Mythologies around the world have given rise to thousands of gods (polytheism) who have all manner of duties and responsibilities and are credited (or blamed) for a whole host of natural phenomena. That’s understandable to primitive people who don’t quite grasp the science behind natural phenomena as well as the various aspects of the sociological, psychological, legal, political and other related parts of their world. However, humanity has also given substance or credit to creator gods whose obvious function is to create. That’s not understandable at all, unless mythology isn’t quite as mythological as it first appears.
*There are numerous creation myths surrounding the ‘gods’. The ‘gods’ created heaven and Earth; living things; other ‘gods’ – you name it, they probably created it.
*’Gods’ are of course usually responsible for creating the human race and beings.
*How did or could the ‘gods’ create humans, when we’re obviously descended from our primate branch of the zoological tree of life? Slowly but surely, the ‘gods’ created ever newer and improved hominoid species. How? By genetically improving their earlier experiments on more primitive hominoid and primate species. That genetic bioengineering ultimately produced modern humans from that earlier hominoid, and ultimately primate stock – most likely the chimpanzee branch.
*This solves a lot of physical anthropological quandaries like why our facial features; why our racial features; why our high IQ; why did we lose our fur; why are we bipedal; why are all our hominoid ancestors extinct?
*Mythologies across the globe tell tales of various gods, well known as well as obscure to audiences of our modern era, that have created life, the Universe, and well, everything. These ‘in the beginning’ tales I suggest were highly unlikely to have been invented out of whole cloth by our ancient ancestors unless these imagined mythological creator gods were neither mythical, nor creators nor gods, but sophisticated extraterrestrials who knew a thing or two about the need for explaining creations.
*Say you lived 8000 years ago at the dawn of the transition from ‘primitive’ hunter-gatherer to ‘sophisticated’ urban dweller (well maybe a farmer or herdsman in a small settlement). Now you have no knowledge of modern biological evolution, the origin of species, or physical geology or cosmology or astrophysics. Would you, in pondering life, the Universe and everything (in your spare time of course) come up with an ‘in the beginning’ or ‘as it is, so shall it have ever been so’? I would suggest the latter because in your world, your environment, your environmental world view, everything is cyclic – a seemingly endless repeat of events, of events, of events, of events (like a stuck record): Birth-death-birth-death; seasons come and seasons go, but always in the same order; the Sun rises-sets-rises-sets-rises-sets; ditto the stars, their patterns and movements are endlessly fixed (patterns) and cyclic (movements); you go from full Moon to quarter Moon to new Moon to quarter Moon to full-quarter-new-quarter, etc. You witness no Big Ticket newness – no acts of grand creation. You have no real reason to assume any grand scale ‘in the beginning’.
*Why would you assume that the ground beneath your feet hadn’t always existed as that solid good earth? Wouldn’t such an idea seem rather alien? It would go against the grain of commonsense.
*Day after day, year after year, you see the Sun rise and the Sun set. The exact same set of observations, the circumstances surrounding what the Sun does daily, has been passed down generation unto generation. Nobody has experienced anything different no matter how far back your ancestors go. Why would you not assume it has always been that way; that way forever and ever, amen? There seems no need to postulate that some natural event, or deity, created the Sun.
*That’s not to suggest you wouldn’t invent deities in order to explain natural phenomena you had no understanding of, like the tides or volcanoes or earthquakes or eclipses or where does the Sun go at night and why rain, wind, thunder and lightning? It’s just there’s no need to invent creator deities, deities who did things ‘in the beginning’.
*Yet ancient mythologies nearly all adopt creator deities and an ‘in the beginning’. The Universe isn’t cyclic – it had a creation (the Big Bang event). Ditto the Sun and the Moon and the stars and the Earth (land, sea and sky) and plants and animals and humans. All were created ‘in the beginning’. Why? Maybe because there were ‘people’ (i.e. – those extraterrestrial ‘gods’) around 8000 years ago who did have knowledge of biological evolution, the origin of species or physical geology or cosmology or astrophysics and were able to pass on that information to the human populace who (not fully grasping the technical fine print) incorporated those revelations into their world view: what has come down to us as creation mythology.
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