Was Moses a Ninny, a Yahoo, or both?

Isaac Asimov said:

How it Happened


My brother began to dictate in his best oratorical style, the one which has the tribes hanging on his words.

"In the beginning," he said, "exactly fifteen point two billion years ago, there was a big bang and the Universe--"

But I had stopped writing. "Fifteen billion years ago?" I said incredulously.

"Absolutely," he said. "I'm inspired."

"I don't question your inspiration," I said. (I had better not. He's three years younger than I am, but I don't try questioning his inspiration. Neither does anyone else or there's hell to pay.) "But are you going to tell the story of the Creation over a period of fifteen billion years?"

"I have to," said my brother. "That's how long it took. I have it all in here," he tapped his forehead, "and it's on the very highest authority."

By now I had put down my stylus. "Do you know the price of papyrus?" I said.

"What?" (He may be inspired but I frequently noticed that the inspiration didn't include such sordid matters as the price of papyrus.)

I said, "Suppose you describe one million years of events to each roll of papyrus. That means you'll have to fill fifteen thousand rolls. You'll have to talk long enough to fill them and you know that you begin to stammer after a while. I'll have to write enough to fill them and my fingers will fall off. And even if we can afford all that papyrus and you have the voice and I have the strength, who's going to copy it? We've got to have a guarantee of a hundred copies before we can publish and without that where will we get royalties from?"

My brother thought awhile. He said, "You think I ought to cut it down?"

"Way down," I said, "if you expect to reach the public."

"How about a hundred years?" he said.

"How about six days?" I said.

He said horrified, "You can't squeeze Creation into six days."

I said, "This is all the papyrus I have. What do you think?"

"Oh, well," he said, and began to dictate again, "In the beginning-- Does it have to be six days, Aaron?"

I said, firmly, "Six days, Moses."

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seebs said:

Here's one explanation:

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tyreth said:

I'll bet I could explain it in as short a space as Genesis has. Besides, God has the greatest mind so He would be able to word it best. God also works in the minds of those who have His indwelling Spirit, so He can also aid in their understanding of it.

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St. Worm2 said:

I have always wondered, if any form of macro evolution is true, why the ruse from God?

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Perhaps it was God simply looking for a handy way to explain our races' universal corruption? But if this is true, why go to all the trouble of the fairy tale? Why not give a simple explanation of the "true" origins of life (IOW, evolution) and then just explain that as living things became more and more complex, they also became corrupt, or something along those lines?

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seebs said:

Once there was a little girl. She asked her father what he did, and he said that he built houses. She was happy about this, and told all her friends that her father built houses. Being a little girl, she imagined that he must be very strong indeed to build houses; they look quite heavy. When she was older, she found paperwork in his office, describing "subcontracting agreements". According to these agreements, her father organized people, and the people he organized did the physical labor; he might or might not even physically go to a given place where a house was being built, because the people who worked for him were able to take the plans, which he designed, and build a house as he described it. But he paid them, and when the work was done, the house was his to sell.

There are two questions here:
1. Would you describe his explanation that he "builds houses" as a lie, or a ruse?
2. Given the context in which I told this story, do you think it matters whether or not the little girl described actually lived and had these experiences?

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