Cosmic Revelations: Every Culture Has a Creation Story
In the beginning there was a yawning gap between a world of ice and a world of fire. Where the frost met the heat, it melted, and out of the dripping came a giant named Ymir. Odin and his brothers killed him and built the world out of his body: his flesh became the land, his blood the sea, his skull the sky.
If you were raised in the church, you probably read that and thought, what a great story. You didn’t wonder whether it happened.
Now try this one. In the beginning the Gods went down and “organized and formed the heavens and the earth.” They formed a man from the dust, put him in a garden, and made a woman from his rib.
Most of us read that second story differently. It gets a pass the first one never gets. I call that the exemption: every culture’s creation story is a myth except the one we were raised with. This page is a short tour of a few creation stories, a look at why we exempt our own, and an honest answer to a fair question: isn’t the Big Bang just science’s creation myth?
A short tour
Every people we know of has told a story about how the world began. Here are a handful, kept brief.
Norse. The giant Ymir rises from the meeting of ice and fire in the void called Ginnungagap. The gods build the world from his body, then carve the first man and woman, Ask and Embla, from two pieces of driftwood. The story comes down to us mainly through the Icelandic Prose Edda, written in the 1200s.
Māori. Ranginui, the sky father, and Papatūānuku, the earth mother, lie locked in an embrace. Their children live cramped in the darkness between them, until Tāne, god of the forest, sets his shoulders against the earth and his feet against the sky and pushes them apart. Light floods in. Rain, in some tellings, is the sky father’s grief.
Chinese. Before anything, there is an egg. Inside it, the giant Pangu grows for eighteen thousand years, pushing heaven and earth apart a little more each day. When he dies, his breath becomes the wind, his eyes the sun and moon, his body the mountains.
Egyptian. At first there are only the dark waters of Nun. A mound of earth rises out of them, and on it the creator god Atum brings the first gods into being. Every year, when the Nile flood went down and the fields reappeared, Egyptians could watch that story happen again.
Hindu. Vishnu sleeps on the cosmic ocean. A lotus grows from his navel, and on it sits Brahma, who brings the world into being. And this is not the first world. Time runs in vast cycles: worlds are made, last for ages, dissolve, and are made again.
Latter-day Saint. Mormonism has its own distinctive version. In the Book of Abraham it is not one God but “the Gods” who organize the earth from matter that already exists. Our cosmology also includes spirits who lived before birth, and exalted beings who have become gods and organize worlds of their own.
Why we grant the exemption
Notice how differently we read those stories. Nobody I grew up with lost sleep over whether Tāne really pushed the sky up. We happily pulled lessons out of Greek myths in school without asking anyone to believe in Zeus.
But the Judeo-Christian stories got special treatment. We taught them as literal history in Primary, with flannel boards.
Part of the reason is plain: they’re ours. Ancient Greek religion was a living faith for well over a thousand years, with temples, priests and sacrifices. Its stories were passed down by singers and poets long before anyone wrote them down. Our own Bible stories were likely passed along the same way. We call theirs mythology because nobody we know still worships Zeus.
The other reason is that a lot hangs on ours. Mormonism and most of Christianity rest the whole plan of salvation on a literal Garden and a literal Fall. Some other traditions don’t. Many Hindus, as far as I understand, read their creation accounts as allegory, and Buddhism doesn’t depend on a creation story at all. Those traditions have not had nearly the same fight with evolution, because nothing in them breaks if the story turns out to be poetry.
Here’s the steelman for the exemption, and it’s a fair one. A believer might say: the other myths are human guesses, and ours is revealed. Of course they look alike from the outside; the difference is that ours came from God. That’s a coherent position. But every tradition on the list above can say exactly the same thing about its own story, and say it with the same sincerity. The claim of revelation doesn’t settle the question. It just restates it.
Isn’t the Big Bang just another myth?
This is the question I promised to answer, and it’s the one believers ask most fairly. Scientists tell a story too. Their story has a beginning, a “let there be light” moment, and a long unfolding. Isn’t it just a creation myth for people who prefer equations?
I don’t think so, and the difference is simple. A myth asks to be believed. A scientific model asks to be tested.
When astronomers in the 1920s found that distant galaxies are all moving away from us, and that the farther ones move faster, it suggested the universe is expanding. If you run that backward, everything was once packed together, hot and dense. That idea made a prediction: there ought to be leftover heat from that early state, still glowing faintly in every direction. In 1964 and 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson found exactly that, the cosmic microwave background, and won the Nobel Prize in Physics for it.
Nobody tested Pangu’s egg. Nobody went looking for Ymir’s skull. Those stories were never offered up to be checked, and they didn’t change when people learned more.
Big Bang cosmology does change. I won’t claim that every detail of it is settled; it isn’t, and cosmologists themselves say they don’t know what came before cosmic inflation (NASA). But the core of it is strong enough that I’m satisfied our planet formed through natural causes, with no need for a divine craftsman to step in.
That’s also why I use the word “myth” carefully. When I call Genesis a creation myth, I’m putting it in the same category as Ymir and Pangu. I’m not calling it worthless.
What the myths are still good for
I don’t need our own creation story to be history to find it meaningful. As I wrote to my family, God, Jesus, the Book of Mormon and the Bible “still mean a great deal to me as metaphorical and conceptual artifacts.”
So I’d suggest lifting the exemption, but not by throwing our stories out. Read Genesis the way you’d read the Māori story or the Norse one. Ask what it’s trying to say about being human. You may find it says more that way, not less.
If you want the evidence behind the scientific picture, start with In the Beginning. If you want more on why “God did it” stops being an explanation, read God Magic.