Our ancestors understood origins by extrapolating from their own experience; how else could they have done it! So the universe was hatched from a cosmic egg or conceived in the sexual congress of a mother god and a father god or was a kind of product of the creator’s workshop; perhaps the latest of many flawed attempts. The universe was not much bigger than what we see and not much older than our written or oral records; and nowhere very different from places that we know. We tended in our cosmologies to make thing familiar. Despite all our best efforts, we have not been very inventive. In the West, heaven is placid and fluffy; and hell is like the inside of a volcano. In many stories, both realms are governed by dominance hierarchies headed by gods or devils. Monotheists talked about the king of kings. In every culture, we imagined something like our own political system running the universe; few found the similarity suspicious. Then science came along and taught us that we are ...
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