Genesis, Evolution and Natural Selection
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1.2. THE SECOND ACCOUNT OF CREATION1.2.1. THE EVOLUTION OF LIFESome apparent paradoxes of Genesis 2-3The second account contains a lot of multiple references. This is why we will discover some paradoxes, which we are going to solve by separating the events the text is referring to, especially by attributing some events to the angels and others to our world. This account is quiet complex however. We therefore have to restrict ourselves to subjects that directly or indirectly touch the cycles of the history of salvation, which is the main theme of the pages on this site. What first of all is attracting our attention in this account is the achronological order of the evolution from matter to man (Gen 2:4-22). The creation of matter is in fact mentioned first (Gen 2:4-6), which is correct, but then the creation of man immediately follows (Gen 2:7) and then the plants (Gen 2:8-9) and the animals (Gen 2:19). Consequently, the creation of man is quoted too early. This paradox reminds us of those we already met in the first account, that is the creation of the day (see Night and day) and the plants (see Celestial and terrestrial plants) before that of the Sun, as well as the achronology of the birds. This is why they are solved in the same manner: the term Adam does not only refer to the first man but also to an angel or to the angels in general. This is why Adam is created out of dust (Gen 2:7) as a kind of compromise between the creation of the angels and man. We will approach this multireference of Adam more in detail in The theory of descent. Another paradox concerns the rivers Pishon and Gihon (Gen 2:11-13) because they are hard to identify, contrarily to the Tigris and the Euphrates (Gen 2:14). The two unknown rivers may refer to the celestial paradise, where rivers effectively flow according to Rev 22:1 or Ezek 47:1-12 for instance, even if it is hard to imagine celestial landscapes with rivers. It is also possible that the Pishon and Gihon refer to Central Africa, where the first humans lived 200’000 years ago and which therefore constitutes another terrestrial paradise like that of Mesopotamia (see The glacial era). So if we allow multiple references, the paradoxes became only apparent. The description of the vegetarian animals is somewhat surrealistic as well (Gen 2:19-20). Without excluding that celestial animals, herb eating lions (Gen 1:30) and wolves living with lambs (Is 11:6) exist in the spiritual world, the reason of their fabulous character is also based on their reference to an analogous hierarchy of the angels. We see this very well with the snake, which is on the one hand described as an animal, but is on the other hand capable of speaking (Gen 3:1-5). These two representations can only keep their validity if Genesis functions according to the multireference, hence if it presents the speaking snake at the same time as fallen angel and as animal. By the way, the snakes effectively lost their paws (Gen 3:14), namely during the evolution having the lizards as ancestors. If behind the snake hides an angel yet, we have to suppose that it is the same for the other animals. This therefore leads us to the analogy between the hierarchy of the animals and that of the angels, which can also be compared with that existing in human society. This reference of the animals to the angels perhaps explains why Genesis 1:29-30 asserts that the primitive food of animals and man was composed of plants, more precisely of fruit trees and seed plants, which is inconceivable with some animal species that have always been carnivorous. Yet this passage precisely also refers to the angels, who eat exclusively a spiritual food the fruit trees of paradise produce (see Celestial and terrestrial plants). In the beginning, they were therefore spiritual "vegetarians", until the day when they consumed the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.
Monogenism or polygenism?A discovery in biochemistry made a sensation in 1987 because it showed that humanity really has a cradle in South-Eastern Africa. This means that hominization did not take place on a large scale, that is to say at several places on the planet, as the majority of the paleontologists supposed before, but descended from a small group of individuals. May be that other discoveries will perhaps even establish a monogenism, that is to say the descent of humanity from a single couple, Adam and Eve. In any case, monogenism would fit in with a monogenesis that predominated at crucial steps in the evolution: the whole physical universe was formed from a single point, a singularity, at the big bang; the planets were born within the same solar disk; the continents issued from a single one before their drift; life was only formed on earth and nowhere else1, so not on other planets or in other planetary systems outside the solar system, and from a single cell; new species emerged from a single couple of a previous species; Adam and Eve are the ancestors of humanity; Abraham is the ancestor of Israel; Christ is the first born of a new generation called Christians. It consequently seems that monogenesis, when something completely new enters into existence, is a universal law because creation is not a team work but has the signature of the unique God. Man was created in the image of his Creator (Gen 1:26), in the likeness of God (Gen 5:1). This is why he resembles God. This resemblance inevitably implies a diversity within the crowd of subjects who resemble God, since there is only one God but many humans, who reflect, each one in his manner, the image of God. By applying this law to the whole evolution, which aimed to form man and for this purpose crossed the various steps we know, the same diversity prefiguratively manifested itself before a new step, which in turn prefigured the uniqueness of God by a singularity, that is to say by a single occurrence of a new entity at its first rise. This may be understood mathematically: if we want to express an irrational number, for instance the Euler number e = 2.718... , by the next closest integers, then the diversity has only two possibilities, namely 2 and 3. If we allow the numbers to have one digit after the coma and be between 2 and 3, the diversity increases to 11. If we allow them to have 2 digits after the coma, it increases to 101 and so on. In other words, the more complex the numbers prefiguring the irrational number are, the more possibilities arise increasing the diversity of the numbers, which also increases their resemblance to the irrational number but they never reach it. This is why, there were only hydrogen and helium some time after the big bang. Then, the ninety-two elements were produced in stars. Still later, the diversity of the matter enormously increased during the chemical evolution in planetary systems. On earth then, there may still have been a biochemical evolution eventually producing cellular components in the hot seas of the primitive Earth. The complexity of such components was equivalent with a big diversity. Finally, at the beginning of the biological evolution occurred a singularity when the first living cell appeared, which was kind of prefigured through the chemical and biochemical evolution. The same scenario recurred in the frame of the biological evolution, which constantly increased the diversity from one species to another to finally arrive to man. This transition to man has introduced an entirely new dimension, which must in turn have begun by a singularity, in other terms by a monogenism. This is why before this step there is a an increasing complexity and diversity in approaching man, those of all animal species resembling more or less to the unique gender of man. This new step opened what should be designated the spiritual evolution, because with man the creation received a new spiritual dimension of life because humans ask where they come from and where they go, have consciousness, raison and a lot of other spiritual goods that animals do not have. This spiritual evolution brought forth culture, civilization and religion. Because of the singularities, an intervention of God must have occurred with each new step, namely at the big bang, the formation of life, and the appearance of the first humans. I am convinced though that there were even interventions at each appearance of a new species and even during the material evolution, for nature is often found in a situation of chaos, in which the lesser changes of the starting conditions can provoke very different results from those that would have arrived without the changes. That's the famous knock of the butterfly's wing, which in a situation of chaos of the meteorological conditions can eventually decide between bad or beautiful weather elsewhere on the globe. Interventions of God at the level of the material evolution would consequently have had no need to really disturb the natural process. In any event, they would have been undetectable for science. The theory of descentAn apparently insurmountable difficulty arises with the verse: "And the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being" (Gen 2:7). Are we to take this verse to the letter, as do creation scientists, and to believe that the species were created independently of the others and that an evolution never took place? Cleary no! But not all is scientifically explainable. We must forget the old controversy creation vs. evolution, for the first is not at all opposed to the second and vice versa. The three steps with diversity before a singularity make part of three levels having different "degrees of life": at level zero there is the nothingness from which God created the angels and later caused the big bang. This level is in reality no level since it concerns the naught, but it is nevertheless taken into consideration for reasons the reader will understand further on. The first level of the physical universe begins with the big bang opening the evolution of the inanimate matter. A second level is formed with the biological evolution, the flora and fauna, the animated creation. Finally, man makes part of the third level, the creation supplied with reason, free will and responsibility. The "average" between level zero (naught), which the angels issued from, and level two (fauna), which man issued from, is level one, that is to say matter. This is why Adam, according to the multireference, was formed with dust, because this figure not only represents the first man, but also the angels as can be seen from the next figure.
Hence, the dust is multisignificant and its sense changes according to the event to which it is applied. Thus, it firstly designates the naught, which the angels were created from, and secondly the fauna, which man issued from, that is to say a part of his genetic code necessary to the formation of his body, his spirit being directly created by God at each time when a new individual is formed in the maternal womb according to the teaching of the Church2. Also remember that the creation of Adam gets out of the chronology of evolution because he is created before the plants and animals (see Some apparent paradoxes of Genesis 2-3). The dust, which the first man was formed from, therefore refers to a mother belonging to an anterior species of Homo sapiens but of the same genus Homo. This can be Homo erectus or Homo neanderthalensis depending on whether one considers that the latter is a species itself or a subspecies of Homo sapiens. In any case, the real first man was born of a mother capable to feed, educate, and give him the love necessary to have a behavior worthy of the first man. The ancestor of man must consequently have been rather close to modern man, he was probably capable of a primitive language for instance. If this interpretation is valid for the first man, it is also valid for all species, that is to say that we can fully interpret Genesis in agreement with the theory of descent, according to which all species issued from previous ones in the course of a long evolution. However, this kind of progressive or discreet evolution contrasts with the supposedly continuous evolution sustained by most biologists. It is situated somewhere between progressive creationism and theistic evolution.
Natural selectionAnother point is the incompatibility of such a discreet evolution with the concept of natural selection, which is handled as a scientific theory on the same level as quantum mechanics and general relativity. However, the exact contrary is true: it is neither proven nor is there any serious probability of its authenticity. The reason why it could nevertheless survive up to the present is principally due to the following: one does expect of educated people that they question the origin of man. If those persons are atheist, they found themselves in the dilemma to provide natural explanations of the origin of their own species and of all the others, for there are only two possibilities, either God is responsible for life or nature. For that reason natural selection is still discussed, just because not all educated people believe in God. So the theory of natural selection has nothing to do with science but with beliefs, that is with anti-religion, which can reach high degrees of irrationalism. In fact, the theory has not become less hypothetical in the course of time like a solid theory, which is confirmed more and more. The obsession with which Darwinists want to make an inventive and life-generating nature believable closely resembles the hysteria emerging from the belief in the unlimited possibilities of technology raising in the 13th century. This was revealed in an exemplary manner by the countless attempts to construct perpetual motion, engines supposed to continually deliver kinetic energy without consuming another form of energy, which violates the two laws of thermodynamics: conservation of energy and increase of entropy (disorder) in closed systems. As it happens, also natural selection hurts the law of increasing entropy: left to itself, nature generates more and more disorder and only intelligent beings are able to make order within a system. For instance, humans are able to construct sand castles on the shore, but not the ocean, which on the contrary destructs them. In a similar manner, a complex system like the eye cannot be produced by coincidence. There are no living beings, neither in the fossil record, that have their lens somewhere on the body and the retina somewhere else as well as the pupil, the iris, the eyelashes, and so on, without speaking of the fact that these components alone are complex system, that nature should have combined them in the right way at a later stage and then achieve the same task for a second eye both placed symmetrically on the head3. Apart from these scientific reasons like the evolution of the eye, there are many others indeed more difficult to prove but, in my opinion, not less convincing: since the idea of natural selection is based on survival of the fittest, life should only be in possession of features that are related to mere survival. Life however, especially human life, overflows with characteristics that have nothing to do with survival. How can our ability for humor, for instance, or the fact that we like music, or art in general, be related to natural selection? Or emotions such as love, which is easiest toward weak individuals like children and animals? Love and respect for others are "mechanisms" that bring no advantages for individual survival, but nevertheless we consider them the highest human characteristics. One may argue that such virtues are good for social survival, which is stronger than individual survival. Therefore, abilities for social life as well as for art may have been developed by natural selection because they make someone happy and willing to live. Also the love for children may be just something emerged from natural selection because otherwise nobody would want to raise children and the survival of the human species would have been impossible. But the problem with this point of view is that love would then only be virtual, just a means to an end, a kind of illusion. It would not be real. However, everlasting survival is only possible when real love exists. This is why there must be a creator: such as most people came into existence because their parents decided as an act of love to have children also God created through real love the world, all species and the human race. Life has only a sense if it came into existence through the real will and love of God. The Parisian Academy decided in 1775 to never again examine any proposals concerning plans of perpetual motion, which however did not prevent that new projects were invented again and again, even up to the present. This same obsession is linked to the hypothesis of natural selection: like perpetual motion reflects the desire to handle an inexhaustible energy as only God holds it, the idea of natural selection manifests the wish to possess creative forces as only God owns them. And since the example of perpetual motion shows how far an obsession of this kind can go, one should be very critical with pretentious "scientific" theories about the apparition of life, even if otherwise competent persons defend them. In fact, also very famous people like Michelangelo tried to construct perpetual motion. Natural selection is the exact anti-replica of reality: it is evident that God wanted to reduce his creative acts to a minimum because he wanted to increasingly bring his creation to an independence reflecting his own one at the highest possible level. In the domain of speciation, this independence implied that not the new species had to adapt themselves to the environment but this latter in view of giving an adequate base of life to a future species to come, in other words in view of producing an ecosystem capable to make the new species live independently. The rise of the oxygen-producing cyan bacteria, for example, prepared the environment for heterotrophic micro-organisms, which themselves became later an environmental component for another species, and so on. So creation does not at all exclude evolution, which inversely cannot be used to exclude God from the process of evolution. By professing this opinion, one does not trench "in a refusal of this or that scientific reality" 4, one is simply convinced that reality is not as simple and transparent as some people see it. Because of its essentially philosophic dimension, the theory of natural selection can have extremely dangerous social consequences, in that it praises the law of the strongest following the example of that existing in nature on the level of food chains. This is known under the name of Social Darwinism, upon which western imperialism and most of older or younger racial ideologies are based. Social Darwinism is indirectly responsible for the two World Wars as show various studies5. And a certain regime was inspired from it in its intention to "purify" the planet of the presence of the Jews. Scientists often do not believe in God because they cannot imagine a God "inventing" all the complicated natural processes. They think that if God had created all things, all would be supernatural, so that creation would not be understandable since nothing would function logically. This vision could not be more erroneous, for God is himself "the Logos" (Jn 1:1). This is why all what he created is logical, behaves logically and reflects his Logos. If this was not so, the creation could not behave independently and man would have no free will. This is also why the unique logic of nature cannot be taken as an argument against the liberty of God to create the world in his manner: the fact that the natural laws are unique reflects the unique God, for the image of God is reflected in all what he created.
The incarnation prefigured by AdamWhat’s the difference between an angel and a human? At the spiritual level we are certainly very similar to angels, which raises the question why God created man, since he had already created the angels before us: one is inclined to consider the angels of lesser importance, that is to say to believe that they have no other meaning as to serve us as messengers or guardians. However, all spiritual goods man received, that is to say his resemblance to God according to Genesis 1:27, his free will, his supernatural initial grace, and so on, did receive already the angels. At this level, God created nothing new with man. One can therefore assert that initially his creation was not foreseen, since it does not make sense to create two beings, in fact different, but nevertheless equal on the highest level. So the reason for creating man must have appeared in the course of time after the creation of the angels, independently of the fact that God certainly foresaw from the origin that this reason would occur: God decided to create the physical world and man to save both the angels and man through the sacrifice of the cross. This salvation was necessary because of the sin, first of the angels and thereafter of man. For this purpose, God created man spiritually similar to the angels, but physically vulnerable, to become one of them by the incarnation. For some people this viewpoint may be highly revolting. However, why should God not do all what is in his power to save us? So why should God not have created an entirely new world especially for this purpose? His love has no bounds and exceeds all our imagination. Is there not written that "God so much loved the world that he has given his unique Son" (Jn 3:16)? We are living in such a complex world requiring a considerable effort trying to understand it that we defend our vision of the world too often for the only raison to save the labor accomplished in pain and the beauty of the edifice that would collapse, so without much objectivity and asking ourselves whether it really stands on a solid fundament. However, the creation of the physical world in view of the redemption is the sole "model" that can reasonably answer the simple question: "Why did God create beings of spirit and body if their spirit can live without the body?". The creation is full of prefigurations of the incarnation and the redemption. We have already become acquainted with the six levels, which end with Christ and increasingly announce him (see figure 7). We also spoke of the three steps linked to the physical, biological, and spiritual evolution, which manifest a diversity before a singularity. As for the spiritual evolution, it brought forth culture, civilization and religion and followed the same principle as the other levels of evolution, that is it increased in diversity because religions became more and more numerous in the course of history. Then the history of salvation were restricted to the Jewish people, from which the Messiah issued. So the spiritual evolution also arrives to a singularity, the incarnation, which is thereby prefigured by the first man and the other singularities. The theory of descent can thus be confirmed because Christ is born in a similar manner to the first man, that is to say by becoming son of a woman. Genesis 2:7 refers to this birth, for the breath of life that God blew in the nostrils of Adam prefigures the Holy Spirit, whom Jesus was conceived with (Lk 1:35). And the pure earth of the garden of Eden, out of which Adam was formed, announces Mary, the mother of Jesus. We have here a multireference that is based on the analogy between the creation of the first man and the incarnation of the Son of God. So the evolution did not end with the first man but continued until the incarnation, which is the key event of the whole evolution and is prefigured by many sub-events. Because of the same analogy, Mary is prefigured by the pre-human mother who gave birth to Adam, but she is prefigured even more by Eve, who is "the mother of all living" (Gen 3:20) and who is possibly born of the same pre-human mother. She was therefore the sister of Adam, despite their later conjugal relationship. This status of brother and sister and their conjugal relationship prefigure the relationships between Christ and Mary. For Mary is the Bride of God, since the Holy Spirit, who is God, conceived Jesus in Mary (Lk 1:35). However, Christ is also God, more exactly God-man. This double nature of Jesus makes that he is not only son of Mary, but at the same time her Spouse. It is this conjugal relationship that is prefigured by that of Adam and Eve as shows the following figure.
Figure 8 Mary thus became the Mother, similar to God the Father, of all humans born in the faith in Jesus, who – because he is at the same time entirely human – is the First-born of this new Generation (Lk 2:7; Col 1:15; Rev 1:5), the Eldest of a multitude of brothers (Rom 8:29) born and adopted by the Holy Spirit (Gal 4:4-7), the new Adam exempt of all sin (Rom 5:12-19). Finally, because Mary herself lives in the faith in his son, she is also a child of this big family. In this sense therefore Jesus and Mary, like Adam and Eve, are at once brother and sister. It seems that thus is perfectly realized what Jesus said: "Whoever does the will of God, that one is my brother, and my sister, and my mother" (Mk 3:35). The incarnation is consequently at the beginning of a fourth and last step of the evolution: as with the first man the creation received a spirit at the image of God on the third step, opening the third level (see The theory of descent), with Christ it received the Holy Spirit at the fourth step, opening a fourth level. Yet, it is necessary to specify that the people who receive the Holy Spirit evidently do not become equal to Christ and that the incarnation itself is only a creation concerning the human nature of Christ. The analogy between the first man and Christ answers moreover the question of continuity or discontinuity of the hominization, because a prefiguration has similar principles to the key-event it announces. As for the incarnation, the discontinuity is obvious, because people, from the first humans to Christ, did not gradually change to increasingly resemble him, although humanity traversed the spiritual evolution and the incarnation was announced by Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who are firstborns and fathers of a people, namely of Israel6. Yet, this is not in line with an increasing and continual evolution ending with the incarnation, which is a quite discontinuous event, because God became man. As already said, the environment within the biological evolution did constantly adapted itself to receive a new species and the rise of the pre-humans served to receive the first man. The spiritual evolution served therefore to receive Christ, that is to say to make humanity apt – at first the Jews and then the rest of humanity – to understand the event. Because of the close relationship of the incarnation with the creation of the first man, we can therefore suppose that the latter was accomplished in a similar manner, which means, among others, that the hominization was discontinuous too. Yet discontinuity implies monogenism. And because nature is similar in the large and small dimensions, like fractals, the rise of the species must have been discontinuous too, which implies that there was monogenesis and thereby intervention and intelligent design through God. |
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NOTES
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