Chapter I: On Evolution & Awareness of the Self

Or “Theistic Evolution”

Theistic Evolution says that God creates through evolution. Theistic Evolutionists vary in beliefs about how much God intervenes in the process. It accepts most or all of modern science, but it invokes God for some things outside the realm of science, such as the creation of the human soul. This position is promoted by the Pope and taught at mainline Protestant seminaries.

· Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, The Phenomenon of Man (HarperCollin, San Francisco, 1959, 1980)

Fundamentalists and literalists claim that Creation (not evolution) most accurately describes mankind’s genesis & that of the universe. Humanists, on the other hand, work tirelessly pointing to irrefutable evidence to support the argument that Natural Selection, rather than the touch of a creator, best explains how we came to be.

What kills me each time I speak to someone who professes the one (whether “creationism” or natural selection) at the exclusion of the other is the lack of imagination & sheer intellectual laziness demonstrated by framing the discourse as a zero sum equation. To me, this is one of the cases where both prevailing opinions are very, very wrong. To assume that creation & evolution are mutually exclusive is evidence that man only sees what he wants to see… only believes what he wants to believe…

There are a few of us who actually believe the two are likely married. That is to say, there are those of us who have no problem whatsoever nodding to the evidence that indicates that evolution is likely a function of creation, rather than its chief antagonist.

That the anthropological evidence supports Darwin’s Natural Selection is not a matter of faith, but rather one of acknowledging fact & truth. The archeological record is written in stone & preserved in resin. It is, in short, undeniable. That the universe is inexplicably & seemingly boundless is also inexplicable. That the system of the world & universe are governed by hard fast & immutable laws and that the heavens, for all the chaos they seem to portend, are predictable in observance of those laws is also irrefutable. For those that believe that to accept Natural Selection is to turn your back on the Creator, as well as for those who have turned their back on creation as a plausible scenario for all things in the universe, the proposition that the two are inextricably con-fused should feel intellectually honest & easy to accept.

Imagine a world where there was nothing to learn, nowhere to explore, no understanding to be revealed. Imagine a finite universe. Imagine the world painted in a palette of grays. Imagine, just for a minute, that there was as much to understand in this lifetime as is contained in your average racquetball court. Most folks would see this as a horribly dull alternate universe. In fact, it is likely that most of us would likely die of boredom given a year or two of suffering it. Sales of Pink Floyd records would spike along with the price per share of the major razor blade manufacturers. But this begs some monumental questions: Who would give a crap whether we were bored or not? Who would bother to assemble bones in the dirt for us to dis-cover? Who would create such an elaborate universe and why? How come we cannot venture any deeper into the sub-molecular level? Why are our efforts thwarted for the first time, not for wont of technology, but rather by our inability to observe sub-atomic behavior beyond a given point due to the “nature” of the building blocks we strive to observe themselves? Is there any credence to the saying, “the more we know, the more we realize how little we know?” What is this perpetual learning curve humanity seems to be on? Is it finite? Will there be a time where the mysteries of the universe are truly known? How much is there to learn?

I leave these questions to those who have the Real Gift. I leave them to the philosophers & the great thinkers of present, past & future. In the interest of furthering this line of thought, I impart a story that I have carried around with me for a long time. Maybe this is why I hung on to this experience for so many years. I pass it on to make what you will of it.

When I was a teenager of about 15, I came home from school to find “Wally” doing laundry. Wally’s given name was actually Walterine Hill. She was hired as help around the time I was born. She had become a member of our family by the time I was 1. She covered a lot of shifts for my mom while she was in hospital & really was like a second mother to me. In any event, Wally would ask me daily what I had learned in school. One particular day I was more interested than usual to share what I had learned in school because I had, in fact, learned something that had truly fascinated me & gotten me to thinking. So, I told Wally that I had learned that the moon shines on account of being illuminated by the Sun’s light, rather than moon-light produced by the moon herself. She found this of interest, but reacted in a way that surprised me. I had explained the phenomenon analytically, but she saw it as something more. Wally saw it as even more evidence that God knew what he was doing when he crafted the universe. “Child,” she said, “you know I never knew that. But it doesn’t surprise me in the least. God works in mysterious ways”.

Now, for some of the more elitist flies on the wall, this would appear an intellectual cop-out of sorts. I mean, it is generally accepted among pop cult-ure devotees that demonstrating how the mechanics of the moving parts operate de facto removes the mystery out of the equation. Essentially, the culture that gives you “let me stick my hand in his side to repair my disbelief” often sees scientific explanations as victories that take god out of contention as the authoring force behind inexplicable mysteries of olde. For Wally, on the other hand, that moonshine functioned this way, rather than that, just reinforced her intuitive understanding of the true nature of the universe. This example sang to her soul & served as yet another instance of God and His majesty at play. “How can that be?”, the Saab-driving, Macintosh using, dual income, no kids metrosexual asks himself & his latte sipping peers. It can be only if you recognize that this universe & everything in it were authored by an incomprehensible chain of events purposefully choreographed & set to a grand waltz of definitively set rhythms, patterns & laws. These pulleys that we see around us… these ropes and weights & bearings… they were created. And they are governed by an equally fascinating set of invisible forces, such as torque, gravity, tension, &c.. Am I telling you that all of these fantastic things, be they planets, satellites, comets, humans, penguins, light, gravity, plants, dinosaurs, fish, birds, black holes, wormholes, were created? Yes. Why would you have me believe such a thing? Because it is infinitely more probable that this monumental apparatus is the work of one Creator, than the fantastic improbability that all we observe is accidental.