• Can God make a peg so round that he can't fit it in a square hole?
• Can God make a woman so sexy that he can't resist her?
• Can God make a dinner so European that he can't eat it with chopsticks?

I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.

If it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. Apart from the law, sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died. The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me.

Now imagine you are hovering through a thick mist over a large body of water. It’s completely dark and the fog is so heavy that you can’t tell where it ends and the ocean begins. The first theme begins and you see a soft glow straight overhead beginning to saturate the mist, lighting up around you like headlights on a foggy night. Everything around is now blazing with light, which softly dissipates into the thick dark blue of the sea. The music fades.

A second theme begins, different than the first, and a billowing wind pushes the mist upward, and suddenly you see the huge dome of the sky above and the sea stretching off into the horizon in all directions. The music subsides.

As a unique third theme begins, the waters start roaring and rushing downward, like a giant whirlpool, and suddenly huge rocks rise out of the ocean. Now the sea is to your back and you stare in awe at a vast landscape of giant mountains and craggy cliffs, with the last drips of the water trickling down. The third theme fades.

You hear the first theme again, but louder and richer than before. Looking upward into the clear sky, you see a tiny pin prick of sharp light slowly moving into place, followed by a billion other stars sweeping across from east to west. Then, with a flash, the crisp white outline of the moon appears. Finally, in the east, comes the blinding yellow light of the Sun. The fourth theme fades.

The second theme resumes, but with more depth and power. Looking back over the ocean you see schools of fish of every variety swimming all around, and whales and dolphins crashing about. Now flocks of gulls and ducks and every kind of bird soars overhead, and their singing and squawking echo back across the mountains. The fifth theme fades.

The third theme comes again, booming and deafening, and the landscape is now green with grass and trees and every type of flora, as thick as a jungle. Insects crawl and buzz, and now small animals scurry about the fields. Then herds of buffalo and horses thunder over the hills, and a mountain lion roars at the edge of a cliff. Finally, in the center of it all, a man and woman walk into view, their perfect nude bodies glistening in the sunlight, and all the animals in the sea and the land turn to face them. They are the signature of the artist. The sixth theme fades.

The last piece of music is a majestic combination of all three, and you gaze upon the brilliant sky with its countless stars, the expansive sea with the myriads of fish below and birds above, and the towering landscape teaming with plants and animals, and the man and woman watching it all in wonder. You take it all in and then give up trying to take it all in, just resting in the moment. The sun sets, the animals quiet, and the man and woman lay down to sleep. The music fades.

All this mythological business belongs to the poetical part of men. It seems strangely forgotten nowadays that a myth is a work of imagination and therefore a work of art. ... But for some reason I have never heard explained, it is only the minority of unpoetical people who are allowed to write critical studies of these popular poems. We do not submit a sonnet to a mathematician or a song to a calculating boy; but we do indulge the equally fantastic idea that folk-lore can be treated as a science. Unless these things are appreciated artistically they are not appreciated at all. ... If any student tells me that the infant Hiawatha only laughed out of respect for tribal custom of sacrificing the aged to economical housekeeping, I say he did not. If any scholar tells me that the cow jumped over the moon only because a heifer was sacrificed to Diana, I answer that it did not. It happened because it is obviously the right thing for a cow to jump over the moon. Mythology is a lost art, one of the few arts that really are lost; but it is an art.

for believing that man was made to the image and likeness of God. They look at the shape of our body and ask so infelicitously whether God has a nose and teeth and a beard and also inner organs and the other things we need.

It struck me that it was, after all, possible to vindicate Ambrose's arguments. I began to believe that the Catholic faith, which I had thought impossible to defend against the objections of the Manichees, might fairly be maintained, especially since I had heard one passage after another in the Old Testament figuratively explained. These passages had been death to me when I took them literally, but once I had heard them explained in their spiritual meaning I began to blame myself for my despair.

I have therefore no difficulty in accepting, say, the view of those scholars who tell us that the account of Creation in Genesis is derived from earlier Semitic stories which were Pagan and mythical. We must of course be quite clear what 'derived from' means. Stories do not reproduce their species like mice. They are told by men. Each re-teller either repeats exactly what his predecessor had told him or else changes it. He may change it unknowingly or deliberately.

Thus at every step in what is called—a little misleadingly—the 'evolution' of a story, a man, all he is and all his attitudes, are involved. And no good work is done anywhere without aid from the Father of Lights. When a series of such retellings turns a creation story which at first had almost no religious or metaphysical significance into a story which achieves the idea of true Creation and of a transcendent Creator (as Genesis does), then nothing will make me believe that some of the re-tellers, or some one of them, has not been guided by God.

As to the fabulous element in the Old Testament, I very much doubt if you would be wise to chuck it out. What you get is something gradually coming into focus. If we could sort out all the fabulous elements in the earlier stages and separate them form the historical ones, I think we might lose an essential part of the whole process.

The first five miles would seem familiar to air travelers, but at the seven-mile mark, Earth's curvature would become noticeable, and by 30 miles the sky would turn black and the stars would become visible, even in daytime, on the climber's shaded side.

At 100 miles, Earth would clearly appear as a partial sphere. By 215 miles, gravity would drop by a noticeable 10 percent; by 456 miles, it would drop 20 percent. And at around 1,642 miles - roughly 13 hours into the trip - it would drop by 50 percent.

At the 22,000-mile-high geosynchronous orbit stop, Earth would appear the size of a baseball held at arm's length.

• I want to engage the text - to not shy away from the parts that jar and even disgust me, and to see the parts I've always loved with new eyes.
  
  
• I want to focus on more than individual passages or stories - to let the grand sweep of the narrative carry me to places further up and further in.
  
  
• I want to invite others to come along with me - to show me things I'm missing, and to tell me what thoughts resonate and which ones don't.

All that afternoon Ransom remained alone answering Oyarsa's questions. I am not allowed to record this conversation, beyond saying that the voice concluded it with the words:

"You have shown me more wonders than are known in the whole of heaven."