God said,  “Listen, Sam, I hope you are getting the point here. The plants, using photosynthesis were able to convert the energy from the sun into useful chemical energy by a complex process of electron transport. What a great system. When I saw that, I knew that natural selection was really powerful, and that my initial design for living cells was really good. So don’t forget to report that about the use of sunlight by all of the plants; that is the key to life. Understand?”

“Yes, Lord”, said Sam, and looked at what he had written so far. OMG, he thought, he hadn’t written anything about the sun. So he put that down, and for good measure added the moon and the stars, just in case God mentioned anything about them later.

But God started talking about life again:

“Animal life started in the ocean, and then after a sufficiently long period of evolution, some amphibians were able to get onto dry land and breathe air. After these amphibians came the reptiles, but I don’t need to go into all of those details. Let’s just say that evolution was working really well, and I was very pleased, because I knew that it was only a matter of time before I would start to see some pretty large hominids, derived from the primate branch of mammals, and that some of these would eventually have pretty big brains and good manual capabilities, and would become the perfect clay for my next step in creation. Man.”

Sam wrote down two verses, each taking a day, one about the creatures of the sea, and then those of the land, and about God being really happy with how things were going. And then he got to the verse about Man. He didn’t get that stuff about hominids and primates, but he did know that God had said he created Man with brains and hands, and he had always pictured  God looking like a man so he wrote down that God created man after his own image. That made sense. Then God talked about Man becoming the most important species on Earth, through his brain and consciousness and his ability to communicate and develop culture, and how with time, Man was able to overcome all obstacles and become the dominant species on Earth.

At that point, Sam’s brother Jake arrived and asked him what he was doing. Sam explained about the voice of the Lord commanding him to write down how everything started. He also told Jake it was hard work getting it right, and that he, Sam, was pretty tired. So Jake said:

“Lord, my brother Sam is tired from his labors. Would you permit me, also a scribe, to shoulder his burden for him? Would you deem me worthy to continue this task?”

God didn’t answer right away, but Sam was asleep with exhaustion, so Jake wrote “The End of Chapter 1” and started a second chapter. The first verse he wrote was explaining that Sam was tired and needed to rest after his exertions. Much later, Sam found out about this and changed the wording to state that it was God Himself who got tired after His creative labors, and needed to rest. Sam was a bit worried that God might take offense at the idea of His ever being tired (being God and all), but apparently God never actually paid much attention to what was being written down.

Jake heard God talk a bit more about the creation of Man and put down his own version. When God talked about differentiating the conscious mind, or soul of man, which was of divine origin, from the body of man, which shared the same elements as the rest of the Earth, Jake wrote that God had created Man out of the dust of the Earth, and then breathed a soul into him.

Jake had a different technique than Sam. Jake had a great imagination, and took more liberties than Sam did. When God said something about the dinosaurs, explaining that these had been enormous reptiles that had gone extinct, Jake added a reptile in the form of an evil snake to the story of Adam and Eve.

More scribes arrived, and took over to give Jake a rest, because God never stopped talking. Some of these scribes were pretty literal, and wrote down God’s words even when they couldn’t understand them. Some were poets and turned  the word of God into poetry. Quite a few were historians, and they had a great time with God’s knowledge of the early battles between tribes settling the land masses on which they lived.

Soon God’s voice became fainter, and some of the scribes had a hard time hearing Him. Some of them just started writing down what they knew. After a while, God could no longer be heard by anyone. But they kept writing. The truth of Scripture is God’s; all of its errors belong to man.