How the Worlds Became: Philosophy and the Oldest Stories

Our ancestors told many a story about the world, addressing in imaginative terms questions we now consider philosophical or scientific. Among the oldest stories are those telling how the First Thing emerged from Nothing and gradually became "the ten thousand things," including powers of a larger and longer-lasting sort than those of mortals, sometimes represented in the motion of heavenly bodies. Such imaginative tellings or myths in some ways resemble modern cosmological theories, but in t...