Creation Without Beginnings: 4 What Creation Myths Actually Do

To understand why the Big Bang so readily becomes a creation story, we need to look more carefully at what creation myths have always been doing.

Creation myths are rarely naïve attempts to explain the physical origin of the universe. Read attentively, they are not primarily concerned with how matter came into existence. They are concerned with how a world becomes inhabitable, ordered, and normatively intelligible.

In many traditions, creation is not an absolute beginning but a differentiation. Sky is separated from earth. Light is distinguished from darkness. Order is drawn out of chaos. What is brought into being is not existence as such, but a structured world — a world in which things have places, roles, and relations.

This is why so many creation myths begin not with nothing, but with something excessive and indeterminate: chaos, waters, darkness, formlessness. These are not proto-scientific hypotheses about the early universe. They are symbolic names for a condition in which distinctions do not yet hold.

Creation, in this mythic sense, is the cutting of difference.

Once this is seen, the question “Did the universe have a beginning?” looks slightly misplaced. Creation myths are not answering that question. They are answering a different one: How did meaningful order arise? How did this world — with these norms, powers, and hierarchies — come to be the one that holds?

The power of creation stories lies precisely here. They stabilise meaning by rooting it in an origin narrative that cannot itself be contested from within the world it establishes. By placing the source of order at a privileged moment — often outside ordinary time — the story secures the legitimacy of what follows.

Modern readers often miss this because they approach myth with the wrong evaluative frame. When read as failed science, myths appear false, fanciful, or obsolete. When read as symbolic anthropology, they reveal themselves as extraordinarily precise instruments for world-making.

This misreading has consequences. When cosmological models are unconsciously recruited to perform the same stabilising function, they inherit expectations they cannot satisfy. Physics is asked to do the work of myth while disavowing mythic intent.

The Big Bang-as-creation is a particularly clear example. Treated as an origin event, it is made to secure the existence of the universe as such. Treated as a model, it does something else entirely: it describes how a structured universe evolves under certain conditions.

The temptation to treat it as myth arises not because physics gestures toward theology, but because human sense-making consistently seeks anchoring narratives. Where explicit myth is no longer culturally authoritative, scientific language is pressed into service.

Seen in this light, the modern opposition between myth and science looks increasingly unhelpful. Myth does not compete with science by offering alternative mechanisms. It operates at a different level altogether, addressing the conditions under which a world is intelligible, justified, and liveable.

The problem is not that we still tell creation myths. The problem is that we tell them badly — pretending they are something else.

When cosmology is allowed to remain cosmology, and myth is allowed to remain myth, both become clearer. The former gains precision without metaphysical inflation. The latter regains dignity without literalism.

In the next post, we will look at a particularly influential mythic move — creation from nothing — and ask how this idea came to dominate modern thinking about origins, necessity, and explanation.