People have not always had domesticated camels. Or tomatoes. Or science.

“The Bible is a historical record, but it tells us just as much, if not more, about the people who wrote it as it does about the people they wrote about.” That’s Joel Baden writing about history of domesticated camels, which we discussed here last week.

Baden, an Old Testament professor at Yale Divinity School, chooses not to judge the biblical writers harshly for mistakenly assuming that, since they had camels, everybody must always have had camels.

Without any evidence to the contrary, it is perfectly natural to assume that things have always been the way that they are now. Today we have more information about the past than any other moment in history. In ancient Israel, they had virtually none.

And yet we still fall victim to this basic, very human, historical fallacy.

Yes we do.

Baden suggests one example of this: Our tendency to imagine medieval Italians as eating pasta with tomato sauce, even though tomatoes didn’t come to Italy until much more recently.

But that’s small tomatoes.

Here’s a bigger, better example — and a much more common one: Science.

Today, we have science. We’re so accustomed to this that we assume we’ve always had science — that we have always referred to and accounted for nature through the lens of science. But we didn’t always do this. We didn’t always have this any more than Italy has always had tomatoes or Israel has always had camels.

Go back 2,500 or so years to the time of Thales of Miletus and nobody had science yet. Even Thales — the natural philosopher sometimes hailed as the “first scientist” — didn’t have science in anything like the sense that we think of it today.

Meanwhile, right around when Thales was busy contemplating primary substances, a few hundred miles away some devout Jews were putting the finishing touches on the book of Genesis. Thales might have “invented science,” but he hadn’t done a very good job of publicizing the idea. He never made a single appearance on TV or radio to popularize his new ideas. Not even so much as a newspaper interview.

That’s silly, of course, to expect Thales to have done TV or radio interviews when no such thing existed at the time. But that’s no sillier than expecting those Jews writing Genesis to have done so with anything other than the pre-scientific view that was then shared by everybody everywhere ever.

Assuming that Genesis provides us with a scientific view, or a scientific explanation, or a scientific “account of nature,” is just as wrong as assuming that Abraham and Isaac owned camels a thousand years before such a thing had ever happened in their land. And it is wrong in precisely the same way.

Keep in mind that the mistake here was not on Abraham’s behalf. We can’t criticize him for not doing a better job in having domesticated camels before any such thing existed in his world. The mistake is on behalf of the writers who anachronistically ascribed those camels to Abraham.

Likewise, it won’t due to blame the book of Genesis itself for not attempting to contain science. That’s not a flaw of the book, it’s a flaw for anyone dim enough to impose that anachronistic expectation onto it — whether that someone is Ken Ham or Al Mohler or Neal DeGrasse Tyson doesn’t matter.

To be fair to Tyson, though, his misconception is of a different, less egregious kind than that of the young-Earth creationists whose hermeneutic he accepts at face value. To appreciate the difference, imagine that instead of misconceiving Genesis as a science text, they were all misconceiving Genesis as a sonnet.

Tyson looks at Genesis 1 and sees that it is not in iambic pentameter, that it lacks any coherent rhyme scheme, and that it is more than 14 lines long. “Genesis 1 is a terrible sonnet,” he concludes.

Ken Ham and Al Mohler, on the other hand, look at Genesis 1 and they see that it is not in iambic pentameter, that it lacks any coherent rhyme scheme, and that it is more than 14 lines long. “Sonnets must never be in iambic pentameter,” they conclude. “And they must never have a rhyme scheme, and they must always be more than 14 lines long. The so-called ‘sonnets’ of Shakespeare and Petrarch are not sonnets at all, merely humanistic lies and the product of a depraved, deceived worldview.”

One more example of how, as Baden says, we still today find it “perfectly natural to assume that things have always been the way that they are now.” In the sixth century BCE, Israel had domesticated camels, so the biblical writers in that time and place assumed that everyone who lived before them must have had them too. This mistaken assumption bugs us as 21st century readers because, here in the 21st century, we have this idea of what history and historical accounts are supposed to look like, and we assume that everyone who lived before us must have had those ideas too.