Origin belief
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- See also: Creation within belief systems
An origin belief is any story or explanation that describes the beginnings of humanity, earth, life, and the universe (cosmogony). Such beliefs can be derived from many different venues including scientific investigation, metaphysical speculation, or religious belief, or any combination of these. As with any set of beliefs, opinions regarding the validity of particular origins beliefs differ — points of view on these subjects vary widely.
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[edit] Creation myths
Origin beliefs commonly refer to creation stories or creation myths; mytho-religious stories which explain the beginnings of the universe as a deliberate act of "creation" by a supreme being. However, "origin beliefs" may be generalized to include non-religious claims and theories based in contemporary science or philosophy.
The term creation myth is sometimes used in a derogatory way to describe stories which are still believed today, as the term myth may suggest something which is absurd or fictional. While these beliefs and stories need not be a literal account of actual events, they may yet express ideas that are perceived by some people and cultures to be truths at a deeper or more symbolic level. Author Daniel Quinn notes that in this sense creation myths need not be religious in nature, and they have secular analogues in modern cultures.
Many accounts of creation share broadly similar themes. Common motifs include the fractionation of the things of the world from a primordial chaos (demiurge); the separation of the mother and father gods; land emerging from an infinite and timeless ocean; and so on.
Creation myths generally have nine elements throughout the story:
- Birth: where the first person or deity came from.
- Mother/Father: who the father god and mother goddess. For example, the Greek creation myth has Gaia as the mother goddess, and Uranus as the father god.
- Genealogy: who was the parent of who
- Active/Passive creation: how everything was created. If it was active creation, then there was a creator. Passive creation is when something is just created. Using the Greek account again, Gaia forms the earth with Uranus' dead body. Therefore, Gaia is the active creator and Uranus the passive creator.
- Supreme Being: the most powerful god. For Babylonians, this was Marduk.
- Realm: the home of the gods.
- Sin/suffering: explains why bad things happen.
- Destruction: how the earth will end. The Norse account calls this "Ragnarök", saying it happens after the death of Balder.[citation needed]
Some religious groups assert that their accounts of creation should be considered alongside, supersede, or even replace scientific accounts of the development of life and the cosmos. This assertion has proven highly controversial (for one example, see creation-evolution controversy).
[edit] Scientific observations
Science, strictly speaking, deals only with observable phenomena. Anything that cannot be observed (either directly or indirectly) is, by definition, not a subject of scientific investigation. Scientists look for patterns among observations, which give rise to hypotheses to be tested against further observations. If a hypothesis passes these tests, it is then called a scientific theory, which again is subject to amendment or rejection based on new observations.
Using verifiable observations science is able to measure some of the effects of past events of evolution of the early universe (for instance, via the microwave echo of the big bang) and interpret these observations within a scientific framework. By extrapolating the current observed state of affairs into the past, scientists seek to construct an accurate picture of the past. Those who are strict adherents to philosophical naturalism believe that such is all that is possible to know. This is not a universally accepted idea by any means, and there are many who promote other paths to knowledge which are not characterised as scientific inquiry.
In scientific theories supported by the mainstream scientific community, the universe and life is described as developing through solely natural causes, and the progress of science is hoped to continue to improve the explanation of things and events in the past.
[edit] Mainstream scientific theories
The Big Bang, the dominant cosmological theory about the early development and current shape and evolution of the universe, is supported by a collection of observed facts. It places origin of the Universe at about 13.7 +/-0.5 billion years ago. This widely accepted scientific dating contradicts many religious accounts of creation - for example, certain creationist accounts consider the Universe to be only a few thousand years old. The preconditions for the Big Bang are currently a subject of developing theories (e.g. cosmic inflation theory).
The solar nebula which coalesced out of gas and dust about 4.3 billion years ago is considered the best planetary system formation model available for explaining the origin of the solar system. The Earth-moon system was formed out of this and there is evidence that the two bodies were formed after a collision between the proto-Earth and a Mars-sized object.
The modern evolutionary synthesis is the dominant biological theory about the origin of human life on Earth. This combines Charles Darwin's theory of the evolution of species by natural selection with Gregor Mendel's theory of genetics as the basis for biological inheritance.
The origin of life itself on Earth is more contested. Scientific conjectures, hypotheses, and observations pertaining to this topic are detailed in the article on the origin of life.
It should be pointed out that the above scientific theories are not ex nihilo beliefs, that is they do not start from nothing. They provide no mechanism for the origin ex nihilo of energy or matter. In this respect they are unlike the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic beliefs which assert that the universe, Earth, and life originated in a unique creative act by a superior cosmic being (In these religions it is a single diety), or scientific speculations which propose an original cause of some other type. For a more precise understanding of modern science's concepts concerning "matter from vacuum" or "something from nothing" see virtual particle and vacuum energy.
[edit] Beliefs grounded in philosophical naturalism
Atomism is an ancient Greek philosophy supported by Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius which held that events in the universe were not the consequence of any act by a Creator, but rather was the result of atoms moving about randomly. This philosophy was reformulated as determinism after the Enlightenment and still enjoys a following by some scientists, though the character of deterministic interactions in nature involving quantum mechanics is an outstanding question.
The Anthropic Principle and its more controversial derivative the Strong Anthropic Principle are explanations for the existence of humanity with respect to the conditions of the universe that we inhabit. The principle is used as a guide for some scientists to determine certain physical laws that have necessarily resulted in the existence of ourselves. In some sense, the Anthropic Principle is an empirical truism while the Strong Anthropic Principle is an idea that may defy falsification.
Deism was a popular belief of many scientists and philosophers of the post-enlightenment, including Newton, Leibniz, and Thomas Jefferson that kept the formality of a creator, but allowed creation to function solely based on natural laws that were established at the time of creation. In this formulation, every interaction was completely deterministic.
The Many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and the idea of parallel universes are ways of resolving questions of causality and determinism in the framework of probabilistic interactions. In this speculative interpretation, the universe that we inhabit is one of many possible universes that all simultaneously exist, but are independent of each other, and each universe bifurcates with every quantum mechanical "observation".
[edit] Creation ex nihilo
Creation ex nihilo (Latin: out of nothing) is at odds with our everyday experiences, in that nothing spontaneously comes into (or vanishes from) existence but instead matter and energy merely change forms. However, quantum mechanics allows for energy to be spontaneously created from the vacuum as long as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is not violated (usually, by the spontaneous annihilation of the created particles, e.g. the Lamb shift). This may give a means by which creation ex nihilo can be achieved, but nevertheless we are not currently able to explain creation ex nihilo, nor even to prove that it is required. Julian Barbour suggests that reality simply terminates on nothing at the alpha point, as a brute fact, in the same way that England abuts the sea at Land's End without requiring an explanation.
An explanation advanced by some theists is that God created the Universe out of nothing; some creationists hold also that life was created in something like its present state of variety, so that organisms were fully speciated from the beginning. While there are various attempts to square these ideas with available evidence and currently accepted theory, their explanatory utility, predictive power, and scientific standing are questioned by critics of creationism. Many scientists in the relevant fields, theist and otherwise, do not regard notions like divine power or divine will as playing genuine scientific roles in cosmology or biology.
The scientifically prevalent view is that life originated on Earth, although other views hold that organic compounds from comets may have been an important source of material for the appearance of life. The Miller-Urey experiment showed that amino acids could arise from a type of primitive environment. Nevertheless, while scientific research on abiogenesis is ongoing, there is no consensus on how life began.
[edit] Religious creation beliefs
Several religions have creation stories, some of which account for the existence and present form of the Universe by the act of creation by a supreme being or the Creator God. Most of these accounts depict one or several gods fashioning things out of themselves, or from pre-existing material (for example chaos or prakriti).
The scholastic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam for the most part speak of creation ex nihilo. This is typified, for example, by the assumption that the first verse of the Christian Bible ("In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth") indicates the only self-existent entity is God with all other things deriving from God. 2 Maccabees 7:28 indicates that this philosophy may have been a common Jewish understanding of creation: "I beseech thee, my son, look upon the heaven and the earth, and all that is therein, and consider that God made them of things that were not ...". Similar to this is the language found in the Book of Hebrews, which states, "Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear". Some (notably Augustine of Hippo) also hold that God is altogether outside of time and that time exists only within the created universe.
However, in these traditions, the belief that God gave shape to pre-existing things was not unheard of, and that idea became more fully articulated especially under the influence of Greek philosophy. In both Judaism and Christianity, belief in creation "from nothing" began to dominate the traditions sometime in the second century C.E., in part as a reaction against classical philosophy. The following story from the Talmud illustrates this:
- A philosopher said to R. Gamiliel: Your God was a great craftsman, but he found himself good materials which assisted him: Tohu wa-Bohu, and darkness, and wind, and water, and the primeval deep. Said R. Gamiliel to him: May the wind be blown out of that man! Each material is referred to as created. Tohu wa-Bohu: "I make peace and create evil"; darkness: "I form the light and create darkness"; water: "Praise him, ye heaven of heavens, and ye waters" -- why? -- "For he commanded, and they were created"; wind: "For, lo, He that formeth the mountains, and created the wind"; the primeval deep: "When there were no depths, I was brought forth". BR 1.9, Th-Alb:8
Departing from this tradition, some modern scholars have argued that these statements and all others are still susceptible to ambiguous interpretation, so that creation ex nihilo may not be clearly supported by ancient texts, including the Bible. They point out the similarities of the biblical account, to other ancient religious beliefs that the universe was created by God or the gods out of pre-existing matter, as opposed to "out of nothing". Some scholars see evidence that the biblical account, like other ancient religious views, presumes pre-existence of some kind of raw material, albeit without form: "Now the earth was formless and void, darkness was over the face of the deep, and the spirit of God hovered over the waters." God then fashions the disordered material, to create the world.
Joseph Campbell wrote extensively on the subject and considered creative mythology a means to reconcile the waking consciousness to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of this universe as it is. In his book The Masks of God: Creative Mythology he explains that the retelling of the creation myth would render an interpretive total image of creation to be known to contemporary culture. Renewing the act of the experience of creation the existence of adventure is renewed, “at once shattering and reintegrating the fixed already known, in the sacrificial creative fire of the becoming thing that is no thing at all but life, not as it will be or as it should be, as it was or as it never will be, but as it is, in depth, in process, here and now, inside and out.”
[edit] Limits to the ontology of creation
While many scenarios are proposed by religion and science to identify 'first cause' and the origin of creation (ontology), there are some fundamental limits to the knowledge of humankind that present a barrier to finding any definitive answer.
Post-modern philosophy currently holds that there is nothing that one can know for certain. Immanuel Kant's philosophy can be seen as a forerunner of this idea — that because we view the universe through the lens of the mind, which is 'shaped' by space, time, and the things embedded in space and time, it is not possible to see things-in-themselves (noumena) - the real objects that lie behind the subjective objects (phenomena) we recognise. If true, it is beyond the mind of humankind to perceive a condition that has no space or time. Many other philosophers, most recently Popper have all shown that there is precious little one can be sure of that would provide a starting point to determine the 'first cause' that led to creation.
Modern physics is an empirical science based on experiment and observation that characterizes how things happen through scientific theories and physical laws, but ultimately does not answer the question of 'why' things happen at the foundational (ontological) level. For example, the existence of the Big Bang is not predicated on a reason for its occurrence. What's more, the modern physics breaks down at the Planck time/Planck length, where both the influences of quantum mechanics and gravity are required to be combined in order to characterize the interactions that occur. As such, there is no model available that has been tested at this level, and so any attempt to theoretically probe beyond this regime in search of a more fundamental appreciation of the nature of the universe is hampered.
Religion has philosophy and oral testimony available to it to demonstrate a God or a separate "first cause" that called the universe into existence. As such it is dependent on faith in God or the specific "first cause" to which it ascribes.
[edit] See also
- Creationism
- Creation (theology)
- Creator deity
- Dating Creation
- Creation evolution controversy
- Evolution
- History of Earth
- Big Bang
- Non-standard cosmology
[edit] References
- Rouvière, Jean-Marc, Brèves méditations sur la création du monde L'Harmattan, Paris (2006), ISBN 2-7475-9922-1.
- Leeming, David Adams, and Margaret Adams Leeming, A Dictionary of Creation Myths. Oxford University Press (1995), ISBN 0-19-510275-4.
- Rev. Klees, WIlliam H. Mythology and Religion: Fall Session 2 Susque, Trout Run (2006)
[edit] External links
- Genesis And Creation Myths, Duncan Heastor
