Yet for all this the aim of the
narrator is not mainly a religious one. Had he only meant to say
that God made the world out of nothing, and made it good, he could
have said so in simpler words, and at the same time more distinctly.
There is no doubt that he means to describe the actual course of
the genesis of the world, and to be true to nature in doing so;
he means to give a cosmogonic theory. Whoever denies this confounds
two different things--the value of history for us, and the aim of the
writer. While our religious views are or seem to be in conformity
with his, we have other ideas about the beginning of the world,
because we have other ideas about the world itself, and see in the
heavens no vault, in the stars no lamps, nor in the earth the
foundation of the universe. But this must not prevent us from
recognising what the theoretical aim of the writer of Genesis i.
really was. He seeks to deduce things as they are from each
other: he asks how they are likely to have issued at first from
the primal matter, and the world he has before his eyes in doing
this is not a mythical world but the present and ordinary one.
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