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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

And I am Joe McCormick. And in today's episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, I wanted to talk about creation myths. In particular, an aspect of creation myths that has always really interested me, but which often felt kind of overlooked, especially in my early religious education.

And that element is what people imagine the world was like before the time of creation.

Yeah, this is a, this is a tough one, right?

I mean, because on one level, it's hard enough for us to imagine the world before we were born,

much less some state of existence before the advent of humanity or the advent of everything that came before that.

But it's, you know, it's an important, you know, core contemplation, you know, what existed before the observable universe.

And it's such an enormous question.

It's only possible through human reason and self-awareness, building, allowing us to build out mythological, philosophical, and ultimately scientific models of phases of existence completely beyond our time, or beyond our observation,

beyond our just, you know, basic fathomability. And in a literal sense, the interesting thing is it does us

absolutely no good as a species to form an understanding incorrect or even partially correct

of what such a period might have been like,

or to even call it a period, may not even be accurate.

But to even contemplate such a thing, it doesn't really give us a survival advantage or anything.

But it is, I guess, to a large extent, urged onward by our deeply seated survival instinct

to understand the past in order to better navigate present and future threats.

Absolutely right. It pays to understand the past, but does it pay to understand what came

before the past? Are there lessons to learn from that? Yeah. But it is actually a question worth examining when you're

looking at religious or mythological creation narratives, because one thing you will notice

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