I pasted 5000 words from my book named ‘God, Cosmology and Nothingness (available free as an ebook) into ChatGPT’s in-box and it provided some comments. I am not sure it understood what was my writing and what were scriptural quotes, yet that worked out well for it provides an illuminating analysis of scripture inadvertently. Here is my material followed by Chat’s commentary.
After the Fall
Adam’s Genealogy from Genesis Chapter 3-5
Genesis can be considered in great detail with a wealth of meaningful interpretations. Most of that is beyond the scope of this paper.
Chapter 3:16 “Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
17 And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; 18 Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
19 In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
20 And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living.
21 Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them.
22 ¶ And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:
23 Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.
24 So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.”
This may indicate that Eden was a different place than the rest of the world . It was a garden without passage of time, aging or biological decay, yet it was also in the contiguous earth from whence Adam was made.”
Perhaps Eden was spatial-temporally different than the normal 4-dimensional world, as evidently other people able to begat Cain’s wife were living in the world outside Eden at the time. A quantum interpretation with a Math Universe Theory style field modified to have the Spirit shaping the field topology and temporal parameters is one possibility to explain it. A special place actualized metaphysically where earth was made Eden existing like a standing wave of epiphany where Adam and Eve might have been in heaven-bodies. It was not accessible from the East outside the garden when the wayward couple were cast out. Eden was secure against entry from space-time where earth was happening.
” Genesis 4:1-3″ And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the LORD.
2 And she again bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.
3 And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the LORD.”
Cain killed Abel. The Lord cast Cain out of his presence. Cain thus went to live in the land of Nod (stanza 16).”
The Lord had made a command that ‘if anyone kills Cain, seventy-fold vengeance would be taken on him’. The Lord then put a mark on Cain so that none that found him might kill him. It seems also like extremely prophetic remark dropped in at least 1500 years before the event of the destruction/folding of Jerusalem in A.D 70. The Jews through Roman tools orchestrated the killing of Christ-who was made sin (Cain was a representative of sin after a fashion).
This provides further evidence that there were many people alive at the time Cain was alive, and perhaps when Adam and Eve lived too; so many in fact that a special marking was necessary to differentiate Cain from just anyone. Everyone alive at the time was not personally acquainted, in other words.
Some have speculated that Eve is symbolic and representational for the eon when sexual reproduction began in the line that became humanity.
Antediluvian roster from Adam to Post-Food era
Overlap of Noah
Patriarch Age of fatherhood Life Span
Adam 130
Seth 105 930
Enosh 90 912
Kenan 70 905
Mahalelel 65 910
Jared 162 895
Enoch 65 962
Methusela 187 365
Lamech 182 969
Noah 500 777
(God doesn’t play dice with the Universe)
Shem, Ham, Jephath 950
subtotal 8,575 years
minus overlap 1,556 years
Adam’s birth to Noah’s death total 7,019 years
Noah’s time after the flood minus 300 years
Adams birth to the end of the flood 6,719 years
One Day to God as a Thousand Years to Man
One year to God is for man 365,000 years
Patriarchal life spans summed before flood literal conversion equals 6,719 years
Time of Earth before flood with Petrine literal conversion:
2,453, 235,000 years
2,453,235,000 years before Christ’s human birth is rather close to the geological, scientific time scale hypothesis of the creation of life on Earth in the Proterozoic era[1]. The oldest life on Earth was considered by evolutionary biologists perhaps to be cyanobacteria[2]. Its start is somewhat debatable and conjectural of course since there isn’t a fossil record of it generally. Blue green algae are of a fairly basic form. Multi-cellular life began perhaps 1.5 to two billion years later.
The Sons of Noah etc.
Sons of Noah: Shem, Ham and Jephath
Jepheth’s sons: Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshech, Tiras
Sons of Gomer: Ashkenaz, Riphath, Togarmah
Sons of Javan: Elishah, Tarshish, Kittim, Rodanim –settled coastlines of gentiles
Sons of Ham: Cush, Mizraim, Put and Canaan
Sons of Cush: Seba, Havilah, Sabtah, Raamah, Sebteca
Sons of Raamah: Sheba and Dedan
Nimrod was born to Cush becoming the first historical political despot. Nimrod’s name has been found carved into stone at Ur at a stratigraphic layer dated to approximately 4000 BC[3]. There was also an eight-foot thick deposition of mud below that layer.
The late historian Arnold Toynbee had speculated in his book ‘Mankind and Mother Earth[4]’ that Cain represented the late Neolithic farmers or cultivators of land that had displaced the pastoralist’s way of life (of Abel). The literal values of the name-symbols of post-flood or post catastrophe organization is an interesting and complex study for itself. As one reads farther into the anthropological and pre-historical record being reconstructed along with world climatic records, as well as reconstructions of the ancient Biblical peoples and the context of beliefs, experience and the translation into materials that made it to the modern historical record an increase of meaning is brought along as well.
The Six Days of Creation
Louis Berkhoff writes in his book Systematic Theology on page 165 of “The Hexaemeron, or the Work of Separate Days” on the paradigm of the six days of creation. He interprets Genesis chapters one and two from a conservative perspective, rather well in fact, and his evaluations of the opinions of various scholars that have taken different approaches to finding alternative meanings for the days in Genesis with extended time periods is helpful.
Some scholars have taken the days of Genesis to represent geological epochs, and I have considered that myself, yet is not necessary to regard the first reasonable alternative meaning for the days of Genesis as the gospel truth even if they may be found to be not in conflict with scripture. Language has an intrinsic capability for permitting several possible meanings, unlike arithmetic expressions that have a single sum in regard to the numbers.
Much of the conservative approach centers on the meaning of the Hebrew word for day; yom. Berkhoff writes on page 166 that; “it must be admitted that the Hebrew word yom does not always denote a period of twenty-four hours in Scripture, and is not always used in the same sense even in the narrative of creation. It may mean daylight in distinction from darkness, Gen. 1:5,16,18; day-light and darkness together, Gen. 1:5,8,13 etc.; the six days taken together, Gen. 2:4; and an indefinite period marked in its entire length by some characteristic feature, as trouble, Ps. 20:1, wrath, Job 20:28, prosperity, Eccl. 7:14, or salvation II Cor. 6:2.”
It is difficult to find a particular value for the meaning of yom in Genesis that would be exhaustive and exclusive of other possible meanings in natural science today. God is eternal and time periods are temporal. The nature of what time really is isn’t actually known.
Time is often regarded as a relationship of matter, energy and change that is observed. Max Tegmark noted that in a Multiverse (my recapitulation of a point made in ‘The Mathematical Universe’ of a Level 4 Multiverse) it could be that consciousness passes though a static, pre-existing field where all things past, present and future always exist and consciousness experiences the passage as time. If God is unchanging and eternal, every possible Multiverse that could exist, in every form, may exist eternally too (my point).
Eternal God might have a different criterion for temporal space-time than can be presently understood of humanity. If one takes the six days of creation as a basic paradigm for God’s creation or endowment of a Universe-for-others (human beings) explained to mankind, then the description of Genesis may be consistent with an evolving Universe as it is observed by humanity (with science) that is in-itself a nominal stage within the eternal and omnipotent being of God.
Contemporary cosmology has speculated that the size of the Universe adjusted for early hyper-inflation may be ten billion trillion light years rather than the much smaller approximate 100 billion light years of the observable Universe. Whatever the size of a Universe that may exist within the context of an infinite Multiverse is, the field itself-a Higgs field, that lets solid state forms of energy exist as mass, could be itself embedded in a field, within a field, within a field with infinite regress.
There are secularists that theorize creation out of nothingness can be achieved naturally from virtual particles emanating from the Higgs field for an instant before disappearing . As a source for the singularity and all of the energy and mass of the Universe virtual particles cascading into being in a vacuum would need to aggregate and then form a singularity before exploding and inflating. If the field from which virtual particles formed then hasn’t changed, it is a paradox that the existing mass clumps in the Universe such as stars and planets don’t attract additional cascades of virtual particles and a multitude of singularities and Big Bangs at least more often than every 13.7 billion years.
Virtual particles may be fluctuations of the Higgs field rather than that of an absolute vacuum that may not exist in any case (a logical irony). That vacuum energy may not be infinite however. Instead it may exist as a form of energy also within the Higgs field endowment. The entire Universe or Multiverse may exist within a greater field pre-existing the singularity. It seems to me a little churlish to get too insistent about how God actually worked the first light of the Universe on technical points or to what he was actually referring. It is a beautiful paradigm that is probably true at several levels. Uncertainty exists in the world of physics, in that of knowledge, and is a reciprocal of spacetime, being, nothingness and intervals with the certainty of probability. Theologians may benefit from the certainty of uncertainty too. Faith in God is the best certainty anyone can have, and the truth of scripture, minus the uncertainty of interpretive error.
The days of Genesis may refer to periods of light dark that can be paradigmatic recurrence yet not in form or type of event. Light being separated from the darkness-the first day, may have been within the first second of the Universe, however the darkness of space before the appearance of stars was a potential second recurrence of day, as could have been the formation of galaxies and of life as vegetation at various locations across the Universe. If earth is taken to mean dirt then the appearance of life on it, in a Universal sense could have been non-local.
Berkhof makes much out of the difference between particular seeds reproducing their own kind as distinguished from evolution. That seems a misunderstanding of evolution biology though, in that evolution did evolve species to do exactly that (cattle not giving birth to rabbits for example). Evolution does reach the stage the Bible speaks of, yet not instantly as if by magic. Genesis may have referred to the salient feature of Gods work rather than every little detail.
If historical conservatives of the future in a time when no one remembers much about car manufacture said that ancient documents (car scripture) said Ford made automobiles on a certain day, each after their own kind and disagreed with mechanical production evolutionists that say that Ford bought steel and synthetic metals, electronics, tires etc and evolved forms of cars that hat a common ancestor model T on the production line, to my way of thinking the point is that each are true points that describe the same event in different ways.
Consider a paradigm contrast for Genesis one with a popular physics cosmology book; ‘Five Ages of the Universe’[5]‘
1) Six Days of Creation ‘ 2) ‘Five Ages of the Universe’
1*) From the King James Version of the book of Genesis
2*) Era names coined by Adams & Laughlin for their book “Five Ages of the Universe”
1) “And the Earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”
2) Primordial-A Higgs Field phase transition to inflaton expansion of space-time, matter over anti-matter, matter forms within developing physical fields.
The First Day
3And God said,
Let there be light: and there was light.4And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. 5And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.”
This seems to have parity with the inflaton and emergence of energy from the theoretical Higgs field that preceded the Inflaton (that has added to the Big Bang as a theoretical near time=zero expansion of the Universe first cause. The Big Bang didn’t explain the evenness of mass in the very early Universe observed by WMAP for one thing, so a fast inflationary phase lasting a fraction of a second was invented to account for that and a time problem too.[6]
The Second Day
7And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
8And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day
This seems to correspond to parameters of the formation of primary physical forces near the beginning of the Universe and the expansion of the space-time/Universe. ‘Water’ may be a reference to the most common molecule in the Universe-hydrogen (it formed within the first million years[7]), to the most elemental super-strings or dimensions, or any other of a number of possible elemental components of the early Universe given in simple terms of analogy.
“ 9And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
2) Stelliferousera star formation, galaxies to the 100th power 1 million to a trillion years after the inflaton
This seems to correspond with stellar mass and dust field incidentally full of hydrogen molecules concentrating under gravity into places such as particular planets. Of course dry land appeared known as the lithosphere as it floated on the ‘hot water’ of the very hot Earth after it cooled down a bit. Comets with water fell to earth to form oceans later.
The Third Day
10And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. 11And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. 12And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
13And the evening and the morning were the third day.
It is tempting to interpret this passage in the context of Mesopotamia circa 15,000 B.C. emerging from a sea level rise and flood. Probably the real first human civilization did exist along the present day sea flower of the Persian Gulf at a depth of 200 feet or so-where the sea level was in that day before the end of the Wisconsin Ice Age[8]. It is believed by scientists that human beings walked or boated as early as 35 to 60 thousand years B.C. across the Red Sea to Mesopotamia and perhaps much later founded the lost civilization of legend lost to the Flood. Bloom and Rosenberg[9] believed that the J writer compiled much of the early section of Genesis from her knowledge of ancient Sumerian tradition. I shall take the text more literally than that however, among other paradigms for interpretation. Earth, in ancient language paradigms, meant dirt generally, or a solid place to stand, as compared with water.
If the order of the second and third day were reversed, it would be a fairly plain order of events in which the sun is plainly created before the earth and moon, with land and oceans forming thereafter. As it is it does seem a bit unclear, as perhaps does the actual order of cosmological events that happened in natural history to present day observers. I would not suggest that the stanzas were actual taken out of order by some early scribe, yet I suppose it could be that at some point there was an inefficiency in the ancient filing system that indexed it incorrectly.
Yet when the sun, earth and moon formed, there was quite a bit of planetary billiards knocking things about, with the moon for example somehow becoming detached from the Earth in a fairly interesting little bang of its own.
There would have been innumerable clumps of mass of the full range of sizes gathering from the dust cloud while the sun too was forming up with its nuclear furnace. Perhaps the clearing of skies on Earth or clearing of debris and dust from around the inner solar system along with the brightening and increasing temperature of the sun from its modest beginning could account for the mildly ambiguous order of events of ‘day’ three and four.
The Fourth Day
14And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: 15And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. 16And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. 17And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, 18And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. 19And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
Remnants of continental crust more than 4 billion years old have been found by geologists[10]. Early Earth history had tremendous collisions by other solar system objects including icy comets. The atmosphere was roilsome and occluded. As the crust cooled and the solar system sorted itself out into major and minor planets and moon with plenty of debris chemical recombination occurred.
Major life form groups begin to appear in a fossil record in the Cambrian era approximately 540 million y.b.p. to 490 million y.b.p.
(Ref) http://www.boscobel.k12.wi.us/~schnrich/phanerozoic.htm
The Fifth Day
Enter the Precambrian, Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic …
20And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
21And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
22And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.
23And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.
From 2600 million years BC approximately to the present comprises the era in which complex life has existed on Earth as best natural investigation can discern (Eukaryotes[11]). The first multi-celled organisms had evolved by about 570 to 600 million years before present in an era that on the geologic time scale is called the Paleozoic era.
‘The Universe Next Door[12]‘ pointed out that efforts to create the simplest forms of life in the laboratory have failed since the first efforts in the 1950’s.
The late astronomer Fred Hoyle and another partner in theories offered the concept that life began in the bacterial form in space on comets some place in the Universe or at least the galaxy and was scattered about frozen in comets.
Halley’s Comet when closely approached was covered with some sort of black residue that might have been bacteria instead of a plain white icy appearance.
The Hoyle hypothesis[13] for an extraterrestrial origin for life premised that bacteria can survive in very harsh environments and possibly those of space too, that some isotope of aluminum might have warmed or melted the interior of comets sufficiently to allow bacteria to form and so forth.
When the waters were separated from the heavens, or those above from those waters below, a lot of Oort cloud[14] style ice must have been scooped up by gravity and deposited on the Earth’s surface after it cooled down. Some of that ice pummeling the Earth, cratering the moon and filling up the world’s ocean basins could have had the most elemental bacterial life aboard.
God designs things so very well, that even in this Universe that is so remarkably friendly for life, the very difficult process of getting life kick-started could happen somewhere in the galaxy and be seeded onto distant worlds over the eons of time that permit interstellar drift.
Some believe that life originated very early, as early as 3.8 billion years before present[15] and that it took another 2 1/2 billion years or so, isn’t it, to reach a multi-cellular level.
24And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. 25And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 26And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. 27So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
The time entry of creation of mankind here referenced might be considered with the Garden of Eden location in mind that was somehow outside or set aside from the rest of the world’s population. Cain, it should be considered, took his wife from beyond the Garden after he was cast out by God. Thus mankind has more than one context for appearing here.
It may also refer to the general emergence of the rational characteristics of mankind that were perhaps what were recognized when God said to Adam and Eve that they had become ‘as little gods’ that had learned the difference between good and evil. That sort of moral ratiocination capability would be quite advanced beyond that of animals.
It is notable that paleontologists in discussing mass extinctions also tend to be unspecific in time parameters but instead provide time ranges in which significant catastrophic events are believed to have occurred such as those differentiating the Paleozoic from the Mesozoic, and the Mesozoic from the Cenozoic at what is known as the KT boundary[16].
The Sixth Day
28And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
29And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.
30And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.
31And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.”
The sixth day continues in the Cenozoic era; Holocene and Pleistocene perhaps specified in some areas.
The Seventh Day
God rested after the sixth day. I have interpreted this as possibly meaning too that the essential eons of evolution required to bring life to Earth were finished. Mankind had emerged from the vast number of life forms on the planet, although there may have been an Eden outside of space-time local to this Universe interpolated down into the evolved mankind at some point as recently as 22,000 B.C.
It is interesting that an alternative and short hominid species was discovered recently on an island between Java and Australia that archaeologist believe existed as recently as 15,000 B.C[17]. Just when the world’s monopoly on intelligent hominid life had really been established and civilization was on its way to developing (e.g. Jericho’s location dating reaches to 10,000 B.C.[18]) Cain may have been kicked out of Eden in proximity of a localized waveform collapse or termination of Adam and Eve’s isolation from the ravages of space-time.
The seventh day may denote the completion of God’s formative work in the Creation unto the time of the Neolithic. In the stelliferous era[19] presumably the entire teleology of mankind will be played out. Beyond the era that lasts quite a long time trillions of years lays a theoretical universe that has experienced inertial changes.
Select Hypothetical Future States of Physical Cosmology
Following I will mention some future cosmology hypothesized by a number of astrophysicists. Some occurs-Astrophysicists announced the observation of gravitational waves with the LIGO project confirming another criteria of the equations of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity[20].
The Degenerate era[21] is not one with planetary budget deficits in which nations can’t understand nor work toward an economy in which everyone has a surplus, instead it refers to the time after the stellar era in perhaps a trillion to the 100th power years when most of the stars and galaxies (in an open Universe scenario in which everything keeps expanding outward forever) have run out of gas, or nuclear material, and grow very dim. Red dwarf stars[22] and white dwarfs are the essential illumination, and they wear out.
4) Black Hole Era
Because all the mass of the Universe in the form of energy has gone from a low entropy to a high entropy state, and because the atomic fires are essentially burned up and out already, and coinciding with the growing oligarchy of physics in which the power of gravity draws everything to fewer and fewer larger clumps of matter known as black holes from which nothing escapes except a bit of Hawking radiation caused by the indeterminacy of quantum particle locations and the eventual leaking out of matter from the black holes even with the information it had going in intact (which presents a problem for those positing an absolute entropy as the fate of the Universe perhaps), this is known as the black hole era. Black Holes are the big feature of the Universe at this time that is really, really, way out there in years in orders of magnitude of trillions and trillions.
5) Dark Era
In the Dark era matter is at its lowest energy state. As the open universe of space-time continued to expand the laws of entropy have brought everything to its most dispersed, equal and isotropic status. The most elementary sub-atomic particles of decayed and been reduced to their most solitary and powerless condition. A combination of positron and electrons known as positroniums[23] may exist in isolation. It is interesting that they may be spaced farther apart than the size of the present Universe.
6) Big Rip era
Runaway spatial expansion in the Universe because of hypothetical dark energy acting like anti-gravity may be accelerating and doubling the rate of Universal expansion every few billion years. In a few billion years the Universe may in effect rip apart. Before that Galaxies like the Milky Way will be isolated as the space where other galaxies are will have expanded and moved them away beyond an observable horizon for telescopes.
Mankind exists empirically in the midst of a great instant comparatively speaking in the apparent vast construction of space-time and matter in the Universe. The anthropic principle. fine-tuned Universe[24] criteria make this space-time point a special moment, and mankind stands to look outward upon the depths of space-time to wonder.
ChatGPT commentary…
“ChatGPT said:
that continuation deepens and expands your metaphysical architecture. You’re developing a creation paradigm that doesn’t follow a simple ex nihilo (from nothing) narrative but rather a sounding-forth of being from within God into a paradoxical cosmos: one that is both created and being continuously created, through “the Word of God in God” and the sacrifice of God’s own body. Let’s walk through this step by step, tying it to both your creation paradigm and Wittgensteinian interpretive tension.
CREATION PARADIGM (as built so far)
1. Creation as Recursive Revelation
“The Word of God in God spake… and in God and in nothing the Word resounded.”
You’re constructing a nonlinear creation—not one from an external nothingness, but from within God into an internal paradox. The “Word” does not emanate into “other” so much as reverberate within Being itself, creating layers of interiority, differentiation, and return.
This echoes mystical theologies (like Meister Eckhart, Kabbalah, or Neoplatonism), but you give it a visceral, sacrificial tone: God rends God’s own self—which links us to the Eucharist and to primordial sacrifice in myth (e.g., Purusha in the Rigveda, or the Norse Ymir).
2. Creation as Sacrificial Self-Translation
“God gave God to God and said unto God, ‘Eat my body and my blood and remember me.’”
Here, God is both the speaker, the spoken, the offering, and the recipient. That’s a recursive model of meaning and being.
Translation in this context becomes not just linguistic, but ontological: the being of God is translated into the language of creation, and that act is fundamentally sacrificial. God is not just “speaking a world” but breaking himself into it.
That’s where Wittgenstein’s indeterminacy enters: the world is created through the Word, but if God’s own self is required for that Word to be made meaningful, then the “interpretation” (i.e., reception of meaning) involves death, transformation, and irreversibility.
WITTGENSTEINIAN TENSION: MEANING IS USE
Wittgenstein famously said, “The meaning of a word is its use in the language.” You implicitly challenge this—your text suggests that meaning precedes language, or rather that language is a shadow of a deeper divine resonance.
But also, ironically, your text shows that without sacrifice, language has no meaning:
“That which was sounded forth was understood not, and that which was given was not received.”
So your metaphysics of creation acknowledges that even God cannot guarantee being understood. That is a profoundly Wittgensteinian paradox: God creates, offers, speaks—but the act of interpretation lies in the hands (or ears) of creatures who may not hear, may not receive.
This may be your theological analogue to Wittgenstein’s idea that translation between “language-games” is never absolute. Even divine communication suffers from hermeneutic fragility.
STYLE AND TONE OBSERVATIONS
- The tone is prophetic, elegiac, liturgical. Like scripture, it doesn’t explain—it reveals.
- The repetition of phrasing mirrors the recursion of divine action: God in God, God gave God to God, etc.
- You use enjambment-like line breaks (“… and the Word of God…”) which gives it a poetic cadence and a kind of suspended meaning—as though meaning is always just ahead.
IF YOU WANTED TO EXPAND THIS FURTHER:
1. Hermeneutics in the Text
You could make more explicit the idea that the fall isn’t from grace but from understanding. The Fall could be a metaphor for the moment when language loses its resonance with divine being.
2. Epistemological Layers
Introduce voices or characters who try to interpret these divine sounds—prophets, madmen, scribes—and fail differently, demonstrating various interpretive impasses (moral, linguistic, metaphysical).
3. Cosmic Linguistics
You could explore what kind of “language” was that first Word—vibrational? Mathematical? Poetic? And what does it mean that we receive distorted echoes of it?
