The Edge of Forever

From Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos, The Book”, Chapter 10, (Ballantyne Books paperback edition Nov.1985, pages 200-201 and 212-213).

“….”Some foolish men declare that a Creator made the world. The doctrine that the world was created is ill-advised and should be rejected.
If God created the world, where was he before creation?.....
How could God have made the world without any raw material? If you say that he made this first, and then the world, you are faced with an endless regression…….
Know that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning and end………”
{The Mahapurana (The Great Legend), Jinasena (India, ninth century)}

Ten or twenty billion years ago, something happened – the Big Bang, the event that began our universe. Why it happened is the greatest mystery we know. That it happened is reasonably clear. All the matter and energy now in the universe was concentrated at extremely high density – a kind of cosmic egg, reminiscent of the creation myths of many cultures – perhaps into a mathematical point with no dimensions at all. It was not that all the matter and energy were squeezed into a minor corner of the present universe; rather, the entire universe, matter and energy and the space they fill, occupied a very small volume. There was not much space for events to happen in.

In that titanic cosmic explosion, the universe began an expansion which has never ceased……..”

“….If the general picture of an expanding universe and a Big Bang is correct, we must then confront still more difficult questions. What were conditions like at the time of the Big Bang? What happened before that? Was there a tiny universe devoid of all matter, and then the matter suddenly created from nothing? How does that happen? In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing. But this is mere temporizing. If we wish courageously to pursue the question, we must of course ask next where God comes from. And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and decide that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question. Or, if we say that God has always existed, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed?

Every culture has a myth of a world before creation, and of the creation of the world, often by the mating of gods or by the hatching of a cosmic egg. Commonly, the universe is naively imagined to follow human or animal precedent. Here, for example, are five small extracts from such myths, at different levels of sophistication, from the Pacific Basin:


In the very beginning everything was resting in perpetual darkness; night oppressed everything like an impenetrable thicket.
(The Great Father myth of the Aranda people of Central Australia)

All was in suspense, all calm, all in silence, all motionless and still; and the expanse of the sky was empty.
(The Popol Vuh of the Quiché Maya)

Na Arean sat alone in space as a cloud that floats in nothingness. He slept not, for there was no sleep, he hungered not, for as yet there was no hunger. So he remained for a great while, until a thought came to his mind. He said to himself, “I will make a thing”.
(A myth from Maiana, Gilbert Islands)

First there was the great cosmic egg. Inside the egg was chaos, and floating in chaos was P’an Ku, the Undeveloped, the divine Embryo. And P’an Ku burst out of the egg, four times larger than any man today, with a hammer and chisel in his hand with which he fashioned the world.
(The P’an Ku myths, China, around third century)


Before heaven and earth had taken form all was vague and amorphous….
That which was clear and light drifted up to become heaven, while that which was heavy and turbid solidified to become earth. It was very easy for the pure, fine material to come together, but extremely difficult for the heavy, turbid material to solidify. Therefore heaven was completed first and earth assumed shape after. When heaven and earth were joined in emptiness and all was unwrought simplicity, then without having been created things came into being. This was the great Oneness but all became different……….
(Huai-nan Tau, China, around first century, B.C.)

Theses myths are tributes to human audacity. The chief difference between them and our modern scientific myth of the Big Bang is that science is self-questioning, and that we can perform experiments and observations to test our ideas. But those other creation stories are worthy of our deep respect……….”