Creation stories, or myths, that account for the origin of the universe, the Earth, the continents, mountains, rivers, life, or the first humans–these can provide a common purpose and unity.
Nation states have their own creation stories. But countries are demarcated by artificial political boundaries. Their creation stories tend to reflect history as written by the victors in politics and war. They are more likely to generate conflict, separatism, and polarization than indigenous creation stories.
The woman who falls from the sky is a great Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) creation story. In many Indigenous creation stories, the first humans are interacting with other creatures.
Sometimes animals dive into the depths of the ocean to bring up the material that becomes the continents, like our own Turtle Island.
Sky people versus bringing up material from the depths—both are important aspects of creation.
The question isn’t whether stories are “true,” but whether they enrich our lives and cultures.
Western science has competing creation stories for the origins of life. Some scientists maintain that life came from the sky, perhaps from outside our planet, or from electrical processes in the atmosphere. Others say life came from rocks and gases in the depths of the oceans, before there was any land.
In the latter case, which increasing evidence supports, Earth is truly the mother of us all. Scientists have found signs of early life in the Earth’s oldest rocks, dating back nearly four billion years.
Back then there were no “higher organisms”: species with shells or skeletons that turned into fossils. Nonetheless, some of the first microorganisms formed sedimentary deposits that later became stone. The earliest signs of life in rocks are subtle, and a subject of scientific debate.
Creation of life was not a single point in time. Evolution has been a continuous process. For a billion years during the Proterozoic Eon, it seemed as if not much was happening. Gradually, however, the Sun’s energy, through the process of photosynthesis, was oxygenating the atmosphere. So-called “higher” life forms like fungi, plants and animals took their place alongside the microbes.
Science has given us an appreciation not only of how our world came to be, but how long it took to create the beauty we have now.
The first organisms–our most distant ancestors–appeared many kilometres deep in the oceans where Earth’s internal forces were pulling apart tectonic plates. There, under intense heat and pressure, and without sunlight or oxygen, they developed the metabolic pathways that all life forms rely on today.
While conditions in the ocean depths sound incredibly harsh to us, life still flourishes there in the absence of sunlight. Since life’s earliest days, microbes have fed upon the hydrogen and sulphur gases emitted from hydrothermal vents, providing the basis for increasingly complex food webs. Scientists continue to discover bizarre new species of fish, crabs, clams, and tube worms at the bottom of the sea.
Think of hydrothermal vents as the cradle of life–the warm womb of Mother Earth. When life originated around them, the Earth’s surface was a far more hostile environment, bombarded with cosmic radiation in the absence of a well-developed atmosphere.
Life has persisted and evolved for billions of years. Having developed the ability to tap into the Sun’s energy, our relatives and ancestors—non-human life forms–found a nearly infinite number of ways to thrive on surface lands and waters, covering them in beauty.
The good news is that this can continue for several more billion years. The Sun is only a middle-aged star.
The bad news is that we humans, mostly through excessive use of fossil fuel energy, are destroying life, reversing billions of years of evolution.
Science has given us a magnificent creation story for life itself. Wider appreciation of this story might help unify human cultures. It can serve as an overlay to the tribal and nation state creation stories that sometimes unite us, but too often pull us apart.
