Here's an educational article on Live Science that lists and ranks (based on nothing whatsoever) the
Top Ten Creation Myths. After all, since "Intelligent Design" is "science" based on Christian cosmology, and since some (Christian) people want it taught in place of actual science, it's only fair to consider some other creation myths, especially since most of them come from cultures and relgions that far predate Christianity. (Shouldn't we rank them by seniority? After all, why would the "one true god" wait thousands of years to reveal Himself and then provide a creation timeline that so totally contradicts observable facts?)
Needless to say, none of these myths are remotely plausible to any modern, educated, objective human, but it's interesting to compare them and see what you notice;
the Judeo/Christian one is easily the vaguest and least creative, for example. According to the Bible, some god just is, with no explanation for where he came from. One day he up and creates light and such, from nothing, and then he makes the earth and puts people on it and such. From there it gets more interesting, what with Eden and the talking snake and tree of knowledge and such, but on the whole it's a pretty impoverished myth, in comparison to most of the others.
Compare
the Hindu Cosmology, what with creator gods sprouting 1000 heads, hands, and feet, divine body parts turning into clarified butter, and universes with expirations dates set every 4.32 billion years. Wild! Take your seventh day of rest and shove it!
What I always wonder is how literally people believed in these myths, even back in ancient Summeria or Greece or whatever.
Norse Cosmology, for instance, has fiery lands and frozen lands before the current earth, which was formed from a dead god's body.
The sons rose up and killed Ymir and from his corpse created from his flesh, the Earth; the mountains from his bones, trees with his hair and rivers, and the seas and lakes with his blood. Within Ymir’s hollowed-out skull, the gods created the starry heavens.
It was obvious to the ancient Norse that mountains were not made of the same stuff as human bone, and that the oceans and rivers were not actually blood, etc. So did they take the myth as a cool story that explained something they lacked the science to even take a flying guess at? Or was it believed literally, and were ancient scientists/philosophers making up supporting myths about how Ymir's blood transubstantiated into both fresh and salt water, and how the stars actually formed the shape of the inside of a skull if you looked at them just right?
My natural inclination is to say that those ancient people had common sense and could see the obvious contradictions between their myth and reality, but given that plenty of modern humans can't manage the same trick, I may be giving our distant ancestors a bit too much credit.
As for the whole intelligent design being taught in schools issue, I of course think it's ridiculous that anyone would seriously consider it in science classes. As if American kids weren't dumb enough and the US weren't far enough behind the rest of the Western world in science already? Then again, if they just move the goalposts and change the entire definition of science and knowledge, perhaps we'll be in front again. You might do okay with the Kansas School Board, but good luck convincing your mathematical formulas that 2+2=5 once you're out in the real world, though.
More (and yet less) realistically though, I'm all for the teaching of religious creation tales in school; I'd just like them to be in a Humanities class, and to include at least the nine other cultural accounts in the aforementioned article. I'd love to see a teacher cover those stories of giant skull universes and serpent skirt goddesses and talking snakes and white bull semen being purified to create all the animals of the earth, and so on, and then at the end saying, "But of course we all know that the Christian story is the true one, since it's clearly so much more demonstrably-true than those other old(er) fairy tales. Most of the kids would just yawn and continue day dreaming about a new iPod or Ford Mustang, but wouldn't the few who actually paid attention have to start viewing the religion they inherited from their parents with a bit more skepticism?
