“Creation myths are powerful because they speak to our deep spiritual, psychic, and social need for a sense of place and a sense of belonging.  Because they provide so fundamental a sense of orientation, they are often integrated into religious thinking at the deepest levels...  It is one of the many odd features of modern society that despite having access to more hard information than any earlier society, those in modern educational systems do not normally teach such a story.  Instead, from schools to universities to research institutes, we teach about origins in disconnected fragments.  We seem incapable of offering a unified account of how things came to be the way they are.” 

- David Christian

Christian, David (2004). Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. Berkeley, University of California Press. (p. 2)

“Metanarratives exist, they are powerful, and they are potent.  We may be able to domesticate them; but we will never eradicate them.  Besides, while grand narratives are powerful, subliminal grand narratives can be even more powerful.  Yet a ‘modern creation myth’ already exists just below the surface of modern knowledge.  It exists in the dangerous form of poorly articulated and poorly understood fragments of modern knowledge that have undermined traditional accounts of reality without being integrated into a new vision of reality.  Only when a modern creation myth has been teased out into a coherent story will it really be possible to take the next step: of criticizing it, deconstructing it, and perhaps improving it.  In history as in building, construction must precede deconstruction.  We must see the modern creation myth before we can criticize it.  And we must articulate it before we can see it.” 

- David Christian

Christian, David (2004). Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. Berkeley, University of California Press. (p. 10)

“History as a discipline traditionally begins with written records from about 5,500 years ago...  We need to extend our story backward, for the five thousand years of recorded history tells only a millionth of the lifetime of the Earth.  To understand the kind of world we live in and the kind of creature we are, we must look beyond the written record... Within the last fifty years the scientific community has established a verifiable, and largely verified, account of the origins of our universe – of where we came from, how we got here, and where we may be going.  This is a creation story for our time – for a world built on the discoveries of modern science, a world of jet travel, heart transplants, and the worldwide Internet.”

- Cynthia Stokes Brown

Brown, Cynthia Stokes. Big History : From the Big Bang to the Present. New York: New Press : Distributed by W.W. Norton, 2007. (p. xi)

"For philosophers, the most important discovery of modern science has been the history of Nature."

- Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker

von Weizsäcker, Carl Friedrich. in Forward to Bernd-Olaf Küppers, Der Ursprung biologischer Information (Munich: R. Piper and Co., 1986); Information and the Origin of Life, trans. By Paul Wooley (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), p. xi.