“Many modern scholars classify the Biblical stories of Creation, the Fall and the Flood as myths by which a primitive people sought to explain their origins. Because of similarities between the Genesis account and the Babylonian creation myths, some have assumed that the Hebrews copied their account from the Babylonians. This assumption overlooks the possibility that both the Hebrew and the Babylonian accounts may have been derived from an older common source. But the Babylonian and other pagan creation myths invariably deal with the ordering of a pre-existing world, while the Genesis saga relates the creation of the earth and its order from nothing (exnihilo).” (Richard Coyne, Roots and Branches of Christian Beliefs, 1994, p.1)