¹ ‘Bible’ refers throughout to the Hebrew Scriptures. ‘Torah’ is (therefore) a synonym. Unless otherwise indicated, I quote throughout from the New Revised Standard Version [NRSV].

² The other commitments are the anthropogenic commitments found in Genesis 2. By ‘writers’ and ‘those behind the text’ I mean the men and women who put the whole together. Though I do not make a direct case here for the proposition that the text has a unitary meaning, the fact that I supply a reading on which Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 cooperate works against the view that the text is a set of elements lacking thematic integrity.

³ In the decades between the two dates Hawking has come to a different understanding of the laws of physics. Either Hawking now sees implications that he missed before, or else the laws, as he now sees them, are not the same.

⁴ Rashi's comment on Genesis 1:1, translated into English, can be found at: http://www.bible-researcher.com/rashi.html.

⁵ I will show in any case that Rashi can find what he needs in Genesis 2, although Genesis 2 certainly does not tell a story of WP's emergence ex nihilo. I might just mention here that God, in the Book of Job, takes (in effect) Rabbi Isaac's part, though with respect to the whole of humankind, not just the Israelite sector: ‘Where were you,’ God thunders at Job, ‘when I laid the foundations of the world?’ (38:4) That is: the world was not made with you in mind.

⁶ The situation is grist for the mills of minute scholarship. Rashi observes that the opening prepositional phrase—‘be–reshith’—means ‘in the beginning of,’ and that the opening sentence does not supply an object for ‘of,’ so that the sentence as it stands is ungrammatical. The self‐contained prepositional phrase ‘in the beginning’ requires, in Hebrew, ‘ba‐’ rather than ‘be‐.’

⁷ In discussions of Genesis, the sages of the Talmud and the Midrash frequently advert to the model of a house. ‘How,’ the Hillelites press the Shammai‐ites, ‘could it be that God created the heavens and only then the earth? Isn't this like constructing a roof before construction the foundation?’ To which the Shammai‐ites respond in kind. ‘What sense it would make to construct a footstool before constructing a chair?’ All this, as I shall explain, is very much to see Genesis 1 through the (different) optic of Genesis 2. If there were no South America, no one would be asking why North America is called ‘North.’

⁸ How might WP not satisfy SI? If WP were totally chaotic, it would not. Steven Weinberg, in his book The First Three Minutes (New York: Basic Books, 1988, updated edition), makes the following claim (p. 88). ‘There are…hundreds of so‐called elementary particles on the list published every six months by the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. Are we going to have to specify [in specifying the ingredients of the early universe] the amounts of each one of these types of particle?…In this case we might decide that the universe is too complicated and too arbitrary to be worth understanding.’ Aristotelian ‘wonder’ would, if so, give way to terminal confusion.

⁹ This suggests that a reduction in the size of the pantheons to a single deity (= the sense of disorder is overcome) would effectively give us a version of monotheism, the Bible's theological position. This is utterly mistaken. If Zeus were the only deity on Olympus, Olympian religion would not be monotheistic. Some have, entirely mistakenly, identified Plato as a Greek Moses. (Augustine does this.) Plato is a monist; not a crypto‐monotheist.

¹⁰ An artifact does not have to be integrated. Think of a Jackson Pollock spattering. But we lose nothing by taking artifacts to be SI‐satisfiers.

¹¹ It may seem odd that they do not use the model of sexual reproduction. Here, we get an organised entity (a newborn), where the creators (the parents) do not proceed by planning and implementing.

¹² Hume is speaking of living things. But the point extends to the inorganic.

¹³ I say ‘unlikely to be true’ rather than ‘obviously not true’ because it is not easy to decide whether the environment in which human beings are found is ever entirely wild. We carry the garden with us. Or, to put it theologically: God, so far as men and women go, is a constant gardener.

¹⁴ Prior to the production of designer plants in the laboratory and greenhouse and the manufacture of items like benches and fountains in the workshop and factory, gardens will have been made by thinning a wild or uncultivated area of some of its flora, doing a bit of shovelling and tamping, moving stones, etc.

¹⁵ It is not easy to have the first woman emerging sexually. For there is no female parent. But I think that the Bible is more than happy to represent the emergence as un‐natural. (Sexual reproduction, since it applies to animals, is natural.) Eve says of her firstborn, Cain: ‘I have produced a man with the help of the Lord’ (4:1). The phrase ‘with the help of the Lord’ is not just an expression of thanks for the issue. (The Hebrew verb ‘produce,’ cognate with ‘Cain,’ has however to do with the latter's calling.) Similarly, in the genealogy of Genesis 5 (which mixes elements of Genesis 1 with elements of Genesis 2), it is no accident that Adam is said to have become ‘the father of a son in his likeness, according to his image’ (3) immediately after the same language is used to describe God's creation of humankind.

¹⁶ The text does tell us how the bread gets to the visitors. But even here there is a gap. It could be said that in saying ‘Let a little water be brought’ Abraham is downplaying his own role, i.e., being super‐polite. But immediately after, he says ‘Let me bring a little bread’ (5). Water/Bread. Natural/Manufactured. It's like Genesis 1/Genesis 2. There is a further subtlety in the text. The messengers are, we understand, angels. How do they get to Abraham? The Bible is trying hard not to have us say ‘by magic.’ For the point of the episode is not to describe a theophany. The point is to impart to the reader some sense of how the spirit of the text regards the patriarch's progress. So far as the story taken at face value is concerned, God is part of the explanation. For the messengers are doing God's bidding: ‘Let Abraham be visited.’ But the messengers get to Abraham, so far as the story goes, in a natural way, on foot. They emerge from the heat haze. So again we have, in the background, a combination of ‘God is behind it’ and ‘God does not do it.’ Compare also the very start of the Genesis 2 account: ‘…the Lord God has not caused it to rain upon the earth…; but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground’ (5–6). This comes close to saying that the rising up of the stream occurs without God (directly) causing it.

¹⁷ So, as I said, the Bible can accept what Hawking says about the coming‐into‐being of WP. WP can come into being without the hacking that gardens require.

¹⁸ A plastic version of what the language of ‘bringing forth’ purports is one of those remarkable M. C. Escher drawings in which disorder on the left slowly resolves into order on the right. The point is that what comes to be is part of a wider churning.

¹⁹ The Hebrew roots are: [BRA, YTzR, ASE] השע רצי ארב.

²⁰ One is reminded of the old whipping horse of analytic philosophers, Heidegger's ‘nothing noths.’ The idea, that Rudolf Carnap mercilessly mocks, is developed with trademark ingenuity by Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations.

²¹ Recall Rashi's point about the other nations and the Promised Land. Whatever men and women are saying when they attribute dominion to themselves, no sub‐human animal is going to rise up and assert that the attribution is illegitimate because it is not God‐given! Many ecologists say that it is illegitimate. They would have an easy time making their case if the self‐styled dominators always appealed to theology to justify themselves.

²² Dinesen, Contrast Isak, Out of Africa (New York: Random House, 1937), p. 19Google Scholar: ‘The Natives have, far less than the white people, the sense of risks in life. Sometimes on a Safari, or on the farm, in a moment of extreme tension, I have met the eyes of my Native companions, and have felt that we were at a great distance from one another, and that they were wondering at my apprehension of our risk. It made me reflect that perhaps they were, in life itself, within their own element, such as we can never be, like fishes in deep water which for the life of them cannot understand our fear of drowning.’

²³ That ‘dominion’ is asserted for humankind only over the animals confirms this reading.

²⁴ The reader would be right to observe that by so quickly abandoning the search for something comparable in the case of the sabbath, I am betraying the imagination that I try to use in these pages. I bow to the criticism. In fact, I think that comparable (analogical) sense can be made, by pressing on the idea of the sabbath marking a sharp ending/beginning. But I’ll leave the development of the thought for some other time.

²⁵ ‘Tov Me‐od.’ There is an internal ground for accepting this imaginative idea. Genesis 1 is dominated by the adjective ‘good.’ There is no ‘bad.’ The latter first appears in Genesis 2. But ‘very good’ (that is what the Hebrew means) implies that ‘good’ comes in degrees. If so, there is more and less good. ‘Less good’ approaches ‘bad.’

²⁶ I have been arguing that God is dispensable from Genesis 1. I am just putting it here in the most natural way.

²⁷ What happens if Genesis 1 is moralised? See the Tower of Babel! ‘[T]he whole earth [sc., the whole of humankind] had one language and the same words’ (11:1). Observe that the plural forms of Genesis 1 are duplicated in the presentation of the Tower episode.

²⁸ Not that this is logically necessary. But why attribute science fiction views to the Bible's writers? See Loptson, Peter, ‘The Antinomy of Death,’ in Death and Philosophy, Malpas, Jeff and Solomon, Robert C., eds. (London: Routledge, 1998)Google Scholar.

²⁹ ‘Unless a man had been created, there would have been no beginning in the world.’ Or: ‘God created a man in order that the world should contain beginnings.’ The City of God, Book XII, chapter 20. It follows, if so, that the creation of the natural world doesn't really count as a beginning, which is what I said above. It follows that Genesis 1 is not the core biblical story.

³⁰ For a development of the Kantian parallel, see ‘Transcendental Idealism: What Jerusalem has to say to Königsberg,’ Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review XLIX 2010, pp. 25–51Google Scholar.

³¹ The relevent entry is at http://www.sacred-texts.com/jud/mhl/mhl05.htm, the fourth paragraph.