Today Brad refers to Richard Mouw's blog entry, "The Lesson of 'Ancient Seas.'" Mouw writes about evolution, and along the way makes me reflect on the way my own thought has been formed.
How do you get believers to get excited spiritually about the fact that the earth is millions of years old, and that human beings have evolved from lower forms of life?
On this challenge, I was immensely pleased to come across a wonderful paragraph in a scholarly essay, published in the early 1990s in Christian Scholars Review, by Ernan McMullen, who taught in the Notre Dame philosophy department for several decades. Father McMullen affirms that over a period of millions of years, there have been “uncountable species that flourished and vanished [and] have left a trace of themselves in us.” The Bible, he says, sees God as preparing the world for “the coming of Christ back through Abraham to Adam”; but is it too much of a stretch, he asks, “to suggest that natural science now allows us to extend the story indefinitely further back?” And then this wonderful passage: “When Christ took on human nature, the DNA that made him the son of Mary may have linked him to a more ancient heritage stretching far beyond Adam to the shallows of unimaginably ancient seas. And so, in the Incarnation, it would not have been just human nature that was joined to the Divine, but in a less direct but no less real sense all those myriad organisms that had unknowingly over the eons shaped the way for the coming of the human.”
I find that to be an inspiring theme to add to our understanding of the Incarnation. That long process, beginning in “the shallows of unimaginably ancient seas,” was not wasted time. It was preparation for the One who would come with healing in his wings, a healing that will only be complete when the Savior returns and announces, “Behold, I make all things new.” And what he will renew in that act of cosmic transformation is all the stuff that he had carried–in his own DNA!– to the Cross of Calvary.
Wonderful! I love how tightly this binds the story of creation, incarnation, atonement and re-creation. And now I am drawn to consider how the story can move forward; how various teachers leave traces of themselves in us. In particular, I think of my own situation, and I remember Ernan McMullen and Vernon Bourke.
Vernon Bourke looked somewhat like Santa Claus in a glen-plaid suit. Back in the 70's professors dressed up; but Bourke always matched sturdy toffee-colored, hightop work boots with his ensembles. He taught the Medieval Philosophy course, and he was the first person I ever met who could read and write Arabic. It was in his class that I first caught on to the magic of the ontological argument. Gentle, but tough. He lived to be 91.
Father Ernan McMullen is a complex fellow. I remember when we were at Notre Dame, he took aside all the new entering graduate students and told them in in his rich Irish brogue that if they valued their marriages, they would leave immediately. He had seen several divorces in the philosophy department and didn't want to see any more.
Both McMullen and Bourke pointed to St. Augustine as probably the earliest Christian evolutionist, as a result of his theory of rationes seminales. Victor P. Warkulwiz explains why
...St. Augustine’s theory of rationes seminales... develops the idea of trans-species development of organic beings in a way quite different from Darwin or the Neo-Darwinians. Augustine may have believed in far-reaching cross-species development and so proposed an "evolutionist" theory for the origin of species. But he developed a profound metaphysical theory of the causes of such an evolution that is wholly opposed to the atheistic spirit of Darwinism and Neo-Darwinism. Seifert says that the Church too has to separate the "evolutionary" idea of the transformation of species from the idea that Darwinian principles are sufficient to explain the origin of species.
Augustine employs many different terms when speaking of the so-called rationes seminales. He mentions it in at least seven places in three different works, chiefly in his Genesis ad litteram. It is not easy to discern what he means by rationes seminales, but one meaning seems to imply a sophisticated and profound theory of the origin of new species from existing ones. It is clear that Augustine rejects the first two forms of the theory of evolution described above. But he seems to say that God inserted into matter at creation rationes seminales (seminating/germinating ideas or plans) for different forms to be possibly developed in matter. This seems to leave room for the transformation of one species into another. But Augustine replaces the Darwinian principles of "natural selection" and "survival of the fittest" with a principle similar to Aristotle’s entelechy. That is an inner active principle that contains in potency an elaborate form and potentially dynamically unfolding teleological plan that could originate only in a supreme intellect. Thus not mindless "natural selection" but an ingenious creative plan of God "inserted into matter" is the cause of evolutionary development. Augustine did not believe that all living things could spring from any matter. Rather, he held a more restricted view that allowed for the transformation of species subject to limitation by some nature. Augustine also held that living beings are distinct from non-living beings. In living beings the rationes seminales involve a soul that is not reducible to properties of matter. Finally, Augustine sounds as if he meant that the rationes seminales are not principles immanent in matter, but that they are divine creative ideas that exist in God long before the things exist that correspond to them. This is a sign of the influence of Platonic philosophy on the thinking of Augustine.
Three Thoughts:
1) Could it be that the reason evangelicals have had such a troubled time with evolution is that we lack the metaphysical language with which to discuss it, and so make the distinctions necessary that would help us preserve both the faith and the science it involves? Did some babies get thrown out with the Greek bathwater somewhere about 500 years ago?
2) Darwinian evolution assumes that progress is inevitable in evolution, as simpler, lower forms evolve into higher, more complex ones. This principle may be true for the physical world, but does it necessarily apply to the intellectual/spiritual world?
3) Rather than "progress," I believe entelechy/design operates not only in the physical world but also in the intellectual and spiritual world. (cf.Psalm 139). In my own case, God has been preparing for Christ to come to me through the lives of men like Richard Mouw, Ernan McMullan, Vernon Bourke, Augustine and the Apostles. This leads to the unavoidable question: Who He will be coming to through me?
It is an exciting, sobering, humbling thought.
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