Riddle: How
is modern cosmology like ancient creation myths?
Answer: They both envision an exploding egg.
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| Vladimir Kush, Sunrise by the Ocean |
I learned about this parallel in Rupert Sheldrake’s Science Set Free. The Cosmic Egg is
featured in
many archaic stories of origins, like the Orphic creation myth of the Cosmic Egg in ancient Greece, or the Indian myth of Hiranyagarbha, the primal Golden Egg. Significantly, in all these myths the egg is both a primal unity and a primal polarity, since an egg is a unity composed of two parts, the yolk and the white, an apt symbol of the emergence of ‘many’ from ‘one.’
After Taoism became established in China, a
creation myth emerged in which the universe began as an egg that contained yin-yang
(female-male, cold-heat, dark-light, wet-dry, etc). The cosmic egg features in
the myths of Japan, the South Pacific, and Africa also.
Georges
Lemaitre, an astronomer and Roman Catholic priest, proposed in the late
1920’s that the universe was expanding. After Edwin Hubble’s observations of receding
galaxies provided the evidence for Lemaitre’s theory, he went on to examine the
consequences. If the universe is expanding, there must have been a moment in
time when it was a single point. He described this as the “primeval atom,” or “the
cosmic egg exploding at the moment of creation.” This theory became known as
the “Big Bang,” and is widely accepted today.
Today, with our technological, scientific worldview, we congratulate
ourselves on how far we have come from our primitive human origins. It’s
refreshing to find such a profound link to our past.
The Big Bang, unless you are talking about the TV show, places Earth at the center of the Universe sort of like Geocentric Orthodoxy burning Giodano Bruno at the steak. Nice Kush picture though...
ReplyDelete"When a 'red shift' was discovered in the spectral patterns of light from distant galaxies in the late 1920s, the idea that this was caused by the Universe expanding was only one of the explanations available then. Unfortunately, alternative explanations which explained the facts better were ignored, and the myth of the Universe expanding from a single point around 13.7 billion years ago was developed. Ample evidence is now available that the 'Big Bang' is a fallacy. See: The Placid Universe Model [http://www.aoi.com.au/bcw/Placid/]. "
Thanks for your comment...and I wasn't talking about the TV show. That's interesting what you say about a human theory once again putting Earth at the center of the universe. I'll definitely check out your link.
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