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Essay on Creation of the World

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Creation of the World
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Powerful mythologies are normative, as Mircea Eliade described, defining for their societies how the world may be ordered. Myths provide the living backdrop on which people may act. In the Christian societies of Europe and America the “origin myth” that defines the divine order that Christians should follow is laid out largely in Genesis, and the worldview expounded within it in some sense provides the baseline from which “scientific” alternatives must deviate, at least within the Europe and America.

In Genesis, the world, created wholly by God, is described by a divine order composed of a series of superiority relationships—that is to say, of hierarchies. As the Creator, God has …show more content…

The transition is easily accommodated by the Fall of Man, in which decay and corruption are introduced into the world. These changes do not refute the static nature of Creation however—even the Flood (Genesis 7) or the destruction of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11), both of which fundamentally altered the nature of the world in which people live, can be interpreted as part of an ordering process. Eliade describes how many myths occur in a sort of “sacred” time (Eliade, Myth and Reality, p. 13) in which the Supernatural plays out upon the world. Even these later parts of Genesis, which concern less abstract occurrences—bordering on the historical—about humans, occur within the time frame of Genesis and can thus be considered as part of an extended Creation. Within this frame, the chaos produced by the Fall is slowly sifted into a new order that defines the present and is cemented by God, as with the covenant of the rainbow (Genesis 9) that prevents the recurrence of a great destruction like the Flood. And of course, from the very beginning all of the events of Genesis are totally subsumed under the providence of a single creator.

It is only a small step

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