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Well, a couple of thoughts:
1) On the creation myth - yes, it's possible that the creation myth - or more precisely that creation myths in Genesis are an attempt by non-scientists to explain the big bang, having been told by God that that was how the Universe came into being. Sure thing. There's no real way to prove it, though. As it happens, all sorts of creation myths - including the Babylonian creation myths from which Genesis draws - have elements in them which might be compared to the scientific consensus on the creation of the universe, in highly metaphorical senses. Darkness, primal forces, the creation of the Sun and of light, the formation of the moon, the formation of the stars, the formation of the Earth. I'd say that these are the sort of things one would probably expect in the creation myths of a people standing on the Earth looking up at the Sun (and light) and the Moon and stars (and darkness) - not a million years away, the pre-Socratics were talking about ordered shapes of animals emerging from a jumbled mass of primordial limbs - is that evolution? Later, Democritus would talk about tiny elements out of which everything in the world was made up - are those atoms? One could certainly claim a motivating intellect common to all humanity, existing from the Big Bang onwards (somehow), which meant that everyone knew all this stuff all the time, and merely had to wait for their scientific understanding to catch up to the point that they could relate it to the physical universe. I'm not sure that it could ever be proven or disproven, or whether it would have any effect on the day-to-day progress of the world. It would be a religion, essentially - a sort of anagnostic pantheism.
2) Having said which, the universe doesn't incline towards complexity, or at least need not. Until fairly recently, the assumption was that it inclines towards chaos. Second law of thermodynamics, yes? Ultimately the universe breaks down into the simplest possible structures, with no energy transfer possible across it because everything is equal. That's been thrown into doubt lately, but it's worth holding as a model. So, I don't think it's necessarily the case that we can assume that the universe tends towards complexity, or that we are the most complex things in it because we are, somehow, the embodiment of the divine consciousness that pervades the universe.
3) And while we're here, let's not get too down on the Hebrews. The Book of Genesis as we have it was probably finished in the fifth century BC - that's actually a pretty sophisticated period. You've got Aeschylus kicking it over in Greece, Thales, a vast Persian empire with scientists and magicians... you've got a fairly sophisticated view of time and the passage of time by then. If you want to say a billion years, you could just about do it, although you'd have to work at it a bit. Of course, the idea of the time it takes for the planets to form might still just not be a way in which one thinks of the universe, but nonetheless. The final editors of the Old Testament are by no means hicks. |
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