SIR - Vernon Wynn’s thought-provoking article on science and religion reminded me of the account in Genesis of man being made in the image of God (SH 14/1).
Every civilisation seems to produce a priestly caste that claims that it knows beyond a perchance what God is like and how he has to be propitiated (through them, of course). I suspect that the author of Genesis was one such.
The creation story in Genesis is a muddle. Chapter One has man and woman made on day six. Chapter Two has Adam fashioned from dust all over again. Almost as an afterthought, Eve is then made from Adam’s ribs as he slept, to keep him company. She happened, though, to be not unimportant if the species was to survive. It’s a pity that, in his 10 commandments, Moses could not have squeezed one in to ban passing off figments of the imagination as fact, in short, lying.
No-one knows what the creative force was that lit Vernon’s pulsating universe. But I would bet my boots that in no way resembled the typical man on the Clapham Omnibus with his warts, bad breath and hair that needs cutting.
It is man’s little conceit that not only does he look like God, but that God shares his human emotions. So, God is, by turns, angry, pleased, sad and jealous and he wants to be thanked for the many plusses of this life without much being said of the minuses. One human emotion the deity seems to lack; does God laugh? Well, maybe he does when he observes our puny attempts to imagine what he is like!
Ken Bridgman
Martlets, Connaught Close, Sidmouth
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