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MYTHS OF CREATION by Philip Freund

MYTHS OF CREATION

By

Pub Date: Feb. 5th, 1965
Publisher: Trident

A controversial study of man's conceptions of creation is presented by a poet and novelist (The Volcano God, The Dark Shore, The Zoltans) here ""venturing into a special field"" -- indeed several special fields. For the author does not halt at the conventional boundary of myth as a historical anthropological fact, not even at the more recent psychological updatings and interpretations. He moves from the five approaches to creation as he sees them in ancient lore (the watery birth, the golden egg, the dismemberment of the monster, the mating of the gods, the edict) to the findings of science in our century--Lemaitre's super-atom, Gamow's ylem, Hubble's ""discovery,"" Bondi and Gold's ""Continuous Creation."" He draws parallels between the myths of old and advanced ages, and witnessing the similarities, concludes that ""the freedom of man's thought is essentially an illusion."" Man must think as he does, and myth is the key to the mind of man. In the process of proving this, he upholds the tentative nature of scientific knowledge, the place of intuition in scientific thought, and in effect assaults the barriers of science as an absolute. Very special speculations on elementals and fundamentals.