Welcome to Gaia! ::

Creation stories exist in every culture. It influences philosophies and how we interact with each other and our environment. What's your culture's creation story? Do you believe your culture's creation story to be literal, allegorical, or both? For those that do take their story as only literal, is there any allegorical meanings you can make regarding your take on creation? How does your take on "How it all started" influence your philosophy on life?

Usually in philosophies, and theologies by extension, how the world/universe was created influences a sense of one's purpose in a given theology. Carl Sagan does this quite well in his "Pale Blue Dot".

He used information based on his culture and the information he had available at his time to beautifully describe how insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things, yet at the same time, explains how important we are important to each other. While not a creation story per se, he uses the information of the what we know now about the universe was created to share a philosophy on life.

I work with multiple creation stories but this is the one I like and find the most interesting.

The short and sweet version is God's Wisdom (Sophia) tried to contemplate God without her consort and ended up creating a Demiurge (craftsman) and matter. Sophia ashamed, tries to hide it and herself. The Demiurge was ignorant of his origin, made the universe, and declared that no one came before him. He then begins taking advantage of his mother. The other Aeons (aspects of God) hear this and see Sophia in distress. They go, "Oh really?" and shows him someone greater than him. Pissed, him and his buddies make an effigy of this greater being in hope to trap the greater being within it and make this aeon serve them. They were able to make it's body and mind but unable to bring it to life. Sophia, now working with the other aeons, brings him to life and takes the form of a woman called Zoe. The Demiurge not knowing where Zoe came from, tries to rape her but she splits herself into two parts. Her shell, which became Eve, and herself into a tree that would become the tree of the fruit of knowledge of moral good and evil. He couldn't get rid of Eve and he couldn't get rid of the tree, so he told Adam that he made Eve to be his servant, and that if he ate of the tree he would die. Eventually Eve stumbles across this tree and one of the Aeons in the form of a serpent sees her, but Eve, being a shell, didn't recognize him. So she ate of the tree and shared it with Adam and they then knew the difference between good and evil. This act imparted Sophia's seed into them and saw that this "paradise" was nothing but a dung heap and prison. The Demiurge unable to reverse any of this then sets up a curse on them, cursing women into tools to trap any of Sophia's seeds into new people and forcing them to suffer in the material world.

Whether it's literal or not, it conveys a couple of ideas that ancient people noticed:
-The world is not perfect. It decays and degrades over time.
-Creatures in the world have to adapt to its surroundings.
-Truth flows forth taking simpler forms with the lowest form being wisdom/inspiration.
-Inspiration/wisdom without something else helping it leads to the creation of something that is partially true and madness
-Bullshitters will try to assert that this partial truth is the ultimate truth
-We appear to have some sort of crude innate morality about us since we are social creatures
-Our instincts, in general, are hindrances to the goals of truth seeking and helping others.
-The world was not made for us, if anything, it is indifferent to us. If this indifference were personified, it would appear as if nature was against us. Our instincts deceive us, natural disasters destroy indiscriminately, etc...
-That's all I can think of at this point. I'll add more if I can think of more.

Here's an additional interpretation that I wrote on this creation story: Interpretation on the Gnostic Creation story.

On the Origin of the World, where this creation story came from.

Edit: I do believe in evolution and the big bang. If anything those facts add an additional meaning to this mythos.