the people of Israel, and I suppose then I'll get better understanding.

There's something we might miss in the last verse, if we are not too distracted -- Adam and Eve were clearly in a state of innocence. That's important to remember.

Genesis 3:

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Bible Uncommentary: Genesis 1 -- In the Beginning ...

Title/Preface/TOC 

Bible Uncommentary: Genesis 1 

In the beginning ...

What beginning?

The beginning of the entire universe, including all the stars in the night sky? I suppose, just from this much, we might  think so.

But, let's think for a moment. This is the first chapter of

The First Book of Moses
Called
Genesis

that we are looking at. (That's the title, as given in the Bible.) 

Reading along with me will help keep track of what I'm talking about. It'll will also give you a chance to figure out where you might agree with me and where you might not, and why.

For the longest time, I thought "genesis" meant "life". You know, genes, genealogy, ...

Okay, maybe I can't really give a good explanation where that interpretation came from (explain the genesis of my interpretation, hey?). But I had that impression.

All dictionary entries for genesis that I've seen talk about origins. Many talk about "coming into being".

What is the purpose of the book of Genesis?

Near as I can tell from reading the Bible a few times, Moses is trying to explain to the people of the Camp of Israel where they came from. And at least part of the purpose behind that is to try to convince them that the gods of the people in the lands around them were not worth worshiping, any more than the gods of the land they had just left.

Because, you know, it's easier to admire what you can see than what you can't, and people do like to admire things. I don't think we consider the world they were living in carefully enough. It was a harsh world, not nearly as much eye candy as we have in our world. And it's always really tempting to let admiration go beyond admiration as works of art.

So, where they came from.

Not so much where the universe came from, although that also is mentioned, somewhat ambiguously, but where they came from. 

The beginning relative to them, and us. 

I have to acknowledge, my opinions here are influenced by my having gone several times through the first several chapters of Genesis in parallel with the almost, but not quite identical texts in the Book of Moses and the Book of Abraham in the Pearl of Great Price. 

The Pearl of Great Price is one of the standard works of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I also acknowledge that there are people who raise controversies about it. It is enlightening to me, and that is enough for me.

So when the text in Genesis says

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

I don't feel any particular need to read that as that it was created all at the same time. 

Also, I don't see any reason not to see it as Moses retelling what was shown him, the creation as relevant to him in the world where he was living. 

This is about God (and us), not about the universe. It seems to me that Moses is saying

Israel, you have God who created the heavens and the earth and everything in them. Why do you need these gods that created nothing, that were instead created by mortal humans no better than yourselves?

As I understand it, Moses himself had seen the creation in vision, and he knew how impressive it was. He was trying to give the people of the Camp something of the vision he had. But the language he had available was just missing vocabulary and phrasing for a lot of important concepts. 

It helps to be concrete rather than abstract, so he walked the people through it as best he could, with words and language he thought they could understand.

In the Bible, we don't see it very clearly, but in the Pearl of Great Price, we see some discussion of the measurement of time in the world where God resides. I guess Peter does mention this to a certain extent when he says, in 2nd Peter 3 v. 8,

... one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.

I don't think "as a thousand years" must be read as literally "equal to". What we can say is that a day for God, at any rate, is a long time in our reckoning of time.

Moreover, in the first day, the earth itself was without form, and the sun had not yet caught fire. Hard to see the kind of day and night we're familiar with in that kind of environment. It's kind of hard for me to say that first day must be a literal 24 hours or a thousand years, or even any specific time period. And if the first day was not exactly twenty-four hours or exactly one thousand years, what of the next five days?

Words for day are also used in most languages to mean some period of time, rather than some definite interval. For example, in English, we often say, "in my day" to refer to a time in the past relevant to ourselves.

With God, all things are possible. The earth and the solar system might have been made in a couple of 24 hour days, and the plants, animals, and man in a few more. Or it might have been several thousand years, six days plus a day of rest according to the planet on which God resides. 

Or the earth may have been initially tidally locked to the sun, like the moon is to the earth, developing an actual rotation period as it developed form, so that the first day was much longer than the second, and much longer than a thousand years.

Or the six phases of the creation might have taken four billion years, plus or minus, as scientists say nowadays, and Moses, not having the language to deal with such long intervals of time, might have just been using night and day as a metaphor for the passage of time, to delineate the phases of creation.

In the first day or phase, the Spirit of God moved upon the waters. 

Waters? 

The name of the element hydrogen comes from water in most of our languages. Hydrogen is the most prominent element in universe.  

Spirit?

God is the creator of the universe. The laws of physics are God's work. On the one hand, the Spirit of God is metaphor for physical principles like gravity and light. On the other hand, the physical principles are literal expressions of God's personality. 

This is something that I have found in scripture. Physical fact often becomes metaphor for physical fact when principles in one context act similarly toprinciples in another, especially when directly connected to them. The Spirit of God communicates with us through our conscience. The Spirit of God communicates with the planets and other celestial bodies through gravity, or, in other words, gravity is one expression of the Spirit of God. 

From a different point of view, the initial or pre-existing parameters that physicists speak of in the theory of the big bang creation are the mind of God, and the forces which derive therefrom are the way the Spirit of God works in the natural world.

So gravity and other physical principles work on the clouds of hydrogen mixed with other stuff (including frozen water and methane) and a huge bunch of it coalesces into one locus until gravity heats it enough and

Let there be light.

And finally we have day. Even though the earth is still not very well formed, probably not rotating very fast, there is also night, and one phase is delineated. 

Rocks clump together and gravity clumps more of them together, and gases and frozen water are pulled in towards the big clump of rocks and dirt and separates the hydrogen above the firmament of the atmosphere of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrogen from the ice mixed in with the rocks and dirt.

Firmament? 

What was the word for atmosphere back then? Did they have one?

The rocks at the center of the huge clump are heating up, and the ice melts, and water covers the rocks. And in the second day or phase, the waters (hydrogen) under the primitive atmosphere are separated from the waters (hydrogen) above by the primitive atmosphere, by the firmament or sky. 

And the primitive atmosphere is very dense, hardly letting light through at all.

Huge clump of dirt. Huge clump of earth. Bigger than the biggest mountain you've seen. Bigger than thousands of mountains. Bigger than Moses could describe in the language he had available to explain it to the members of the camp. 

So huge you can't explore the surface of it all in a single day, or a year, or, really, in a lifetime. Big enough to be so heavy that it holds you to the surface and makes the surface feel (relatively) flat.

And our pre-mortal spirits were all there watching, as I understand it, helping in various ways.

What could we do as spirits (since we hadn't yet been given bodies)? I don't know. We witnessed it. As Job notes (jumping way ahead in the Bible), we rejoiced because we were going to get a world to experience life in. (At least, when I read God asking Job where he was, I read it as God reminding Job that he was there, rejoicing, too.)

(And there are verses in the Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price, and the Doctrine and Covenants that seem to be best interpreted as that we were there, also.)

And time passed and day turned into night and then into day again. And the atmosphere changed in composition, and the land on the surface started emerging from under the seas, and the land (and the ocean) were being biochemically prepared for plant life. As I read it, there was primitive plant life (grass bearing seed, etc.) developing on the land, and therefore, I must assume, in the continental shelf area under the water, by the time the earth rotated again through night and back into day.

Now the content of the atmosphere changed more, becoming closer to the oxygen/nitrogen combination we know, and the stars became visible in the night sky, and the sun was visible in the day sky. The other planets in our solar system would be in the process of formation, and they would become visible, too. And I'm not sure whether we should understand that the moon was captured during the fourth phase, or whether it just became visible. I tend to think it was captured during the fourth phase, further driving the process we would call, in our modern language, terraforming. But maybe it just became visible.

In the fifth phase, the seas were prepared for animal life, and primitive animal life began.

In the sixth phase, the earth was further prepared for animal life, and God and all of us were still helping get things prepared. 

Because, truly, even 4,000,000,000 years is not enough for life to come out of random reactions unless there is something influencing the randomness, something preventing at least a few of the random reactions from being followed by sequences of reactions that would completely destroy the "successes" to that point.

Besides, without an observer to give meaning to the reactions, there is no definition of success. Maybe watching actually was helping.

Why do I say it was being prepared? There are some verses in chapter 2 that talk about everything being created before it was all created. If we understand the first six phases of creation as preparatory, those verses make more sense.

Some people go as far as to think that the first six days were planning sessions, and the days and nights mentioned were on the planet where God and we were parked during the process. If so, I think that planet must have been some distance away, as we measure distance -- maybe about 8,300 parsecs away in what is normal space and time to us, perhaps brought effectively closer by means of something like what we call a wormhole. This is well beyond what I have confidence in asserting, however. I only mention it as another example of a possible reading of the days and nights of the creation.

And really, this is all quite a bit beyond anything the people of the Camp of Israel could have understood when Moses was trying to explain it. The point that they are supposed to understand is that God was actively involved in the natural processes (and we, with Him). 

God could not help but be involved, because God is the source of nature itself. And the naturalness of the processes is not a good reason to abandon the concept that the God of nature was behind it all, and try to worship the works of our own hands.

Nature is the expression of God in our universe.

No other God is worthy of our worship but the source of all truth. 

And if it is not true, we have to understand that it is not of God, that it is not God.

In the days of Moses, there were many idols of human invention which people tried to treat as if they were God. In many cases, mortal humans tried to pattern their idols after their understanding and misunderstandings of the real God, but in the end the invented gods are not God. 

In the time since then, humans have repeatedly tried to co-opt the real God and dress Him up and remake Him in the image of their limited ideals and philosophies. Same old thing.

Either way there are a lot of false ideas about God in circulation. One of our homework problems while we are here in this life is weeding through the false ideas and setting them aside, and seeking the true understanding of God. 

That's part of the reason that God has helped us preserve some of the records left behind by people like Moses who gained a fairly clear understanding of this sort of thing in the past.

In the latter verses of this chapter, God is creating the human race, male and female, and telling them -- us -- that we are to assume responsibility for the earth and the plants and animals on it. (The specific creation of Adam and Eve, the individuals, is described in chapter 2.)

Responsibility.

We have changed the meaning of dominion so that we can try to ignore responsibility and convince ourselves that dominion can be arbitrary -- can allow us to do what we please. 

But dominion, in the sense that God gave us dominion, comes with the responsibility to take care of things, along with the requirement that we report to God on our efforts at the end of the day, and at the end of our assignments in mortality, and receive and accept His judgement of what we did with what were were given. (This is also all made clear elsewhere, as are the justice and mercy of God that we can look forward to in the evaluation.) 

Dominion is responsibility, not privilege. (Not just privilege? In our present world, it may be better to deny privilege entirely. In a few years, because of changes in the general public dialog, we may need to recognize the privilege aspect again, as part of it, along with the responsibility. So much of communicating correctly depends on context.)

God is creating us, but, again, there are verses in chapter 2 that indicate that chapter 1 is describing some kind of preparatory creation -- including planning, perhaps including giving us our assignments of what we should do in mortality.

As potential support for the interpretation as six phases in planning, I offer that the last verse of the chapter talks about God seeing that everything was very good. Given that God is not subject to time the way we are as mortals, Moses could be telling us that He was seeing the future relative to us, that His plans would work out very well.

Oh, yeah. He.

He created us in His image. Male and female.

Male and female are also concepts that have been altered in our language; misinterpretations of what it means to be male or female have been woven into our language for millennia, and we have to weed through those, as well.

The name of God is sometimes given as (Latinized to) Jehovah -- or Yahweh. It is also sometimes given as Elohim. Elohim is a plural form. So is Adonai, another name for God found in the Bible. These plural forms are usually explained away as royal plural. This explanation is one of those traditions that we might ought to set aside. No. We really need to set it aside.

Until very recently, the neutral gender pronoun in English was formed by putting the masculine pronoun to double use. We have traditionally semantically overloaded the male forms.

The worship of Asherah and other female gods was often associated with a number of idolatrous practices that are best not to follow, and even now it is well to be careful when talking about a female God. 

But it would make sense that, if the text says "male and female after the image" of God, it is because there are principles of maleness and femaleness in the principle of Godliness.

Might we need to believe that God the Father is a true hermaphrodite? That was a possibility I considered when I was younger. 

I think I prefer to understand that God takes the singular form because neither Father nor Mother are subject to the egoism that would have them competing with each other for superiority and precedence. They would be in such perfect unity that, if one did something, it would be no different than if the other had done it. And it would be such perfect unity that the true worship of the one is identical to the true worship of the other. Thus, one united God.

-- which is quite clearly not the case in the ancient myths about Asherah and Baal, and their Greek and Roman counterparts, or other similar religions which claim both male and female gods but continually put them in competition with each other.

Again, there are other possible interpretations, and, before I forget, I should again point out that these are my interpretations. I don't have time to touch on all my beliefs in relation to Genesis 1, either, and I shouldn't. My understanding won't save you.

Scripture study is about developing your own understanding. It is when we understand the scriptures in our own context that they develop the power to help us, to take us to the next context in our several journeys.

The above is not binding on anyone, and I reserve the right to re-think my understanding. The above ideas should be understood to be personal opinions presented to provoke you to thought and study, and not considered doctrinal.

 Genesis 2 -- ... And Not a Man to Till the Ground

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 An earlier version of this can be found at https://guerillamormonism.blogspot.com/2022/11/thoughts-on-bible-genesis-1.html.

Thoughts on the Bible: Genesis 1

[This also just is not working. 

(See https://guerillamormonism.blogspot.com/2022/11/in-beginning-gen-01-not-good-start-on.html for a previous attempt that didn't work very well.)

(Better yet, see https://guerillamormonism.blogspot.com/2022/11/bible-uncommentary-titleprefacetoc.html for what I hope is going to work.)]

In the beginning ...

What beginning?

The beginning of the entire universe, including all the stars in the night sky? I suppose, just from this much, we might  think so.

But, let's think for a moment. This is

The First Book of Moses
Called
Genesis

For the longest time, I thought "genesis" meant "life". You know, genes, genealogy, ...

Okay, maybe I can't really give a good explanation where that interpretation came from (the genesis of my interpretation, hey?). But I had that impression.

All dictionary entries for genesis that I've seen talk about origins. Many talk about "coming into being".

What is the purpose of the book of Genesis?

Near as I can tell from reading it a few times, Moses is trying to explain to the people of the Camp of Israel where they came from. And the purpose behind that is to try to convince them that the gods that of the people in the lands around them were not worth worshiping.

Because, you know, it's easier to admire what you can see than what you can't.

So, where they came from. 

Not so much where the universe came from, although that also is mentioned, somewhat ambiguously.

I have to acknowledge, my opinions here are somewhat influenced by my having gone several times through the first several chapters of Genesis in parallel with the nearly identical texts in the Book of Moses and the Book of Abraham in the Pearl of Great Price. 

The Pearl of Great Price is one of the standard works of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I also acknowledge that there are people who raise controversies about it. It is enlightening to me, and that is enough for me.

So when the text in Genesis says

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

I don't feel any particular need to read that as all at once. 

This is about God, not about the universe. Moses is saying

Israel, you have God who created the heavens and the earth and everything in them. Why do you need these gods that created nothing, that were rather created by mortal humans no better than yourselves?

But Moses himself had seen the creation in vision, and he knew how impressive it was, and how it helps to be concrete rather than abstract, so he walked the people through it.  

In the Bible, we don't see it very clearly, but in the Pearl of Great Price, we see some discussion of the measurement of time in the world where God resides. Peter mentions this when he says, in 2nd Peter 3 v. 8, that a day for God is like a thousand years for us. Not equal, like. A day for God, at any rate, is a long time in our reckoning of time.

Moreover, in the first day, the earth itself was without form, and the sun had not yet caught fire. It's kind of hard to say that first day was a literal 24 hours, or even any specific time period. 

The Spirit of God moved upon the waters. 

Waters? 

The name of the element hydrogen comes from water. Hydrogen is the most prominent element in universe. 

God is the creator of the universe. The laws of physics are God's work. On the one hand, the Spirit of God is metaphor for physical principles like gravity and light. On the other hand, the physical principles are literal expressions of God's personality.

Gravity and other physical principles work on the clouds of hydrogen mixed with other stuff (including frozen water and methane) and a huge bunch of it coalesces into one locus until gravity heats it enough and

Let there be light.

And finally we have day. Even though the earth is still not very well formed, probably not rotating very fast, there is also night. 

Rocks clump together and gravity clumps more of them together, and gases and frozen water are pulled in towards the big clump of rocks and dirt and separates the hydrogen above the firmament of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrogen from the ice mixed in with the rocks and dirt.

But the rocks at the center of the clump are heating up, and the ice melts, and water covers the rocks. And in the second day, the waters under the primitive atmosphere are separated from the hydrogen above by the primitive atmosphere, the "sky".

And our pre-mortal spirits were all there watching, and, as I understand it, helping in various ways. What could we do as spirits (since we hadn't yet been given bodies)? I don't know. We witnessed it. We rejoiced because we were going to get a world to experience life in.

And a long time passed and day turned into night and then into day again. And the atmosphere changed in composition, and the land on the surface started appearing from under the seas, and the land (and the ocean) were being biochemically prepared for plant life. As I read it, there was primitive plant life (grass bearing seed, etc.) on the land, and therefore, we must assume, in continental shelf area under the water by the time the earth rotated again through night and back into day.

Now the content of the atmosphere changed more, becoming closer to the oxygen/nitrogen combination we know, and the stars appeared in the night sky, and the sun was visible in the day sky. And I'm not sure whether we should understand that the moon was captured during the fourth period, or whether it just became visible. I tend to think it was captured during the fourth period, further driving the process we would call in our modern language, terraforming.

In the fifth period, the seas were prepared for animal life, and primitive animal life began.

In the sixth period, the earth was further prepared for animal life, and God and all of us were still helping get things prepared. Because, truly, even 4,000,000,000 years is not enough for life to come out of random reactions unless there is something influencing the randomness, something preventing at least a few of the random reactions from being followed by reactions that would completely destroy the "successes" to that point.

Besides, without an observer to give meaning to the reactions, there is no definition of success.

Why do I way prepared? There are some verses in chapter 2 that talk about everything being created before it was all created.

Some people think that the first six days were planning sessions, and the days and nights were on the planet where God and we were parked during the process. If so, I think it must have been some distance away, as we measure distance -- about 8,300 parsecs away, perhaps brought effectively closer by means of a wormhole. This is well beyond what I have confidence in asserting, however.

And really, this is all quite a bit beyond anything the people of the Camp of Israel could have understood when Moses was trying to explain it. The point is that God was actively involved in the natural processes (and we, with Him). 

God could not help but be involved, because God is the source of nature itself. 

Nature is the expression of God in our universe.

No other God is worthy of our worship but the source of all truth. If it is not true, we have to understand that it is not God.

In the days of Moses, the idols were of human invention, and humans tried to pattern their idols after what they understood of the real God. 

In the time since then, humans have tried to co-opt the real God and dress Him up and remake Him in the image of their limited ideals and philosophies. 

Either way there are a lot of false ideas about God in circulation. One of our homework problems while we are here in this life is weeding through the false ideas and setting them aside, and seeking the true understanding of God. 

That's part of the reason that God has helped us preserve some of the records left behind by people like Moses who gained a fairly clear understanding in the past.

Why do I say that we were there?

In the latter verses of this chapter, God is creating man, male and female, and telling them -- us -- that we are to assume responsibility for the earth and the plants and animals on it. (The creation of Adam and Eve, the individuals, is described in chapter 2.)

(And there are verses in the Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price, and the Doctrine and Covenants that seem to be best interpreted as that we were there, also.)

We have changed the meaning of dominion to believe that dominion can be arbitrary. But dominion, in the sense that God gave us dominion, comes with the responsibility to take care of things, and the requirement that we will report to God on our efforts at the end of our assignments in mortality, and accept His judgement of what we did with what were were given. (This is also made clear elsewhere.)

Creating us, but, again, there are verses in chapter 2 that indicate that this was some kind of preparatory creation -- planning, maybe, maybe giving us our assignments. We still did not have physical bodies with which we could physically till the ground.

Before I forget, I should point out that these are my interpretations. They are not binding on anyone besides me, and I reserve the right to re-think things next time. These interpretations should be considered to be personal opinions and not considered doctrinal.

Theorizing the Existence of God

{No, this doesn't belong here. It belongs in my Random Eikaiwa blog. But I don't want to argue with people who will think it's "Mormon theology". 

It is not.

It's a very limited allegory, borrowing from themes and memes in the science fiction and speculative fiction genres, and from certain variations of the traditions in cultural Mormonism. 

Doing a full doctrinal treatment of the concepts touched on would consume quite a few more words than we have in extant scripture, and would invite the kind of argument that occurs when people jump to conclusions before properly reading and understanding even the first page of such a work.

It does contain some concepts that need to be discussed.

But it is not doctrinal.}

Ms. G: Honey, I'm bored.

Mr. G: Bored? What's to be bored of? We have this wonderful playground -- planets, comets, stars, black holes, galaxies, mmphff ...

Ms. G: Shush. I know we have an entire universe to play in. We've been playing in it how long?

Mr. G: Uhm, let's see. According to the time on the world in the universe where we grew up, what? Roughly a hundred million years?

Ms. G: More like two hundred million years.

Mr. G: And? It all runs perfectly, according to our blueprints and plans -- nothing out of sequence, nothing out of place, everything just as we set it up, and it will continue to do so forever.

Ms. G: Don't you think something's missing?

Mr. G: Let me look at the list. Uh-huh, yep, yep, uh-huh, it's all here, even the hyper-gamma white-bodies that the old scientists where we grew up wanted to call dark matter because they radiate too far above the spectra of gross thermodynamic reactions to be visible to the eye of the physical body. 

Ms. G: That last one is getting warm.

Mr G: Oh? Let me check the temperature. Yep. They are getting warm. Ouch. What was that for?

Ms. G: On the world where we grew up, when we had built a house, what was next?

Mr G: Move in? 

Ms G: (Clears her throat.)

Mr. G: That?

Ms. G: Yes, that.

Mr. G: But, sweetheart, if we do that, it will make a mess. Disorder. Chaos. Entropy and all that general thermodynamic stuff. And evil.

Ms. G: And Good. Can't have good without evil. You say so, yourself. What's the purpose of a house or a playground without children?

Mr. G: Children. Oh. Here it is, it's even in our plans.

Ms. G: Of course it is. You wrote it in.

Mr. G: With your hemphppffflp mmmm. Nice kiss. Help.

Ms. G: Uh, huh.

Mr. G: I remember our first baby in the world where we grew up. Quite a shock.

Ms. G: And you weren't even the one carrying her.

Mr. G: I did help raise her.

Ms. G: You did. You were wonderful.

Mr. G: You, too.

Ms. G: They should be coming for a visit sometime soon.

Mr. G: Sometime before the planets in this solar system begin to form.

Ms. G: One of those planets will be our first biologically habitable world.

Mr. G: I wonder if they'll stay.

Ms. G: We could use the help.

Mr. G: Are you sure you're ready for the changes?

Ms. G: The changes are already occurring. Do you think we should stop them?

Mr. G: That would not be good.

Ms. G: No, it wouldn't.

{Hmm. Somehow, that didn't go the direction it was supposed to. Maybe I'm writing too much romance. Let's try again.}

G1: I'm bored.

G2: Bored? What's to be bored of? We are the end product of millennia of biological evolution and we have for our toys the end products of millennia of technological evolution. We can do anything.

G3: Anything?

G2: What can't we do?

G4: I'd say we can do anything. We long ago learned to synthesize matter, including elements in the islands and continent of stability. We have intelligent robots that repair and improve themselves, we've defeated death for ourselves, what haven't we done?

G1: Made solar systems. Bootstrapped a civilized world in its habitable zone.

G2: We can't do that.

G3: Why not?

G4: They'd call us God or something. Yuck.

G3: I don't see that as a good reason.

G2: They wouldn't believe in us.

G1: So?

G4: They'd hate us, call us evil because life is hard and then you die.

G1: Hmm.

G3: Can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. I say we go for it.

G2: Why?

G3: What else have we got to do?

G1: Not much that I can think of. What've we got to lose? At worst, they could only eventually become our equals in intelligence.

G0: After all, how did you guys come into existence? Was it such a bad thing that I/We made your world?

G4: Good point.

G2: Mmm, okay, let's do it.