Creation and Evolution
Since Plato’s Battle of the Gods and Giants (and obviously before), the struggle between idealism and materialism has waxed and waned, at the base of which is the distinction between mind and body. Plato’s Gods, who send lightning bolts from the heavens, represent the side of religion. The Giants, who tear up trees by the roots to use as clubs represent religion’s ‘anti’ or materialism, but to get it into focus, what we are looking at here is the physiognomy of the human mind and culture.
For a rational perspective on the battle you have to determine where you and others stand on the emotional and time spectrum, where creation and evolution each split into two. Instead of religion we have good and bad religion. Instead of evolution we have, well, good and bad science. Good science is reflective, math based; bad science is blind and impulsive. It sees nothing in religion, and denies that mind exists, without noticing that its assertion undermines its own case, but it can tell whether a tooth or bone fragment is from a human ancestor as far back as 160,000 years ago.
Anthropologists claim that recently discovered fossil remains confirm genetic evidence that modern humans evolved separately from the more primitive Neanderthals, and coexisted with them for more than 100,000 years before the Neanderthals died out some 30,000 years ago. Dying out suggests a gradual diminution. It could just as well have been a relatively sudden event, complementary to humanity’s origin (Note the fragment in Genesis 6:4, “In those days there were giants on the earth.”).
The assumption that tooth and bone affords sufficient evidence to identify the sapient species (Homo sapiens) could be wide of the mark. The mutation, if we call it that, which points to the origin of our species, needs to be traced to neural architecture and process, and this leaves no convenient trace in the fossil record. Creationism clings doggedly to the biblical record and will not retreat from it. This may be due to the fact that its evidence, objective in its own way, is part of the relevant existing record.
Philosophically, religion, re + ligare, to bind back again, is as real as our speciation and thinking, i.e., as our DNA and brain. It buds from the mechanism that establishes mind in the mother infant relation; reestablishing in higher form the intimate unity they possessed before the birth. Religion is thus the social condensation of this universal process, and in this way all humans are religious. Humanity, or the human form, is a particular expression of nature’s mind, and religion is a state of this mind.
The theory then, is that, reaching a threshold, evolution approaches and passes a critical point that defines our sapient kind. As a change it arises in the depth of the neural mechanism that governs our being, etched not in tooth and bone but fleeting electronic process. It leaves, however, a permanent trace, and this specifically is the existence and history of religion.
The word ‘creation’ is from Latin, creare, to produce or make. Religion presents this as God’s act in bringing the universe into being. Initially, in the animal state, there is nothing there, but a spontaneous sensory-motor process. On one side this is a vision, no sooner formed than it disappears in action; on the other it is an understanding which is not yet reason. Then suddenly these weld. The former unconscious unity is overtaken by reason, confronting a world of comprehensible objects and events. The innocence and spontaneity of the previous world is gone, replaced by the forlorn state of a nascent humanity.
Now, these ‘objects and events’ lend themselves to the psychological refinement and manipulation that we call language. This too, is a divarication. The first branch is the beginning of religion, our sense of self within a greater context; the second is our sense of a subject world, accessible to our use and management. In the first we hold ourselves entirely apart. This, in extreme form is the sense of our mortality. In the second, we hold ourselves selectively apart (from the world we manipulate and manage), and this differential detachment signifies or comes forward as the beginning of our species and the independence of knowledge. Another way of saying it is that in total detachment the mind itself comes objectivity into view.
Language does not generate the change, but is generated by it. Religion expresses this viewpoint in the words:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. John 1:1
God is the collective expression of our sense of mortality, a form that, overreaching this mortality, stresses the infinite side of everlasting life. The whole constitutes an insight corresponding to the objectification of mind, whose internal aspect is this sense of God, the presence of an invisible objectivity, time and space, which holds the world in its grip, against the external materialization of a world accessible to our management.
This materialization conversely, or existence of objects in time and space is at the same time in leading strings to the human mind, a creation, in other words, of God.
So defined, or in this context, the word ‘human’ is inseparable from language, wherein it initially takes form as chant song psalm poetry and prose, in descending order in terms of evolution, ascending in terms of useful function, passed on within the function of the imprinting that, in the mother-infant relation holds the generations together.
The song of a thrush, as a continuous sound track over several minutes is of exquisite beauty, but unless we can show that it consists of a whole that splits into parts, which then, separately, have independent meaning, —and it is not impossible that birds communicate in this way, —we cannot claim it as a form of language in the human sense. We must, nevertheless, remain open to the possibility that other species are incipiently human, or can become so, and that we constitute but the first member of a collective family of sapient creatures.
Religion and science are complementary sides in human knowledge. Objectively our species springs from the maturation of something inherent within our development, and that of all living forms, from the beginning, a crucial threshold change in the anatomical physiological and psychological basis of our mind, taking place in the central nervous system. It does not correlate in any essential way with our skeleton or tooth and bone fragments. The record of our link to the past is not however, broken. It is continuous, set in the oral tradition of antiquity, whose mutually supportive sides are religion, which reflects the inner subjective side of unity, and language, which reflects the understanding that gathers up the diversity and independence that imbues the outer world held in sense. Together these meld in an unbroken record, bourn along in the mechanism of imprinting, whose continuity represents the coherent foundation of our knowledge structure, inseparable from the existence of our species.
This explains the existence and persistence of the religious message over thousands of years, as indelible as our species, while change grips everything else. Seasons wax and wane. Civilizations come and go, mountains rise and fall, but the thread of religious teaching surmounts all change, an evolving core that sustains the continuity of our knowledge back to the origin of our kind.
There is not an aspect of knowledge, from nuclear technology to the ongoing press of communication that does not have a religious footing, whose unsolicited permanence is the abiding foundation of every attempt to portray it in the material world of pyramids, statues, sepulchers vaults tombs and whatever else. The simple words, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” will not go away, because they reflect a truth subjectively experienced in the first childhood of everyone living.