Plug for one of my favorite short stories: “Tower of Babylon,” by Ted Chiang.
It was, methinks, not so much the fact that the Tower of Babel was being built that upset God but rather their intention to reach Heaven.
Would they have actually been able to reach Heaven? Did God think they might? Is Heaven in the sky? Did God think it was?
The text says that God was afraid if they kept one language, then “nothing will be impossible” for them. What possibilities was he afraid of, and can it still be said that human langauges are really all that confused? What about the International Space Station? The language barrier hasn’t impeded that much? Why didn’t God make it impossible for people to learn each other’s langauges if it was that important to him that they not communicate? His strategy hasn’t really been that effective at the enmd of the day.
Yeah, if their strategy for reaching heaven and challenging the divine order was building a really tall tower, well, YHWH might :rolleyes: a bit, but He’s not gonna be all :eek:.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Terrifying possibility.
Very confusing. Have you ever tried to learn English?
That was part of the grand scheme. We waste our money on stuff like the ISS and then all the people who are skeptical of the space program can poopoo it and expound on why it’s a waste, and so we never send our rocket ships to Mars…where heaven is. It’s all part of the master plan…
Greatly. If only everyone spoke Swahili we’d already be building space ships to Mars. Sadly, everyone doesn’t, and instead they have to learn English, which is really hard, so instead we have the ISS. Q.E.D. (which is Latin actually) we don’t have rockets to get us to Mars.
He gave us lawyers instead. And NASA. And liberals and conservatives. It’s pretty devious if you think about it in the right way. So far it’s worked out, too…we don’t, after all, have rockets to take us to Mars.
Sure it has. It’s worked perfectly so far, and I don’t see any chance of a real change in my lifetime. And I had to learn English, which really sucked…
-XT
Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Prelude to Space (first published 1951) is about the first rocket to the moon. One subplot is that a crackpot tries* to sabotage the rocket because he believes that men bodily entering Heaven will bring the wrath of God down on humanity.
*and for his trouble gets a lethal dose of radiation from an unshielded reactor.
Old Testament God was a bit of an over-reactor though, so it’s not too inconsistent for him to completely lose his shit just because man dares to think in more uppity ways than they oughta, even if ultimately that thinking would have brought them nowhere fast. It’s the intent that counts.
Free will yes, but not to will freely nilly !
The Great Pyramid at Giza was built using bronze age technology. It was the largest building in the world for almost 4k years after it was built.
Indeed, and the authors of the Old Testament ought to have known about it, surely, at least if their second book is to be believed (a fortiori if the relevant author actually was Moses).
Read it before I wrote my story. The difference was that in my story the religious nuts were right.
And that I’m no Arthur C. Clarke
But the pyramids of Egypt were built by extraterrestrials. It says so in Chariots of the Gods, and they couldn’t print if it wasn’t true. Don’t you know anything?
This seems like the same theme we see in the Garden of Eden, where God is truly concerned that if people obtain knowledge of good and evil they will be just like God, and that would be a bad thing. Therefore they need to be kicked out of the Garden, suffer when giving birth, and then return to dust. But that punishment was obviously not sufficient to keep humans from seeking and obtaining knowledge, and next thing you know they’ve developed the technology to build tall structures and the social structure for vast numbers of people to work together on a big project. Now they can keep watch over their land, have a tactical advantage in war, store lots of stuff in there, who knows. The story doesn’t indicate that they intended anything disrespectful to God, they just wanted to work and live together as one people. I think a lot of people twist this story in order to justify God’s behavior.
Also a plot point in my favorite movie, Sunshine. The Danny Boyle one, not the old one.
Proof positive! Look at the complexity of the grammar underlying the joke in that sentence! No-one not a native English speaker could follow that. Thus, Og’s Babel strategy worked. Thus Og exists.
QED.
Or not. YLMV (Your logic may vary.)
As to the OP specifically, I imagine the argument of the fundies is the usual handwave about “mysterious ways” - the Bible quote does not actually specify with clarity what Og’s motive was, therefore it is not possible to confidently transfer Og’s “reasoning” as revealed in the story to such modernisms as skyscrapers and Apollo 11s. Maybe the detail of the Babelian heresy and hubris was different from ours, and warranted a different response.
Or something.
There is no end to the capacity of literalists to conjure legalistic arguments out of whole cloth.
Having said that, I am aware that I have been a little unfair in attributing an argument to the fundies that I have not seen actually made, but it seems to me to be the “best” argument open, so I have critiqued it accordingly. I may be wrong about what fundies actually say about such things. It may be that they say Og is gettin’ his smitin’ hand all warmed up ready for us. Any day now…mark my words!
The thing is that the literalists are sometimes right about the intention of the text, and the Babel story isn’t an allegory. It’s a just-so story about the reason people have different languages. The fact that the story is (historically and logically) stupid doesn’t mean it wasn’t meant literally.
No – not in the text of Genesis itself. The text says that the Tower was built to “make us a name” . It was essentially a monument, a symbol of power - it’s about pride/hubris.
The ‘invade Heaven’ idea is IIRC dated to the earliest centuries AD (eg Apocalypse of Baruch in which the builders planned to pierce the sky to see what it was made of) – much later than Genesis.
The text said that they intended to build a tower “whose top reaches Heaven,” and this evidently worried God because he said he thought that “nothing would be impossible” for them. It wasn’t about hubris. He was afraid people would become too powerful.
How do creationists explain the Tower of Babel. The same way they “explain” everything else, “God did it.”
I think what the OP is asking is, if God took offense at a ziggurat a few hundred feet high, why do we have skyscrapers, airplanes, rockets, etc.? Answer seems to be the tower of Babel itself wasn’t the problem.