new church life: september/october 2017
that all created substances, spiritual and natural, in all their endlessly varied
forms, devolved, were involved in the outmost substances of creation, and
could then evolve.
Now apply this to human evolution. If, as is widely believed today,
human beings evolved from animals, it is only because these prior forms
(these “acorns” of human life) came from a God who is Human. This is where
animals got their potential to evolve toward humanness. In fact, the whole
earth and everything in nature, has within it a “conatus” – an urge, an inherent
tendency -- to strive toward the human form.
Unlike the natural oak from which natural acorns come, the “Divine
Oak” (or Tree of Life) from which we humans come is invisible – but then so is
the soul that makes us human. For that matter, although an acorn and an oak
are visible objects, the life force within them that makes the evolution of acorn
to oak possible is not visible. It’s the same with us. Our physical body is visible
and tangible, but without the invisible human soul within it, the body would
be just another form of animal; not human.
Regardless of the stages of formation the human body may have gone
through since life on earth began, it is not the body that makes us human.
So, to say that humans evolved from animals (or to go back further, the same
primordial stuff animals evolved from) is at best a vague, incomplete, and
misleading statement. Better to say that both animals and humans evolve from
God.
“Those who do not evolve the creation of the universe and all things
thereof by continuous mediations from the First [Being], can but hold
hypotheses, disjoined and divorced from their causes, which, when surveyed
by a mind with an interior perception of things, do not appear like a house, but
like heaps of rubbish.” (Divine Love and Wisdom 303)
(WEO)
evolution of the automobile
In Michigan once we took children from the Oak Arbor Church School to
visit a Ford Motor Co. assembly plant. At the beginning of the assembly line
the steel frame of the car was assembled, then as we moved down the line the
axles, springs, wheels, doors, engine, transmission, and the rest of the car’s
components were added. The part that really amazed me was at the end of the
line when a worker got in the car, turned the key and drove it off the line under
its own power.
The whole process of assembly from piles of parts took an incredibly short
time; a new car rolled off the line every few minutes. (And this was before
all the robot assemblers there are now. Of course, the various components
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