Explore a critical analysis of religious creation myths and their potential societal impacts. This piece examines how certain narratives about the world's origin may shape beliefs about social structures, conflict, and human purpose. Consider alternative perspectives on interpreting our world and humanity's role within it.

 

2: The Universe

 

How did the world around us get here?

Many theories about how the world came into existence seem to be designed to manipulate people, rather than to inform and enlighten them.  For example, I was taught that a superbeing in the sky made everything through a magical process that violated all of the known laws of physics.  This being was a god whose name, they told, was ‘Jehovah.’

Jehovah said a few words and the heavens and Earth appeared.  Then a few more words and light appeared.  Jehovah used this method of chanting incantations to divide the waters and create land, then create plants and animals.  Once the right environment was created, He created man and then, out of man, woman.  

At a certain point, Jehovah created the societies that are now in place: He split the human race into tribes (to prevent them from working together on the Tower of Babel).  He then divided the land into nations with borders.  He gave the nations away to the tribes of people.  He then set these groups against each other in battle, creating war.  He accepted that the winners of wars had gained sovereignty over the land they controlled militarily at the end of the conflict  He organized the wars and watched them, manipulating events so that the tribes/nations he wanted to have the land won land up to the desired limits.  (This principle, called ‘manifest destiny,’ has been the primary rationalization behind war at least since the conquest of the New World began in 1493.)

My teachers couldn’t provide any logical reasons these things happened.  They only said that Jehovah was behind it all.  Jehovah is very wise and loves us with all His heart.  Whatever His reasons, they are good ones that we must never question.  .

If we accept this version of ‘how we world got where we are now,’ we are led to believe that there is a very specific way that we are supposed to be acting. 

The world works as it does because that is the way it is supposed to work.  We, the children of Jehovah, are not supposed to question the realities of the world around us.  War is NOT a problem that we should be trying to solve.  It is a deliberate and integral aspect of life on Earth, as envisioned by Jehovah.  If we accept this version of history, we have a certain very clear reason to exist:  We are to work hard, pay taxes, and support leaders who help us organize our nations to be better at war.  We are to contribute to the ‘system’ until we are dead, without question or hesitation. 

Cynical people may feel that this explanation is not a legitimate attempt to figure out how the world came to work as it does.  They may think it is a tool, one of many tools that people have created over our (actual) history to manipulate people who are gullible.  It is not designed to provide objective information about how the world came to work as it does so that we, the people of the world, can work together with others in our species to solve problems and move our race toward a better future.  It was designed to make us accept a role for ourselves as servants of the masters and cogs in a machine that benefits a tiny minority at the expense of the great majority.

How Did We Get Here?

Science can tell us a lot about history.  Often, our prejudices tell us to reject science, because it doesn’t conform to the things we want to believe.  We want to believe that we (humans) are the center of everything.  We are important.  The universe revolves around us.  When we look at ‘the beginning of the universe’ we often think that it corresponds, more or less, with the beginning of humans.  (The creation story claims that human history began 6 days after the universe was created.)   Early analysis to determine the age of the universe involved reconstructing geologies in religious books.  Go back to the first human, then six days more, and you are at the beginning of everything.  Using this method, researchers came up with the Ussher–Lightfoot chronology which held that the first humans were created on October 16, 4004BC; the universe was created 6 days earlier on October 22, 4004 BC.

The 19th century saw a significant shift in thinking about the age of the the universe. Geological evidence, such as the slow erosion of mountains and the accumulation of sediments, suggested a much older Earth. Scientists like Charles Lyell proposed that geological processes were gradual and had been operating for millions of years.

In the 20th century, astronomical observations began to provide more concrete evidence for an ancient universe. Edwin Hubble's discovery of the expanding universe in the 1920s led to the development of the Big Bang theory, which posits that the universe began as a singularity and has been expanding ever since. By measuring the rate of expansion, scientists could estimate the age of the universe. Early estimates placed the age around 10 billion years.  Later research pinpointed the first moment of existence more closely, giving an age for the universe of 13.2 billion years.

We want to want to put a date on it and Hubble’s theory made this possible.  Our produces make us want this date to be as close to the date that humans came to exist as possible, because this makes us appear to be more relevant and important than we would be, if we accept an earlier date.

In recent decades technological advancements such as the James Webb Space Telescope have allowed astronomers to observe galaxies at incredibly distant distances. These observations have revealed that even the estimates built on the Big Bang Theory are far too short.  The James Webb Space Telescope has observed galaxies that appear to be fully formed and mature—billions of years old—just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang was supposed to have occurred.

Many still cling to the Big Bang Theory, in spite of evidence it is wrong.  But new theories are emerging to replace it.  A few of the more promising candidates are in the text box below.

We have prejudices that distort the way we look at history.  We want to believe we are extremely important.  We want to think that our time of existence is all that is important and anything outside of this period of time is unimportant. We want to make the ‘unimportant’ period as small as possible so we can pretend it is irrelevant and nothing of any importance happened until a few thousand years ago.  This just isn’t true.

Even if we accept the 13.2 billion year figure, and compressed it into a year for the purposes of comparison, the human experience would be insignificant.  If we start the year at January 1, the first members of the ‘homo’ genus (our ancient ancestors) didn’t evolve until December 31st at 11:48 PM.  This is a mere 12 minutes before midnight.  Recorded history didn’t begin until December 31st at 11:59:46 PM, a mere 14 seconds before midnight.

Why does this matter?

The human race is currently in a very dangerous situation.  We are at the very edge of extinction.  We need to look at reality objectively if we are to understand how to get us out of this mess.  We will see that objective analysis shows that we have very real tools we can use to help us get onto a path that leads to a sound, healthy, prosperous, peaceful world where we live in harmony with nature.  But we can’t build these kinds of systems on things we want to believe but that objective evidence tells us did not happen.  We will need to accept things that go against our preconceptions of our own importance.  Some of these things involve evolution and our very strong relationship with very violent and highly territorial apes that fight over territory just as humans do. We will see that if we accept the science behind this relationship, we can see that we can understand the forces that push use to divide into ‘nations’ to fight over territory.  If we understand them, we can alter them.

The truth is that we can only say one thing about the origin of the universe:  It happened a very, very long time ago, so long that the period of human existence is meaningless by comparison.

Solar System Comes into Existence

We have considerably more information about the age of the solar system.

In December of 1998, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) hosted a seminar. They brought together scientists to establish an evidence-based figure for the age of the solar system and of the Earth.  Here is the summary of findings from this seminar:

Earth Comes Into Existence

The Earth formed at roughly the same time as the Sun and other planets. The Earth started as a contracting ball of gas and began to form a hard surface crust about 4.4 billion years ago.

Scientists have many tools they can use to help understand how this took place.  The new space-based telescopes allow us to actually watch solar systems being formed.  We can analyze the composition of the different worlds and compare them to earth.  The Webb Telescope website provides detailed images that show planets being formed.  We have no need to resort to stories about beings with magical powers to understand how planets form.  We know how this happens.

First Rocks

When the Earth first formed, it was a gaseous mass coming together under the effect of gravity. The surface of the earth was the coolest part of the planet, but it was still far to hot to have solid objects in it for hundreds of millions of years.  The oldest rocks found so far have been dated to 4.28 billion years old.