In this article we will introduce the concepts of scientific and religious creation myths. Throughout the next six articles we will take a much more detailed look at cosmology from various viewpoints.

Cosmology is defined as “an account or theory of the origin of the universe”. We will look at these various accounts, theories and creation myths of science, religion, philosophy and spirituality – comparing and contrasting their various views.

Keith Critchlow writes, “The great creation myths of humanity epitomize our need to transmit our roots and give original meaning to existence.”

John Michell adds, “The fundamental importance of cosmology lies in the fact that the images that a person or society projects upon the universe, condition its whole experience of life. Thus any system of belief tends to attract evidence and phenomena that seem to confirm it. A cosmology for that reason is a powerful artifact. It serves to actualize the reality that it purports to describe.”

Michell starts us off with a key point: the fact that a belief system can easily become a dogma, conditioning a person to reject any beliefs outside their system, no matter how valid those new beliefs may be. Furthermore, fanatically grasping onto a certain viewpoint can easily blind a person to new truths.

People tend to see what they want to see. They refuse to acknowledge information outside of their closely guarded belief system. To them, nothing exists except for what they want to exist. This is a problem. It is not a problem to hold a dear belief, but it is a problem to hold it so fervently that a person develops an arrogant superiority complex, damning or ridiculing anyone who believes differently. This grasping onto extreme dogmas, whether religious or scientific, commonly leads to divisiveness, hatred, violence, oppression, torture and war. Take a brief glance at human history over the past two thousand years and you will see how horrifically true this has been.

Dogmas divide & destroy

Returning to John Michell, in The Dimensions of Paradise he discusses three cosmological types available for the future.

First, he writes, “is the modern Western variety, based on no fixed standard in nature, formally undefined, and shaped by conflicting opinions and interests.”

The second type represents a decline of the first – a grim warning of where we as a global community may be heading. With this type, civilization has declined to the point where standards are necessary to maintain order. This order is provided by tyrannical artificial structures including: personal tyranny, dogmatic religion, scientific atheism, fascist economics, or Marxian historical theory. “The security they promise,” he says, “is never actually experienced, for, as mere human concepts, their eventual destruction or chaotic collapse is assured.”

Note that this type represents the extreme ends of both dogmatic science and religion.

Michell writes, “The lack of a declared humanistic basis to modern cosmology has deprived the present age of the proper yardstick for discerning aberrant developments. Thus policies and institutions are free to flourish that, from the traditional standpoint, appear vain, inhuman, and oppressive. Generated by them are equally extreme reactions in such forms as anarchism, nationalism, sectarianism, fundamentalist religion, and symptoms of alienation ranging from apathy to terrorism.”

The third type leads to another possibility that we as a global community can just as assuredly achieve as the previous negative type. This type “depicts the essential structure of the universe and the human mind alike, uniting them both within the comprehension of reason.” This type is dependent on the recognition of the metaphysical realm as the underlying creative source for all realities, the realization that everything and everyone is interconnected, and the awareness that consciousness is the building block of life and matter.

Creation Myths – Science & Religion

Mark Booth writes in The Secret History of the World, “Science and religion agree that in the beginning the cosmos moved from a state of nothingness to the existence of matter. But science has very little to say about this mysterious transition, all of it highly speculative. Scientists are even divided on whether matter was created all at once or whether it continues to be created.”

Before we discuss various myths in detail, in this and the following article, we will examine the differences between scientific creation myths and religious creation myths to determine if any common ground can be found.

“Concerning Darwinian evolution and Biblical creation,” writes Robert Butts, “the members of each ‘pressure group’ want to see things their way…Each school of thought takes upon itself, and often with great intellectual and emotional arrogance, the right to advance its own belief systems in the world at the expense of its rivals…All arrogance should be transcended as we become more and more aware of the limitless beauty, complexity, and mystery that surrounds us, and of which we are a part.”

Keith Critchlow adds, “The fact that contemporary mechanical materialist science cannot explain what life is, only what it does, serves as a warning…We should be extremely wary of adopting any mechanical (or so-called functional) theory to cover our ignorance when considering as important a phenomenon as life itself.

What is most distressing is that without a definition for life, and without a traditional reverence for life, the contemporary ‘scientistic’ community gains so much of its knowledge of living creatures by killing them.

Dissecting living things into smaller and smaller parts has nothing to do with the traditional meaning of ‘inner’. Life is a motive force within, and is equally a whole.”

Darwin’s Theory of Evolution

Darwin’s theory of evolution is an imaginative construct many have used to view the world.

The Seth Material states, “In all of the other imaginative constructs, whatever their merits and disadvantages, man felt himself to be a part of a plan. The planner might be God, or nature itself, or man within nature or nature within man. There might be many gods or one, but there was a meaning in the universe. Even the idea of fate gave man something to act against, and roused him to action.”

With Darwin’s theory of evolution, humanity’s meaning in the universe was lost, sadly replaced by a mechanistic view of evolution and the idea that random life developed from chaos. The irony is that this theory attempted to show how an obviously ordered mind and intellect can imagine itself to be the result of non-order. It asserts that all life has a common ancestry in which a single cell evolved into a variety of exceedingly complex forms, and this evolution occurred solely by random chance. We examine Darwinism in greater detail in other articles.

In reality, what this theory says is that the ordered universe, life, the miraculous healing capacity of the body, consciousness, thoughts and dreams somehow ‘magically’ emerged.

As the Seth Material states, “Evolutionists must certainly believe in a God of Chance somewhere, or in Coincidence with a capital C, for their theories would make no sense at all otherwise.”

Darwin’s theory of evolution claims the weakest of any species are ruthlessly eliminated through natural, predatory selection and the ‘game of life’ so to speak is unbridled competition, or the “survival of the fittest.”

This belief in competition leads to the idea that all members of a species are in competition with one another and each species in competition with each other species. It leaves no room for cooperation, collaboration or even symbiosis and it promotes strength, violence and manipulation as necessary components of life.

This theory creates the detrimental beliefs in humanity’s inherent greedy nature, essentially asserting that man’s nature is amoral. Anything goes for the sake of survival, it is said. This, of course, allows for all kinds of suffering and pain in the process of evolution, yet this suffering supposedly has no purpose except to promote survival.

This belief system turned Darwin into an agnostic and away from a God that allowed this process of suffering to exist. He assigned pain and suffering to the impersonal workings of natural selection and genetic mutation. Psychologically this had a profound impact on how humanity viewed Nature. They began to see Nature as bad, evil or chaotic and something that must be conquered.

Humanity, in turn, learned its presence on earth was accidental and the ideas of gods, souls, reincarnation, mysticism, life after death…etc. were ridiculous. Each man or woman was turned into a victim, vulnerable to forces he or she could not understand and certainly could not affect, modify or transform.

According to Darwin’s theory, humanity is part of a flawed species in a random chaotic universe in which individual life rests precariously, always at the beck and call of random forces, with survival – a survival without meaning – as the only goal.

However, Seth tells us, “A man who believes life has little meaning quickly leaves life – and a meaningless existence could never produce life.”

Regarding evolution, Rupert Sheldrake writes in A New Science of Life, “Very little is actually known or even can be known about the details of evolution in the past. Nor is evolution readily observable in the present. Even on a timescale measured in millions of years, the origin of new species is rare and the origin of genera, families and orders rarer still.”

The point is: we don’t know what we don’t know. Theories come and go. Truth remains and it is up to each and every human being to discover that truth for themselves. Truth lies within. We spend many an article in Cosmic Core explaining exactly what that means. If it is unclear at this point, there are 178 more articles to go.

The Mainstream Biblical Story of Creation

According to the traditional, mainstream view of Abrahamic religions – that of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, God made the earth and all of its creatures in six days with the seventh as a day of rest.

Many followers believe that the Bible is literally true, in every detail and in every way. According to this belief system, God exists outside his creations, separate from humanity and all life.

This belief system has been challenged for many reasons, not the least of which is because this system is far too simplistic and not backed by even a modicum of ‘fact’. It asserts the idea of the relative immutability of species – that is, it denies evolution on any scale and burdens humanity with the idea of original sin – that is, humanity is a ‘fallen’ species and evil by nature. Humanity must be punished first, by a difficult life on earth riddled with temptation, and then forgiven – that is pardoned and allowed into heaven after death, but only if that person believes exactly the right beliefs. Otherwise they are damned to hell for all eternity with no chance, ever, for salvation.

However, for all the falsity and guilt-mongering inherent in this belief system, it at least offered humanity the idea that they had been put on earth for a specific purpose and are not just the product of random chance and chaotic chemical processes. Humanity could at least see a possibility of forgiveness and salvation, and humanity knew they possessed a soul.

It is a shame, however, that these noble purposes were effectively strangled under the weight of fundamentalist dogma, guilt, torture, ignorance and war, creating so much unimaginable pain and suffering in the world.

Robert Lawlor writes: “The three dominant monotheisms which originated with and presently bind Western civilization, all adopted dramaturgies with one very simple element: One God, having a specific name who actively intrudes in the social, political, sexual and military endeavors of human life. This specified and anthropomorphized “God” guides nations through the rise and fall of Empires as well as through the, not uncommon, plagues, famines and floods. In this way the deification earns devotion and fear in their constituency. Consistent in the three mid-Eastern European monotheisms the ultimate “God” communes through a historic figure, (ruler or military) who is instrumental in establishing an institutionalized church…

“The Gnostics believed that collective narratives, such as those found in monotheism, as well as in its antithesis, atheistic secular scientism, distorts human thought and perception on all levels and can only direct the formation and goals towards corrupt and self-destructive conclusions.

For the Christian Church of Rome to convert this ancient sacred principle of the soul into a behavior report card of sin and disobedience and also to claim that all human souls are stained with “Adam’s original sin” is among the most spiritually debilitating devices ever perpetrated against human psychology. Permeating human history with the fear of death and punishment along with the guilt-ridden obedience made subjugation a template for a world totalitarian hierarchical system which overshadows humanity to this day.”

Science & Religion

Returning to a quote from John Michell in a previous article, “For a cosmology to be successful and lasting, it needs to be inclusive, capable of reflecting every possible type of human experience, physical, mental, and those that lie in between…The cult followers of Darwin, Freud, Marx, Einstein, and all other systematizers are compelled for the sake of consistency to ignore or devalue testimonies that do not suit their book; and the Church (though avowedly based on faith and therefore less vulnerable to incidents of being proven wrong) has nevertheless felt threatened by every new discovery that went against its temporary dogma.

To the extent that they fail to recognize and allow for all possible elements in human experience, they are inadequate, producing friction between convention and reality.”

We are left trying to combine these two seemingly polarized opposite systems – that of mainstream science and mainstream religion – so that all possible elements of human experience may be recognized and included. This is due, as Robert Lawlor writes, “to the human yearning for freedom from the millennia of warring monotheism which continue to fracture the potential spiritual wholeness in human kind.”

Despite the assertions of hard-line Darwinists, Seth states, “One mind alone could not come into being from chance alone; one thought could not leap from an infinite number of nerve ends, if matter itself was not initially alive with consciousness, packed with the intent to be.” Darwinism clearly falls short of the mark.

On the other hand, the Biblical creation story asserts that the universe was created for man alone by a willful and destructive God, and just as a cruel God must have dominion over man (and ‘lowly’ woman), humanity must have dominion over all other species. Biblical creationism surely falls short of the mark as well.

Furthermore, you have many religious believers who feel that as soon as God created the world, the process of decay began. This idea is mirrored in scientific belief systems among those who feel that the Universe is ‘running down’ – that is, energy is gradually dissipating and slowly disintegrating into chaos.

“Both versions,” Seth tells us, “conceive of a finished creation, though one is a divine production and the other is a result of nothing more than happenstance.”

We must expand our minds to accept the possibility that the world was not created by an exteriorized, anthropomorphic God who set life in motion from the ‘outside’, but that consciousness is continually creating life in every new moment.

“The view that unfolds is of humanity expelled from the center of the former organic, divinely created cosmos, and placed, irrelevant and purposeless, among the lifeless fragments of a universe constantly expanding.” John Michell

An Alternative Model of Creation

The esoteric stream of knowledge encourages one to consider a universe in which creation is continuous and spontaneously occurs everywhere simultaneously.

There is always new energy available from the metaphysical reality. All systems are open, drawing new energy and potentials from the Infinite Source reality. “There are horizontal events,” Seth tells us, “that appear in the true activity of nature, and there are horizontal entry points and exit points in all experience. These allow for the insertion of unofficial new energy, the introduction of surprising events.”

The esoteric model of creation is based on the active cooperation of its parts, and not competition. Changes of form are the result of creative synthesis, and the origin of all life, and the universe itself, is “within a vast, infinite, divine subjectivity – a subjectivity that is within each unit of consciousness, whatever its degree.”

“A subjective divinity,” Seth continues, “that is within creation itself, a multidimensional creativity of such proportions that it is itself the creator and its creations at the same time.

There is presently no science, religion, or psychology that comes close to even approaching a conceptual framework that could explain, or even indirectly describe, the dimensions of that kind of universe.”