“Order and Truth are born when Passion is aroused. From them is born Night and from Night the Ocean and its waves. From the Ocean’s waves is born the Year, which apportions Night and Day and governs all that the eye sees. The Creator gave shape first to the Sun and Moon, then to the Sky and the Earth, then to the Air and finally to Light.” Rig-veda, X, 190.
According to Vedic tradition the Creation took place in a completely different order from that specified by the familiar Jewish/Christian story: on the first day God created matter and light out of chaos; on the second day He, created the air by separating the sky from the waters; on the third day He divided the earth and the waters; on the fourth day He created the celestial bodies, on the fifth the fish and the birds and on the sixth the animals and man; finally, on the seventh day, God rested and contemplated his work.
According to Genesis the separation of light and darkness took place on the first day, the sun and moon not appearing until the fourth. The light which existed on the first day therefore did not come from the sun. Here the bible is perpetuating an ancient belief that light and darkness are independent of the sun, moon and stars, which exist not to provide light but merely to increase it, to distinguish between day and night, to mark the changing of the seasons, and so on. “We must remember that daylight is one thing and sunlight, moonlight and starlight another – the sun’s purpose is to give daylight additional brilliance,” wrote St Ambrose in his Hexameron.
This idea is clearly illustrated by the mosaics in St Mark’s cathedral in Venice and by the frescos in the baptistery in Florence and the basilica of St Francis at Assisi, all of which show the Creator placing in the sky two discs of equal size distinguished only by their colour or by an inscription.
The Creation of Light. The ceiling of St Mark’s cathedral in Venice is adorned with a series of beautiful mosaics illustrating the story of Genesis. The pictures relating to the Creation, in the first cupola, were probably completed around 1220 and are modelled on the Cotton bible, a 5th or 6th century illuminated copy of an -ancient Greek manuscript.
Whereas mythical and religious stories describe the creation of the world (by one or more gods), scientific “accounts” are concerned with the formation and evolution of the universe and its content. There are, however, many parallels between these two approaches.
The Creation of Heaven and Earth. The caption to this bible illustration reads: “The Creation of Heaven and Earth, of Trees, Plants, Stars and all the Animals”. The engraving therefore represents the first five days of the Creation. God the Father is seen setting the sun and moon among the clouds and the stars; below are the creatures of the land (left) and the sea (right). Engraving by Jean Cousin, in Figures de la Bible, Paris, 1614.
The Creation of the World According to the Nuremberg Chronicle
The famous Nuremberg Chronicle, an encyclopaedia of historical and geographical knowledge on the eve of the Renaissance and the largest book published in medieval times, was the work of the humanist scholar and Nuremberg doctor Hartmann Schedel (1440-1514). With the help of his fellow doctor Hieronymus Munzer (d. 1506) and the poet Konrad Celtis (1459-1508), Schedel trawled his vast collection of books (most of which are now preserved in the Nuremberg Library) to find material for this immense work – a history of the world since the Creation, beginning with an account of the traditional heptameron.
The Chronicle was published by Anton Koburger, a leading bookseller who was largely responsible for the development of the woodcut as an artistic technique. For the work’s 1,089 illustrations he turned to two local artists, Wilhelm Pleydenwurff (1434-1519) and Michael Wohlgemut (d. 1494) – teacher of Dürer, whose godfather Koburger was. This German translation, dated 23rd December 1493, was published a few months after the original Latin version.
Cosmic Evolution According to Big Bang Theory
Big bang theory is now the established historical framework for the study of the universe and today’s astrophysicists claim to be able to give a plausible account of its 15 billion year history right back to a micro-second after its birth. At that time the universe was so dense and so hot that it was opaque. It was not until approximately a million years later that it first emitted light – light which can still be detected today by radio telescopes. A billion years after that, the first galaxies were formed. One of these was probably our own Milky Way, in which several generations of stars have since come and gone. Cosmic gases condensed to form the sun about nine billion years later, i.e. about five billion years ago. Within a relatively short time the planets solidified around it, the most reliable figure for the age of the earth being 4.56 billion years. Once the initial intense meteorite bombardment had ended and the earth had cooled, life began to appear in the oceans: single cell organisms first developed 3.5 billion years ago. From then on the pace of evolution accelerated: the first vertebrae appeared 600 million years ago, the first mammals 200 million years ago. Our own species, Homo Sapiens, developed only recently – two million years ago. The seven corresponding pictures illustrate the modern equivalent of the traditional heptameron.
The First Day. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” The hand of God pierces the sky to divide the light from the darkness. This is the first stage in the transformation of the void; as yet no matter exists.
The Second Day. The hand of God divides the firmament from the waters below, the two essential components of the void.
The Birth of Light. The COBE Map of background radiation shows what the universe looked like a million years after its birth, when it was nothing but a homogeneous “soup” – all of it at more or less the same temperature. The electromagnetic radiation (at wavelengths including those of visible light and radio waves) is independent of matter and therefore evenly spread. Astronomical structures such as stars, galaxies and planets have not yet been formed. The different colors on the map nevertheless indicate minute variations in temperature (the difference between the hottest and coldest areas is a mere hundred thousandth of a degree), which are related to variations in density: the coldest areas are also the densest. The chart therefore shows how all astronomical structures originated.
The Third Day. The hand of God gathers the waters under the firmament into one place so that the dry land can appear, the world thenceforth being divided into land and sea. Since earth, water and the other elements had previously been part of a chaotic concoction, the number of spheres shown in the first three illustrations varies (two, five, four) as the artist strains his imagination to depict the invisible.
The Birth of Galaxies. This montage of pictures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1996 shows what could be the “building blocks” of galaxies in the infant universe: a group of 18 giant star clusters, each approximately 2,000 light-years in diameter, close enough together (about two million light-years) to fuse into a single structure the size of a galaxy. Approximately 11 billion light-years away from us, they belong to the period when the first galaxies are believed to have formed. This image therefore supports the theory that galaxies were formed by the amalgamation of star clusters rather than by the fragmentation of some vast proto-galactic cloud.
The Fourth Day. On the fourth day, time was created and its passage began to be marked by the motion of the celestial bodies across the sky. By now the earth had been divided into recognizable regions. This illustration shows the familiar geocentric universe of Ptolemy.
The Birth of Stars. In every galaxy there are great clouds of interstellar gas and dust. Within our own galaxy some such clouds, known as nebulae, are dramatically illuminated by nearby stars and have been photographed, studied and catalogued by astronomers for more than 100 years. Nebulae vary in density, pressure, temperature and chemical composition. Often we cannot see inside them because the dust they contain obscures our view, so we look at the infrared radiation emitted by the dust itself. Many of these nebulae are the birthplace of stars. Here, the Eagle Nebula.
The Fifth Day. The creatures of the land, sea and air, which God created on the fifth day, fill the earth.
The Birth of Planets. Bêta Pictoris, a star in the constellation Pictor (The Painter) in the southern hemisphere, is surrounded by a disc of gas and dust resembling that of the early solar system, but 20 times as large. One or more planets may already have formed within the disc while countless comets can be seen vaporizing as they collide with the star itself.
The Sixth Day. The heptameron culminates in the creation of Adam. Whereas previously only the Creator’s hand had been shown – the instrument of the Creation – His whole body is now shown as he raises the first man from a handful of dust with his left hand and blesses him with His right. God and the creature He has created in His own image look at each another with expressions of caritas while animals graze peacefully in the Garden of Eden, which extends as far as the eye can see.
The Birth of Life. These colonies of rod bacteria were found in 3.465 billion-year-old rocks in north-west Australia. The presence of such prokaryotes (cells without a nucleus) indicates that micro-organisms were already widely distributed on earth in the Archæan Period and that autotrophic bacteria, which produce oxygen, could have developed from these primitive organisms.
The Seventh Day. Having completed His task, God rests on His throne and contemplates His work. It is the seventh day and the world is complete and finished. Beneath God’s feet the cosmos, which He set in motion on the fourth day, continues to revolve. On either side of the throne are the nine orders of angels (listed on the left of the picture), protecting the cosmic “egg”. From the four corners of the world blow the cardinal winds.
The Birth of the Human Race. The first hominids appeared about five million years ago. Probably because they walked on two legs, their brains increased dramatically in size: from a volume of 400 cm3 (Australopithecus) to 600 cm3 (Homo Habilis) and finally to 1,500 cm3 (Homo Sapiens Sapiens, the sole surviving representative of the genus). It is not merely brain size, however, but cerebral complexity which distinguishes Man from all other species. Recent advances in cerebral imagery allow us to “see” which cortical areas are stimulated by various cerebral activities. Superimposed IRM and TEP scans, cross-section.
4 thoughts on “Cosmogenesis (5) : The Order of the Creation”
The parallel between the Genesis narrative and the Big Bang theory is somewhat disturbing. It’s like science give us a new version of the creation of the Universe not so far away by some aspects.
The comparison is just aimed to show how the rational approach of cosmogenesis is also looking for a time ordering of events. But compared to religious narrative the ordering and the timescales have nothing to do. The provocative aspect (and the limit) of the parallel is to have selected the same events. In scientific cosmogenesis for instance, events such as the emergence of the Higgs boson or the quark confinement have a major role while the appearance of Homo Sapiens has no significance.
Thanks for your reading!
I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon — the unimaginable universe. Jorge luis Borges, The Aleph (1949)
The parallel between the Genesis narrative and the Big Bang theory is somewhat disturbing. It’s like science give us a new version of the creation of the Universe not so far away by some aspects.
Not so far away from the religious point of view.
As I explained in another commentary, it should not be interpreted in this way. I am very far away from any kind of “concordism”.
The comparison is just aimed to show how the rational approach of cosmogenesis is also looking for a time ordering of events. But compared to religious narrative the ordering and the timescales have nothing to do. The provocative aspect (and the limit) of the parallel is to have selected the same events. In scientific cosmogenesis for instance, events such as the emergence of the Higgs boson or the quark confinement have a major role while the appearance of Homo Sapiens has no significance.
Thanks for your reading!