S. Worthen | Weblog

My more-religious-than-the-rest-of-us brother has spoken of his interpretation of parts of the Bible like this, too. He uses the part where God is making Adam as an example: the Bible tries to explain how God did it, but if you're God trying to explain to ancient man - "So first I had to assemble some proteins out of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, y'know, and then I've got to sequence the DNA, and your cytoplasm's got to be sort of a saline solution, and..." and ancient man probably says something like, "What?" And God's like, "Yeah, ok, sorry. I made you out of mud. Just think of it as mud."

It's probably hard to interpret with modern knowledge what God's actually capable of when all our data comes from a much older account. If it didn't occur to them that time travel might even be possible, any evidence for it from their stories would have to be picked up from bits and pieces scattered throughout.