What started life in your setting?

My species is a mixture of organic and robotic, although it is mostly robotic.  They were created by another species as an experiment but they have no idea.  They don't really interact that much and it isn't really that important to the story to be honest but maybe some day I will work more on that species that created them.

I have a bunch of worlds but I guess I'll answer this for the only one that has gods lol 

Life evolved on its own! There's actually a lot of ambiguity in-universe as to which myths are true because large scale belief can retcon things into existence, but there have never been enough humans on earth to change billions of years of evolution. 

In the setting of Eagles and Swans, there's what I refer to as "guided evolution": while life emerged from entirely abiological origins, its first emergence attracted a host of deities (who are drawn to "high potential" situations). These deities then shaped the evolution of various lineages by influencing probabilities and speeding up the process of speciation. While life still evolved through the same mechanisms as irl, this happened much faster, and with a touch of deliberate design.

Every such deity favours a lineage of biological life and can be thought of as its "creator".

For my own main setting, life started before any of the gods existed. The world has an almost identical geological and biotic history to earth, but with the exception that mana energy came to exist somewhere along the way. When life took on sapient forms, gods came forth from that life, and eventually they started creating other creatures that stemmed forth from the already existing life on Life. 

Since my gods were mortals once who had the wit and the luck to ascend, and we're still in like the 1600's, none of them really possess the necessary biochemical knowledge to properly guide evolution along with their standards, so they mostly leave it be and when they create need a lot of trial and error. It's also why many created species die out rather swiftly; their genome is simply so flawed because their creators had no idea how genetic stability was acquired (or even what genes were). 

arceus (basically the ultimate god) greatest a whole set of assigned gods when they created their world, new being one of them. in canon pokemon fashion, mew was the biological ancestor of all pokemon , so that’s where they came from

humans were originally created in another universe (ultra space) , by the ultimate deity of that universe, who happened to be like... arceus’s long distance gf at the time. she sent over some humans to the main world as a gift , and that’s where humans originated from ; but it’s been tens of thousands of years so humans probably can’t be considered aliens anymore shsgsgah

anyways. we throw out pokemon canon in our house

Mine is a mix between created and evolution. The universe was made by gods and some creatures/planets were purposefully set up to be contain certain species. All the main gods have their favourite things they like to make so there is some repetition on what can be found across the universe. 

Everything else that wasn't made directly evolved. Life just wound up on some empty planet and just got busy populating.

In my setting, you have Titans -born of primordial forces- who have a strong compulsion to create worlds. Over they long lifespans they craft many and often wander away.

But sometimes they instill life on precious few. Maybe following a plan only they can fathom, maybe out of jealousy after looking an inhabited planet, maybe following a strange trance instilled by a superior force. No one really knows. Their methods are vast and varied, and life sprouts in many forms as well. Sometimes they leave evolution to take its blind course, sometimes they carefully craft the life they want to see. And sometimes life sprouts as an accident, out of the spilled blood and the broken body of a dead titan.

What it's certain, is that life doesn't exist without the actions of titans.

i have several stories, but they're all linked to a main 'hub-world', and all originate from one place.

in the beginning there was just stars and space, some stars combined to form what was pretty much God, and then it made basic planets and life. God split in half, one half making animals and plants, the other making ores/minerals and humanity.

humans all came from one place, while gods and angels started off as the children of the two gods - when one god became corrupted, he mated with animals, creating demons. my world is.. weird

      The Origin
"Long  ago when the universe was still young,there was a god named,Sol that  cultivated planets many were vacant,young and incomplete.But the one  planet the first the god started with was near completion naming it  Venero.Sol wanted this planet to be protected and be to be loved.Sol was  a galaxy themself in the shape of a man.When described or drawn he is  often depicted with a comet for a tail and paws for feet,horns,long ears  that could hear a supernova in another galaxy, eyes bright like shining  stars and hair as beautiful as a nebula.When Sol finished Venero they  pulled apart of their body and scattered it among the planet.Sprouting  from the remains were the first Earth Givers."

This is copy and pasted from OCs page.

I like to leave it vague in my settings. There's one, however, that I worked on from ages 13-17 which explained the creation of worlds. And since it was made so long ago it's a bit odd to explain...

The world was created...by demons. 

The things known as "demons" in that setting were in fact the...builder drones of worlds. When a world was completed and capable of sustaining itself they left for the next one. Once gone they could only visit it by being summoned by the inhabitants. A summoned demon would fulfill tasks for its summoner and in turn take a bit of the summoners' soul, thus shortening their lifespan (in fact the whole drow race in the story had made a deal back at the dawn of days, resulting in their lifespan being about half of that of elves in exchange for a racial affinity to demon handling). The energy from said harvested souls probably either went into powering the creation of the unfinished world or sparking the first living things. So the fist human/fox/dandelion/whatever in a new world could in fact be possessing a recycled piece of soul from some cocky necromancer from another dimension. Since "demons" are just drones the actual life is probably created by whoever bosses over them (A god? An eccentric architect?).

I think the story even had a character end up in an unfinished world. It had plants and trees already, but no light nor darkness. Just looked like what a 3D landscape would look like if every single shader was turnt off. And if I remember correctly then there was birdsong before actual birds were created.

...I actually still love that idea. Not to toot my own horn but I had an great imagination as a 13-year old, I don't think I could come up with that sort of stuff nowadays.

In one of mine, life came from natural computers. Bits of electricity ramdomly sparking around natural quartz and other minerals began to construct and replicate as information, the same way chemical strings did on real earth. Instead of chemical DNA and an organic carbon brain, they have something like natural computer chips and a large crystal "heart" that acts as a storage device.

They create genetic variation through predation, by eating each other's hearts and assimilating that data.

They reproduce by growing a new heart and copying their data.

The planet has strong magnetic fields, so they do not need to metabolize. They get their energy from ambient electricity.

All the species on this planet work that way, not just the marketable ones. It's an entire ecosystem different than the one that evolved here, but just as plausible when you think about how life works.

As we are born from water, they are born from stone.

In my main universe, the main gods are just personifications of the primordial forces of creation, destruction, and harmony. Most of life just evolved without the direct influence of Creation, who was busy with her war/flirt fest with Destruction. It was all subconscious on Creation's part.

There are a few species that Creation did have a direct hand in, like humans. She just found them fun. However, it was still through evolution and she wasn't super attentive when making humans anyways, which is why humans are all messed up like that.

The rest of the gods were created later and weren't at all involved with creation at all. 

RIP, TECHNICALLY BOTH OF THE ANSWERS IN THE POLL? IS THERE A BOTH

So essentially what happened in the Rapture Universe is that all the lore of religions exist, but only where they are believed in. So for somebody who believes in Christianity, the Creation myth would be true. For the Ancient Greeks, there were Titans and Olympian Gods. For an atheist (albeit rare at the modern point of the universe), they wouldn't have any special lore. It's very odd, because all of this happens BUT evolution and the scientific creation of the universe always runs true because aliens and astronomists (why is that not spelling correctly) scientifically proved them. So it's believed in. Everywhere. The second reason that the scientific creation counts before anything else is because the religions were only created when humans roamed the earth, so any creation myths they came up with are pretty much busted. 

It's incredibly confusing and I've been trying to figure it out, honestly. For a Christian the Earth would have been created in six days but also over the course of several billion years. The Supernaturals and Deities involved in their creation myths would have very clear memories of the process of creating the world, and those "fake" memories would be indistinguishable from "real" memories. Even after the formation of the universe is proved by aliens, a lot of the deities still insist that they created the regions they are believed in. And they have to be right about their creation myths, otherwise the other Supernaturals wouldn't exist, would they? It's paradoxical, but people in the universe have accepted that the universe was created, but on the planet, the deities think they did a thing (but they're just like... really old people tellin' stories or something).

FreeFallingUp13 oh same hat! I voted evolution in the poll bc I figured evolution came first and then everything else was retconned into existence "afterwards" (in a causality sense if not time sense). I love universes like that, there's so many fun ways to untangle the weirdness.

In my verse, gods definitely create physical evidence of their origins as well as memories, but since they're not doing it consciously they don't tend to catch all the details. For example, a god might retcon a war into existence, and it'll be undeniable that the war happened since there are battlefields and records of the event. But when you dig deeper, you might find that the political situation leading up to the war makes no sense, or that nobody alive today has an ancestor who fought in the war, almost as if they just popped into existence for that particular event. Historians have a rough time in this world.