Creation Stories Quotes

The way I define 'intelligent design' is that when people started out, we wanted to make sense of the world we lived in, so we created stories about how things worked.

I don't believe in Gods and devils. I think it's man-made stories to try and help people understand where all this came from. They said 'Where did the world come from if there's no God', 'Where did life come from'. Just say 'I don't know'. Don't say some guy made a man and a woman. You have no business doing that, you know what I mean? And then He got mad and flooded the whole world; told Noah to build an arc. These are terrible stories.

We hunger to understand, so we invent myths about how we imagine the world is constructed - and they're, of course, based upon what we know, which is ourselves and other animals. So we make up stories about how the world was hatched from a cosmic egg or created after the mating of cosmic deities or by some fiat of a powerful being.

I have built my world through Native American mythology.

Gods always behave like the people who make them.

Creation stories, so central in the religions of the Middle East, play a surprisingly marginal part in Greek myth. The Greeks had nothing to set alongside the resounding 'In the beginning' in the book of Genesis, where one eternal God creates the universe out of nothing.

We ought to recognize that religious strife is not the consequence of differences among people. It's about conflicts between creation stories.

It is only myth that attempts to say how the universe came to be, either four thousand or twenty billion years ago.

For the Greeks, there was no single canonical version of creation, but a number of overlapping stories.

Myths are about the human struggle to deal with the great passages of time and life--birth, death, marriage, the transitions from childhood to adulthood to old age. They meet a need in the psychological or spiritual nature of humans that has absolutely nothing to do with science. To try to turn a myth into a science, or a science into a myth, is an insult to myths, an insult to religion, and an insult to science. In attempting to do this, creationists have missed the significance, meaning, and sublime nature of myths. They took a beautiful story of creation and re-creation and ruined it.

Few nations have been so poor as to have but one god. Gods were made so easily, and the raw material cost so little, that generally the god market was fairly glutted and heaven crammed with these phantoms.

Modernity sees humanity as having ascended from what is inferior to it - life begins in slime and ends in intelligence - whereas traditional cultures see it as descended from its superiors. As the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins put the matter: We are the only people who assume that we have ascended from apes. Everybody else take it for granted that they are descended from gods.

I loved all the world's mythologies.

Religion begins in story. Yes, it does, because religion is an attempt to make sense of what is incomprehensible to us, what is inexplicable, what is awe-inspiring, what is frightening, what moves us to great wonder, and so on. That is the religious impulse, and it is part of our psychological makeup -- of everyone's psychological makeup.

I personally have a hard time with a lot of the creation stories that revolve around the creator being a white man. It seems very limiting to me. So God to me is... so limitless and magical and loving and beautiful.

Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted.

There is no way that you can read the entire Bible seriously and take every word literally. Contradictions start in the first chapter of Genesis. There are two Creation stories, two stories of the making of Adam and Eve. And that is all right. The Bible is still true.

Science and mythology were the topics which fascinated me since my early childhood.

If you take different mythologies from different cultures, the names may change and the story lines may vary but there is always something in common.

Creation stories had never been regarded as historically accurate; their purpose was therapeutic. But once you start reading Genesis as scientifically valid, you have bad science and bad religion.

Mythology is studied in the school system because most of us come from it.

We read Greek and Norse mythology until it came out of our ears. And the Bible.

Before we understood that houses shift just over time because the ground is moving, the creaks in a house were assumed to be apparitions, or ghosts. Before we understood that we live on a planet, and there are others, the only answers to where we came from had to be something supernatural.

I know a little about Greek mythology. It's not that far away from the Nordic mythology.

'Sanctus' deals with creation myths in every culture. It fascinates me that all cultures, evolving independently, have similar models of mankind's origins, of a Greater Being, of the flood, and so on. It's amazing how they crop up time and time again.