Saturday, January 3, 2026

Pan Gu And The Cosmic Egg

Different versions of the Chinese Pan Gu (also spelled Pangu) creation story can be found, telling of how the giant of this name breaks out of a great egg and releases the heavens and the earth.  Really, it is at its core an alleged account of the shaping and furnishing of an already-existing universe rather than its true creation, in sharp contrast with something like the Genesis creation story—an actual creation narrative that describes time and matter as having a beginning without ever denying the necessary existence of logical truths, empty space, and the uncaused cause before creation [1].  At a minimum, possible versions of the Chinese story contradict the nature of all of these necessary existents.  More details about this will be examined soon.  As for the tale itself, after splitting the egg's shell, Pan Gu grows along with the universe and holds the heavens above the land, and in at least some versions, dies afterward.

From his body come additional features of the natural world.  One eye becomes the sun and the other the moon, his blood the waters, and so on.  Unlike the story of Genesis 1, where God outlives his process of creation indefinitely and does not have a physical body which can merge with the universe at any point, this account of Pan Gu has him come to an end without which the universe would not have had all of the appearance and functions.  This is not the only sort of difference between these two narratives, and completely aside from the issue of whether the Bible is true (or probably true), the Pan Gu creation tale entails logical impossibilities.  Scientific evidence never reveals the inherent truths of reason: reason does, and it alone allows for absolute certainty.  Therefore, it is reason's necessary truths and not the empirical or theoretical cosmological framework of a given era that can actually bring such things to light.

Opposites like wetness and dryness, various manifestations of yin and yang, are in the egg before it is broken, for instance.  Of course, there is no physical wetness or dryness without specific concrete examples of physical things that exist, though the concepts exist as logical possibilities regardless of whether there was any matter in existence at all.  Likewise, there is no such thing as female-ness and male-ness existing (again, other than their anatomical/physiological concepts, which are functions of and governed by the necessary truths of logic that exist independent of all other things) without individual female or male beings, and physical beings at that, since gender is purely a category of the body for certain creatures.  All versions of this creation story with such details are a philosophical myth for this treatment of metaphysical opposites alone.

Some opposites in the egg also could be absent, yet a holistic philosophy of yin and yang would need them to be.  Any logical necessity is true, but its opposite is not, for a genuine opposite in this case would require that it is false.  Logical contradictions and other falsities cannot exist except as untruths that deviate from logical axioms and what follows from them.  As opposites, a strict version of the Pan Gu story would hold that logical truths and falsities—falsities being false because this is itself true by necessity in light of axioms or some other fact—also were contained as physical things within the cosmic egg (or even if immaterial were trapped inside it).  Because they are necessary truths, they would be immaterial because they are true in the absence of the egg or any god or universe altogether, and there already would have to be a metaphysical distinction between what is inside the egg and what is outside; it is logically impossible on many levels for the egg to have contained everything, opposites or otherwise, in initial reality!

Separate from how metaphysical space would already have to exist as well to hold a material egg to start with, which is an opposite of matter already as well as another necessary existent that would have to precede the egg, this cosmic object could not have been past-eternal.  The universe already existed in an unfinished form according to this worldview, for any egg would have to be made out of matter (and the cosmos is nothing but whatever matters exists), and even then, the egg already contained many basic elements of the universe.  If this egg is supposed to have always existed, this is impossible, because material events like opposites swirling around in chaos within the cosmic egg can only happen in time, and there cannot have been an infinite number of past moments because the present would never have been reached.  Infinity cannot be traversed!  For the same reason, there cannot have been an infinite number of past physical events, but the fact that matter requires time already disproves this.  An uncaused cause would have had to have brought matter into existence and any being's body, like Pan Gu's, could only be created by something even if not directly by God.


[1].  In the same order as they are brought up as necessary existents in the first paragraph, here are some of the multiple articles I have written about each of these three metaphysical existents:

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