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This chapter demonstrates that Intelligent Design can be called a form of neocreatonism that, just like old-style creationism, confuses the word “theory” with the words “postulate” and “fact”. It shows that Intelligent Design implies purpose in the universe, a concept that science can neither support nor refute. It further describes creation myths as found in Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism, discussing how these myths influence scientific thinking in various societies.

Creation myths from several traditions – Zuni, Vedic, Christian, and Icelandic, for example – reveal several ways by which humans through the ages have attempted to identify themselves culturally in relation to what they have seen as the source of being. Ex Nihilo cosmogonies stress a central male creative sky power; earth‐centered cosmogonies see creation through the feminine metaphor of motherhood. Universalists and some scientists see a new vision of creation based on new scientific understandings. A literary example of a modernist approach to creation is Virginia Woolf's novel, To the Lighthouse.

Among the earliest monumental sculptures of the Americas were depictions of the human fetus. Along with representations of the human embryo, sculptures of the fetus were important subjects in the art of the Olmec of Mexico, 1400–400 BCE. This chapter explores the crucial roles of these images in the earliest known narrative—a visual one—of the creation of the world and the origins of human beings in Mesoamerica. The monumental fetus sculptures of La Venta, an archaeological site in the State of Tabasco, Mexico, were players in a underworld ball game. In this context, the fetuses, as metaphors for “life force,” battle the chthonic forces that would usurp that precious vitality. Images of fetuses and embryos in ancient Mexico emerge as metaphors for the ineluctable processes of metamorphosis that life entails.

This chapter examines the Gnostic nature of the Gospel of Mary. It argues that despite the lack of any explicit detailed account of a creation myth, or an explicit reference to the creation of the world by a demiurge figure, there appears to be sufficient correlations with Gnostic themes and motifs — both in terms of general ideas and in terms of smaller details — to suggest that the Gospel of Mary is indeed Gnostic text, or at least sufficiently close to texts such as the Apocryphon of John to make a comparison between the texts fruitful and positive. However, whether we can be any more precise (e.g., assign the Gospel of Mary to a ‘Sethian’ or ‘Valentinian’ form of Gnosticism) remains uncertain.

The development of the Zohar's creation myth will be traced in this chapter. This account describes the engraving of the initial shape of the universe in the midst of a primordial nothingness, or ether. The Zohar's creation myth is reprised many times throughout the entire work and forms the basis of the oral myth of Lurianic Kabbalah.

Like the creation myths of many of the New World's agricultural societies, the Navajo creation myth describes an emergence of all life from within the earth. In common with the myths of the Pueblos of the Southwest as well as those of the Aztecs, the myth observes a number of formalities: the cardinal directions have colors and characteristics; four, or multiples thereof, are ever present—there may be four underworlds, and deities often appear in four manifestations; and deities are often presented as male and female pairs. Emergence myths are found among most of the agricultural tribes of North America, and are based on an analogy to the cycle of germination and growth followed by maturation, death, and rebirth. Uniquely Navajo is the great emphasis placed upon the tension between male and female that culminates with the separation of the sexes in the third underworld.

This book examines how the ancient Babylonians approached the question of what true knowledge was. The ancient Babylonians left behind a monumental textual record that stretches in time from before 3000 BC to the first century AD. The system of reasoning the Babylonians followed was very unlike the Greek one, and thus that of western philosophy built upon the Greek achievements. It was rooted in the cuneiform writing system. The book focuses on one area and explores it in three structurally related corpora: epistemology as displayed in writings on language, the future, and law. This chapter considers the poem entitled Babylonian Creation Myth, which belongs “before philosophy,” the importance of the Sumerian and Akkadian languages to Babylonian hermeneutics, the Babylonian cosmopolis, the written and oral traditions of ancient Mesopotamian culture, and intertextuality of Babylonian texts.

The various myths that follow the immediate postemergence events do not follow any particular order and are not included by all narrators. This chapter examines those episodes that are salient in all versions: the coming of Changing Woman, the birth of the Twins, the slaying of the monsters, the creation of the Navajos, and Changing Woman's departure. It uses Sandoval's narration on the presumption that, because he was not a ceremonialist, he was uninfluenced by the perspective of any particular ceremonial point of view. For example, his depiction of Coyote is difficult to place in any ceremonial tradition.

The crucial defamiliarization of 19th‐century French science set up via the Alexandrian Schools in Part Two allows Hilarion to return as intermediary/antagonist once more, this time as commentator‐double of Étienne Geoffroy Saint‐Hilaire as Starr has argued. This chapter however fills crucial gaps in Starr's arguments by elucidating previously unacknowledged 19th‐century intertexts and their importance for tableau five. Its parades of Nature gods (from India to the more familiar Rome and Gaul) turn myth language into 19th‐century scientific ‘story‐telling’ in deep time—geology and palaeontology—to describe creation. Saint‐Hilaire's growing discord with Cuvier is set in place for tableau seven and provides a solution for the knotty problem of Hilarion's departure and the arrival of the Devil (incredibly as Science) at the end of the tableau.

In creation myths, the problem of the beginning of life out of non-life is addressed at three levels: creation of the universe, of the human race, or of the individual human being, the embryo. Hinduism, and the Rig Veda in particular, offers no one, single theory of creation. Instead, there is the paradox of mutual creation whereby Aditi and Daksha create one another. By the dharma of the gods, two births can be mutually productive of one another, yet the earth born from the crouching divinity is also said to be born from the quarters of the sky that are born from her. This chapter examines the logical paradox of creation myths in Hinduism. It considers the mythology of Hindu cosmogony and the creation of the human race, or anthropogony, as well as the distinction between gods and anti-gods.

This chapter exhibits the link between music and religious, philosophical, and political ideologies during the nineteenth century in Europe. Nineteenth-century compositions gradually became larger, as audiences became accustomed to concert-going as a mass social activity. The anti-Wagnerian Selmar Bagge characterizes Beethoven's forms as fairly usual with some modifications, identifying the finale as a fantasy to which the composer has joined aspects of variation in form. Exegeses or “programs” of the Ninth Sympathy fall roughly categorized into four sections that include search narratives, creation myths, accounts that interpret the piece as autobiographical on Beethoven's part, and those that content themselves with more general assessments of moral instruction. The catalog of exegetic excess mentioned by Schumann in connection with the Ninth Symphony involves the creation myth, which is a prominent one. The Ninth gave rise to an apparently unique fictional genre, a collection of originary myths focusing on that work itself.

Here is offered a new twist on the traditional view of the mound/pond complex at the Fort Center site (AD 200–800) in the Lake Okeechobee Basin of south Florida by interpreting the site through the lens of a Cherokee creation myth. Although recent work contradicts the elaborate mortuary pond platform proposed by Sears, Sears's original reconstructions are used because they provide the detailed stratigraphic sequences that are the basis for the interpretations. Brief summaries of the components of the mound/pond complex and the construction sequence are first provided. Then the construction sequence is discussed in terms of how it closely corresponds to aspects of the Earth Diver myth as recorded by Mooney for the Cherokee. The mound/pond complex is interpreted as an idealized reconstruction of the cosmos of Southeastern Indians, per Hudson (1976).

The modes of recovery, re-contextualizing, and re-writing of the Kanak creation story of the first man, Téâ Kanaké are compared across three versions; the play-spectacle, (Kanaké), written by the independence leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou for the Kanak cultural revival festival in 1975’, Déwé Gorodé's woman-centred Kënâké ou KNK 2000; and the young Kanak poet, Denis Pourawa's illustrated version of the founding myth for children. The shared oral culture of origin, depiction of customary pathways, and socio-political purposes of these three distinctively Kanak texts is never in doubt. A closer reading, however, reveals significant differences and oppositions. Gorodé's ambivalent text indirectly puts Tjibaou's patriarchal and masculine Kanak universe and his politics of reconciliation into question, placing women's daily lives and questions at the centre. The mythico-poetic and also didactic version of Pourawa, representing the younger generation of writers, partially sets its adaptation of the traditional tale of the Ancestor within an urban and ethnically mixed society of modern storytellers surrounded by kids on skateboards. Emerging Kanak writing itself contains inner spaces of cultural encounter and contestation, internal hybridities.

The essay traces a sequential history of violence of the Indian nation state, marking the Partition and the Bengal famine as its repressed inaugural events, its ‘creation myths’. Outlining the vision of the nascent Indian state which internalized and fetishized development, planning and related economic rationality, he argues how we need ‘iconographic meditation’ and ‘conceptual reflection’ to understand the genocidal violence of these categories. Further, reflecting on the paradigmatic moments of violence in the post-independent India—Emergency, Narmada, Naxalbari, Bhopal, and Gujarat—the essay unravels hidden layers of statist and developmental violence. As the state marvelled in the ‘new possibilities of evil’ in its systematic apathy to the phenomenology of suffering, there was routinization of disasters and normalization of riots. The essay concludes with an articulation of an urgent need for a new language, a new discourse to understand the routinization of violence and fragility of citizenship that are built into the value system of the current political regime.

This chapter focuses on Michael Harrington, a one-time member of the Catholic Worker movement in New York City before converting to socialism in the 1950s. He became “the man who discovered poverty” in what is one of the most enduring creation myths in modern American history. A poignant piece of social criticism that became a bestseller and political and cultural touchstone, The Other America was read by some of the most powerful people in the nation, even President John F. Kennedy, the story goes. Believing that poverty indeed could be eliminated, federal officials and liberal economists then set forth with what would become the War on Poverty, conceived under Kennedy's administration in 1963 and pursued, although never fully, by President Lyndon Johnson.