When I say “nothing,” I do not mean emptiness or mystery.
I mean literal non-being.
No potential.
No substrate.
No ground.
When I say “no thing,” I mean something that exists before categories.
Not an object, not material, not measurable, but real enough to give rise to everything that is.
The distinction matters, because I am assuming one can’t generate, and the other must.
Pulling on an Old Thread
This isn’t insight. It’s wandering. This is me tugging on a thread. I have avoided this for years. It tends to attract people who enjoy arguing in circles. I do not always have the time or the patience for that. But we live in a world where birds aren’t real. Ancient wonders are credited to aliens as seen on cable television. Maybe a quieter and older idea deserves its turn.
Where This Began
At least this one comes from lived experience and a life that sometimes feels like it belonged to someone else. It started with a simple thread from a friend. He said he had been thinking that the Greek, Roman, and Norse stories are more real than we assume. Not real in the cartoon sense. Real in the way ancient memory preserves something strange that happened before anyone wrote it down. That comment stirred up old thoughts for me. Thoughts I had not visited in a long time.
A Conversation in a Kitchen
The spark for all of this came from a kitchen. I once worked with a Greek Orthodox man named Yorgos. He wasn’t a scholar. He was one of those people who carries a whole world inside him. One day I casually referred to the Olympian stories as myths. He stopped, looked at me, and said, “Do not call myth. Read the great men of renowned. You know. Genesis 6.” That moment stayed with me. My deeper studies came later, but the spark came from him.
Before the Flood
Which brings me back to Genesis 6. The world was already full by then.
Humanity had multiplied.
Spread.
Built.
Invented.
We should not pretend our ancestors were simple.
They carved order out of wilderness.
They domesticated animals.
Discovered music.
Forged metal.
Built cities.
Formed networks.
Traded.
Fought.
Cooperated.
They pulled culture out of chaos. And with mastery came confidence.
The dangerous kind.
Into that world enters the phrase sons of God.
Some argue it refers to righteous men, but that never sat right with me. In the Hebrew scriptures, that phrase almost always points to divine beings. And the result of their union with human women is described as men of renown.
The Ones Remembered
The Nephilim.
The giants.
The ones who left a mark so deep that cultures separated by oceans still tell stories that sound suspiciously similar.
The heroes of Greece.
The kings of Sumer.
The watchers of Mesopotamia.
The god kin of the north.
What the Pattern Suggests Logically.
When cultures with no contact preserve the same pattern of beings.
Beings that are part human and part something else.
Resemblance becomes a pattern rather than coincidence.
Across geography and time, these beings share three features: unnatural origin, extraordinary stature or power, and catastrophic consequence.
The simplest explanation is that something was remembered.
Not perfectly.
Not literally.
But remembered.
When Strength Outpaces Restraint
Genesis 6 describes a world where the boundary between the human and the divine had blurred. In this context, the flood reads differently.
The flood becomes a reset and not just a punishment.
It was a world full of mastery, metal, and music. Cities and culture thrived. Yet arrogance came from believing we are the center of the story.
A world where power had outpaced wisdom. A world where the lines between categories had been crossed in ways that were never meant to last.
The Tower of Babel fits the same pattern. Humanity unified under one language and one ambition.
Not to honor God, but to secure its own permanence.
To build a name for itself.
To reach the heavens by its own strength.
Another reset…
Because humanity was too strong.
Strong enough to repeat the same pattern that led to the flood.
The Modern Assumption
This is the part we struggle with. We assume ancient stories are impossible because we assume ancient people were primitive.
But the text itself paints a different picture.
A world of rapid advancement.
A world of early genius.
A world where the extraordinary was not rare.
A world where the strange was normal enough to be recorded without shock.
Once you accept that the ancient world was not simple, the ancient stories stop sounding impossible. They start sounding like memories.
Shifting Measures
We assume ancient impossibility partly because we assume our measurements are fixed. And even our measurements of time are not as fixed as we pretend.
The Earth is slowing. The Moon is drifting. Days lengthen by amounts so small we barely notice, yet over centuries they add up.
Changing measures change plausibility. They remind us that our confidence in the present often makes the past look smaller than it actually was.
If the rhythm of the world itself shifts, then ancient people’s way of counting years would not match ours.
What looks impossible to us could have been ordinary to them.
The Ground Floor of Reality
I once heard a comedian say that believers and non believers are often describing the same thing with different accents.
Different accents do not mean equal accuracy but I digress.
The believer says everything came from God. Not a thing, but the source of things.
The non believer says everything came from nothing. And nothing, by definition, is not a thing.
Both are reaching for a reality outside the categories we use for everything else.
If the ground of reality is not a thing, then encounters with it would be overwhelming.
They would be strange.
They would be remembered.
They would be mythologized.
They would echo across cultures.
Exactly what we see in the ancient stories.
What This Suggests
Not that every detail is literal.
Not that every story is exact.
But that the ancient world was remembering something real.
Something powerful.
Something that required a reset.
Something that pointed beyond itself.
Up to this point, this has been reasoning. What follows is my witness.
Some threads are worth pulling.
And this one leads toward a center.
A center the ancient world sensed but could not name.
A center that would one day step into the story Himself.
Matty Thinks 
Leave a comment