The "Big Bang"

Creation stories are treated as truth by the culture from which they emerge—at least until they are "exposed" as "mere" myths. One creation story of modern culture is the "Big Bang" theory. Like all other creation myths, this one reveals the priorities of a culture; it is a record of our culture's understanding of its own place in the universe and its sense of what the universe is. It is told here by Brian Swimme in the form of an interview between a man called Thomas, whose ideas reflect those of the philosopher Thomas Berry, and a youth who is simultaneously the author and the collective voice of our curiosity.

• Youth: Where should we start?
• Thomas: At the beginning. We need to start with the story of the universe as a whole. Our emergent cosmos is the fundamental context for all discussions of value, meaning, purpose, or ultimacy of any sort. To speak of the universe's origin is to bring to mind the great silent fire at the beginning of time.
• Imagine that furnace out of which everything came forth. This was a fire that filled the universe—that was the universe. There was no place in the universe free from it. Every point of the cosmos was a point of this explosion of light. And all the particles of the universe churned in extremes of heat and pressure, all that we see about us, all that now exists was there at the beginning, in that great burning explosion of light.
• Youth: How do we know about it?
• Thomas: We can see it! We can see the light from the primeval fireball. Or at least the light from its edge, for it burned for nearly a million years. We can see the dawn of the universe because the light from its edge reaches as only now, after traveling twenty billion years to get here.
• Youth: We can sec the actual light from the fireball?
• Thomas: When you see a candle's flame, you see the light from the candle. In that sense, we see the fireball. We are able to interact physically with photons from the beginning of time.
• Youth: So we're in direct contact with the origin of the universe?
• Thomas: That's right.
• Youth: I can't believe I didn't know this.
• Thomas: Scientists have only just learned to see the fireball. The light has always been there, but the ability to respond to it required a tremendous development of the human senses. Just as an artist learns to sec a lakeshore's subtle shades and contours, the human race learns to develop its sensitivities to what is present. It took millions of years to develop, but humans can now interact with the cosmic radiation (from the origin of the universe. We can now see the beginnings of time--a stupendous achievement.
• Youth: It's amazing.
• Thomas: Most amazing is this realization that every thing that exists in the universe came from a common origin. The material of your body and the material of my body are intrinsically related because they emerged from and are caught up in a single energetic event. Our ancestry stretches back through the life forms and into the stars, back to the beginnings of the primeval fireball. This universe is a single multiform energetic unfolding of matter, mind, intelligence, and life. And all of this is new. None of the great figures of human history were aware of this. Not Plato, or Aristotle, or the Hebrew Prophets, or Confucius, or Thomas Aquinas, or Leibniz, or Newton, or any other world-maker. We are the first generation to live with an empirical view of the origin of the universe. We are the first humans to look into the night sky and see the birth of stars, the birth of galaxies, the birth of the cosmos as a whole. Our future as a species will be forged within this new story of the world ....

Bibliography

The most important contribution to the study of cosmogonic myths has been made by Mircea Eliade, who sees the creation story as the basis for all myth. See especially Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York, 1954); Gods, Goddesses, and Myths of Creation (New York, 1974; Myth and Reality (New York, 1963); and Patterns in Comparative Religion (New York, 1958). See also Charles H. Long's Alpha: The Myths of Creation (New York, 1963) for a comprehensive collection of creation myths. Also useful is Long's overview entitled "Cosmogony" in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York, 1987), vol. 4, pp. 94--100).

This text is taken from Leeming, The World of Myth, 41-42. Leeming cites Brian Swimme. The Universe Is a Green Dragon: A Cosmic Creation Story (Santa Fe, N.M.: 1984), 27-29.