Science Fiction Needs to Reassess the Garden of Eden

Science fiction is afraid of the Bible. Many science fiction writers have embedded anti-Christian points of view in their stories, some subtly so and others not-so-subtly so. Historical Christian leaders and peoples have certainly failed to live up to the promise of the faith that took its name from that which Greek-speaking followers gave to Jesus of Nazareth. So-called Christians have launched crusades against Muslims, persecuted Jews, enslaved Africans and New World Inhabitants, and otherwise behaved in a most intolerant, unloving fashion. Modern “fundamentalist Christians” in the United States routinely disregard the New Testament’s teaching that we are subject to the spirit and not the law in favor of pursuing legalistic interpretations of the Bible.

Given the inability of so many Christians to act Christian-like, it should be no wonder that science fiction rarely if ever treats Christian teachings well. But some teachings are not the sole purview of the Christians. In fact, the Old Testament really belongs to the Jewish faith and only serves (for Christians) as a primer in why Salvation was necessary and how his followers (all Jews, many of them orthodox Pharisees) came to identify and accept Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah (when so many other possible Messiahs had been rejected).

Rather than accept the possibility that God exists science fiction substitutes frauds, fakery, and flaky double standards for the miracles and miraculous beings described in Biblical and other ancient writings. Ironically, science has been looking at some of these miraculous events with a less critical eye lately. For example, while generations of scholars have attempted to identify where Moses might have led the Israelites out of Egypt, none of them have really looked at the mechanism of how the Red Sea could have been parted — until recently, that is.

Now we have a formal hypothesis that might explain the Biblical event in terms that exactly match the only known record of the event without challenging one’s faith in God. After all, even if there is a possible natural explanation for how the Red Sea might have been parted, there are so many other unexplained factors that the miracle seems no less miraculous. Pharaoh’s priests supposedly changed sticks into serpents in challenge of Moses’ authority, so the Biblical doesn’t necessarily imply that every miracle has to be exclusive to God.

And now new research is suggesting that the Garden of Eden could have been located under the Persian Gulf. The science behind the hypothesis is not yet fully developed. In fact, you could say that amateur, populist attempts at developing the science are still farther along than formal science. But the Theory of the Garden of Eden is coming along and one day someone will publish a formal statement that will force scientists to revisit a painful area.

I’m talking about Creationism, which in all its evil forms is about as UNChristian a philosophy as one can develop. After all, Creationism at its heart is a denial of the truth, something Jesus would never have advocated. The Bible is not a formal scientific document. Nor is it an accurate record of man’s relationship with God. After all, there was no Bible until 1-2 centuries after the Crucifixion. Sure, the Jewish people had a library of important writings they had built up for over 1,000 years but that library continued to grow in other directions after Christian scholars formally adopted what they wanted to serve as the basis for their canon.

When scientists finally begin to speak with a unified (or nearly unified) voice about a real Garden of Eden (or at least a lush, fertile region that would have resembled the Biblical garden in many ways) their ideas and theories will be appropriated by Creationists as further “proof” that Genesis’ account of the world’s creation was essentially correct. Creationism has always failed the test of faith that Jesus gave us (“You will know the tree by the fruit it bears”) because it engages in cherry-picking the facts.

I am pretty confident that science has shown the world was not created in six days. But though that part of Genesis will most likely never be proven by science, science doesn’t in any way detract from God’s existence. I have often said that if God exists he is completely natural and must have left his fingerprint on whatever works he has made. Our science is not yet advanced enough to understand the nature of the universe so it’s ridiculous to argue that science is ready to understand the nature of God.

Science fiction, however, can dabble in the ideas without having to be fully constrained by our ignorance. That is, science fiction can certainly ask, “What if there IS a God and what if the Bible was essentially correct in many ways?” Those questions don’t mean that we have to start composing end-of-world stories that match the Book of Revelation. Nor does it mean we have to stop speculating about ancient space farers visiting Earth.

After all, what is an angel? We derive the word angel from the Greek word for “messenger” — angelikos. The angels of the Bible are messengers from God but the Bible doesn’t explain who they are, where they come from, what their history is, or what their nature is. There are certainly, in a number of prophetic writings, descriptions of beings (in extremely symbolic terms) that have been equated with angels. Those symbolically-described beings or creatures don’t much look like the messengers who told Job to get out of Sodom and Gomorrah, though.

Science fiction has tried to explain away the story of Eden by placing it on Mars, on the Moon, on lost and forgotten continents — by writing about advanced civilizations that collapsed, and by suggesting in every way possible that there was nothing miraculous about it. And yet, what if it was a truly miraculous place at the time of its discovery by early modern humans? What if it was so rich, so fertile, so welcoming and safe that humans could live there without having to work hard?

Science fiction doesn’t have to depict the Fall of Man in Biblical terms in order to speculate on what might have happened. We know that the Persian Gulf was filled by seawater after a natural retaining wall (probably made mostly or completely of sand) was breached by the rising waters of the Indian Ocean. We also know that a huge deluge inundated the Mesopotamian region thousands of years ago. Science fiction could certainly look at those events and develop some speculative ideas about how the world might have looked without endorsing or condemning Judeo-Christian teachings.

We can now write about when and where civilization flourished for the first time — so why not look at the growing list of scientific theories and discoveries and write about where and when Biblical traditions began without belittling them or turning them into caricatures of themselves. We don’t need to inject spaceships and rayguns into Genesis. Neither the Bible nor science has suggested any such things were around in the days of Adam, Eve, and “the first cities”.

Ancient peoples had to cope with a changing world just as we do. It’s hard to imagine just how much time had to pass for significant events to occur. We can say that from about 12,000 BCE to 8,000 BCE was a 4,000 year period. The first permanent communities appeared within that time frame. Man learned to domesticate animals and grow the first crops in this timeframe. That is equivalent to all the time that has passed since Abraham left Uruk around 1800 BCE.

In the period from about 8,000 BCE to 4,000 BCE the Black Sea was transformed from a giant lake into a saltwater sibling of the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf was flooded. Middle Eastern farmers migrated north into Europe and east into India (and farming was probably independently developed in east Asia around this time). At the end of that period the first civilizations had arisen and people were beginning to write.

Our ancestors’ inability to write down their histories and their ideas about what the world is and where it came from has forced us to speculate about those things. The speculation so far has been pretty bad in no small part due to the anti-Christian propaganda that has been published in the name of “speculative fiction”. Some writers just seem to want to rub science in the noses of Christians — and yet, science keeps coming back and showing that there really was something to all those Old Testament stories after all.

Maybe now it’s finally time for a new generation of science fictionists to begin rethinking the past and imagining it in ways that don’t take sides.