Big History and the Creation of New Myths

Photo by Piermanuele Sberni on Unsplash. “Big History” stories which include a broad scope of history of the cosmos and the billions of years of life on earth are an effort to create a secular myth reminiscent of the Judeo-Christian myth.

(This is a brief interlude from the series on the reformation of Christianity.)

I’ve read several books lately that fall into the category of “Big History” before I ever learned that that’s what I was reading. One of those was Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by one of the newest of the globe’s intellectual leaders, Yuval Noah Harari. For reasons unknown to me my two post review of his book went Medium-viral and I took a good deal of heat for saying some things contrary to the secular-physicalist viewpoint offered.

A more recent one was A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth: 4.6 Billion Years in 12 Pithy Chapters by British science writer and an editor of Nature, Henry Gee. I must say I enjoyed Gee’s book considerably more than Harari’s, probably mostly because the physicalist underpinnings were more implicit than explicit. It was more science than propaganda, but advocacy for the belief system was definitely there if merely embedded in the observations and speculations.

There are others that may not fall into the specific category of “Big History” because they are more sciency than historical, still they try to tell a cogent and comprehensive story of everything there is. I include Sean Carroll’s Something Deeply Hidden and especially Brian Greene’s Until the End of Time.