Overture
Welcome to Between The Stools on September 19th 2021.
The music I played you in with was my love gift to my sister and brother in law on their wedding – ten years ago this weekend. The piece is called Alessio, a splicing of their names. So that overture was to honour them.
This month’s theme is The Flood and Fossils. I chose this weekend because it’s the close of the Jewish festival of Rosh Hashanah – a moveable feast – which celebrates the start of the Jewish new year, and according to Craig Chester, the end of the Great Flood. Although September can feel a new start for many of us, I felt that this newness marked by the end of a long cataclysm felt very apt this year. I didn’t know what state the world would be in now when I chose it. Would we be on Ararat, awaiting the waters to lower, or actually coming down that ramp? Depending on where you are listening to this, and your own perspective, you may feel at different parts of the Flood story.
I’m mindful of dinosaurs and fossils just now: one is in the local cathedral – guess my thoughts! We have a sculpture trail of them round the city, and I’ve just seen the film Ammonite about real life English fossil finder Mary Anning, which I will review anon, and recently been to where the story is set. (I also read a novel about her). I didn’t foresee any of that when I picked this theme and set this date. But I’m starting to look at dinosaurs in a new way and see that the early history of our world, and how it’s presented, is very relevant, and actually key in these times of awakening; and that there is much about the imagery of the Flood and the Ark which relates to our current situation.
Let us pray.
Where’s your nearest dinosaur? I bet that wherever you are, you’ve some fossils in even a modest museum near you; perhaps you’ve even found them in your locality. In your nearest big city, a large skeleton will be an iconic exhibit in the main hall of a vast Victorian edifice, such as the diplodocus in London, which is currently touring Britain. Berlin is graced with a brachiosaurus, and Ipswich has a woolly mammoth. I note the marketing decisions: Exeter to Poole is the Jurassic Coast, symbolised by spiralled ammonite shells, whilst we in the East are Ice Age country, symbolised by cuddly elephants with bouffants. I’m becoming aware of presentation choices. You may have an outdoor park, such as London’s Crystal Palace, with models of creatures that modern scientists have scoffed at, or roaring, even moving fibre glass beasts to half terrify yourselves with.
Dinosaurs are so well known to us, cuddly and terrifying by turns, that it is hard to put ourselves in the position of explorers 200 years ago, such as Mary Anning of Lyme Regis in Dorset. We are familiar with not only the mass extinction of prehistoric monsters, but the dodo, and we are often threatened with the disappearance of extant creatures. But in the early 1800s, the concept of extinction was new, and unthinkable. Could there be types of being that had been lost? Why didn’t God take better care of them? Was He less concerned with creation than we hoped? Was He a wind it up and watch it go – in both senses – kind of god? Might he not bother about the sparrow of the Gospel now, and let us fall too?
Were fossils false evidence, laid by God or Satan, to test our faith and lead us from Truth?
The new found interest in rocks was also causing cracks in faith, but I struggle to see why. This was before Darwin’s theory which necessitated huge time spans to be possible. So I do not understand why geology now required that the world must be far older than originally thought. Although some arrive at a young Earth – under 10,000 years – from adding up dates and ages in the Bible, it seems the chief source of this prevalent belief was Bishop Ussher. So it was he that might be disproved, not God.
I do not see the leap from the existence then extinction of dinosaurs to an Earth millions of years old. Theologically, I see why an older world is a problem – primarily because of the position of the Fall. If death is supposed to have entered the world due to Adam and Eve’s sin, then their having evolved – even as a collective motif – over eons changes this first turning point in human relations with God. I see that it’s not the age of the world, but when the Eden moment happened within it, and it’s the theory of evolution which causes the theological concern.
I was brought up a Creationist – that is to say, in the belief in the literal creation of the world in 6 days, and that the theory of evolution is just that – a theory, an erroneous one, and moreover, a godless one. When, like many children, I took an interest in dinosaurs, my mother’s faith was shaken, much like those in Mary Anning’s day. Could her creationism be compatible with my brachiosaurus? She decided that it was, and found some evangelical scientists who offered much material on why one could still believe in Genesis and science. Creationists have thought about how the world’s population, with all its differing ethnicities, could come from one pair of humans. They’ve thought about Cain’s wife and where the water from the Flood went; how much space there was on the Ark to fit all the animals in.There were dinosaurs on it, they say – these creatures are not intrinsically old Earth nor evolutionary.No, fossils were not tricks and traps. The Great Flood perhaps is a misleading title, for this is not about monsoons, or even just broken dams. The Bible speaks of the heavens opening and bursting forth from the deep. This was water pummelling from above and below. Thus Flood created fossils – it is the perfect condition for doing so, and is a better fit than the weak proferrings of heavenly bodies, for which we have no evidence. It also explains our current land masses. The climate and plants were altered by the Flood, so that dinosaurs could no longer survive, although postdiluvian Job knew of two.
At this point, some of you might feel divided. If you are a Creationist, you are firstly very welcome, as are all of you, and I seek to find common ground and be respectful of other’s views. I want to make clear that I know that Creationists are ‘real’ scientists, are intelligent and sincere people, and I was and am disappointed in the division and derision – even from other Christians, which I first discovered when I wrote a university dissertation ‘Is creationism a scientific possibility and theological necessity?’. I think that some of mainstream society can be quick to dismiss those who don’t believe in evolution. We are again in times of scientific bifurcation, and many will be aware that what we are peddled is not often scientific fact, or it’s a carefully curated one. What we are told has an agenda.
We are also encouraged to continue our belief in a ruling class; as in Veronica Roth’s Divergent series of novels, there is a group, a faction who consider themselves best suited and placed to run society, and make decisions and disseminate to the rest of us. They are often self serving and deluded. There are many others with as good or better skills, including empathy. Academics have become if not leaders, our steerers, and politicians’ advisors are often either lawyers or scientists. Note that science and other ‘disciplines’ are contained within the academic system; and how often one needs a certificate from an official body to practice, or at least be taken seriously. Note that ‘science’ means knowledge; thus a particular discipline, only disposed to look at particular aspects of our world, has come to be a synecdoche for all ken. It can be embraced by believers, but it understandably has been pitted against faith. Science has become the new orthodoxy, the new creed to hold one’s beliefs against. Its proponents are priest-like, their words, like Latin to medieval parishioners, an initiates’ code, keep the keepers secure in their superior ken [quote from my poem].
I am about to differ strongly from Creationists, but I will make a point: that I admire not only their willingness to stand out from the fads and fashions of the world, but that for them, God comes first, over the changing whims of the scientific community. These whims are called paradigm shifts – by Thomas Kuhn – and canons of knowledge – what is accepted to be true. These shift like tectonic plates over time: fossils were a shift; Darwin another; and I think we are due another, imminently, which will be just as radical.
When researching this, I saw an article about a Christian geologist refuting the idea of a global flood. He just ceded that a more regional one might have occurred. His 21 points were all focussed on geological suppositions. He gave academic references and endnotes. I think that is slight of hand bolstering, for it says, because I’ve put (Elspeth et al: 1997) in the right format, you’ll believe me that I know what I’m talking about. And you probably won’t go to the notes to see what these references say. He often cited himself! Despite being 15 pages long, his points were brief. His style was much like how Creationists themselves argue. In the Christian Post, Ken Ham responded. He didn’t go through point by point; he said that the article was purely on modern geological assumptions, and not an eye witness account. This so called Christian had put alleged scientific authority before the authority of the Bible, inciting atheists against Bible-believing Christians. He’d be facing his Maker on that anon.
I noted the rhetoric of both sides: one tries to bamboozle with serious sounding science; the other, whilst stating that true science supports him, threatens with the Day of Reckoning, questions the faith of this author, and pronounces that this scientist is a people pleaser before a God pleaser.
The final chapter of my undergraduate thesis was entitled: Your God Is Too Small. I borrowed it from the book by J B Phillips. I felt that many Christians were squeezing their faith into the worldly mould that mainstream science made for them, and that much of it was about fitting in and being acceptable. Only by embracing evolution and standing away from the die-hard fundamentalists could modern Christians, especially academically trained ones, have any kudos. You may wonder what my own view is, and whether I have altered it in the three decades since I first watched a Ken Ham video or picked up the wonderfully illustrated book by David Watson – see below. Yes…and no.
The Creationists I recall have not. They have built a lifesized Ark, light it in rainbow colours, but do not support those denoted by the 6-spectrum rainbow. They argue that how you believe the world was made affects how you live in it. I agree, but no longer with all the ‘evils’ they wish to shoot at and feel attacked by, like castles (there was an illustration of literally that, with the castles given labels such as homosexuality). I won’t delineate my views on those castles tonight, except to say that this is a no judgement community, and we welcome gay people.
I wanted to explain why else I diverge from Creationists. There seems to be an almost… if not joy, relish in telling people they will be judged. They can seem combatant – understandably, as they are often attacked, and I too like a good argument. But judgement is very key to the story of the Flood, for the biblical account frames the event as an act of divine judgement. We thought about Judgement in June – not the sheep/goat pearly gates bouncer moment, nor the fires of hell for unbelievers, but for those who commit atrocities, and how we handle such perpetrators in a mature, loving, spiritual society. I asked at Christmas: why did God build a world – or refashion a world – in 3 chapters, curse at the end of them, then do a bit more cursing in the next two, and then flood the world and destroy it? Is this god the true God? I spoke last June about the possibility of the deity of the Old Testament being plural. Who is this God who annihilates not only all people, save one family, but most of his animals, and plants, in a flood so violent that it changes the environment?
My issue is not: could the Flood have really happened? I am aware that flood stories are told in many ancient civilisations, and that seems to bolster the likelihood of there having been one. I agree that the Flood is a better explanation for fossils and deceased dinosaurs than wanly hypothesised meteorites. The Bible’s specificity of the time it happened, and of the ark itself, is further evidence for it being true. My issue has become: why would a good loving God destroy the world? And why do many Bible (and Koran) believers vindicate this violent verdict?! Why does believing in the Flood cause ridicule – just as Noah was? What would it mean if the Ark was real? How else could we understand the Flood?
Improvised Flood music:
The Warning…. the rains begin…. the floodgates open… the Ark whooshes over the mountains…the flooding subsides…the Ark comes to rest…and there’s a long wait towards the hope of release and a new world
I have read the explanations of conservative Christians, mystical Jews, Gnostics and New Agers. I read the Flood in the Koran and other ancient texts, such as the Book of Enoch, and Jasher.And I don’t have a definite answer to offer you, as I hoped, even for my own sake.
I don’t accept that the world was simply too evil and that God was right, and has the right, to judge. I would need to hear that:
1) There was something so utterly evil about the world, and out of control, including creatures, which meant that annihilation was the only option AND that they refused repentance
2) That this wasn’t the true God…. or more shockingly, that the true God needed to evolve too
3) This myth covered up a different narrative
The first option has some credence, because of the first few verses of Genesis chapter 6. I first heard it from David Icke. Those otherworldly giants, the Nephilim, the ‘fallen ones’ who mated with earthly females. The kind of beings he speaks of – and it isn’t just him – link into the fossil part of this service. The Hebrew for the ‘sons of god’ is bene elohim – ‘god’ is plural too. Or beings who would be gods.
I note that conservative Christian and New Age teachings are similar: that an other worldly evil force has interfered with our fauna and created terrible beasts. Their name – dinosaur – is apt: for they are terrible or fearful lizards. Whereas Christians blame the Devil et al, the New Age teaches that it was aliens, often the Anunnaki, themselves partly reptilian, who bred on the Earth, to subdue it/us and to keep other alien conquerors away. That might seem outrageous to some of you, but I am sensing a link between alien and prehistoric or crypto zoology. Remember how both can be ridiculed? That often means that you’re on to something that the keepers of knowledge do not wish to be known.
I have oft heard of forthcoming disclosure of our true origins – I suspect this story will be part of them.
The Flood narrative (Genesis ch 6-9) repeats chapter 1’s ‘according to their kind’. Creationists aver that this statement precludes evolution; one can develop within one’s species, but not change into another. Is the sin here hybridisation?
Mary Anning, one of Britain’s earliest fossil finders, who was not given the recognition she deserved in her lifetime (1799-1847), was accused of forgery or making a mistake with her plesiosaur. This is a long necked swimming creature – basically, Nessie, whom I wrote of in January. Baron Cuvier, contemporary leading fossil curator in France, in Tracy Chevalier’s novel Remarkable Creatures, thinks she’s got her skeletons muddled up. Is this not the body of a whale or turtle or shark with a sea snake’s head and tail attached? Come to think of it, several of the dinosaur family are kind of hybrids. An ichthyosaur (which she also found) is a fish lizard. I read that the tyrannosaur has much in common with birds. So rather than being forgeries – and I was surprised at how incomplete much evidence is – are dinosaurs in fact, engineered chimera?
On Before Its News last weekend, Lee Austin said that the Nephilim tried to dehumanise our DNA so that Jesus couldn’t die for us and save us as a human – hence the Flood put an end to them.
What were these beings doing? We’re not given details, and whereas I’d not want horrors described, I would like to understand their general nature. The famous phrase of this era is ‘Each did what is right in their own eyes’. Conservatives see this as sin and thus that the punishment justified, but why is individual freedom and discernment wrong? This is relevant as we’re encouraged to put aside our principles and needs and do what we’re told, for the sake of the collective. Thus our civil leaders have become god-like absolutes, but I do not believe that our duty is to obey regardless – quite the reverse. (I took on Romans 13 in November). So I do not find this phrase a satisfying explanation, nor those who riff on the wholly evil hearts of antediluvians and what they must have done. I need to know more. But I do wonder if these semi divine huge hybrids were a danger. I think of the movie Superman II, with that trio with superpowers, and how quickly they destroyed buildings and enslaved humans.
I have become more aware of enslavement, on many levels, and the terrible atrocities being committed. If the kind of violence and abuse was happening that I’m often hearing of and trying not to imagine, then perhaps this wiping of the Earth is more justified? But is it fair to kill animals too? Some have mentioned that since the Earth was given to the dominion of humans, that animals had to suffer with them and for them. I am not happy with that, unless animals were part of that violence. We usually see animals as morally neutral, unable to be made culpable as they are less capable than us. We do kill animals that have been violent. What marked out the pairs that were chosen to live from the ones that did not? Were they righteous, did they just respond quicker, or were they randomly chosen?
I am also concerned about the world not having sufficient opportunity for repentance. One Christian commentator said the populace was given 120 years, but I struggle to see this directly in the account. In fact, I can’t see that the people were given any warning at all in the Bible.Noah seems passive – does he even speak? He preaches in the Koran and invites the world to repent. But in the Bible, the judgement seems underway and there is no reprieve or appeal. I realised that some of the basic Christian telling does not come from the Bible. The oft repeated ridicule of the people is not in my versions, including New Testament sermons mentioning Noah.
We are not given any evidence of Noah’s blamelessness. We are told that he walked with the Lord and was blameless in God’s eyes – does that really mean that he was obedient and had found favour? But is that the same as being good and righteous? We are not told that his family are good.
I have a final point on this section. The wickedness of the world was only stopped temporarily, for it has continued. If the dinosaurs – having perhaps had millennia to develop from stupid lumbering creatures into cunning ones – were the culprits, if they were taken onto the Ark, it meant that these hybrids could continue. Was the new world designed to ensure they could not? Clearly some did survive, for what was Job 41 looking at? What are dragons, that are such well known motifs? And some would argue that the orms and beisties throughout history, and which are even sighted in modern times, are evidence that some dinosaurs did survive. As has evil. I am finding clues but just as many questions.
2) The New Age quotes ancient accounts which speak of a pair of brother gods, Enlil and Enki, and it was the harsh one who tried to destroy the world via a massive deluge; the boat was his brother’s idea. This pair have been subsumed into a single deity, but the real God is beyond both. I have often felt that the Old Testament god behaves like those in pantheons of under gods. This worries me, for it’s suggested that my God didn’t make me and these creatures. I do not wish to be a genetic experiment. That makes me feel as Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot’s generation often did – the very nature of our beliefs about God and his relations to us being kicked from under us.
Could the one True God have been crueller in his adolescence? Ilia Delio suggests that God too has evolved. His curve would need to be steep for me to want to associate with the one who emerges here.
3) The books I read on Mary Anning and her friends suggested that scientists now thought of the world as not being shaped by the hand of God, but natural upheaval. I do not know why the two are exclusive, for surely this is an example of a theistic guided cataclysm. The New Age also suggests that there have been others. I note that the Bible begins with a formless world, ready to be shaped and have life put upon it; it does not say that planet Earth was created in Genesis 1. Could this have been the account from just the latest disaster? How many reshapings and destructions went before?
There are the myths of Atlantis (or Mu) and Lemuria, said to have sunk in the Flood, but rather than judgement, it was human’s own endeavours which destroyed themselves – or at least, two continents. The atomic bomb is not a 20th century invention, but a re-discovery. How often have you seen such a plot in science fiction? There’s a Wonder Woman episode, called Judgment From Outer Space, where Andros, from far more advanced galaxies, informs the wartime princess in a bathing suit that their worlds moved on from weaponised nuclear power ages ago. That we had just discovered it and intended to use in war was exactly why he was sent to Earth. And if he felt humans were too belligerent, too selfish, this council – unknown to all but Wonder Woman – was going to blow up the planet, wholesale. Not an ark, or a spacecraft. (I believe it to be based on the 1950s film The Day The Earth Stood Still, remade c2009). But thanks to Wonder Woman and friends, Andros gives a reprieve for he can see – just like the Superman The Movie trailer – that ‘mankind’ has the capacity for good.
It is striking me more and more how sci-fi is modern myth and subversive, disguised truth.
I’m about to wrap now, and explain why I believe the Flood is relevant. We, like Atlanteans, are advanced technologically, but not spiritually. We are not only destroying our world, but each other. We have an ark against a wave of danger, but if we do not come aboard, we may be shut out and left to the elements. Some of us have been given deadlines to board the ark. Note that the new wave is called Mu. Some of us believe that there are plans for genocide, long laid, by those who would set themselves up as gods, and aided by otherwordly beings intent on mining our resources and controlling or destroying all life. Some of us feel that we are at the end of a cycle, and this is the denouement of a long running series when curtains will fall in both senses. We have been shut in an ark for many months, with hopeful reports of when it is safe to come out, often to be told that we must wait longer, or even have the door opened, to only get back in again for another round of storm which often we cannot see.
Some of us are resisting the ark offered us, and finding a different kind of ark, in new communities, and in our faith, whilst avoiding the division of who is and is not boarding a boat of gopherwood, with other undeclared ingredients.
We have faith that the waters are lowering, and that when the storms whip up again, it is the death throes of those who would destroy us. There is another kind of water – and fire – for them. I want to close with two positive points. One is from the film Evan Almighty, about a modern man building an ark. When it seems that the rains that God predicted aren’t coming, his wife says: ‘Maybe it’s a flood of knowledge and awareness’. The deluge comes too – due to corruption and greed – but I loved the thought that a Neo-Noah would precipitate not precipitation but consciousness.
The last point is from Michael Berg, who offers a Kabbalist interpretation. He sees the Noah story as a Flood of Mercy, a cleansing, a new cycle. Whereas the disaster was planned to be destructive, it can be turned to be an opportunity – not for greater reaches of power for the few, but a different kind of reset. Much will be swept away, all that is rotten. I trust that we explore our new world with doves and olive branches. I play you out with a shorter reprise of the Flood – this time sounding, I hope, Jewish, and although mournful, it is also time for dancing.
Our next service is on October 24th: Vibrating at the speed of love – 8pm GMT. We don’t change our clocks here til the next week, but beware if you’re elsewhere in the world and already have.
Elspeth R - A skewed world view 
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