I've been quiet for a while, just noting what has been going on, some of
it heartening, some definitely disheartening - people claiming to be
Christians behaving badly and giving Christianity a bad name, besides
wasting the potential of this medium for genuine meetings and reciprocal
learnings, whatever the position any particular person adopts. Extreme
positions on either/any side (mechanistic-materialistic or fundamentalist
Christian) should/could be opportunities to try to understand why a
person should want to adopt such a position, to try to see where they are
coming from. People like Dawkins and Lewontin have made it clear what
their agenda is - in Lewontin's words: " an a priori commitment to
materialism", a materialism which is absolute "for we cannot allow a
Divine Foot in the door". Christians of various persuasions also have
their agendas, not all of which will stand the light of truth, which
would shine as harshly on some of the narrower conceptions of creation as
it does on the materialist's denial of the reality of the spirit which
everywhere sustains the physical.
Phillip Johnson has referred to the clash between the metaphysical
naturalism of the orthodox evolutionary paradigm and the necessity of
positing a creative intelligence behind the manifestations of the
universe as 'the culture wars'. This scarcely does justice to the
reality. What we are witnessing is the age-old struggle between the
forces of life and death, of light and of darkness, the archetypal battle
for the future of humanity represented in millenia of myth and art (for
example the struggle between Ahura Mazdao and Ahriman in the Persian
myth). There is much at stake. Are we to become robots or free men? The
love of the machine and the flirtation with mechanistic models of living
processes are the work of Ahriman, the Prince of Darkness, who would have
us forget totally our spiritual origin and believe only in the reality of
substance. The selfish gene is the brainchild of a mind and soul
considerably under the sway of "the spirit which always denies" (Goethe's
"Faust"). This is the spirit which just loves measurement and calculation
and the reduction of life to physics and chemistry.
We have to ask whose side we are on and whether we really mean what we
say we believe. As Christians, we actually carry the hope of the future,
we who should be the repesentatives of the way, the truth and the life.
In reality, we ought to be much more concerned with future rather than
past evolution. We have an awful long way to go yet. Christianity is the
only truly evolutionary religion, because it has the understanding that
we are engaged in an immense cosmic drama of enormous importance: the
evolution of a faculty which has never existed before in the universe and
which it is our task to bring to birth - true freedom, rightly understood
as the loving acceptance of responsibility, the model for which was
Christ's sacrifice on Calvary.
We need to understand evolution as the creation by the gods of the
universe - or at least 'our' part of it - and in particular of our solar
system and our earth as the stage for the unfolding of the cosmic
drama, which has now reached a crucial stage when we are expected to
become co-creators. If we are to fulfil this task, we need to understand
the creative intentions of the gods. I use the word 'gods' rather than
the singular God, because that is more correct. Genesis refers to the
Elohim, a plural noun denoting a group of high spiritual beings who were
involved in the creation of our solar system. Mistranslation of the Bible
has created enormous problems of understanding, often compounded by
rigidly literal interpretations. If approached with appropriately
imaginative thinking, Genesis can reveal deep truths about the creation
of the world and the evolution of the forms of life upon it, including
mankind. There is a wonderful correspondence between the Creation story
in Genesis and the development of the human embryo, beautifully told in
Thomas Weihs' book: "Embryogenesis in Myth and Science" (Floris
Books,1986). Most importantly, we need to understand that always and
everywhere behind the physical manifestation there is creative spirit at
work, in fact creative spirits; that contemporary Christianity's view of
spiritual reality is a sadly denuded caricature of the true richness of
the spiritual world and of the cosmic nature and mission of Christ.
Only a Christ-centered science can hope to penetrate to an understanding
of the meaning and purpose of our existence and of our crucial destiny.
This would be a genuinely spiritual science, including a science of the
spirit which can investigate spiritual reality with the same objectivity
as materialistic science studies material-physical reality. This is not
mere fancy. The foundations of a true science of the spirit were laid
earlier this century by Rudolf Steiner, who placed the understanding of
the central importance of the incarnation of Christ at the very heart of
his work. His researches have borne abundant fruit in numerous fields:
education, science, art, medecine, agriculture and religion. Steiner gave
many lectures on the origins of our solar system and a complete cycle of
ten lectures was devoted to making wonderful sense of the Genesis account
of creation.
Steiner's work resolves the conflict between science and religion and
points the way forward to a new science which is in harmony with the
creative intentions of the spiritual world. Many of the difficulties in
understanding the evolution of the world, and which cause such conflict
between creationists and evolutionists - such as the gaps in the fossil
record - can be resolved. Most importantly, it becomes possible to
discover the direction of future evolution, so that we do not merely say:
Thy will be done, but know what that will and intention are.
This is the beginning of true science.
Paul