Creation Mythologies
January 21, 2019
Perseus with head of Medusa (detail) Benvenuto Cellini
NO ONE believes in the Greek gods anymore. Gaia, the earth mother who gave birth to Uranus, the sky deity with whom she later conceived the Titans and a whole pantheon of passionately warring and amorous divinities — any adult today who accepted this as true history or theology would not be taken seriously. Can you imagine a student at Princeton, say, seriously maintaining that Zeus is real? Agreement is universal: these gods do not govern our world. According to Hesiod, the famous ancient poet and chronicler of the gods:
[Gaia] lay with Heaven and bore deep swirling Oceanus, Coeus, and Crius and Hyperion and Ipateus, Theia and Rhea, Themis and Mnemosyne and gold-crowned Phoebe and lovely Tethys. After them was born Cronos (Cronus) the wily, youngest and most terrible of her children, and he hated his lusty sire.
The stories of the Greek gods contain psychological insights and intuitions about the creation of the universe, the immortality of man and the existence of warring supernatural beings. But no one worships these gods anymore or appeals to them for assistance.
It’s interesting to speculate as to what the Greeks of ancient times would think of us, if they could come back to life. What would they think of our creation story?
In the Greek stories, supernatural beings created man and gave him a soul. In other words, something created something. In the Darwinian account, which is the reigning creation story, nothing created something. The idea that Zeus sent Prometheus to earth to create man out of mud and Athena breathed life into his clay figure, isn’t that far less absurd and hard to swallow — the Greeks might think — than the idea that primordial, living organisms arose out of nothing and through natural changes alone evolved into beings who resembled no other creatures on earth in their capacity to think and speak.
The Greeks would probably be amazed that any society could so throughly fall under the spell of such a fantastic (and boring) myth as has ours. They might find it preposterous that parents spend huge sums to send their children to schools where the idea that the human mind “evolved” from non-conscious mud is seriously promoted. Although they had their own proponents of philosophical materialism, it was not generally accepted or imposed by the ruling classes.
The Greek stories sustained a society of constant warfare. They certainly encouraged battle. Perhaps the wise Greeks might analyze our leading creation story and see that it makes sense in a world ruled by money. For in the Darwinian account, there is no such thing as right or wrong. There is no such thing as truth or justice. Everything is biological. And where there is no objective right or wrong, the powerless have no argument or defense against the powerful.
“Darwinism is a system of control which is effective because it denies the reality of any stable being. If everything is in flux, there is no such thing as justice and no way to object to an unjust social order,” Dr. E. Michael Jones has written.
Though the Greek gods were often capricious, selfish, lustful and violent, they also represented noble qualities — and hinted at the existence of objective good and evil. The goddess Athena stood for war if the cause was just. She came to represent wisdom and an eternal battle between moral opposites.
In the Darwinian pantheon, there is no right or wrong because everything — even the human mind — is an emanation of matter.
Darwinism, Jones states, plays a crucial role in an empire of money and warfare because it allows “scientific” materialism “to rule out of court any moral objection to the economic exploitation that is an intrinsic part of the oligarchic system known as capitalism. Control means, in the first instance, decertifying any and all forms of logos or rationality which restrict the power of the oligarchs.”
The Darwinian universe is crueler than the universe of Zeus. At the end of the day, it’s really about power. Our creation story fits our culture, and the cut-throat materialism that is its guiding ethic.
