the other heritage of Charles Darwin

Two hundred years ago, on 12 February 1809, Charles Robert Darwin was born, and 150 years ago, his revolutionary book ‘On the Origin of Species’ was published. In 2009, the media paid a lot of attention to this double anniversary. However, in this article, the pentagram presents a hardly discussed aspect of the biologist: the relationship between knowledge and faith.

Darwin believed that scientific work should be carried out independently from religious ideas and that faith in a directive deity can easily be combined with the theory of evolution, because faith has a basis other than the sciences. But his very life showed how closely both are related.

During his theological studies, Darwin was confronted with natural theology. This discipline states that the effect of a loving or punishing god is noticeable in all natural phenomena. The scientist’s main motivation for his five-year journey around the world was his quest for irrefutable proof of this. This is why he carried the Bible as an undisputed authority in his luggage. However, due to the many surprising insights that he gained into the history of the earth and the development of plants and animals, his naïve faith in the Bible began to waver.

An image of god disappears  Back in England, Charles Darwin began to evaluate his comprehensive and diverse discoveries. Then, gradually, the theory of evolution developed. Simultaneously, he understood that his faith in a God who miraculously intervenes in the events in the world, was no longer tenable. In his main work ‘On the Origin of Species’, he stated as his opinion that, though God created the universe and the laws of nature, he further gave them free rein. ‘There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.’ ²

As Darwin grew older, his faith in a God waned, which was certainly influenced by his long illness, but when his dearly beloved daughter died at the age of ten, he could no longer believe in a compassionate God. Ever since that event, he called himself an agnostic, but actually the process of evolution had already interested him all his life. His idea was that the question of the reason for it surpassed human cognition. He wrote: ‘To us, the mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble; and as far as I am concerned, I have decided to remain an agnostic.’

His life actually ended tragically: his insights totally destroyed his faith and his image of God and this was not replaced by something else. When he died in Downe (Kent, England) on 19 April 1882, he fully believed that death was the absolute end. However, by his theory of evolution, he not only paved the way for a new, dynamic worldview, but he also laid the basis for a wholly new image of God, without being aware of it.

The other Darwin  Charles Darwin’s premise of the survival of the fittest was soon interpreted as ‘the fittest will survive’. Actually, he meant that only those organisms would survive that thrive in their environment. He deduced the ‘struggle for life’ from his observations; he did not consider it an ideology. To him, the cooperation and the symbiosis in the vegetable and animal kingdoms were at least as important. Eighty percent of all plants have a symbiotic relationship with fungi. Darwin’s theories have been abused in an unparalleled way. The social Darwinists were the worst by turning ‘the struggle for life’ into a ‘right of the strongest’, thus taking the ‘selection’ into their own hands and distinguishing between a valuable and a worthless human life. According to Charles, cooperation and transcendence are much more important for human development than competition and self-interest. These were super modern insights! He considered love, fellowship, compassion, communication and creativity decisive factors of human development. He wrote: ‘Moral skills should be put higher on the scale than intellectual ones. Moral properties rather develop, directly or indirectly, by the effect of habit, rationality and teaching than by natural selection.’ ³

In Darwin’s second important work The Descent of Man, the expression ‘survival of the fittest’ only appears twice, while the concept of ‘love’ is mentioned not less than ninety-five times. The same numbers are reached by the expressions ‘mutual affection’, ‘mutual help’ and ‘sympathy’. ⁴ During his life, he was not a champion of a rock-hard evolution machinery based on natural selection and the survival of the fittest. His message was: there is hope for a future, higher human destiny, which is implied in what is highest and best in us, namely love.

Later effects  Not until long after his death, did a new dynamic image of the world, humanity and God develop on the basis of his theory, which was further promoted by the knowledge of elementary particles and quantum physics. Spiritually interested scientists and progressive theologians tend to grow towards a concept that is acceptable to modern people, in which the new scientific worldview corresponds to a new and noble image of God, an image which sees God’s activity in everything that lives, as the eternal possibility that encompasses everything and everyone and does not exclude anything or anyone. It is interesting to see how these new ideas (at least partly) approach the timeless universal teachings.

universally linked  ‘The universe constitutes a whole and has originated from the big bang. It is a unity that covers the universes down to the microbes. The earth, too, is a physical-chemical system, in which there ultimately is, via evolution, as in a great organism, a coherence of everything with everything. According to Jörg Zink can the awareness of the fundamental unity of everyone with everything be described as compassion. Compassion also means placing egoistic interests in the second place in favour of life.’ ⁵

‘Quantum physics deals with a general relationship, in which changes of form (metamorphoses) continuously occur. However, mere ‘change’ actually does not exist, but only ‘renewal’ (modification) or ‘working’ or ‘living’. ‘Modifying’ is actually ‘flowing through everything’ without being understood… In order to understand the world, we actually should not want to ‘comprehend’, but we rather should stretch out our arms and open our hands to ‘receive’ it. At the moment that we want to understand, we suffocate what we would like to comprehend or we grope in the emptiness. For the essence of the world is ‘what is in between’. ⁶

Becoming instead of being  ‘Being human is becoming human: the progressing manifestations of the divine spirit in the world and in man.’

‘Creation is a permanent process and not an event from a distant past.’ (Th Dobzhansky, evolution biologist)

‘The more progress we make in life, the more we change. The more we change, the more we die. This is the law of genesis.’ ⁷

The relationship between science and religion  ‘Many scientifically thinking people trace our existence back to the activity of a mysterious, transcendental power. They believe that a divine plan underlies the creation of our cosmos. Then God is the creative potential of the evolution.’ In this context, theologians like H R Stadelmann speak of an evolutionary God, who surpasses good and evil.’ ⁸

‘Actually no contradiction is possible between science and religion, provided science restricts itself to what, when, how and where and religion to why.’ ⁹

‘The discovery that something, which our mind is unable to comprehend and the beauty and sublimity of which only touch us indirectly, underlies everything that we can experience: that is religiosity… Science without religion is paralysed. Religion without science is blind.’ (Albert Einstein)

the primacy of the spirit  Spirit and matter are not opposites, but only different states of aggregation (complex, composite states): matter is solidified spirit, of which spirit is the primary aspect, because there was not yet matter in its current state at the time of the big bang.

‘The cosmos is not kept together by matter, but by the spirit.’ (P Teilhard de Chardin)

god does not work from the outside  ‘The cosmic spirit is realised through evolution; it incarnates during the course of the evolution of the structures of the world. Because God makes himself concrete in continuous interaction with his creation, he is part of its fate.’ ¹⁰

‘God does not work in the world as the immovable mover, from above or from the outside, but he works from the inside, as the dynamic, most real reality, in the process of development of this world, because he enables, flows and accomplishes. He is the origin, the centre and the goal of the processes of the world… fully respecting the laws of nature, of which he himself is the origin.’ ¹¹

‘In the gnostic consciousness, every human being finds his perfect self and all discover their truth and the resonance of their different activities in what surpasses all of them and of which they are expressions.’ (Sri Aurobindo)

the mentality of the sermon on the mount  ‘This also results in a new interpretation of Jesus Christ. The historical events fade into the background. Not only Jesus is the son of God, but all of us are called to become sons and daughters of that God, that is, new human beings. The appearance of Jesus may be seen as a ‘quantum leap’ in human evolution, just as, for instance, in the Beatitudes the usual social-darwinist patterns of behaviour are broken up. In this respect, Jesus may be considered ‘the saviour’, because he has liberated us from the pressure of biological selection (competitive behaviour, self-maintenance) and has, for instance, shown us, by his consistently practised, non-violent ‘way of the cross’, the love for all life as the path to becoming whole again.’ ¹²

The aim of evolution  The new insights correspond to many biblical statements. For example, when Jesus says that the kingdom of God has already begun in the here and now. Or when the New Testament speaks about Jesus as the ‘new man’. Or when  Paul says: ‘We shall not die, but be changed.’ The aim of evolution would then be that ultimately ‘God dwells’ in his creation in the ‘new Jerusalem’.

‘The resurrection of Jesus is not a miracle that contradicts the laws of nature, but it concerns a wholly different mode of existence in the wholly different dimension of eternity.’ ¹³

The insight is growing that we, human beings, have a specific task in building the body that becomes God in his creation, the mysterious body of Christ… Put on the garment of light! Become Light! Be a new creature! ¹⁴

Bridges to the absolute truth  In this way, the fundamental tenets of the Christian faith, like Jesus Christ, creation, revelation, salvation and resurrection receive a totally new meaning. By the way, should we not consider whether or not this concerns a superficial reconciliation of the natural and the spiritual sciences? Or whether the concept of spirit is not watered down? Or whether things are not interpreted wrongly? However, it is undeniable that many statements have a close link with the universal teachings. May they constitute bridges to the universal truth.

Evolution and involution

What is usually described as evolution is called involution by the Spiritual School, namely the chaining, and enveloping of the spirit in matter. However, true evolution means liberation, the development of the spirit from matter, the process of transfiguration.

J v Rijckenborgh: Elementary Philosophy, Rozekruis Pers 1965, chapter 6, Involution-Evolution

Sources

1. Last sentence from Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species.

2. http://www.literature.org/authors/darwin-charles/the-origin-of-species-6th-edition/chapter-15.html

3. David Loye, Darwin in Love – Die Evolutionstheorie in neuem Licht (The theory of evolution in a new light), Arbor 2005, blurb

4. id., p. 150

5. Jörg Zink, Dörnen können Rosen tragen (Thorns may bear roses), Kreuz 1997

6. Hans Peter Dürr, Auch die Wissenschaft spricht nur in Gleichnissen – Die neue Beziehung zwischen Religion und Naturwissenschaften (Science also speaks in parables – The new relationship between religion and the sciences), herder 2004, pp. 109, 116

7. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Frühe Schriften (Early writings), Alber 1968, p. 297

8. Hans-Rudolf Stadelmann, Im Herzen der Materie – Glaube im Zeitalter der Naturwissenschaften (In the heart of matter – Faith in the age of the sciences), Buchgesellschaft 2004, p. 92 ff

9. Mathias Plüss, Was Darwin wirklich meinte (What Darwin really meant), Das Magazin, 2009,1

10. Hans-Rudolf Stadelmann, id., p. 69

11. Hans Küng, Existiert Gott? (Does God exist?), Piper 1978, p. 709

12. Hans-Rudolf Stadelmann, id., pp. 120, 133

13. Hans Küng, Ewiges Leben? (Eternal life?), Piper 1982, p. 138

14. Pia Gyger, Hört die Stimme des Herzens, Werdet Priesterinnen und Priester der kosmischen Wandlung (Hear the voice of the heart, Become priestesses and priests of cosmic change), Kösel 2006, pp. 54, 157

 © Lectorium Rosicrucianum 2010.

Article from Pentagram No 2, 2010