We need beings who can talk, worship us, and, above all, create the calendar that reflects the creation. The next two times they try to make humans out of wood and then clay. The wooden humans are too stiff, and the clay humans dissolve in the rain. After long mythological episodes where hubris is duly punished and other universal human values reinforced, real human beings emerge who can speak, worship, and mark out cosmic time. In the cultural controversies that pit the supposedly rapacious West against the supposedly egalitarian views of other peoples, we forget that virtually all cultures place a high value on the distinctively human, especially in its relationship with the divine.
Some special link exists, it seems, between the human ability to speak and the capacity to worship.
An old Brazilian friend who was also in Guatemala holds the slightly heretical view that our ability to think arises when we must choose between good and evil. In his reading of Genesis, God let Satan tempt us, not because he desired evil, but because human beings could come to their full dignity as moral agents in no other way. My friend is a native of Rio de Janeiro, though, and perhaps that climate has influenced him in complicated ways. I am grateful for what many generations of human ingenuity and effort created. But I still yearn for some lost childhood of the world.