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THE CREATIVE
ASPECT
OF EVOLUTION
OBADIAH HARRIS P.H.D.
THE CREATIVE ASPECT OF EVOLUTION
The theory of evolution, when properly interpreted,
deepens man’s insight into the meaning of life and
elevates his status as a participant in a vast and boundless
unfoldment of creativity.
The Bible says that God made man but little lower than
the angels. Evolution, when rightly understood, does not
relegate man to some inferior role, or demote him from
some pinnacle of dominion on which he was previously
stationed. It adds luster to his past achievements and hope
for his future attainments. The right interpretation of this
theory imparts to man “a cosmic perspective, a profound
understanding of the principles of existence, and the
significance of the world process.” It is only if evolution
is narrowly interpreted that the error is made of falling
into “materialism, skepticism, negativism, etc. which
are interwoven into serious problems of contemporary
civilization.”
Thus, when understood in its deeper meaning, the
principle of evolution can make “a positive contribution...
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to our understanding of life and its significance,” and to
the solution of its problems. To find this deeper meaning
it is necessary to contrast the theory of evolution with the
ancient idea of creation in time. Perhaps some light can be
thrown on the idea of creation in time by telling a fable
about it which has a very telling point.
Once three friends, a doctor, an architect and a
politician, went for a walk. They got in to a discussion
as to whose profession was the earliest. Said the doctor,
“Surely the doctor’s profession is the earliest, because, as
you know, God created Eve from a rib taken out of Adam,
and to do that he had to make a surgical operation. So
the medical art of surgery is certainly the earliest.”
The architect then spoke up and said, “No, we must
go beyond that. Don’t you know that God created the
world out of chaos? It is the profession of the architect
to create something orderly, something useful, out
of the disorder and chaos and to impose form upon
formlessness.” At this the politician hastened to remark:
“Ah chaos!–and who made this chaos?”
This story calls our attention to the problem of absolute
beginning. What is the beginning? Can you imagine any
beginning of time? Greek philosophy started with the
idea of chaos, and with the idea of God conceived as the
spirit of intelligence brooding over chaos, and fashioned
out of that chaos the cosmos, the universe. But, as the
politician says, “chaos has its beginning too.” That is, if
there is chaos or disorder, it pre-supposes some kind of
previous state of order that was broken up.
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THE CREATIVE ASPECT OF EVOLUTION
To give a homely example, if a housewife says that
her whole house is a mess, she means she has allowed it to
fall in to disorder. She does not mean that her house was
never in order. Perhaps she got too busy with something
else. So we get to no absolute beginning of time by
saying, as Greek philosophy did, that the universe came
out of chaos.
Now let us turn to the theological doctrine of
creation in time. We are all familiar with the account of
creation in the Bible. The first words of the first chapter
of Genesis says, “In the beginning God created the
heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form
and void.” That is how the Bible starts, with creation in
time, the forming of the world out of void, nothingness.
Theology begins with God and nothingness. In other
words, theology believes that there was a time when
there was nothing, the world did not exist. Nothing
existed, and out of that all-pervasive nothingness God
summoned into existence this world. But what is the
nature of nothingness? Sages and philosophers have
pondered this question through all history. Can you
imagine how something can come out of nothing?
Modern philosophers, including the French
philosopher Henry Bergson, have challenged the idea of
nothingness. Bergson says that “the notion of absolute
nothingness is a contradiction in terms: there must
always be some positive reality. Nothing is just a negative
idea without objective reality.” What Bergson means
is: Who can put his finger or his thought on nothing?
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You can stop thinking, but cannot think of nothingness
because it does not exist.
Let us illustrate this, too, with some everyday examples.
The same housewife may also say, “I have nothing to eat for
supper,” or “I have nothing to wear to the party.” Actually,
she probably has a refrigerator full of food and a closet full
of clothes. What she is really saying is that there is nothing
in the house she wants to eat or wear. Likewise, we may
say of a certain man, “There is nothing to him.” By that we
mean he lacks certain qualities we expect him to have. We
are disappointed in him. But others may see a lot of good
qualities in him.
Again, suppose you are a farmer. You look at a field
with the idea of buying it. But you find the soil is poor
and it grows nothing but weeds and wild bushes. So you
say “There is nothing there,” and you do not purchase the
field because it will not yield the crops you expect to plant.
But it is a different story to the field mice who live in their
nests there, the birds in their brilliant plumage who flash
their wings in the sunlight, the rabbits to whom the vines
and bushes provide friendly cover from hawks. Then there
are the colonies of ants and other forms of life, even to
the earthworms underground. To all of them this wild
wasteland is a paradise, a safe refuge, an abode of beauty, a
land of plenty. If you buy the field and ravish it with your
plow and drench it with pesticides, they will flee; it will be
a paradise lost to them.
Thus, says Bergson, “Nothingness is a relative idea.
It just expresses non-fulfillment of our expectations—a
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THE CREATIVE ASPECT OF EVOLUTION
feeling of disappointment… there may be others who find
lots of things where you see nothing.” Let us apply this in
the same way to the remotest past, to the question of chaos
or nothingness as the beginning. “That is just a human
way of thinking. We are expecting to find a certain kind of
order, a certain kind of structure. If we don’t find it, we say
that there was nothing.”
If the structure of the world, as we now think and
expect it to be, did not exist, then we say there was nothing;
but the truth is there is always some kind of positive being
with some kind of order and structure; so neither the
philosophic idea of chaos nor the theological concept of
nothingness can lead us to an absolute beginning.
Such is the conclusion of science. This is the scientific
attitude, the evolutionary perspective. Science believes that
the world process is a beginning-less and endless perspective,
[that it] is going through different types of order, different
types of formations, configurations, arrangements and
rearrangements which are changing from time to time.
So actually, while the cosmos and the world may have
emerged from a different configuration or order than we
now have, there was never a time when there was absolutely
nothing. It is only when we do not find a particular pattern,
order, or configuration that we say there is nothing or
chaos. When we reject the idea of absolute nothingness, we
grasp the meaning of evolution, of the perpetual advance
of life and nature. Evolution thus “rejects the theological
idea of creation out of nothing and the idea of creation of
the world in time.”
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Charles Darwin demonstrated by empirical evidence
“that all the many varieties or species of living things on
earth today are the result of a long and gradual process
of evolution. They did not always have the form they
have now. Every kind of living thing has behind it a long
history of change and development; of slow, gradual and
continuous growth. So scientific evolution says that man
as he is now, once did not exist. First, it says, there were
lower animals, then higher animals, then man appeared
as the most developed species of today. So it is that the
evolutionary perspective “questions the ordinary religious
ideas and [repudiates] the notion of creation in time.”
The materialistic or mechanistic theory of evolution
advanced by Darwin was further elaborated by the
philosopher Herbert Spencer. He said that life can be
ultimately analyzed into forms of matter and motion; that
is, into physical and chemical forces. These materialistic
and mechanistic theories of evolution were applied to
many fields, such as psychology, economics, and social
development. There arose, for instance, the school of
behavioristic psychology. It says that what we call human
intelligence is merely the mechanistic response of the
body to the changing circumstances of nature. Karl Marx
applied this materialistic concept in his interpretation of
the growth of civilization. He sought to explain the whole
historical order in “terms of material forces or economic
factors.”
The economic forces are reflected, he said, “in the
means of production and the conflicting interests of the
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THE CREATIVE ASPECT OF EVOLUTION
different social classes.” It is said that Marx wanted to
dedicate his book, “Das Capital,” to Darwin, but could
not get Darwin’s permission. These views rise from the
narrow concept of evolution which causes men to fall into
the trap of “materialism, skepticism, and negativism.”
With the pronouncement of the theory of evolution,
some of the ancient traditional ideas lost much of their
significance. Evolution bolstered by astronomy brought
rejection of the theological dogmas that man is the center
of this earth of ours and that the earth is the center of the
solar system. It is now accepted that there are countless solar
systems, very possibly with worlds among them, inhabited
by beings who may be as intelligent and developed or more
so than we are—so far beyond the realm of speculation that
man is now exploring outer space in an endeavor to find,
among other things, whether such other worlds exist with
intelligent life upon them.
Certainly the creativity of God is not limited to this one
world of ours which, as Aurobindo said, is like a flicker of
God’s eyelash. The Bible says that man shall have dominion
over the beasts of the filed, but he is reaching out now for
dominion over outer space where the stars wheel in their
courses. Thus we begin to see how through evolution and
science generally the vistas and possibilities of humankind
have not diminished, but expanded.
Nevertheless, the theory of evolution at first caused a
deep chasm between religion and science. The philosopher
Nietzche declared: “God is dead.” What he really referred
to is the “traditional anthropomorphic conception of God.”
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His statement was needlessly negative. The rejection of the
traditional concept of God and the right understanding
of evolution does not annul the higher values and truths
of life. It is not necessary to understand evolution in a
materialistic way. Herbert Spencer, himself, for example,
was a very religious man who believed in the existence of
an absolute, an infinity beyond the capacity of the mind
to know, which is what theology believes concerning God.
Evolution can be understood in a creative way. We can
“reconstruct our idea of God on a different basis, on a
broader and sounder basis.”
The disregarding of super naturalistic ideas does not
call on us to deny and be skeptical about “higher spiritual
values.” It means we must deepen our conception of
spiritual values. It means that we gain a deeper insight into
the meaning of life, and the nature of reality, in harmony
with the latest development in science, in psychology, in
philosophy, etc.
Now let us consider evolution in this broader aspect, what
is known as creative or emergent evolution. It acknowledges
“the element of truth in the evolutionary process but tries
to understand it on a deeper foundation.”[22] There can
be no doubt that life is a process of evolution, of constant
changes, inner and outer. The face of nature undergoes
constant changes, so do individual human beings. If you
look within yourself you can see how you have changed,
are changing and hope to change spiritually, intellectually,
ethically. History reflects many changes in the international
and social order. Therefore, we cannot doubt that evolution,
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THE CREATIVE ASPECT OF EVOLUTION
the process of growth, the rise of new forms, qualities,
values, higher planes of intellectual, ethical and spiritual
attainment, is an indubitable fact of existence.
But this does not mean that evolution is mechanistic
or materialistic. The changes occur, but what causes the
changes? What causes the new and larger quality and
power, unprecedented forms and unpredictable values, the
fresh and new development? It was to explain this that the
new theory of emergent evolution has been advanced, a
modification of the original theory, a creative modification.
Let us apply this new theory to the case of human reason.
The appearance of human reason marked the emergence
of a new and higher power on the evolutionary scene. The
mind of the animal is a step above many lower forms of
life; but the mind of reason of the human being is far above
and different from the animal mind. An impassable gulf
separates them. When you realize that such higher qualities
have emerged in the past and are emerging into being now,
you ask yourself, “What is the power responsible for their
newness, for the fresh appearance?” Obviously, this is
not and cannot be just a physical or mechanistic process,
a random result of groupings of matter and motion. A
mechanical process, as we know, always operates in the
same mechanical way. The most advanced computer is
always a computer. “Life, mind, spirit, etc., are not mere
complexities of matter and motion.”
The power which produces these changes “must be
something… infinitely rich in quality and potentiality…
capable of bringing into manifestation spiritual powers
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and characteristics, intelligence and reason, etc.”[24] This
infinite power is what guides and controls evolution. So
in this way we reconstruct the idea of God as the source
of creative evolution, emergent evolution. Thus you gain
a profound conception of God on a deeper foundation, a
deeper insight into the Divine Power.
In this reconstruction, we realize, first of all, that God
cannot be logically defined by human thought. If we did so
we would, like the theologians, set up an anthropomorphic
idea of God; but with our new insight into evolution, we see
God as the superconscient creative power. The Divine is at
the center of the cosmic system, and capable of manifesting
ever-new qualities and forces and powers and values. But
we do not attempt to limit the Divine to this, because He
is multi-dimensional in nature, multiform in character,
beyond any logical ideas or mental expressions. He is richer
than all the spiritual powers of which we are aware.
We also reconstruct the old theological values. In
creative evolution, man is not the center of creation. But
if we have the right understanding of life this does not
demean or degrade the human being. Instead of being
proud or self-conceited, we will see ourselves cast in a
nobler role—that of an active participant in the significant
problem of world evolution.
Evolution repudiated the idea of God as external to the
world. That idea is an anachronism today. God is beyond,
but also in the world. He is involved in the world as the
“creative principle which is at the center of the universe,
and is capable of manifesting itself in infinitely diverse
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THE CREATIVE ASPECT OF EVOLUTION
ways…” which is unfolding itself more and more in the
process of evolution, in the historical order, in the flux of
time. In this diversity, the principle advance of evolution
now is and will be a heightening of consciousness. Rational
man has appeared through the expansion of intellect, and
spiritual man will appear by the growth of the soul in man.
That is why Christ said, “The Kingdom of God is within
you.”
When we understand God in this way, “the objections
of science and philosophy are met.” God at the center of
the universe is the re-vitalizing, renewing power of the
world, who guides and controls the evolutionary process.
If anyone asks, “What is the nature of the divine
creativity?” and asks whether it should be called Life Force,
Cosmic Will, Creative Logos, Universal Mind, etc., we may
well reply that it is “human stupidity to ascribe any specific
nature or determinate essence to God.” We may describe the
Divine from different standpoints and in different ways, all
of which have a relative validity; but the Divine essentially
transcends all specific forms, essences and structures. That
is why the ancient Hebrews would allow no statues or
graven images of God. As infinite creativity, God is also
absolute freedom. He is personal and impersonal, one and
many, in and beyond the world. He guides us to perfection,
light, and the immortal. The process of evolution is now
in travail with the production of still higher powers and
values in human existence, namely, the embodiment of
supra-mentality in divinized manhood on earth. In this
higher manhood will be “the overflowering of the Divine
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in collective humanity,” and the emergence of a new world
order of peace, progress and unity.
This was the kind of evolutionist that Christ was. He
taught that men had to be born again to enter the Kingdom
of God. They had to evolve, change to something different
and of a higher order—something unprecedented. When
he was pressed to answer how this could be, to give a
description, he answered, “Do not marvel that I said to
you that you must be born anew. The wind blows where it
wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know
whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with everyone
that is born of the spirit… if I have told you earthly things
and you have not believed, how can you believe if I tell you
heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven but he
who descended from heaven, the son of man.”
Thus did Christ teach that man who has been born
of the mind will yet be born of the spirit, and the world
society that now is will be born into the Kingdom of God
on earth.
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ILOSOPH
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2001
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