ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates how religious cosmologies or stories about the origins and structure of the universe describe natural processes and the relationships of deities to physical reality and humanity. It compares the orally transmitted origin stories of indigenous Polynesian religions to those found in the scriptures of the Abrahamic faiths. Religions accumulate a corpus of sacred stories or cosmologies concerning human origins and our role within the universe. Religious cosmologies adapt to local environments. The Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all share narratives from the ancient Hebrew scriptures relating the histories of Abraham, Moses, and other religious founders. In addition to explanations of physical existence, honoring or venerating distinctive natural objects, living organisms, and locales is widespread among the world's religions. The anthropologist Mircea Eliade has highlighted the widespread image of the world trees, representing the productivity of the generative cosmic event.
