What is your favourite story of the creation of man, Veeky Forums?

>creation
Moreover, what is there to explain? Either it's strict necessity from ultimately non-propabilistic nomic laws or if it's a matter of chance, the odds of a very unlikely event happening at least once anywhere very rapidly approach 1 in a hugefuck universe with billions of years of repeated attempts.

the four metallic races of Greece and the demigods, as recounted in hesiod and elsewhere. a fine juxtaposition with the four kingdoms of daniel and the heroes of renown from genesis.

also these, but the Gospel according to St. John > Genesis

Organic molecules such as proteins have been synthesized entirely from basic elements, you know. like literally in a flask with water, some basic gases, and electricity

But proteins aren't alive

>by Kubrick

I like the theory of the big headed scientist Yakub creating man as a race of devils.

What's the most badass story of creation of man?

patrician

prole

how is that compelling

And God said "let there be light" and everything was fucking lit.

Enûma Eliš

>gods labour
>gods get slack f labouring
>make man to labour
>gods rest
>man is noisy
>gods want quite
>gods kill man

>rinse and repeat about 7 times?

He made man out of clay, that's boring shit.

I can't explain it. There are things we don't know. Mysteries in the world and in the universe in general. The origin of life from its building blocks is shrouded in darkness for now. Perhaps it requires a special set of circumstances, or perhaps its something supernatural that we can't quite understand yet.

Think about how little our ancestors knew about the world, about the cosmos, about the nature of existence in general. They made up stories to explain the things they lacked the means to understand from time to time, and those stories were eventually driven out of knowledge by the truth. Consider the outdated medical theories of the past or what ancients thought disease to be. Who knows what we will "know" tomorrow.

In context, its a direct cultural connection to how the ancient Hebrew tribal cultures made bricks from clay, water, and straw. You would appreciate this if you weren't a pleb. Religion always reflects the culture and society of the time period that gave birth to it.

Definitely the purusha shukta. Whole world created out of a Vedic song-sacrifice.

Maybe, but I'm asking for something more stupendous from other religions.

Creation OF MAN

Man made from clay is actually a fairly common creation story; clay, dirt, dust, something along those lines. It's the idea that man was formed from the Earth and given life by God. I think it's pretty stupendous.

How are you defining creation? If you mean the creation of man as distinct from other animals then I think evolution covers it. If you mean the creation of life from nothingness then there are several theories as to how basic molecular building blocks first formed into living matter.

This user gets it. The beauty is in the simplicity, and how the myth relates to the mythmaker to connect on a personal level. The breath of life is given by the ultimate creator to the most rudimentary creation of the Earth. It speaks to the humbleness of the creation as well as the supreme glory of the creator, and the connection the two share.

Darwin's theory and its development into the modern understanding of evolution is not a creation myth, its an overarching understanding of how life changes and adapts over time to the world around it, eventually branching off into different species and changing greatly over time. It has nothing to do with genesis or the first of all beginnings.

Is it as cool as humans used to having four arms and four legs and being powerful enough for Gods to consider killing them with lightning but then deciding instead to split them into two?

The Greeks, as always.

christlard brainlets btfo

I mean, if people stopped believing in it and then we waited 1,000 years it would be pretty creation myth-y.

epic of gilgamesh

what is the simplest living thing?

This experiment from the 50s has been torn down from biological theory

Bacteria. Here is an article about the simplest form of life ever made in a lab.

motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/jpgpz8/craig-venter-created-the-simplest-living-organism-possible-in-a-laboratory

sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131105132027.htm

This is a bit leading, as it wasn't really "made" from scratch as it suggests, they rather genetically modified bacteria.

I guess, it should go without saying though. Nobody has ever successfully "made" life from scratch. Every new strain of modification or domestication is a hybrid of something else.

what makes bacteria living to you?

Generally we regard bacteria as living since they are able to metabolise, respirate and excrete and divide. A virus on the other hand is not considered a living organism -if that is the right choice or word. Why? It requires host cells to reproduce, does not do any any of the previous mentioned functions and also is just a packaged RNA and some proteins to aid in DNA replication. Some viruses are still being questioned if they are living or not but this is the general thought.

That's about as close as I can go. Definitions can get tacky on the micro scale. Living or not, bacteria are what they are.

what makes humans living to you?

do you agree? why or why not?

Yes, I do agree. Because the parameters for our definition of life are surprisingly subjective at the highest and lowest levels. Bacteria meet those criteria, therefore they meet the definition of life.

Imagine a being with the hivemind intelligence of 1000 human races, each which connects to the hive queen and orchestrates her bidding. When one of their scout probes finds us, mucking around in the dirt and fighting with one another over everything, would this godlike species consider us to be "living?" Or would its definition of life associate with being part of a greater collective? What if its consciousness is hundreds of millions of years old, and views our 80 or so year lives as utterly irrelevant? Its all about perspective here. You could also imagine life within wavelengths of light, because why the fuck not, or 4 dimensional beings who view time as another dimension instead of as a passing event that cannot be changed a-la string theory.

we have souls

Who decides what has a soul? How do you know you aren't the only true consciousness in existence? What makes you assume humanity is any higher up spiritually than creatures more attuned to nature?

is the life of a bacterium irrelevant?

To me and you, yes. To the bacterium, no. But is it irrelevant if that bacterium multiplies and mutates until it takes on a form that wipes out millions of human lives? In that sense, its extremely relevant.

I think life is defined incorrectly.
There are more things not alive than alive, so life should be defined against the criteria of not being alive.
Life: The departure from the state of death, that which is not dead.
Death: The base state of all things, fulfilling only physicality, trending towards entropy.
When you do this it allows for a semi-quantitative assessment of life, as you can assess pretty much anything by how not dead it is. Ie Viruses can be considered alive but not as much as bacteria, which can be considered alive but not as much as higher Eukaryota, which each phyla can then be ranked against one another by how many traits beyond those of the dead state they are.

Although I do admit my definition of death is awful, I think their are greater benefits towards an empirical understanding of life if you can define it against a well defined dead state. Also it means that obviously dead things ie The sun or a comet can also be assigned a life value (although it may be incredibility small) which goes against peoples intuition.

It's an idea i've been mulling about.

i didn't mean its existence i mean its life. do the hopes and dreams of joe streptococcus matter?

Nothing matters, swallow the blackpill.

Do the hopes and dreams of people you don't know matter any more or less than the strain of bacteria in question? Nothing matters in an absolute sense, meaning is assigned by the individual.

I think OSC talked about this in Xenocide actually, when the main characters debated the morality of wiping out a viral strain.

I doubt the scientific community would work with this, but maybe in the future this line of thinking will catch on. I like your idea better than the popular definition right now. You could say a star is more alive than a stone, that an ember is more alive than soot. It provides a concrete ranking without drawing a meaningless line between a spook of black and white reasoning.

Reminds me of how Diogenes mocked the definition of man as "featherless bipeds" by plucking a chicken and shouting "behind, a man!" before the entire collective.

Kek

Clarke and Kubrick credited each other as huge influences on their respective interpretations on 2001, saying each could easily be given co-writer credit on both the novel and the film.