They are curious: they mean such and less such, that and its opposite. One day, when I’m older, I’m going to go out and fill a bag with those words that express two very opposite meanings. But for now I’m going to settle for the word creation, which does it very well: it can be the action of inventing something, it can be the action of refusing any invention.
If we are magnificent modern optimists, when we come across the word creation we think of a powerful mind, a very free instinct, that makes something that did not exist before: the vaccine, paid vacations, a hydrogen bomb, the sonnet. The word began, like so many others, in Latin, where creare meant to engender, produce, name, and thus it spread in our co-official languages.
But it turns out that, before the birth of those languages, some incredible creators had created a religion that, in those days, appropriated everything that served it. Hence, “create,” for so long, was used above all to say that a so-called god had created — “out of nothing” — with his mere words Heaven and Earth and all of us.
The verb and its derivatives became the watchword of that religion. His totem was “the Creator”, his fundamental myth “the Creation”, that week of little talks in which He made everything that is: creating and believing became very confused. And, as they boasted of being accurate and truthful, those fanatics undertook the noble task of specifying history: thus they reported that the Earth and the heavens had been created on Sunday, October 23, 4004 before Jesus Christ, 6,027 years ago. By chance we don’t celebrate New Year’s Eve in a few days. (Although the great Isaac Newton did not agree: according to his calculations, it had been in 3988 BC: the controversy was almost merciless).
Now it seems like a joke, and it wasn’t: until less than two centuries ago, all Europeans and a good part of Americans were absolutely convinced that that was their story. Convinced in the most total way: that in which it is not necessary to reaffirm the conviction because no one even imagines that there are doubts. The thing was like this, the world had begun when that god had created it, that was his age and everything was from the beginning as it is. The supporters of immobility needed a motionless history.
It took a lot of creators—a lot of people willing to think differently—to start undermining that absolute truth. Around 1830 some English geologist said that the layers of certain rocks showed a history of millions of years; Some naturalist began to find fossils of animals so different that that god had not made them. They proposed doubt and it was a massacre: they disowned them, they condemned them, they cast demons on them; little by little they began to show that their ideas made perfect sense.
Although there are still many who still do not believe it. You and I accept—because we now believe in science—that this world is more than 4 billion years old and was the product of a series of explosions and was changing until, a million or so ago, our ancestors began to appear. But one in three Americans still believes that turnkey Creation 4004 story, and we don’t know how many in how many other places. That is the usefulness of belief: that it allows you to ignore the evidence, to think what you want or what you are told you should want.
And, above all, it is imposed: it is worth remembering the 2,000 years in which women and men were so convinced of that false story. Not only to deplore once again that institution that kept us in the most supine ignorance: more than anything, to doubt what we do not doubt.
How much of what we “know” with the same certainty with which our children knew that the Creator had created them—or that they were dying from an imbalance of their four humors or that the Earth was really flat—is as flimsy as that? How much more evidence of falsification do we need to doubt almost everything? What other ideas that seem undoubtable to us should we question right now?
We have to create a world where there is no Creation: where there are no untouchable speeches, where there are, of course, no bonfires or repudiations for those who touch them, where there are no fanatics who take advantage of those dogmas to gather power, lasciviousness and smiles.
It is our turn, at the end of the day, no matter how bad it may be, to create a world where the word creation has only one meaning.
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