Origins of the Universe: From Mythology to Modern Science

The Quest for Explanations: Beauty and Forces of Nature

The need to find explanations for the beauty of the cosmos and the forces of nature is a fundamental human drive. The inability to find appropriate responses can produce a confusion difficult to bear. To alleviate this anxiety and intellectual restlessness, the first explanations arose from mythology and religion. Nietzsche claimed that human beings preferred nothingness to a lack of belief, and any explanation was better than none.

Judeo-Christian Legend

These explanations appear in the Bible. This work tells that God created the earth in succession: the firmament, the seas, plants, stars, and finally, animals. His work culminated with the creation of man, who was in charge and master of all that exists. The story shows that the universe is a work of God, who freely chose to create it. It is a creationist interpretation of the universe, also present in other religions. Creationism is an interpretation based on a pre-existing god to explain the origin of the world.

Greek Explanation

For the Greeks and Romans, the idea of creation ex nihilo (from nothing) did not make sense because it was impossible for absolute nothingness to produce the cosmos. In antiquity, it was believed that there was a chaotic matter on which God worked as a goldsmith or a craftsman. The universe was, therefore, a divine work of art. The Greek cosmologies of Homer and Hesiod give us a vision of its genesis very different from Christianity. These cosmologies are mythic narratives that attempt to answer questions about the foundation and origin of the world.

Anthropocentrism

Anthropocentrism is another key theory in the fixist conception. This is a typical viewpoint of philosophy from the later Middle Ages. In anthropocentrism, man believes he is the center of creation because he is the most important being.

Relativism

Relativism is a position that considers that something (a sentence, a pattern of conduct, a standard, a concept) is linked to another entity and therefore cannot be understood except by reference to this. It can be distinguished, including cultural relativism, cognitive relativism, moral relativism, linguistic relativism, and epistemological relativism.

The Rise of Evolutionary Thought

In the seventeenth century, Lamarck was the first to venture the idea that species were not always the same. With this in mind, Lamarck fully faced fixism, which was offset by a new theory: transformism. Transformism explains that some species originate from others as a result of anatomical changes, because, according to Lamarck, function creates the organ. To adapt to the environment, species are transformed with the use of more appropriate body parts, while useless ones atrophy. Thus, components of different species acquire new characteristics transmitted by inheritance to their descendants. The best-known example that Lamarck gives is that of giraffes. These animals, while trying to reach higher leaves of trees, subjected their necks to continuous stretching, so that it lasted up to get the current length. However, acquired characteristics cannot be inherited because only genes and, therefore, genetic mutations are inherited. For this reason, Lamarck was wrong.

Darwin's Theory of Evolution

• All living things have a common origin.
• Living organisms are related to each other because the descendants of the first form of life slowly generated all the others.
• Species evolve. Species appear, become extinct, and change constantly, but we can only observe changes in the long term.
• Gradualism: the process of change is gradual, and there are no sudden and discontinuous jumps from one species to another.
• Natural selection is the great discovery of Darwin and Wallace. It is the mechanism that causes evolution.

Culture, Ethnocentrism, and Universalism

Culture is the set of all forms and expressions of a given society. Ethnocentrism is the act of understanding, judging, or evaluating another culture or social group in accordance with the standards and values of one's own culture or group. Universalism, as it appoints many occasions, is the ideology that has as its end the unification of all powers and global institutions under a single head, whether by media or religious politics.