by Greg Mayer
A commenter on my post about the four-legged snake, Tetrapodophis, quoted a line from Genesis about the snake in the Garden of Eden going on its belly in retribution for bamboozling Eve; I thought (and still think) it was a poe. But apparently there are real people who think this fossil demonstrates the truth of the Adam and Eve story. An alert reader sends a link to “New Fossil Discovery Provides Massive PROOF of Bible’s Story of Adam and Eve” in the “Conservative Tribune: In Defense of Western Civilization”, and there’s a link in that piece to a more extensive story at a site called “shoebat.com“. (The latter reminded me of a similar word, except the syllables are reversed, and the two letters “oe” need to be replaced; adding the word “crazy” is also clarifying.) I didn’t want to soil my cursor by clicking around at these sites, but some of the most horrifying sponsored content and ads I think I’ve ever seen (hint to Nissan: if you want to maintain your corporate image, you may want to exercise a bit more discretion about the company your ads are keeping), ALL CAPS FOR IMPORTANT WORDS, and clauses lacking needed parts of speech, all point to the sort of earnest incompetence that marks sincerity, so I don’t think they are poes.
It’s really amazing– how you get from a four-legged snake (that went on its belly!) to confirming the existence of Adam and Eve is incomprehensible. The one site even says this proves that Moses and Joshua knew snakes once had legs! (It reminds me a bit of claims that the Koran contains all or much of modern science, just expressed cryptically– see FvF, p. 105.) The Tribune gets a little modest at the end, admitting “This discovery may not prove the entire biblical account of Adam and Eve outright”. You can say that again.
h/t Steve Plegge
The creationists are searching for straws to hold onto.
And now I need to reboot my brain, I have a stupidity overflow error!
I thought that creature was a salamander as some have said. Depends on who is translating of course.
Grasping at straws is the optimum way to describe it. So I guess fossils aren’t just a means of fooling humans by either JHVH or Samael’s doing.
I actually thought about this when I read the post. Of course, though, the fact that the Bible does contain actual facts (there is a city called Jerusalem, there was a Roman Empire), those do no more to validate the other claims of the Bible than the fact that there is a country called England or a King’s Cross Station means that Harry Potter is real.
Good comparison, seeing how Harry Potter is a modern take on the Moses legend. And the “Exodus” myth has left as much real life remains as the usual Hollywood movie. (I.e. none.)
That would make Joshua Ronald Weasley, I guess.
Harry Potter is not real!?!?! Well, at least we can be sure that Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn were real people!
Historical fiction is just loaded with facts and realities doesn’t it? Better to sell the fiction.
Well now, if the fossil snake had some vocal cords, so that he could be talking the girls out of their fig leaves while he was strolling around Eden, then….
Technically only after they aite of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good an Evil were they cast out and made known of their nakedness. Being naked is fine with me. Must be a throw back.
In 1980, I visited a small, roadside zoo in Virginia. The zoo keeper showed off various animals, including a snake with vestigial legs, and yes, said that this supported the idea that snakes used to have legs and lost them, just like the Book of Genesis says.
Isn’t it odd that in Genesis 3:14-15 God only dresses down the snake for its treachery and commands it to slither? He doesn’t rip its limbs off. NO limbs are ever mentioned. How does the zookeeper know that primitive snakes didn’t just pogo around on their tails?
He also says that snakes will always eat dirt. Have snakes ever eaten dirt?
Humans have big brains and they use them. He like others like to fill in the blanks, which is done all of the time. So much they forget it was they or others who created it, not the Bible’s language.
It is this simple ..our ancestors dosvovered four legged snake fossils and told stories about dragons and stories about how snakes lost their legs …Or they might have figured it out by killing and eating them ..so they paass down the story on how snakes lost their leg ..That is how the story might have made it to the bible ..
I think ancient peoples were perfectly capable of imagining some talking legged snakes from scratch, without the help of fossils. In any case, we have no evidence they ever stumbled upon such fossils. Besides, how could a Brazilian snake fossil inspire a myth in the Middle East?
I think the Babblical serpent is just an “infolding” of a far older story that was just an attempt to “explain” the presence of a creature so incongruous amongst all the other common, “legged” creatures that they were used to encountering; kind of a minor version of, “Where did the stars come from?” or, “How did the leopard get his spots?”
You will fined that all over the world there are many similarities in their myths. From giant snakes to little people to half-snake half-humans created the first civilizations in Rome and China. Even to global flood myths. Comparative religion and mythology can lead down some interesting avenues of thought.
“How could a Brazilian snake fossil inspire a myth in the Middle East?”
It didn’t always live in Brazil. It only went there after it got off Noah’s Ark.
Wait… are you saying Satan is a time-traveller?
It’s really weird that creationists aren’t able to see how silly a collection of just-so stories their literal Genesis is. Usually, they interpret the snake as Satan in disguise. So does god’s curse mean that all the innocent snakes were penalized because the devil decided to go with that disguise rather than a dragonfly or kangaroo? They tend not to think about that.
Leave aside what I consider the silliest part of the story: god stumped in finding a helpmeet for Adam until, after trying everything else, he hits upon a female human.
We are told that JHVH is a “jealous god” and venal too.
Oh, so many kinds of stupid to mock, and so little space… OK, I’ll limit myself to one point, but only because I don’t want to hog all the fun for the other users:
They do know this fossil dates from the Early Cretaceous, right? Even the latest part of that epoch is more than 100 million years too early to even qualify for the biblical narrative. Not to mention even accepting the fossil evidence requires accepting branches of science that completely upend their biblical tales (assuming common sense doesn’t do that anyway).
I sincerely hope this is a poe, because its so selective with its “scientific” evidence for biblical plausibility that it makes the “Birds Are Not Dinosaurs” crowd look like competent amateurs.
The thing that always bugged me about the talking snake story:
Genesis reads like a collection of just-so stories. Why do we have to die? Why don’t snakes have legs?
But if the serpent really was Satan in disguise (and Christians are positive it was, even though it’s an obvious later retcon) then why curse the completely blameless snakes?
Pfft, that’s easy. Satan, being a fallen angel with dark powers, is both the ultimate evil being that is the Lord of Hell, and manifests himself in all the limbless serpents you see around you. Don’t you have any theological insight?
Milton, Paradise Lost, Book X, lines 159-181, gives the theology (though Milton tries to be rather kinder to the poor serpent – I love snakes because they move so beautifully! – than Mercerus, Calvin & others):
To whom (GOD) sad Eve with shame nigh overwhelm’d,
Confessing soon, yet not before her Judge
Bold or loquacious, thus abasht repli’d.
The Serpent me beguil’d and I did eate.
Which when the Lord God heard, without delay
To Judgement he proceeded on th’ accus’d
Serpent though brute, unable to transferre
The Guilt on him who made him instrument
Of mischief, and polluted from the end
Of his Creation; justly then accurst,
As vitiated in Nature: more to know
Concern’d not Man (since he no further knew)
Nor alter’d his offence; yet God at last
To Satan first in sin his doom apply’d
Though in mysterious terms, judg’d as then best:
And on the Serpent thus his curse let fall.
Because thou hast done this, thou art accurst
Above all Cattle, each Beast of the Field;
Upon thy Belly groveling thou shalt goe,
And dust shalt eat all the dayes of thy Life.
Between Thee and the Woman I will put
Enmitie, and between thine and her Seed;
Her Seed shall bruise thy head, thou bruise his heel.
And just as I love snakes, I love the way Milton will snake a long and complex sentence through any number of iambic pentameters. With Edward Thomas, he is one of the greatest masters of enjambement in English poetry.
Perhaps I should add that Milton’s serpent does not have legs, but mesmerising coils, and it can somehow move upright, its coils in constant motion in the air; I do recall seeing, though, mediaeval paintings in which the serpent of Genesis has four legs. Within the last century, and perhaps even now in places, peasants in Lithuania, Poland and the Ukraine would, as Czeslaw Milosz tells us, put out milk for snakes, which were reputed to be repositories of strange wisdom and were held to be semi-sacred.
Tangential point: I despise Poes. I don’t mean people who take on a genuinely funny persona to skewer religious delusions. Edward Current is an example of good satire.
I mean people who act in a way indistinguishable from a shoebat fundie just to get a rise from the rest of us because we can’t tell that he’s insincere. It’s not a joke. It’s not funny. It’s, as Steve Albini once said, being an a**hole about being an a**hole.
sub
A while back I made a joke about how snakes used to gyro-corkscrew through the air prior to the Fall. They still could, if they wanted to, but the entire suborder Serpentes is still so ashamed that they all slither on their bellies. That’s why snakes don’t talk anymore.
Somebody asked if I was kidding.
Some snakes do cork screw through the air. Really.
I am interested in those fire breathing winged snakes mentioned. Let’s see some fossils on them.
How do they explain the 120 mya part?
Dating error : the true date is about October 28th, 4004 BC.
Reminds me of back when I used to be a believer. About 15 years ago, the pastor of the Missouri Synod Lutheran church I was in mentioned in a sermon that zoologists said snakes used to have legs, but now they don’t, supposedly because of the curse. Even then I thought this was a strange argument to make, because this was a staunchly creationist denomination and those same zoologists doubtless also denied the existence of Adam and Eve and a young earth. I would have called it “cherry picking” if I had known that term then.
My snake fossil refutes the existence of Adam and Eve.