Creation myth

“ The current opinion as to the origin of the world in earlier ages was almost a universal belief in creation. This belief has been expressed in thousands of interesting, more or less fabulous, legends, poems, cosmogonies, and myths. A few great philosophers were devoid of it, especially those remarkable free-thinkers of classical antiquity who first conceived the idea of natural evolution. All the creation-myths, on the contrary, were of a supernatural, miraculous, and transcendental character. ”

“ Looking only at nature, or looking at it only with the lights of experience and reason, I see not how it is possible to avoid one of these two theories, the development of all organic existence out of gaseous elements, or the eternity of matter in its present forms.
Creation, however, solves the dilemma. I have, in my postulates, begged the fact of creation, and I shall not, therefore, attempt to prove it. Creation, the sovereign fiat of Almighty Power, gives us the commencing point, which we in vain seek in nature. But what is creation? ”

“ To try to find science in mythology is like looking upon Dante's Divine Comedy as a tale of real adventure.
It is interesting to study the speculations which Christian thinkers have evolved upon the question of creation. Usually, the idea of a creation of the physical world out of nothing by a fiat has been favored. "I am the Lord, that maketh all things; that stretches forth the heavens alone; that spreadeth abroad the earth." Such is the natural goal of the idea of a creation. ”

“ The first cycle of myths—that is, those which refer to creation, in other words to the metamorphoses of [Pg xix] the first people or gods into everything which is in the world, including the world itself—is succeeded by another in which are described the various changes, phenomena, and processes observed throughout nature. ”

“ Miracle discredits the ordered scheme of creation; and quite as much does it do so if you believe creation to be the work of a personal Deity. Creation (science shows us more and more) was from its inception a process of absolutely related causes and effects—a whole system reared up through millions and millions of years upon a structure involving infinite millions of lives and deaths—and the whole a perfect sequence of causal happenings. ”

“ In a word, they have not arrived at the conception of the Creator as infinite and eternal, and that his acts are in eternity, not in time. Nor have they a conception of a creation by law—a creation through the Logos—that eternal Reason, that all-providing Wisdom—whose hand stretched the line upon it, and whose right hand held the plummet; a scintilla of which enlightens every man that cometh into the world. ”

“ To cease to accept on faith the statements that the world was created by the gods, and ordered by the gods, and that all mysteries were in their hands, and to endeavor to find out by observation of natural phenomena something of the elements of nature, was to gradually break from the mythology of the past as explanatory of the creation. The first feeble attempt at this was to seek in a crude way the material structure and source of the universe. ”

“ We have seen, thus far, how there came into the thinking of mankind upon the visible universe and its inhabitants the idea of a creation virtually instantaneous and complete, and of a Creator in human form with human attributes, who spoke matter into existence literally by the exercise of his throat and lips, or shaped and placed it with his hands and fingers. ”

“ Within the memory of living men theologians have been compelled to ask themselves: What if the geologists should establish facts that contradict our Biblically derived doctrine that the universe was made in a week? Again have they been constrained to put to themselves the question: [96] What if the evolutionists should supersede our doctrine that the creation is the immediate product of successive fiats of the Creator by showing that it came gradually into existence through the progressive operation of forces immanent in the cosmos? ”

“ No, the immutability of species had been seriously impugned, and bold minds asked themselves why a single act of creation, at the outset, should not constitute as divine an origin of life as a continued series of "creative fiats." ”

“ Double that period, and you come to the far distant moment when the present aspect of this world was called, by creation, out of the formless void in which it was before.
Modern science has raised us to a pinnacle of thought beyond even this. It has commanded us to think of countless ages in which that formless void existed before it put on the aspect of its present creation. Millions of years before God called the light day, and the darkness night, there was, if science speaks true, creation after creation called into existence, and buried in its own ruins upon the surface of this earth. ”

“ For myself, I am not conscious that in examining the theory of evolution I have been influenced by my belief in what is called revealed religion. I have, at all events, studiously excluded from the argument all that has been inculcated by the Hebrew or the Christian records as authorized or inspired teachings, and have treated the Mosaic account of the creation like any other hypothesis of the origin of man and the other animals. ”

“ But there was a time before creation, before this beautiful fabric of the world was made, before even chaos itself, or the production of the rude matter, of which the world was made. And this time must be affirmed, not only as to material creation, but to that of angels and spiritual beings. Reckon we never so many ages, or myriads of ages, for the commencement of creation, yet it certainly began, and there was a time before that beginning. For, by the definition, creation is bringing that into being which was not before. ”

“ The ability to create life from the not-living implies the ability to make full-grown trees or birds or beasts in twenty-four hours, instead of waiting for months or years, as is usual at the present time.
As we have already found regarding matter and energy, so of life. The record in Genesis is confirmed, for modern science compels us to believe in Creation as the only possible origin of life,--a Creation entirely different from anything now going on, and one that can never be made to fit into any scheme of uniformitarian evolution. ”

“ Here, however, we must remember that creation, as maintained against such materialistic evolution, whether by theology, philosophy, or Holy Scripture, is necessarily a continuous, nay, an eternal influence, not an intervention of disconnected acts. ”

“ Whether matter or spirit has been the world's architect, the astounding miracle of its creation is not the less. What does it import whether it resulted direct from the fiat of Omnipotence, or intermediately from the properties He impressed, or the law of development He prescribed? He who gave the law, who infused the energies by which Chaos was transmuted into an organized universe, remains great and inscrutable as ever.
It is time, however, that we entered upon a more detailed and closer investigation of the Vestiges of Creation. ”

“ What theology calls original sin, modern philosophy the brute inheritance—the ape, and the goat, and the tiger—is dying out of man. The perfecting of human nature and of human society stands out as the goal of creation. In a sense, all creation waits for the manifestation of the sons of God. ”

“ In what light, or on what principle, shall we most correctly read the prophetic drama of creation? In the light, I reply, of scientific discovery,—on the principle that the clear and certain must be accepted, when attainable, as the proper exponents of the doubtful and obscure. What fully developed history is to the prophecy which of old looked forwards, fully developed science is to the prophecy which of old looked backwards. ”

“ A pious expositor very justly observes, By faith assenting to Divine revelation, and not by reason we understand the truth and wonders, the reasons and causes, the manner and end, of the creation of the world. Reason indeed tells us that there was a creation, consequently a Creator; but reason without Divine revelation could never have discovered the circumstances and manner of the creation, which wholly depended upon the will of God. ”

“ What are man’s earliest ideas of a soul and a God, and of his own origin and destiny? Why do we find certain myths, such as of a creation, a flood, an after-world; certain symbols, as the bird, the serpent, the cross ”

“ And if a human life, with its spiritual being, were limited to this earthly span, then what would be the harvest of creation? Indeed, what would be the effects and the outcomes of Divinity Itself? Were such a notion true, then all created things, all contingent realities, and this whole world of being—all would be meaningless. God forbid that one should hold to such a fiction and gross error. ”

“ But each separate step in the program of creation was a separate and distinct act of creation. The creation of the vegetable kingdom, with its innumerable species, was at every step a new act of creative activity, as was the creation of the animal kingdom. And man was as distinctive a creation as anything that preceded him, for, as we have seen, there was created in him that which had not existed in vegetable or animal, the plane of the spiritual, with its inmost receptacle of God to enable him to become the moral image and likeness of his Creator. ”

“ Now let me show you an origin of man, with his intellect and consciousness, which will entirely overthrow the idea that he was a special creation in the sense to which you seem to be drifting, namely, that of miraculous interposition by a being called God. You must be aware, as you have read so much, that modern science has made great discoveries, and that there are certain conclusions on this subject which are drawn from very numerous and important data. ”

“ And here we have (as I think will be seen one day) the whole rationale of Creation—we have the conception which brings into line the phenomena of the visible and material world and their genesis, with the genesis of thoughts in our own minds, and their passage into visibility and expression; we have the conception which unites the mental and material, and which makes the whole Creation luminous with meaning. ”

“ And it much more exactly answers to what we mean by a miracle than it did under the old theory of creation before Evolution was made a scientific doctrine. For under that old theory the creation of living creatures stood on the same footing as the creation of metals or other inorganic substances. It was part of that beginning which had to be taken for granted, and which for that reason lay outside of the domain of Science altogether. But if we accept the two evolutions, the creation of life, if unaccounted for, presents itself as a direct interference in the actual history of the world. ”

“ But those older revelations, imparted to the first man and the second progenitor of mankind, are expressly laid down as the groundwork of that evangel of the creation, which forms the introduction to the whole volume of Scripture, and furnishes us thereby with a key to understand the history and religion of the primitive world—or, to speak absolutely, the true Genesis of the existing world, its history and its science. ”

“ We find in his book on the Origination of Mankind, published in 1685, the strictest devotion to a theory of creation based upon the mere letter of Scripture, and a complete inability to draw knowledge regarding the earth's origin and structure from any other source. ”

“ But theologians have stopped with the bare assertion of the fact of creation. It has been generally taught and accepted as true, that the universe was created but of nothing by a spoken word, by an Almighty fiat. ”

“ To assign to a hypothetical agent called God powers sufficient to produce what experience tells us exists explains nothing. The primary assumption, of course, is that there must have been a creation. But the conception of evolution has attacked that assumption at its very foundation. ”

“ Few works of a scientific import have been published that so promptly and deeply fixed public attention as the Vestiges of Creation, or elicited more numerous replies and sharper critical analysis and disquisition. Upon so vast a question as the evolution of universal creation differences of opinion were natural and unavoidable. ”

“ If we understood the process of creation there would be no mystery about it, it would be all reasonable and plain, for there is no mystery except to the ignorant. This we know by what we have learned naturally since we have had a being on the earth. ”

“ And when it shineth forth from the Horizon of the universe with infinite Divine Names and Attributes upon the contingent and placeless worlds, this constituteth the emergence of a new and wondrous creation which correspondeth to the stage of "Thus I called creation into being". ”

“ The creationist theory does not necessitate the perpetual search after manifestations of miraculous powers and perpetual 'catastrophes.' Creation is not a miraculous interference with the laws of nature, but the very institution of those laws. ”

“ What is the limit of my existence? Is there any other being in the universe between whom and myself there exists the relation of Creator and creature?
The whole history of the human mind, so far as we have any reliable history, is marked by this perpetual effort to find a First Cause. ”

“ An account of creation is given, not with the idea of furnishing man with an epitome of geological science, but because it forms a fitting dress for the portrayal of the regeneration of man. As all Scripture is given in parables and for the sake of its spiritual teaching, a history of creation must be, in its essential meaning, a description of the creation and development of the spiritual nature within us. ”