Deep waters
have always troubled the human imagination. Even with all of our modern
technology, whole airliners vanish into them. Hundreds, thousands sometimes,
who dare venture out on them, perish in the cold slippery darkness, in minutes.
To our ancestors several millennia ago, they were really bad news, often filled
with unspeakable monsters. To the point that even the imaginative humans who
came up with our ancient creation myths shied away from explaining just where
the ocean depths had come from.
There are now, in this summer of 2014, literally 101
creation stories out on Wikipedia, from Native American to South Asian to
Chinese to Norse, on and on 1 (please see links in list of
references below). Most are good fun to read on a Saturday afternoon, with some
more than a tad creepy, and a few downright icky. But let’s focus on our own.
The one Hebrews wrote down around 600 BC, that Christians and Muslims
adopted centuries later, and still believe in to this day.2 Remember it reads
right to left….
בְּרֵאשִׁית, בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים, אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם, וְאֵת
“Bereishit Bara Elohim…” it begins.
Okay, let’s do switch to the familiar and moving English
translation ordered up by the otherwise very problematic James I, King of Great
Britain and Ireland:
"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the
earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of
the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And
God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light." 3
So Genesis tells us that God created the Heavens and the
Earth and the Light, but not the Waters. How come? Alas, because the Hebrew
creation story is a derivation, way condensed - a one god, PG rated version of
the far more exciting, complex and lurid Babylonian creation story that had
been set down in writing about eight hundred years earlier, a bit further
north, in what is modern day Iraq.4 And which the Babylonians had in
turn embroidered from the world view of the Sumerian civilization that existed
thousands of years earlier in the same spot.5
“First was the primeval sea. Nothing is said of its origin
or birth, and it is not unlikely that the Sumerians conceived it as having
existed eternally. Heaven and earth were conceived by the Sumerians as the
created products of the primeval sea”.
Meantime, over in Egypt also :
“They all held that the world had arisen out of the lifeless
waters of chaos, called Nu.” 6
We know now of course that water, abundant on the surface of
the Earth, is actually very rare in the universe, and far from being lifeless,
is the very foundation of all living organisms.
All the most popular creation stories do involve something
happening or being done to create order out of chaos. This is understandable,
given the limited perspective our ancestors had as a consequence of their puny
technological abilities.
It is very likely that you have seen this intriguing image
known as Rubin’s Vase.7
The idea that reality is the product of some agent creating
order out of chaos is analogous to seeing only one of the two images in the
drawing. With modern science in tow, we must now open our minds to the other
image there, the one that we have doggedly refused to see for so very long.
That the Big Bang was
a glitch in the Perfection of the Nothing.
Before that event, before time and space and gravity
existed, before all the variations of matter, anti-matter, energy, dark energy,
weak force, strong force, sprouted like weeds, all was in harmony, perfectly
balanced and non-existent.
Everything we know, from galaxies to icebergs to sharks to
humans to microbes to molecules, and on down to the utterly strange world of
the sub-atomic, is the weird and wasteful, hideously complex, but un-designed
and unplanned spawn - of some sort of unwelcome disturbance.
Why is it important to think about all this, in this
different manner?
Because a creation narrative is the most pervasive influence
on how humans attempt to order and make sense of their lives in a given
culture. Those of us, who no longer live under primitive conditions, should
lead the way in shedding the beliefs of our primitive ancestors.
Copernicus began our modern world in 1543, with his
astronomical book showing that the Earth was not the center of the solar system.8
After some five centuries, it’s time now to turn the page to new
thinking, clearer beliefs and better behavior based on an entirely different
paradigm of who and what we are.
Unencumbered by the fanatical actions, mystical mumbo jumbo, dark fears
and utopian fantasies that were, and are still being engendered by our
forefathers’ convoluted creation narratives.
We can and should seek to make the best of our situation,
accepting that:
None of This is
Supposed to be Here.
And as with any disturbance, it will eventually go away, and
the Perfection of the Nothing will be restored.
Because, yes, it all is “Only for Now”. 9
List of References
1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_creation_myths
3 http://www.bartleby.com/108/01/1.html
4 http://www.gly.uga.edu/railsback/CS/CSMarduk.html
5 http://www.sacred-texts.com/ane/sum/sum07.htm#page_40
7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubin_vase
8 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_revolutionibus_orbium_coelestium
9 http://www.songlyrics.com/avenue-q/for-now-lyrics/
Note to the grammatically fastidious reader – the writer has elected to use “logical” punctuation style for quotes.
