Thanks to Crecganford on YouTube for the framework! Please visit his channel.
Science is not so avant-garde as you may suspect. Of course, for people who had convinced each other that something created existence in a few days, the likes of Darwin presented an alternative. Research into cosmology over the past 50-odd years has extended the Enlightenment with some rather derivative conclusions.
To define the basis of science, the observation of existence and the creation of hypotheses based on those observations is the empirical method.
So far, the origins of the universe are steeped in mystery. Let’s call this ‘chaos’. Writ small, evidence strongly indicates that this planet evolved from a coalescing of gas and dust about 4,000,000,000 years ago, and that about 1,000,000,000 years ago life evolved from a coalescing of amino acids which formed proteins and thusly DNA. The primordial void, one might call it.
The planet underwent a series of changes such as waves of meteors, the growth of oceans, the accumulation of gasses, and the forces of plate tectonics. One might refer to these as the forces which govern all life on this planet. God-like in action and quite beyond human interference.
Land appeared above the waters. Plate tectonics cleverly describes how land floats about on magma or rises from the ocean depths, and the Milankovitch Orbital Cycles tracks glaciations. Vulcanology and geology fill in the details. Using other words, we may envision land as a giant turtle swimming about or as land being summoned from the depths.
Thence life began to alter planetary conditions. As cyanobacteria evolved into more complex organisms a.k.a. ‘plants’ and spread, their conversion of CO2 into carbon for building and oxygen as an emission ultimately created the O3 layer which protects all life. Mythologically, this may be referred to as the tree of life holding up the sky. We certainly discovered the importance of holding up the sky in the 1980s when CFCs destroyed the ozone layer.
Once the planet formed from gas and dust, after water and air were trapped by its gravity, then some complex chemicals formed particular copying mechanisms, which resulted in protection from gamma rays, life began to take off. Eventually, one of the most recent species appeared: homo sapiens sapiens.
In this way, modern empirical research has merely confirmed the traditional beliefs still held the world over by Indigenous peoples.
Science is not so unique in its conclusions as you may have thought.
The Rainbow Serpent told the people she had created that if they did not hold the law, if they did not respect all life, that she would flood the world again and remake it with no people on it.