CCC comments on Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale - Less Wrong

107 Post author: Yvain 13 March 2009 01:41AM

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Comment author: gjm 09 May 2016 12:05:44PM *  -1 points [-]

I think there are two separate questions here.

First: does saying "hahaha, these guys believe in talking snakes, how ridiculous" sound like it demonstrates a lack of understanding and engagement? I think the answer to that is clearly yes, at least if you say it to thoughtful people with some understanding of this stuff. (But maybe not if you say it to people who are already convinced or to people who haven't given serious thought to these questions at all; so maybe Maher was preaching to the choir[1] and/or trying to shock unthinking believers into questioning their beliefs for the first time.)

[1] A curious phrase, that. Some Christian churches -- I'm thinking e.g. of Anglican cathedrals and Oxbridge college chapels, where the music is a Big Deal -- have quite a lot of people in their choirs who are there only for the music and might be perfectly reasonable targets for preaching.

Second: does saying "hahaha, these guys believe in talking snakes, how ridiculous" actually demonstrate a lack of understanding and engagement? I think it clearly does in some cases (and suspect Bill Maher is one), but I think (1) there really is an argument against (some versions of) Christianity based on the silliness of believing in talking snakes, and (2) some (rude) people may choose to express it in simple in-yer-face terms even though they're capable of making a more sophisticated version that isn't so liable to look like lack of understanding and engagement.

The sophisticated version I have in mind, which I've sketched elsewhere in this thread, goes something like this.

  • The story in Genesis 3 doesn't in any way suggest that the talking snake is an incarnation or avatar of, or being remote-controlled by, or otherwise magically influenced by, any supernatural evil being. It's introduced by saying "Now the serpent was more subtle than any of the other animals God had made" or something of the kind; when God is pronouncing his sentences on the guilty parties, what he says to the snake is (1) clearly addressed to the snake and not to some other being that controlled it and (2) clearly addressed to it as a snake rather than as some kind of incarnation of a vastly powerful spiritual being.
    • I understand that -- especially within the theologically-conservative-Protestant tradition -- many Christians do take the snake in the story to be, or to be controlled by, the devil. But it seems to me very unlikely that it was originally intended this way, and as I say there's nothing in the story to suggest that understanding. I suggest that this interpretation of the story may in fact be largely motivated by a wish to make the story less silly :-).
  • So the people who created and spread this story, at least if they intended it to be understood as an account of something that actually happened, evidently didn't find anything unreasonable in the idea of a "natural" talking and thinking snake.
  • But that idea is "silly" in the following sense: given some things we now know with great confidence about how the natural world works, we can see that a talking, thinking snake is not the kind of thing that could actually happen. A snake just doesn't have space for enough brain to think and use language.
    • Of course if you fill the space not with ordinary biological brain-stuff but with some sort of nanotechnological AI hardware, it might be perfectly possible; or if there is magic and the snake talks and thinks by magic; or if there are gods and devils and one of them is animating it; etc. But, again, that isn't the story being told here.
  • Accordingly, the presence of the talking snake in the story really is an extra piece of evidence against the story, even given the other "magical" elements in the story -- not because talking snakes would require magic, but because the story shows every sign of being about a non-magical talking snake. (I am using "magic" and "magical" here in a broad sense, to include the exercise of divine or diabolical powers, even though believers in such powers will for good reason generally want to distinguish between those and "magic" as generally understood.)
  • And if some religious tradition embraces the story as historical fact, that really is an extra piece of evidence against that religious tradition; against its general reliability (because if the story is wrong then the tradition is unreliable) and against that of its present-day advocates (because they really ought to be able to see how implausible the story is).

I personally think that saying "hahaha, talking snake" is counterproductive as well as rude, and I agree with Yvain that if you find a lot of smart people apparently believing in talking snakes then you should very seriously consider the possibility that (1) they don't believe quite what you think they do and/or (2) their beliefs are more defensible than they sound. But I also think -- and my impression from the note at the end of the OP is that Yvain does too -- that someone saying "hahaha, talking snake" may actually have a pretty good understanding of the issues and be making (or at least gesturing towards) a reasonable argument.

[EDITED to acknowledge that the devil-snake interpretation is quite widely believed and comment on that, and to tweak some wording a bit elsewhere.]

Comment author: Alia1d 10 May 2016 05:38:00AM 1 point [-]

I would agree that there are some Christians whose belief set could be vulnerable on the point of talking snakes. I can think of several different arguments depending on what other ideas they were holding in conjunction with their interpretation of Genesis. Using a blanket dismissal would have the advantage that you wouldn’t have to figure out which one would work on your target. But I think we would both agree it could also potentially backfire.

Concerning the issue you presented, that ”natural” snakes just can’t work like that. I think you have considerably underplayed your hand. Consider Gen 1:29-30:

Then God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you; and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to every thing that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food”; and it was so.

That’s right, in the Garden of Eden every single animal was vegan. And ecosystems just don’t work like that. And I would go further and say that all these animals had the capacity at this time to live forever. Death didn’t enter the world till the fall. Rom. 5:12-14:

Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned— for until the Law sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over those who had not sinned in the likeness of the offense of Adam, who is a type of Him who was to come.

So we are dealing with quite a big discrepancy from known biology here, and that would be a problem if I were a (Uniformitarian.)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniformitarianism] But fundamentalists tend to be much less Uniformitarian than main stream society. So the idea that God had a different biological system set up initially, and He changed the rules as part of the curse, seems not only plausible, but a nature part of the story.

Also it sort of seems you might be unconsciously assuming the traditional pictorial representation of a small to medium snake wrapped around a tree branch. But the text doesn't say the serpent was in the tree or give any other reference to size. I tend to picture something more like a Chinese dragon standing on all fours, shoulder to shoulder with Eve. So I don’t get the “brain box obviously too small for speech” effect from my mental picture.

(Note on the preferences for Satan controlling the snake showing an awareness that the talking snake is silly, I think this is more about emphasizing Gen. 3:15 as a Christological prophesy and generally framing the whole story as part of a Christological arch where the first Adam brings san and death and the second Adam (Jesus) brings salvation and life. Having the Devil tempting Adam and Eve here makes a parallel with Christ’s temptation in the desert and with Judas Iscariot’s temptation to betray Jesus. Finding Christological interpretations is a big motivator of Christian Theology.)

Comment author: gjm 10 May 2016 12:25:38PM -2 points [-]

fundamentalists tend to be much less Uniformitarian

That's a fair point. But it seems to me that it amounts to saying that nothing in the stories in your scriptures could count as much evidence against their accuracy. (Suppose it said "And Adam, when he heard the sentence that the LORD God had passed upon him, knelt down upon the red grass and laughed for sorrow and shame" -- well, it's only uniformitarianism that entitles us to expect the grass to have been green or laughter to have been an unlikely response to sorrow and shame. Etc.)

In which case, you're also awfully limited in what conclusions you can draw from anything in those stories. "Genesis 3 indicates that God greatly values obedience to his commands." No, it indicates that he did; for all we know, he might want something very different from us now. "The story of the Great Flood indicates that God has authority over the weather on earth." No, it indicates that he did; for all we know, he might have somehow given up that authority since then. Do these stories actually have much value, if everything they describe might have changed utterly?

(You might say that God's character and values are known to be stable, unlike the laws of physics or anything in biology. But the sources that tell you that are 2000 years old! That's, like, 25% of the entire age of the universe! If God's character and values were changing on that sort of timescale, it's perfectly possible that these ancient texts might declare them to be stable even though they aren't.)

a small to medium snake wrapped around a tree branch

I don't think I was consciously or unconsciously assuming that. But I was assuming something that's recognizably the same sort of animal as today's snakes -- God says "upon your belly shall you go", etc., not "I shall replace you with something 1/4 the size which shall go upon its belly". I think I agree, though, that the Chinese-dragon interpretation is at least kinda tenable.

Christological interpretations

OK, that's a good point. (In terms of what it says about where Christian interpretations of Genesis 3 come from; I don't think the Christian tradition of finding prophecies and parallels everywhere in the OT is actually intellectually healthy, but it's certainly a real thing.)

But ... how good is that parallel, actually? I mean, Judas is not (so far as I can tell) in any way usefully parallel to either Adam or Eve, and the temptation of Jesus seems very different in kind from that of Eve, and most of the actual opposition Jesus is reported to have had comes from very human sources.

I think if you're looking for a parallel to the temptation-and-disobedience of Adam and Eve, through which sin and death enter the world, the place you need to look is for some temptation-and-obedience of Jesus through which sin and death are conquered. And there is indeed an obvious such thing, which takes place in the (aha!) garden of Gethsemane, where he is clearly at least considering the possibility of saying "no" to what he has to do but goes ahead with it ("not my will, but yours, be done"). But this temptation is, so far as the stories say, entirely endogenous; we're shown no tempter, whether human or animal or evil spirit. So I'm not really seeing how any parallel between the Adam&Eve story and the Jesus story is made closer by having the snake in Eden be possessed by, controlled by, or an incarnation of, the devil.

That doesn't mean that the tradition that says the snake "was" the devil doesn't arise from a desire to find such parallels, of course. But it doesn't seem to me so obviously well explained in those terms as to make me abandon my more cynical theory :-).

Comment author: CCC 13 May 2016 01:26:54PM 1 point [-]

we're shown no tempter, whether human or animal or evil spirit.

There's one in Matthew 4 verse 1 to 11, in which Jesus spends forty days in the desert, fasting, and then is visited (and tempted) by the Devil.

Comment author: gjm 13 May 2016 03:49:34PM -1 points [-]

True enough. I meant that there's no external tempter in the garden of Gethsemane. I'd already remarked that the temptation of Jesus (as found in Matthew 4) "seems very different in kind from that of Eve" and was proposing a better parallel.

Comment author: CCC 16 May 2016 09:26:47AM 0 points [-]

Fair enough. The way I see it, there are some themes that are paralleled in Gethsemene, and some themes that are paralleled in the forty days and nights in the desert. They're both parallels, but in different ways.

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