The Divine Universe

We humans are immensely impressed with ourselves. We think we are the last word in biological advance; many people believe we are God’s final masterpiece. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that there could be another, even more advanced species of primate yet to come, and another after that. Genesis says that God took a day off after making mankind, but it doesn’t say he stopped work altogether. The rest of the Bible continues the story and points to the future.

If you believe that mainstream science is on the right track, you accept that Homo sapiens emerged from a succession of earlier primates and hominids, each with larger brains and more complex behaviour than the previous one. The most significant difference between modern humans and Neanderthals is the quality of our consciousness. Human consciousness is of a higher order. We have a capacity for reflection and rational thought, an aesthetic sensitivity and a moral sense that seems to originate with humans. At some point a new dimension of consciousness emerged.

Are there signs of this process continuing? Can we say that, during the last few thousand years, we can see an increase in the number of gifted thinkers and artists? Even in high schools, accomplishments in music and artwork are markedly superior to those of my generation, and philosophy is becoming popular. But that is a tiny dot on the map of evolution.

Recent psychological development coincides with increasing educational opportunities, but which is the cause and which the effect is not clear. Higher education is not obviously linked to higher consciousness. The bulk of the increase in tertiary education is directed to technical training rather than liberal education, to expertise rather than sensitivity of feeling, subtlety of mind and breadth of interest. The faculties of law, dentistry, information technology and financial and business management are blooming while those of the humanities: art, literature, philosophy, pure science and theology, are withering. Most of the development in tertiary education is motivated by the desire to make money. Economic growth and individual wealth creation has been the driving force of the highly competitive tertiary education industry. Technical courses in lucrative skills fill the university prospectuses.

In the midst of this rapid and complex sociological development one could be confused about what real progress means. Some people express a rosy optimism while others are sceptical. But historical time, a few thousand years, is minute in relation to evolutionary change. My own feeling, intuitive rather than based on hard data, is that, over millennia, humankind has become more intensely self-conscious, aesthetically sensitive and intellectually active. I am less certain if we are morally more virtuous.

Throughout recorded history, there have been men and women of genius. We might compare the groundbreaking originality of Aristotle, Saint Paul, Michelangelo and Beethoven with Einstein, Hume, Picasso and Britten. But though the originality of the discoveries and theories of the ancient cultural pioneers is as impressive as that of today’s great intellectual pioneers, I think the subtlety and complexity of the debate is greater in this ‘post-modern’ age. Mysticism is also an important element in assessing psychological evolution. In the West, and where Classical tradition has dominated, mystics have been regarded as harmless but somewhat irrelevant eccentrics, but today they are beginning to make a significant contribution, not only to metaphysics and theology, but in the realm of art and pure science as well.

How influential is world population? Homo sapiens is a flourishing species. It has been increasing exponentially since the days of Socrates. In a world of nearly seven billion humans, what one might call the ‘layer of thought’ is denser. Teilhard de Chardin called it the “noosphere”. Alao, advances in transport and communication technology have facilitated the mingling of the more spiritual Eastern cultures with the materialistic and rationalistic West, creating a new intellectual landscape where interest in science is blossoming in the East while empirical spirituality flourishes in the West.

Another interesting perspective comes from anthropologists and palaeontologists. Biological evolution occurs only partly through environmental change. It used to be thought that drought and deforestation in equatorial Africa caused the tree-dwelling hominids to come down to the ground and adopt the upright posture. Recent research, however, shows that this change of behaviour occurred in other parts of the world simultaneously where no such conditions ocurred. Furthermore, a French palaeontologist has recently found evidence of spontaneous changes in cranial structure, unassociated with environmental changes, accommodating our swelling brains.

These discoveries suggest that there is something else driving evolution. Evolution is not simply the “survival of the fittest”, or rather the success of the best adapted. It seems as though there is a hidden cosmic energy that drives the universe in the direction of increasing complexity and sensitivity.

We have, in historical time, seen individuals with outstanding gifts of mind, including mystics such as Moses, Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed. Perhaps these are early forerunners of the next hominid species, emerging in our midst. One thinks of Einstein, Yehudi Menuhin and the Dalai Lama, but they are not isolated phenomena. We have a continuous range of intelligence from the intellectually handicapped to Nobel laureates and a range of spiritual awareness from blind materialists to inspired mystics. We seem these days to be growing more conscious of being conscious! We are highly introspective, and “self-realisation” is the flavour of the month.

But the story of evolution includes many setbacks. Humankind could become extinct through inability to adapt to the environment and the limitations of the resources it can provide. Mother Earth may prove incapable of meeting our demands, and we may not be capable of modifying them quickly enough. There is tremendous inertia in our massive industrial-military-commercial machine and it is accelerating terrifyingly at the present time.

Finally, Jesus did not say that God would make us perfect; he said, “Be perfect, like your heavenly Father is perfect.” We have a tiny influence on evolutionary development; our behaviour matters, but the journey towards perfection is more than a human endeavour. It is a cosmic project, a divine work: not outside intervention by a “deus ex machina”, but God living, glorying, suffering and dying in the universe. The universe is growing up in Christ. Influenced by Paul and the author of the Letter to the Hebrews perhaps, we might see the process as part of the education and vocation of the cosmic Christ: God’s offspring, growing up, loved, nurtured and guided and even disciplined by the Father. Humankind is not growing up in isolation; we are part of God’s embodiment, becoming what it truly is – absolutely good.