Theogonic structures in naturalistic cosmologies: the implicit theogony of the big bang and the emergent cosmogenesis

The article develops the concept of residual theogony as a structural-morphological category for what persists, in the form of cosmological narratives and explanations, of the older theogonic narrative apparatus once its religious or mythological content has been formally abandoned. Drawing on the morphological framework articulated in Knežević (2024) — a framework that explicitly relates cosmology, evolution, and theogony as parallel morphological domains organised around the morpheme of the prauzrok (the primal cause) — the article applies the morphological method to a precise empirical-textual question: where, and in what specific forms, do theogonic structures persist in the cosmological literature of the post-2017 interval that has formed the immediate context of the contemporary debate? The original contribution of the article is the elaboration of residual theogony through a typology of five recurrent forms in which theogonic structures persist in formally naturalistic cosmological discourse: (1) singular origination, in which the Big Bang singularity functions as a structural analogue of the theogonic origin-from-nothing; (2) the generative void, in which eternal inflation, quantum vacuum fluctuation, and “creation from nothing” cosmologies function as structural analogues of the theogonic primordial chaos; (3) retroactive teleology, in which the anthropic principle and fine- tuning arguments function as structural analogues of theogonic providential ordering; (4) generative necessity, in which multiverse and modal-necessity arguments function as structural analogues of the classical theogonic “necessary being”; and (5) emergent self-organisation, in which contemporary emergence theory functions as a structural analogue of theogonic agency. The article argues that residual theogony is not, by itself, evidence either for or against a theistic interpretation of cosmology; it is a morphological observation about the structural inheritance of contemporary cosmological discourse from the older narrative apparatus that produced the cosmological imagination of European, Mediterranean, and broader Indo-European civilisations. The principal stakes of the concept lie in what it makes visible: the discursive depth at which contemporary scientific cosmology continues to operate within forms of narrative organisation whose origin lies in pre-scientific theogonic traditions, and the consequent inadequacy of any account of cosmological discourse that takes its formal naturalism at face value while ignoring the morphological substrate on which that naturalism is articulated. The article closes with implications for the philosophy of cosmology, for the science-and-religion dialogue, and for an extension of the morphological method beyond the immediate textual material.