Creation Without Beginnings: 3 Why We Cannot Let Go of Origins

If the physics does not require a beginning, why do we keep reaching for one?

The persistence of origin stories in cosmology is not primarily a scientific problem. It is an anthropological one. Long before equations, telescopes, or spacetime diagrams, humans were already telling stories that began with a first moment. These stories did not arise from ignorance alone. They arose from a deep need to stabilise experience by anchoring it to a narrative point of departure.

Beginnings do important cultural work. They provide orientation. They allow time to be told as a story rather than endured as an expanse. They transform an open-ended world into something that can be narrated, inherited, and justified.

A beginning promises closure in advance.

This is why the idea of an everlasting or beginningless universe has always been intellectually admissible yet existentially uneasy. A universe without a first moment offers no obvious narrative foothold. It resists being framed as a story with a clear opening chapter. It asks us to inhabit intelligibility without origin — structure without inauguration.

The Big Bang, when read as a beginning, resolves this discomfort too neatly. It restores narrative comfort under the guise of scientific sophistication. Time starts. History begins. The question “why is there something?” is translated into “what happened first?” — a move that feels explanatory even when it is not.

But this translation is doing more than simplifying a question. It is smuggling in a metaphysical assumption: that intelligibility must ultimately be grounded in a temporal origin.

This assumption is rarely stated. It operates as a background commitment, shaping which explanations feel satisfying and which feel evasive. A cosmological model that traces the universe back to ever earlier states feels incomplete unless it culminates in a moment of absolute commencement. Without that moment, the explanation is felt to “trail off”, even if it remains internally coherent.

Creation myths have always answered this unease by fiat. They declare a beginning, often accompanied by an act — divine speech, cosmic separation, emergence from chaos — that transforms non-being into being. These stories are not concerned with mechanism. They are concerned with legitimacy: establishing why this world, with its particular structures and values, is the one that holds.

Modern cosmology inherits this demand almost unconsciously. The language changes, but the function remains. Instead of gods or primordial waters, we speak of singularities, quantum vacua, or tunnelling events. Instead of sacred time, we speak of Planck epochs. Yet the narrative work being done is strikingly similar: to secure existence by locating its point of entry.

The difficulty is that scientific models are not designed to perform this work. They articulate relations, constraints, and regularities within a defined framework. They do not — and cannot — justify the framework itself by pointing to a first moment inside it.

When the demand for a beginning is pressed onto physics, two outcomes tend to follow. Either the beginning is reified beyond the theory’s warrant, or the absence of a beginning is treated as a failure rather than a finding. In both cases, the dissatisfaction arises not from the science, but from the unexamined expectation that explanation must culminate in origin.

What becomes visible here is a subtle inversion. Instead of asking what the universe requires in order to be intelligible, we ask what it must have started from in order to feel complete. Intelligibility is measured against narrative satisfaction rather than structural adequacy.

A universe without a beginning is not incoherent. It is merely unscripted.

To live with such a universe requires a shift in explanatory sensibility: away from the search for inaugural moments and toward attentiveness to patterns, constraints, and relations as sufficient grounds of understanding. This shift is difficult not because it is technically demanding, but because it unsettles a deep-seated mythic reflex.

In the next post, we will turn explicitly to that reflex itself — examining how creation myths function across cultures, and what is lost when we mistake their stabilising role for literal cosmological insight.