Evolution: The Creator’s Favorite Tool?

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I often sit and read on the small stoop outside our house in the evenings, sometimes with “an adult beverage.” It’s usually cool and always calming.

The calming effect is partially due to the two beautiful trees in our tiny front yard. One is a 25-foot Ponderosa Pine. With its gnarly limbs and long, slim needles, it appears to be much older than it is. The other tree is, according to the plant ID app on my phone, a type of fruitless crabapple. It’s not a particularly elegant tree, but at about ¾ the height of the Ponderosa and with its deciduous leaves, it provides more than its share of shade. And both trees attract a variety of birds, many who sing their hearts out.

I usually sit there late in the afternoon when there’s almost always a cool breeze, reminding me of one of my favorite passages from the book of Genesis, which provides an image of God that is so human, it makes it a bit easier to relate to the divine: “The man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day….”

Nothing at All?

Anyway, I’m often distracted from my front-stoop reading by what some would say nothing at all – except for the beauty of the trees and shrubs, the always fascinating sky and its endless array of cloud formations.

And as I take it in, I sometimes wonder about the seemingly impossible: Did God make the natural world just so we could thrive in it and enjoy it? And in what sense can we even say that God made it?

If I had profound answers to these questions, of course, I could take my place among the St. Thomas Aquinases of the world. No, I can only have lame speculations and the audacity to share them with you.

So, the second question first. I believe in evolution, not only in the physical world but in God’s relationship with human beings and our understanding of that relationship. The only problem I have with the theory of physical evolution is its randomness. Can it be true that the orderliness of the universe, its beauty, its accommodation to animal, plant and human life, is purely accidental? That’s at least as hard to believe as in a God who created it all.

Teilhard de Chardin
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I can easily relate to the author of Psalm 8: “When I look at the heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have established, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you should care for him?”

So, knowing what we do (and I, for one, know practically nothing about cosmology) about the evolutionary theory, how can we say that God created everything? For me, it’s not hard to imagine how God used evolution to get the job done.

The age of the universe is estimated to be 13.8 billion years, according to the NASA web site. Homo Sapiens, the species to which modern people belong, appeared only an estimated 200,000 years ago. The Book of Job, considered by many scholars to be the oldest book in the Bible, was written about 1,500 years before Jesus.

So, what was God doing in all those unfathomable years between the creation of the universe and when God first revealed himself/herself to humans?

Waiting with patience, I believe, while his scheme for creation was unfolding. (Of course, assigning such attributes as “patience” to God is only analogous.)

Spellbound by the Idea of Evolution

As a young man, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest who was also a paleontologist and philosopher, was spellbound by the idea of evolution and subsequently, in his scientific pursuits (which included research in China where he took part in the discovery of the Peking Man fossils), he began to see a pattern that included God’s use of evolution, not only in the physical world but in God’s relationship to humans. And he believed that evolution continues until we're all united to Christ. 

In the introduction to his famous book, The Divine Milieu, Chardin tells how science helped him better understand that relationship. He uses the scene from the Acts of the Apostles where Paul is preaching in the Agora, the great Athens marketplace.

“…There, we shall listen to St. Paul telling (his listeners) of ‘God, who made man that he might seek Him’ – God whom we try to apprehend in our tentative way – that self-same God is as out-stretched and tangible as the atmosphere in which we are bathed. He encompasses us on all sides, like the world itself. What prevents you, then, from enfolding him in your arms? Only one thing: your inability to see Him.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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