Creation Myths and Cosmic Reality
For the first 300,000 years of human existence, our known universe extended as far as the horizon visible from the furthest point our legs would carry us, bounded by the stretch of sky above us.
Within this limited vision, the power of the Sun was blindingly obvious, while a Hunter’s Moon could mean the difference between feast and famine. What could be more reasonable than worshipping the Sun and the Moon? Clearly, the difference they made was like night and day!
On cloudless nights, the myriad points of twinkling light and fugitive shooting stars fired the imagination and were woven into countless mythologies.
Our very narrow understanding of the scale of the universe was natural, given the scant amount of accumulated knowledge.
Knowing that we were smarter than the average bear made it seem reasonable to place ourselves at the very centre of a precarious and threatening existence.
When the known world encompassed just a small part of our globe, the overestimation of our importance was understandable.
Perhaps, while sitting around the modern miracle of fire, twiddling their opposable thumbs, a few wise, weary 35-year-olds—unable to keep up with the hunt and searching for ways to keep their place in the communal cave—noticed that the cycles of the Moon lined up with idle daily scratchings on cave walls.
This proto-astronomy may have marked the beginning of scientific observation.
Revealed Religion and Reviled Science
When the Torah, the Bible, and the Quran were confectioned, no human had ever travelled faster than a galloping horse, risen higher off the ground than their tallest building or crossed an ocean. The Earth was still a vast and largely unexplored centre of the known universe.
By the time Jesus of Nazareth was born, the size of the Earth had been known for more than 200 years. However, mankind’s enormous collective ego still positioned us front and centre in the grand design. After all, men were fashioned in God’s image.
When Copernicus placed the Sun at the centre of the universe, the Earth—and by extension, those who had dominion over it—was relegated in the celestial scheme of things.
This Earth-as-the-centre-of-creation-shattering discovery should have put humanity’s importance into perspective. Instead, the Church metaphorically shot the messenger.
In 1610, peering through his telescope, Galileo Galilei realised that the Milky Way was composed of countless individual stars. The size of the universe had suddenly expanded by unimaginable orders of magnitude.
This giant leap for mankind should have garnered honours and glory; instead, in 1633, Galileo faced the Inquisition.
Dogmatic as ever, the Church continued to maintain—on pain of death—that the entire universe beyond Earth was fabricated on the fourth day of creation: Thursday, October 26th, 4004 BC, according to Bishop James Ussher’s 1650 calculations.
Clearly, as Man (woman being a mere costal afterthought) was so f*cking important, God spent as much time on Adam (the apple of His eye) as He did on the entire visible (93 billion light-years across) and non-visible universe combined.
To Infinity and Beyond!
Fast forward 300 years, and little had fundamentally changed—at least among the fundamentalists. Some ideas that had been gospel, and God help you if you questioned them, were now seen as allegorical by more moderate believers, as the credibility gaps became gaping chasms.
The final nail in the coffin of humanity’s hubris should have been hammered in 1924, when Hubble confirmed that the already mind-bendingly massive Milky Way was not the whole universe but just one of countless galaxies! The ground should have seismically shifted once more under the feet of the faithful. Predictably, this breathtaking discovery was steadfastly ignored by the willfully ignorant.
A hundred years later, we know there are at least 100 billion galaxies—and possibly two trillion—in the visible universe. (For the time being, let’s not even trouble our boggled minds with the enormity of what lies beyond that visible part.)
Needless to say, organised religions remain doggedly disinterested in all but their small, impoverished, blinkered view of the Cosmos.
Over 80% of the world’s population still describe themselves as believers in one or another of those religions.
More scarily, at least to me, 40% of American Christians believe the Bible should be taken literally, word for word: Six days of creation, the Garden of Eden, Noah’s Ark, and even all the truly scary Apocalyptic shit in Revelation.
Flat-Earthers, by comparison—and only by comparison—seem relatively rational.