Poetic visions often passed on from age to age through rote repetition. In our own times, not many learn to recite by rote a verse of even a dozen lines. But all the lines of the Iliad and the Odyssey were once transmitted from generation to generation through their imprints on human memory. Hundreds of…
Whether it is the joy or the despair of love, the celebration of life or the gloom of grief, whether it is anger or anguish or mirth or moaning, every state of the human heart and every mode of the human condition has been brought to words by the poet’s pen. When we read…
Among the many capacities of the human brain are imagination and creativity. The two are not unrelated. If imagination is the brain’s ability to bring forth for our mental perception objects and events that are not in our immediate vicinity, creativity conjures up entities that are endowed with charm and beauty, even meaning and substance…
From the perspective of traditional religions, life-forms were invariably created very soon after the creation of the physical world. Here is another context in which science differs radically in its view of biogenesis. For, per current science, it was only billions of years after cosmogenesis that biogenesis occurred. In the remote past, more than three…
Since ancient times, thinkers have been struck by the wonder and splendor of life, as much as by the majesty and magnificence of the universe. It was generally believed therefore that all this must be the work of a grand Divinity. The idea of a creator-god, endowed with the qualities of omniscience and omnipotence has…
The fundamental thesis of the religious view, as implied in Vedic utterances, as stated in the Book of Genesis and as amplified in the opening to the Holy Qur’an, Man plays a central role as a purported end-product (indeed intended goal) of Creation. The will and guidance of an omnipotent and omniscient Creator are implicit…
One obvious difficulty with the Biblical Genesis picture must have struck quite a few thinkers over the ages, although they don’t seem to perturb some current apologists for literalism. As early as in the fourth century, Gregory of Nyasa wondered how any “man of sense would believe there could have been” any day at all…
The Rig Veda, which is said to date back to more than five millennia, has visions of cosmic origins. The best known of these is the Nâsadîya or Creation Hymn which appears in the tenth book of the work. Here one speaks of a pre-creation stage in which there was nothing in the universe, a…
Middle Eastern visions of a Creator-God date back to a fourteenth century B.C.E. hymn to Aton (the Sun) where the poet declares: How manifold are your works! They are hidden from before us O sole God, whose powers no other possesseth Thou didst create the earth according to thy heart. …
For the Judeo-Christian view of cosmogenesis we go to the opening chapter of the Bible, known in English as The Book of Moses, Called Genesis. Its original Hebrew title was simply Bereshith which means “In the Beginning.” When translated into Greek, it became simply Genesis: coming into being. Here it is stated that the world…