According to renowned British physicist Stephen W. Hawking, “We find ourselves in a bewildering world. We want to make sense of what we see around us and to ask: What is the nature of the universe? What is our place in it and where did it and we come from? Why is it the way it is?” These questions have had a profound impact on the human race.
Many ancient traditions across space and time have stories, in some form or another, pertaining to the origin of this world. We often call these narratives creation stories. Notable in literature are the monotheistic religion of the Jews, the Gilgamesh tablet often known as the Gilgamesh Epic, and the Popol Vuh for the Guatemalan Mayan community. These ancient literatures are best known for their sequential narration of the creation account and the origin of humanity by an act of divine power. This is a theistic interpretation of creation, or what is generally known today as Creationism. Consistently, theistic accounts of creation have maintained a cosmological understanding of the universe as purposefully created by an intelligent designer. That is to say, God created the universe, and He made it out of nothing (ex nihilo).
As time progressed, the theistic interpretation of the universe was challenged by the development of evolution and particle physics, that is, high-energy physics, in the twentieth century…To read more, click on the link below to download the manuscript in pdf format: