Yahweh continues to be the primary god for North America, and recently I've learned a lot more about Him. He doesn't like gay people and He doesn't like women ending their pregnancies, even though it's an ancient practice. He doesn't like Harry Potter, Starbucks holiday cups, yoga, and some new TV show on Amazon Prime called Good Omens. When I was a teenager and attending a fundamentalist Baptist church, I also learned that Yahweh didn't like guys with long hair, rock music, and jeans.
One thing that I do know about Yahweh is that he's a locally grown god that was invented by men (sorry ladies) during the Bronze Age in the land of Canaan. He was the official god of the Kingdom of Israel and later the Kingdom of Judah. He was worshipped not only by the Israelites, but also by other people in the area, including the Edomites, Kenites, Moabites, and Midianites.
Some scholars believe Yahweh is a spinoff from Canaanite religion, which had El as their supreme god. At the time Yahweh was a sub god in charge of metallurgy. Following the Babylonian captivity era of the 6th century BCE, Yahweh was formalized and canonized into the Hebrew god we know today.
During the Second Temple Period (515 BCE - 70 CE) Yahweh decided to have a son, so he inseminated a young Jewish woman, which was likely quite a shock to her. She had a cute little baby boy named Jesus and thus began the Jewish splinter group called Christianity. Later, Yahweh became Allah and became the foundation of the Muslim faith.
In my last post I said that Yahweh was influenced by the Babylonians, who had their own top god named Marduk. In turn, the Babylonian religion was strongly influenced by the earlier Sumerians. Now, throw in a little influence from the Assyrians and Egyptians, and you have Jehovah, the one true, correct, real, proper God that American evangelicals worship today.
The Cosmic Egg
To summarize, the official, correct god Yahweh was not invented by goat herders in 3,500 BCE, as I said in earlier blog posts. More likely, he was made up by copper miners in the Timna Valley of southern Israel.
Now, if you want a more interesting story let me tell you about the Cosmic Egg, which for some unknown reason exploded 13.8 billion years ago and created the Universe. Yep, I'm talking about the Big Bang Theory.
The whole point of my blog post today is to tell you that the Universe has gone from a single electron hydrogen atom to the extremely complex living organism known as a human. So, if you are not really into the Hebrew copper miner god and are looking for something new to worship, it may as well be the hydrogen atom.
The real god is also gravity and heat, and the story of how supernova explosions and red giants turned hydrogen and helium into heavy metals. Our Earth is the product of dust from three previous stars and without iron and other heavy metals we wouldn't have a planet and we wouldn't have life.
Abiogenesis
The Solar System and planets are believed to have formed from a cloud of dust, with the Sun at the center. Not too long after the Earth was formed, life began to appear in very basic forms. Now, to clarify, the creation of life is called abiogenesis, and is not related to evolution. Secondly, I've heard creationists say that creating the first cell would be like dropping a bunch of parts from the air and have it all come together as a fully assembled B-747. This is nonsense because ancient cells were nothing like the sophisticated cells of today — they started out simple and then grew in complexity.
For life to form on Earth I believe we needed heat, provided by the sun and the cooling Earth core, and movement, provided by the gravitational pull of the moon. We also needed nucleobases and amino acids, which were provided in part by meteorites. How organic compounds ended up on meteorites freaks me out a little, but electrical discharges seem to have played a role.
As the Earth was peppered by organic compounds in meteorites it was only a matter of time before more life-like structures began to emerge. The first pre-life forms of gook had no complex protein machinery but rather simple fatty acids. Under a range of acidity (pH) they began to spontaneously form stable vesicles that were permeable to small organic molecules. Once the vesicles encountered the free fatty acids the life functions of eating and growth began. Slowly, a living cell began cranking up. Once a vesicle was broken off, likely by waves caused by the moon's gravitational pull, then you have a basic form of reproduction. Holy cow, the tough part was getting genetic code to emerge. But in the pre-life environment there were hundreds of types of different nucleotides, such as DNA and RNA, floating around. It may have been a trillion to one odds, but somehow, somewhere one drop of gook self polymerized, which paved the way for a modern cell. Recent experiments show that spontaneous polymerization is possible, such as in the creation of of Phosphoramidate DNA. Once polymerization occurs, it's possible to create new templates or extend existing templates. Now, we are just one tiny step away from life.
Having assembled all the things mentioned above, the goop floats in the ocean and perhaps gets caught in a hydrothermal vent, so now you have the movement of the current and heat. All these factors increases the sub-cell membrane's permeability to monomers. As the temperature cools, spontaneous polymerization can occur, and the cycle repeats. This starts an engine, using basic thermodynamics, where lipids are "stolen" from a vesicle with less polymer. This cycle begins evolution because the little bastards are eating one another and the vesicle that can replicate faster, and grow and divide faster, then dominates the population. Early genomes did, indeed, have a form of coding but it was completely random and thus provided no useful information. But evolution is all about mutation and natural selection and, eventually, increased information. Early mutations first changed the sequence to contain the most common nucleotides, and eventually the cycle stabilized. Next the secondary structures begin to form that begin enzymatic activity. Suddenly, a living, replicating cells emerges and life begins.
Evolution
Once that first living cell emerged the rest of creation was easy. Cells joined other cells to give them an advantage in getting food and self-defense. Over millions of years more complex life forms began to emerge.
Evolution can work both slowly (sexual selection, genetic drift) and through major mutations. Most of these genetic mutations end in disaster but occasionally one will give a creature a major advantage in survival. This creature then multiplies in greater numbers because it has a biological edge over competitors. Millions of years ago hominids left the forests and settled in the savannas of Africa. Continued evolution — both slow and fast — turned them into you and me.
Summary
The best way to understand ourselves, and appreciate our humanity in 2019, is to put our lives into perspective. We are simply part of a journey that started with hydrogen and eventually became humans, which, as far as we know, is the most complex structure in the Universe. There seems to be a natural law of ever-increasing complexity, and I have no idea where that will take us. Maybe we will just do a loop or maybe we will ditch our carbon-based bodies and become part of the fabric of the Universe.
As for the human-invented Yahweh, he showed up at a time when humans didn't have science and it apparently made us feel better to invent gods to explain the unknown. But a god who calls for the execution of gays and slaughters little Egyptian babies can't be all that great. If you want a real god, go to your grocery store and buy a balloon, since helium is the basis of everything and hydrogen balloons are a little too dangerous.
It's interesting that young earth creationists say that the Earth is 5,500 years old, since that is about the same time Yahweh was invented. Enough said.
Sources:
• The Terribly Tiny God of MAGA Christians by John Pavlovitz
• Yahweh by Joshua J. Mark
• How to Make an Element, NOVA, PBS
• Organic Material in Meteorites and the Link to the Origin of Life, EDP Sciences, 2014
• The Origin of Life - Abiogenesis, Dr. Jack Szostak, Harvard Medical School
• Origin of Organic Compounds on the Primitive Earth and in Meteorites, By SL Miller, HC Urey, and J Oro.
