God: Fact or Fiction?: Exploring the Relationship Between Science Religion and the Origin of Life

by Brendan Roberts

  8. See “Hoyle on Evolution,” Nature, 294, No. 5837 (Nov. 12, 1981), p. 148.

  9. Christian de Duve. Vital dust: The origin and evolution of life on earth (New York: Basic Books, 1995a), p. 8.

  10. Ibid., p. 9.

  11. William Dembski, ed. Mere Creation: Science, Faith and Intelligent Design (with contributions by Michael Behe, David Berlinski, Philip Johnson, Hugh Ross, etc) (Downers Grove; Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1998), p. 395.

  12. See Neil Broom. How Blind is the Watchmaker? Theism or atheism: should science decide? (Brookfield; Vermont: Ashgate Publishing, Brookfield, 1998), p. 33.

  13. See H. Simon. ‘What computers mean for man and society’, Science, Vol. 195, 1977, pp. 1186-1191.

  14. Jacque Monod. Chance and Necessity, Fontana, 1974, p. 160.

  15. T. Dobzhansky. The Origins of Prebiological Systems and of their Molecular Matrices. S. W. Fox, ed. (New York: Academic Press, 1965), p. 310.

  16. A pessimistic estimate of the time required for an eye to evolve’. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, B 1994, Vol. 256, p. 151.

  17. Sylvia Baker. Bone of Contention (Evangelical Press, 1981), p. 17.

  18. Charles Darwin. On the Origin of Species. Facsimile of the first (1859) edition, (Cambridge; Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 84.

  CHAPTER 4

  DID HUMANS EVOLVE FROM APES? Did we really evolve from animals that swung through the trees, crawled on their knuckles and made weird grunting sounds? Did we then develop the ability to reflect on our surroundings and upon ourselves as rational beings, evolve a language which allowed us to express ourselves and became moral and loving beings? Throughout this chapter we explore how we differ from animals, especially relating to these aspects.

  Animals are conscious beings which have awareness. For example they can feel pain, dream, see, hear, taste and feel. By instinct a dog will chase a ball and take it back to the master or have even more fun by chasing the neighbour’s cat. Also its instinctual nature will pull it to chase its inferior ball of fur, lol.

  With changing conditions at times the instinctual response of animals can look foolish and incompetent. Morton recounts the example of a herring-gull exhibiting a strong territorial attitude to its nest. However if the eggs are removed from its nest while still visible to the bird, it will show no concern. Another remarkable example is the mother hen looking for its chick. It will react to its audible cheeping call only. If a glass bowl is placed over the chick, though it is still visible and its distress evident, the mother will not notice it.

  An example of the instinctual nature of animals is that a parent bird will feed its nestlings only when it sees their open bright yellow mouths. The male robin is moved to fight during certain seasons by its enemy’s red breast. A simulation of red feathers on a wire instigates a fight, but a real robin without red will not:1

  While all animals are conscious beings we humans are unique as we have self-consciousness. In other words we have selfawareness. We can reason through the possible consequences of an intended action and then freely choose to enter into that action. We have the power to stop, especially if our conscience warns us that the intended action could be harmful to oneself or others. As self-conscious beings we have self-awareness in all we do. We can imagine being in a particular place like our favourite beach spot, with specific friends we know. Or we can set goals by imagining ourselves in the future. We can also inquire into a given problem, for example, the car won’t start because it ran out of gas. You can imagine various possible solutions available to fix it, call for help or yell abuse at the car. Thus you deliberate and judge the best course of action and then take that action.

  Other self-conscious actions include reflecting on one’s thoughts or emotional responses to other people; and the loving of others selflessly (including forgiving others) for who they are (including our enemies) and who we are called to be, fully human. Therefore our self-consciousness is interpersonal – we relate to others through our senses, and through our rational thought.

  Self-conscious actions are intentional; they make something present. For example, dreaming makes a dream present and seeing makes colours and shapes present. When I look at someone that person becomes present to me. When one gazes into their lover’s eyes that person is present even more to the recipient. In being aware of other people there is a secondary awareness of self which enables freedom within relationship, the freedom to accept or reject the love of others.

  With the example of the broken-down car, we explored intellectual consciousness. Such rational consciousness involves such activities as testing a hypothesis, weighing the pros and cons for a proposed course of action, and discerning between fact and fiction, the true and the false. Conscience is a law that holds us to obedience and thus calls us to love good.2 Moral consciousness allows one to distinguish something as being of moral value. It encourages us to choose a particular course of action, or warns us to turn away from something that may harm us, our relationship with God and others. In other words it involves the human yearning and drive for what is true and truly valuable as well. It includes such things as love, justice, freedom, responsibility, commitment, forgiveness, promise, trust and faithfulness.

  Our conscience prompting us is the doing something in the here and now. It is calling us to commit to a given action. It’s vital to listen and heed its promptings because if we choose to ignore it then it can become weaker especially when the intellect has been darkened by turning further and further away from God and from love.

  Humans do not have purely instinctual reactions because selfconsciousness accompanies our reactions. Thus we can reason. For example, you have just happened across a delicious dessert left on the table. Drooling over the salivatingly scrumptious food you would love to devour it. But before you act you reason through the possible consequences the action will bring to yourself or others. Then you reason through whether to devour the mouth watering dessert or not. This could be due to it belonging to someone else or being told not to eat it. Maybe it had been sitting there for days or due to a diet you decide not to touch it. Therefore you may salivate with the desire to eat it, but can reason whether to eat it or not. In other words you can freely will not to eat it.

  Animals lack the ability to reason through consequences. They will only hesitate if they are commanded not to, for example a dog may hesitate if commanded to stop, or if you kick the cat it will surely take notice. They do not think: ‘It’s been out of the fridge for days so I won’t eat it.’ But they may not eat it if it smells really bad. Furthermore they do not think: ‘That’s my master’s dinner.’ Have you ever had an animal (and I don’t mean your roommate, lol) eat your dinner before you had the chance to enjoy it? That is purely due to instinct. And damn annoying!

  The Soul The ancient Greek, Aristotle held that form and matter make a single thing with two principles, body and soul; the body exists for the sake of the soul.3 In other words the human body is a living body as long as it is united to the soul; without the soul the body will dissolve into its base constituents. You can always replace any parts of your artificial appliances. But there are certain parts of the human that when they malfunction they cease to be, for example, losing sight means the eye ceases to be a functioning eye. Also a person’s hand, foot or heart can’t exist as part of the body or on its own naturally separated from the body. When a human dies the person is not considered to be a living being any longer; the soul is viewed to have left the body.

  It is the whole person that controls the will, rather than just the soul per se. Moreover, the human or rational soul gives us the ability to reason between right and wrong which is our moral nature. Because animals do not have intellect they do not have any understanding of concepts, let alone the concept of morality. How do we know that we can reason? Through our intellect we can understand the meaning of a word or sentence; and can know principles or the laws of nature as truth. Therefore we have the ability to do mathematics,
scientific experiments and understand the results; our reasoning means that we can be hot in logic. Furthermore we can reason through the consequences of a given situation no matter whether it is a past, present or future one.

  The soul is the principle which animates the body. Aristotle held that it has different capacities or parts, including the capacity of sense-perception, imagination, thought and voluntary movement. He also claimed that the relation of the soul to the body is parallel to that of sight to the eye.4 The mind is the life source of the body.

  St Thomas (1225-1274 AD) nicknamed the dumb ox by his peers was a rather gentle and unassuming giant. He was obese, shy and not very sociable. But to make up for what he lacked as potential bachelor of the year he was very intelligent. Jokes aside, instead of wooing the ladies with his intelligence he put it at the service of God. He became a Dominican monk, and even declined the opportunity to become a bishop.

  He viewed the soul as the primary principle of life. The human soul is united to the body as its substantial form. It is from the form that something gets its specific nature. But a thing has only one substantial form which makes it the kind of thing it is. The human substantial form, the human soul can exercise the full range of its powers, such as thinking.

  The human soul is immaterial because a person can think of things generally in an immaterial way. For example, we can think not of one frog called Kermit, but also all frogs even though we can’t see them materially. If the mind were material then it could only know individual things, as shown by the senses. Additionally one can think of Kermit and even relate the features of Kermit to a friend or foe in jest. Thus we can think of relations.

  Today many people think the soul is obsolete because they claim that science has ruled it out by explaining the mind merely by brain activity. The brain works with the immaterial soul, i.e. for thinking; when we think about a thing we use images, memories and senseimpressions (St Thomas uses the term phantasmata). For example one gets their understanding of what a lion looks like from the sense-impressions of individual lions seen in pictures or in person. St Thomas emphasises that we receive all knowledge (cognitio) through the senses. The brain supplies the sense-data, the information to the soul. The intellect abstracts general ideas from the sense-impressions while the brain does not. Therefore the soul has an immaterial and independent activity. This independent activity means that the soul has an independent existence – it does not depend on its body for its existence.

  The soul is believed to subsist after one dies. Cambridge philosopher John McTaggart believes that ‘natural science supports rather than disproves the idea of immortality, since it only tells us about the destruction of compounds’.5 It is only the combination of units that cease to exist; nothing is annihilated. When we die our atoms go into the creepy, crawly creatures that eat our bodies and these atoms are passed on when those creatures are eaten by another creature or die.

  In comparison the souls of other animals are neither subsistent nor imperishable as they are tied to their bodies and do not exist in their own right. Animals don’t have an intellect and can’t reason between right and wrong, form concepts or have abstract thought. Therefore they don’t think of things in an immaterial way. Because they don’t have self-awareness they can’t truly love as self-gift. They work by instinct and can display a shadow of our loyalty; they can’t make a free decision to give themselves with no-strings attached in love. As a result you will not see animals consciously forgiving a stranger whom has hurt them. Furthermore they can’t overcome instinct without outside help. They can only do what is in their nature to do. It is remarkable that dolphins will at times protect humans from sharks. But they will never protect a shark, unless they had been raised together maybe. As humans we have the ability to love as self-gift and to forgive even strangers; spouses express self-gift wonderfully when they give of themselves totally when their sexual union is one of intimacy, faithfulness and open to the gift of life.

  St Thomas gives three reasons for the immortality of the soul. Firstly because it is immaterial it is indivisible.6 Secondly, a thing, such as a soul that ‘can subsist just as a form (when separated from the body) cannot be separated from itself’.7 Lastly, the composite whole of body and soul is corrupted at death which doesn’t mean a part can’t still exist;8 the whole person is corrupted upon death but the soul remains. This is why when someone dies we do not say a person remains but the person’s lifeless body does.

  He affirms that because the soul exceeds the capacity of matter it also knows things immaterially and so it can’t be generated by matter. Aristotle says that the mind must ‘come in from outside’, because it is not a power of a material organ of the body and so can’t be transmitted with the seed by physical generation.9 Hence he realised that because the soul was immaterial then each soul was directly caused by a Creator. On the other hand if the soul was not created then it could not be in the image of God because we are images of God due to being creatures and the power of the soul given by God. All the powers of the soul, including thinking, understanding (includes awareness and self-reflection) and reasoning are united by one principle, the soul which is the cause.

  The soul is united to every part of the body, in its entirety, because it allows the whole body to exist. Because the soul continues with the same existence upon death and because the each individual soul was united to the one particular body then it retains its individuality. Furthermore when the body is destroyed the soul is not complete according to its nature; the body has a natural aptitude and inclination to be united to the body.10

  St Paul in Sacred Scripture reveals that our body and soul, thus the person, will be resurrected and reunited upon our death. As Jesus conquered death through the Resurrection we too will conquer death! We will be reunited with our bodies. The resurrection of the body seriously refutes the notion of reincarnation; we are immortal as our souls are imperishable but as our body and soul make up one thing then it is possible in principle for there to be a resurrection of our bodies. St Paul says:

  Someone may ask: How are dead people raised, and what sort of body do they have when they come? How foolish! What you sow must die before it is given new life; and what you sow is not the body that is to be, but only a bare grain, of wheat I dare say, or some other kind; it is God who gives it the sort of body that he has chosen for it, and for each kind of seed its own kind of body. Not all flesh is the same flesh: there is human flesh, animals have another kind of flesh…Then there are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies; the heavenly have a splendour of their own, and the earthly a different splendour (1 Corinthians 15:35-40).

  Therefore, following our death and judgment we will be given a glorified body. Our soul is not physical. It enables us to communicate with God, enabling Him to ‘hear’ our prayers, and for us at times to ‘hear’ God or God’s will.

  If we evolved from apes then not only did we evolve from instinct to reason, but an ape would have had to give birth to a human. The question we are faced with is: Could God still have caused this? The Catholic Church states that God created a human soul in the first human:

  The soul of the first man was created immediately by God out of nothing. As regards the body, its immediate formation from inorganic stuff by God cannot be maintained with certainty. Fundamentally, the possibility exists that God breathed the spiritual soul into an organic stuff, that is, into an originally animal body.11

  So the Church is saying that it is possible that God used another living creature as the basis for the creation of man, but that he would have especially created a spiritual soul and inserted it into that creature:

  That which is positively immaterial. It is pure spirit if it has no dependence on matter either for its existence or for any of its activities. God is uncreated pure Spirit; the angels are created pure spirits. The human soul is more properly called spiritual. Although it can exist independent of the body, it nevertheless in this life depends extrinsically on the body for its operations, and in t
he life to come retains a natural affinity for the body, with which after the resurrection it will be reunited for all eternity.12

  If the woman was taken from Adam’s rib, which is abhorrent to some women (lol!), then is it impossible that God used another one of His creation, which He loved (He saw all of it as being good), to form a human? Mankind is much different to the ape – superior in intelligence, creativity and most of all, intellect, will, reasoning and thus true love.

  We are faced with problems in relation to the theory of humans evolving from the ape kingdom. If only one ape gave birth to a human, then when its offspring mated he/she would have had to mate with an ape (bestiality), or the offspring would have had to mate with his/her brother/sister (incest). It is important to realise that if there was no Creator then bestiality or incest would not mean anything, as there would be no objective morality if we happened by mere random action.

  Are Humans Unique? How do we compare to animals? Is Darwin correct to say that we only differ in degree and not in kind? Humans alone can reason (knowingly choose between right and wrong, good and evil; analyse different consequences; and do arithmetic). It is not merely a spasm of the brain but an intellectual activity in which we know what is right or wrong in a given situation. Human comprehension is also a non- physical activity as we take different understandings and make it one whole and appropriate it for us. Having an intellect allows one to take in concepts, to comprehend and moreover to help others comprehend. Also we are unique because we are the only creatures to be in such awe of creation, and that seek to traverse not only the oceans and skies, but also our galaxy.

  We can reflect upon ourselves and thus make the whole process an object for ourselves. We not only have awareness but we are aware that we are aware and possess existence more fully for actualising existence to such an advanced degree.

  It is astonishing that the monkey or ape does not have the ability to ask questions although they are very inquisitive creatures. Also because it can’t think abstractly and due to its fear of fire, it can’t hold the stick at a certain distance from the fire. So it can’t be taught to toast marshmallows on a camp fire. Because they can’t help others comprehend they would not make good teachers even if one looks like a teacher you know, lol.