Final Fridays by John Barth Read Free Book Online Page B

in 1:1, we have evolved by 2:23 a cosmos replete with heavenly bodies in motion, speciated life on Earth, and sexually differentiated human beings endowed with language and intelligence, though not yet with upper-case Knowledge and its attendant hazards.
    The rest, as they say, is history: 7 the rest of Genesis (creation + fall, flood, and bondage); the rest of the Pentateuch (Genesis + Exodus through Deuteronomy); the rest of the Hebrew bible (Pentateuch + prophets and “writings”); the rest of the canonical Christian Bible (Hebrew Bible + New Testament)—all implicit in the beginning, bereshith . Indeed, one might call the opening verse of Genesis the macrobang from which evolve not only the Jewish and Christian sacred texts but the centuries of commentary thereupon: an evolution no more “finished” than that of the physical universe, as biblical scholarship and archaeology expand our knowledge and understanding of the texts. Witness, for example, the recent scholarly catfights over publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the expectable deluge of associated books and papers now that the text is readily available.
    As a creator myself, of word-worlds, I’m admiringly envious—not so much of the universe’s genesis, which is beyond my agnostic ken, as of Genesis’s genesis; less of divine Creation than of this artfully created creation-story.
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    DID I EVER actually believe any of it? The six-day cosmogony, Adam and Eve and the serpent, and for that matter the text as God’s
word and the a priori existence of its divine author? In the sluggishly Christian but essentially secular household of my small-town boyhood, one dutifully attended the neighborhood Methodist Sunday school as a child and then, as an adolescent, the Friday-evening Junior Christian Endeavor, as well as “joining church” round about puberty-time. I did all that in the same mainly unprotesting spirit in which I attended Cambridge (Maryland) public schools: It was what one did. But the air of our house, while not openly skeptical, was in no way suffused with religious belief: God, the afterlife, the authority of biblical texts—such matters never entered our table talk. The first time I heard the Genesis story questioned on scientific grounds (God knows where, in that venue), whatever notional assent I’d given it as a literal account slipped lightly away forever, as did by high-school days any notion of its divine authorship. Later, in university years and the beginnings of my own authorhood, I would come to appreciate metaphor and to respect the power and profundity of great myths, the biblical creation-myth included—but that’s another story.
    As for the one told in the book of Genesis: Bravo! What a splendid beginning!

2.
    For believing Christians, Act Two of the creation-drama is mankind’s vicarious redemption by the Messiah from man’s original sin and fall from grace in Act One. 8 I shall now audaciously rush in where no angel would presume to tread and draw another analogy with contemporary theoretical physics, as I understand that vertiginous discipline.
    Werner Heisenberg’s celebrated Uncertainty Principle and Erwin Schrödinger’s quantum-mechanical wave-function equations, taken together, declare in effect that the position of an electron, say, is
“merely” a field of probabilities until we observe it, whereupon its “wave function collapses” and it may be said to have a position. Extrapolating from these axioms of quantum physics, some later theoreticians have maintained that in a sense, at least, such observation may be said to be not only uninnocent (i.e., not non-disturbing) but downright causative: We didn’t observe Electron X to be at Point A because that happens to be where it was; that’s where it was because we made the observation , prior to which its position was no one particular point but a probability-field. On the