I written before that one of the things Chris Hitchens is at his best talking about is the fact that religion looks manmade. I’ve just recently started reading through the Bible for the third time, which has put me directly in contact with what is, to my mind, one of the clearest examples of this point: the book of Genesis.

There are actually two big ways I think Genesis fits the bill here, but today I’m going to limit myself to the creation mythology, starting with Genesis chapter three. Here’s the story: God has just created a man and a woman, and he tells them not to eat fruit from one particular tree, the “tree of knowledge of good and evil.” A snake–not a fallen angel or any such thing, mind you, but a snake–talks them into eating the fruit that they’re not supposed to eat, and suddenly, being naked bothers them, so they hide. Then God comes down and announces he’s punishing the whole lot of them: now the snake will have to crawl on his belly, men will have to get food through toil, women will undergo painful childbirth, and snakes and humans will fight with each other.

Maybe the people who first told this story didn’t take it literally. After all, it involves a talking snake, and it isn’t part of the story that snakes used to be able to talk but lost that power. That may be a hint that the people who told it didn’t think it really happened. Maybe–or maybe they didn’t worry about those things. Either way, what the story definitely doesn’t look like is a brilliant allegory revealing spiritual truth so profound no human could have written it. Anyone who knows anything at all about the mythologies of other cultures can see it looks like a fairly typical bit of mythology. It recalls the Greek myths that humans use fire because Prometheus stole it from Olympus, or that the evils in the world were let out of a box by Pandora, or that the seasons are due to Hades’ kidnap of Persephone. The part about the snake recalls a lot of stories told by primitive peoples where animals are major players–as in one of Dan Barker’s favorite examples, a story from the Delaware tribe in which ducks played a major role in the creation of the world.

We get more of this in later stories: In one, God wipes out almost everything living on the Earth with a great flood, and then makes rainbows as a way of promising he’ll never do it again. In another, God is upset about humans trying to make a tall tower, so he creates a multitude of different languages to prevent people from working together to build it. Again, it’s easy to wonder if anyone originally believed those things really happened. Continuing with the analogy to the Greeks, though, the historical record shows that many Greek philosophers saw themselves as, and were generally viewed as, combating superstitious explanations of the world that took the gods very literally. That means that other people, the common folk who we don’t hear so much about in histories of philosophy, probably did take them literally, and I doubt the ancient Israelite commoners were much different than their Greek counterparts.

So it looks an awful lot like Genesis is not a revelation of how the world came to be, or even some divinely-inspired allegory revealing some important truth or other. It looks a lot like a collection of some of the many, many stories humans have told each other over the years about how the world came to be, stories which have always just been made up. In other words, it looks man-made, not god-made.

And this is just one way this is true of Genesis. The mythological-explanation side to the book is fairly well known, but there are other sides to the book, and I think one of those sides in particular bears out my point even better. But that’s a subject for another post.