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10a. Evolution
By Kurt Simons | June 10, 2007
To those who choose not to believe in God, the theory of purely material evolution helps maintain free will since it provides an alternate explanation to God-driven creation for the development of humankind. For those who do believe in God, however, it is clear that there is only one God, and only one set of laws by which the universe operates, as discussed in Religion and Science: No Contradiction. All these laws, at both the spiritual and natural levels, work in coherent and consistent harmony with each other. When there seem to be gaps or contradictions between or within portions of this system, those gaps or contradictions are only an appearance, due to limitations in human understanding of either revelation or of the natural scientific facts involved. The evolution concept provides a classic demonstration of this. Saying there is evolution, properly understood, does not conflict with the idea of God creating people when evolution is seen as just another of the countless mechanisms God uses to operate the universe in a lawful and orderly way. In the creation in the womb of every human life, for instance, God “evolves” a body, step by step, from chemical and then cellar “raw material” and then, over embryonic development, into a full body, serving as an external containant for the human soul within it.
Two key spiritual teachings are needed to fully understand any kind of evolution process. One is that physical matter is in and of itself dead. In other words, it can not evolve life on its own; it cannot even exist itself from moment to moment without inflowing power from God. More specifically, the level at which something exists, from sub-atomic particle to chemical, plant, animal or human, depends on the discrete degree level at which it is capable of receiving that inflowing power. In the present context, for instance, the significant difference between animal and human is that the human form is able to receive a higher level of that inflowing power than the animal form. (”Form” refers to functionality, not just shape.)
A second key teaching is that the essential difference between human beings and “higher” animals does not lie in a physical characteristic, such as brain size, or in some external ability, such as tool-using, that science can measure, but in the ability to understand spiritual truth and make moral and spiritual judgments based on it. In keeping with this distinction, for instance, only humans go to heaven or hell, as determined by the spiritual direction of their accumulated judgments.
So, properly understood, there is no conflict between religion and science about evolution. Apparent evolution is simply one of many preparatory mechanisms in what began as a form only capable of receiving life at the animal level. That form was then “evolved” by God - in keeping with the spiritual and physical laws of the universe - into a form capable of receiving influx at the human spiritual level, up a discrete degree from the physical level. Understanding the spiritual side of this development is important because, while the development of the external physical body may have been a gradual change, at the spiritual level there has to have been a discrete change. In other words, there has to have been a change in the internal discrete degree level of existence (outlined in Correspondences: The Great Lost Secret) from sub-human to human. Such a change could not be found by science, but can only known from revelation.
For Further Reading
From the Teachings of the Second Coming
Angelic Wisdom concerning The Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom - Teachings on the mechanics of spiritual and physical creation.
Other Titles
Chauncey Giles, Evolution - Another of Giles’ brief but inspiring and thought-provoking reflections
to “Why am I here? What is Life’s Purpose?
June 12th, 2007 at 6:41 pm
It appears that Swedenborg sees a role for chance a part of the divine provision. He briefly discusses Luck in Divine Providence 212, although he states that he is not permitted to fully disclose its operation. You may want to reflect on this section and how it relates to evolutionary processes that harness the power of chance to develop new or novel features in chaotic systems and also the way chance governs interactions at the quantum level.
June 15th, 2007 at 10:33 am
My thought would be that the operation of chance/fortune/luck is necessarily hidden in situations involving human free will, so that that free will is not compromised (New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Doctrine 276). However when it is simply a matter of specifying a mechanism whereby a newly created form is involved, I think the probabilistic operation of standard genetic variation provides plenty of opportunity for Providentially-guided quantum type changes to take place. Indeed, these options could, and presumably are, expanded by such further possibilities as a cosmic ray hitting a critical DNA component.