light vs darkness, or creation vs destruction?

It occurred to me, while I was washing dishes:

'Is it light vs darkness, or creation vs destruction?'

Good ol' dichotomies.

I was doubtlessly still under the spell of Heidegger's way of thinking, or in my words, 'the way he moves', in "The Question Regarding Technology." There, he digs into the everyday usage of the word "technology," to dig past the Roman adaptation of the word, and finally to rediscover its Greek root.

So, Creation vs Destruction, let's begin from there.

There are, in many religions or myths, gods of creation and gods of destruction, by definition more original, archaic, or primordial, in the sense they exist before and over other more derivative and more humanized gods, such as gods of art.

There are also gods of light and gods of darkness. Or rather, forces of light, and forces of darkness. We see in numerous cultural products, including fiction and video games, the battle between light and darkness, most notably realized in the form of the battle between angels and devils.

Now, I started to ponder, aimlessly at first. Then this question suddenly came to me:

" Is Creation and Light the same thing in that context ? "

No. Maybe not.

What I suspect is this: That it is probable that the whole notion of light vs. darkness was coined by Christianity; and that the relationship between Christianity and other religions with the notion of creation vs. destruction are similar to the relationship between the Romans and the Greeks, in the sense the former, in each case, replaced or 'overwrote' the latter at a certain juncture of history, thereby changing the whole way of thinking in the eras to come.

Why is that so? In what sense is Creation different from Light?
In order to answer that, we have to think about the respective counterparts, Destruction and Darkness.

Destruction means, there won't be anything anymore. After destruction, there's nothing. Destruction removes, eliminates. From the Living's point of view, it is death, in the sense Destruction turns everything back to before-existance.

Darkness, on the other hand, does NOT mean nothingness. It rather means the evil, wicked, ignorant, blind, unsaved, fallen. It is, from the beginning, a very much anthropological and moralistic notion. Thus, in the realm of darkness, there are distorted forms of life, like the undead represented in numerous zombie-themed movies and games. Satan and devils underneath the ground, or aliens from the un-lit, un-charted, un-known space. In the Darkness, there is always something, and whatever there is is regarded as threatening to the children of Light.

The genius of Christianity is, then, that it identifies, in its Genesis, Creation with Light. "Let there be light." That was the very beginning of the whole universe. The moment of Original Creation is defined as the moment of Enlightening. To Create is to Light up. Such displacement of Creation with Enlightening coincides with the fact that the Christian Genesis puts human beings at the very beginning of the universe. As Light vs. Darkness is, as I already mentioned, fundamentally anthropological, it is only natural that man is born not long after the universe itself is created. There's no reason to wait some millions of years.

But according to the understanding of modern science, the history of any kind of life form on Earth, let alone that of man, takes just a tiny portion of the whole history of the universe. Before the birth of any kind of life form, however primordial, there were stars, and before that, bits of what is to become stars, and all kinds of matter and energy, yet to be settled and linked more forcefully to another. We see numerous occasions of Creation and Destruction during this 'non-life' era, but we don't see any Light or Darkness as Christianity understands it.

Then think about how Deleuze and Gattari in Anti-Oedipus describes the way desire, the flow of life, or even more generally, the flow of energy. It works and it breaks down. It flows and stops. It links and unlinks. One and the same thing simultaneously flows and cuts a flow, or alternates between flowing and stopping. And all this is not just about Light and Darkness. Light is rather, I would say, oedipalization, the defining of the 'right' channel through which the life flow is from now on dictated to flow.

One last thing to note: the status of the Sun. Many religions revere the Sun. They have various versions of Sun Gods. Now, that's a concept somewhere between Creation and Light. It's not as 'cosmological' as Creation, but not exclusively anthropological either. Because what the Sun represents is the light that is the ultimate source of energy necessary to nurture Life. Still, that light is not moralizing and moralistic Light. It is light as energy, just like gravity that is responsible for the birth of countless stars. The Sun and its light is, most of all, not a Word.