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7. The Human Condition in the Evolutionary Context
In his famous book “the Phenomenon of Man”69, Teilhard de Chardin simply divides the evolution of the universe into three interrelated stages, from matter to life and then to human. Important and critical transitions happened in these evolutionary processes and the entire universe was created with a potential to move from the inanimate stage to the conscious stage. The historical Jesus was the summit of divine creation and was also a new stage of creation that became a perfect model for humankind. According to Teilhard de Chardin, Jesus is a unique symbol of the union of the divine and the created human, which is indeed the goal and fulfillment of the divine creation. The incarnation of Jesus was not primarily to redeem us from the bondage of sins, but essentially to unite us with God through love. In the gospels, the coming of the kingdom of God, a perfect scene in which God reigns with his full intention of creation, is always the central missionary message of Jesus. We are called to authentic existence and to become a perfect image of God full of grace, truth and love70.
The Logos is the empowerment within the emergent universe that drives the evolutionary processes conforming to the laws of nature. He is present in every creation process and he works through the natural laws he has established. In the first transition, order was shaped out of the chaos towards the complexity of life. In the second transition, life evolved through the biological laws towards even greater complexity that brought about the emergence of intelligence and consciousness71. Nevertheless, each phase of evolution possessed a certain degree of “freedom” and therefore the development of complexity was not carried out in a pre-determined way. In the initial inanimate universe, the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics was the autonomy in the interactions of small particles. Before the advent of intelligence, there were the statistical laws of random mutation and natural selection in biological evolution. There is now the free will for human beings who certainly have a much more profound influence on the course of evolution. Being self-conscious and intelligent, we could actually destroy the long history of evolution by just pressing a nuclear button or contribute to our future development in a constructive way. The evolution is still going on and the current phase becomes more crucial owing to our greater complexity and freedom.
In this crucial phase of evolution, the incarnation of the Logos became necessary for revealing to us the nature of creation so that the present social and cultural evolution might lead us to true humanity. In Philip Hefner's terminology, we have now evolved into a symbiosis of genes and cultures72. Hefner regards original sin as the discrepancy we experience between the information coming from our genes and from our culture and also as the fallibility and limitation that are part of the human evolution. We are fallible in a sense that we move forward only through trial and error. Nevertheless, as emphasized by Denis Edwards, discrepancy and fallibility are not of themselves sins73. Using Karl Rahner's clarification of the theological concept of concupiscence74, Edwards stresses that there are two major disorders associated with original sin. The first kind of disorder comes from the current sinful condition that is a result of the long history of the human rejection of God. We were born and brought up in a sinful world which affects us and which is the framework for making our own decisions. We are more or less shaped by other people and by history. As social and cultural beings, we actualize ourselves in a situation that has been contaminated with the sin of the world. “The sin of others is a universal and permanent part of the human condition from the beginning and is in this sense original.”75
The second kind of disorder is not a result of sin but is intrinsic to us as a spiritual being and simultaneously as a fundamentally physical and limited creature. Owing to our bodiliness and finitude, “we human beings are never fully autonomous, integrated and in control.”76 Nevertheless, Rahner does not think that we can overcome these human characteristics, as they are actually part of the divine creation. This kind of concupiscence is a consequence of our finitude and, as Rahner insists, is morally neutral. It may keep us not only from doing good things but also from doing bad ones. In other words, we are inherently fallible because as finite evolutionary creatures we are subject to our limitations and past evolutionary routes. This is the way that God has created us as free responsible selves. Unfortunately our ancestors did fall and they created a sinful environment for us.
Traditionally, sacraments are regarded as the symbolic instruments for conveying the grace of God to believers. The sacramental rituals are special moments in which the finite humanity encounters the infinite divinity. Jesus Christ is the primordial sacrament of God and the Church, founded by Jesus, is the consequential sacrament of Christ. In the sacrament of baptism we acknowledge Jesus Christ as our savior through the grace of God and we begin our new life in the Christian way. In the evolutionary context, it means that one has to conquer concupiscence by joining the Christian community whose people are witnesses to the perfect life of Jesus and also by making right choices in his or her life within human limitations. Humanity is a new species with the greatest freedom in the evolutionary history and now we can find the meaning of the cosmic evolution in Jesus Christ, the Logos, who will enable us to make the quantum leap. Nevertheless, our own participation in creating ourselves is important because we have become God's “created co-creators”77 who are evolving into a new creation not only through the salvific work of Jesus but also by our own efforts.
8. Jesus Christ in the Evolutionary Perspective
Our being human signifies a new evolutionary step towards the union with the Creator. Before the appearance of human beings, all created entities with their lower levels of freedom are in harmony with each other and they form an ecological system. However, the non-human creations do not have the moral and spiritual capacities that are unique to human beings. Now humanity, as part of nature, has remarkable abilities and potentialities far greater than its pre-human ancestors. We have evolved into self-conscious and spiritual beings with free wills and moral judgments. In the context of evolutionary biology, the fall of Adam can only be a symbolic story for the goodness of the on-going creation. Each level of creation has new challenges directing to the ultimate goals of creation. Using the terminology of Charles Birch and John Cobb, human beings are “falling upward” that “identifies the occurrence of a new level of order and freedom bought at the price of suffering.”78 Adam’s fall denotes not only an authentic experience of every person from being innocent to committing sins, but also the alienation from harmony or the break-up of relationships when the creation moved from the pre-human stage to the human stage. In this perspective, should there be extraterrestrial intelligent beings, they would also have their own fall and inherit their own original sin.
It is important to realize at this point that creation is not a single event in time but is an unfinished continuing process. The concept of continuing creation is not foreign even in the Old Testament, though it may not be one of the central ideas. We, being created, are invited to participate in the continuing creative work of God (Gen 1: 27-28). Like Teilhard de Chardin, Philip Hefner maintains that Jesus is the perfect model of true humanity. Jesus, as fully human and fully divine signifying the unity of the creation and the Creator, denotes a new stage of cosmic evolution and divine self-communication that requires our free decisions and our active involvement. We are called to be in perfect relationship with the cosmos, with others and ourselves as well as with the divine mystery. If “sin, in all its forms, is a violation of relatedness”79, then the salvation of Christ is to help us live out all these relationships to a superb extent. As the Logos placed order out of the chaos in the beginning of the cosmic history, he now places order out of evil and sin in the human history. Like the two faces of a coin, creation and salvation are one plan of God in this cosmic sense.
The grace of God offered to us in the sacraments is therefore part of the continuing creation of God. We are summoned to participate in God's creation by building up qualitative relationships with God, people and nature through the love of God manifest in Jesus the Christ. Grace, as a self-communication of God, is not only individual and communal but also environmental. We live in a world of grace because the universe itself is sacramental.80 The emergence of self-consciousness in the universe is also the gradual awareness of the presence of the divine love in this universe full of grace.
In the incarnation of the Logos, we can discern the nature of the divine creation and the meaning of the human existence. The creation is a long evolutionary process in the light of contemporary cosmology and the historical Jesus is “the continuation and fulfillment of a long cosmic evolution”81. Being the heart of creation, Jesus reveals to us the full meaning of creation. He as a man shares our cosmic evolutionary history that started from the Big Bang, continued in the creation of heavy elements in the stars and supernovae, and evolved from the early life forms to Homo sapiens. As the Logos, Jesus is also the self-expression and the self-revelation of God to creation. He is the origin of all beings in the cosmos as well as the ultimate meaning of the evolving conscious cosmos. The goal of the cosmic evolution may be perceived as the preparation for the incarnation of the Logos who would bring the whole creation into union with God. As a corollary, the assumption of human nature by the Logos implies two possibilities. The first one is that we may be the only intelligent species in the whole universe and the other one is that we may be the intelligent species that has first attained the capacities for making moral judgment and spiritual reflection. This result is consonant with our earlier scientific discussions on the (non-)existence of extraterrestrial intelligent life. To put it another way, the absence of extraterrestrial intelligence conforms to our understanding of the incarnation of the Logos in the evolutionary perspective.
The uniqueness of humankind is in fact a “classical” solution which is now shown to be in agreement with the weak anthropic principle. The stance that only one world existed was taken by Thomas Aquinas when he, following the Aristotelian tradition, tried to refute the many worlds hypothesis put forward by earlier theologians including St. Augustine. Although the plurality of worlds could exhibit the greatness and the glory of the Creator who, being omnipotent and absolutely free, could have created other worlds82, St. Thomas rejected the pluralist model because it seemed to deny the orderly unity of the Creator. In his Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas argues:
The very order of things created by God shows the unity of the world. For this world is called one by the unity of order, whereby some things are ordered to others. But whatever things come from God, have relation of order to each other, and to God Himself... Hence it must be that all things should belong to one world.83
Although the human race might be alone in the universe, we are not the final stage of evolution but we are emerging into a new mode of creation and becoming more like Christ, “the image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15), through the divinizing grace of God. Using the terminology of Teilhard de Chardin, we are in the phase of Christogenesis in which we are creating ourselves with empowerment from the pre-existing and eternal Logos who is the “alpha-point” of all existing things as well as the “omega-point” of the evolutionary cosmos. The human person is more who one becomes than who one is. The ultimate goal of the evolutionary cosmos is the harmony of all creation in the Logos who, as a person, discloses perfect dynamic relationships with God, with humanity and with nature. This is the true humanity for us and this is also the joyful revelation that the Johannine community experienced in the resurrected Jesus. The doctrine of original sin may then be understood as part of the inevitable process for the transcendence of human beings who have a long history of evolutionary legacy. Through the ritual of baptism, the recipient has a new life and becomes a new creation in Christ, as emphasized by St. Paul. In his book on the sacraments of initiation, Kenan Osborne writes:
The Christian does not merely have life without sin, but a wholly new kind of life which is for God and in Christ Jesus… unifying the baptized more strongly with one another, but above all more deeply unifying the believers with Christ, with the Spirit, and with the Father.84
As pre-human ancestors evolved through natural selection and mutation, humanity now evolve through human freedom and decision of accepting the grace of God that has existed ever since the primordial creation and the dawn of consciousness. Rejecting the traditional concept of original sin, the theologian Matthew Fox even writes that Genesis actually portrays the “original blessing” of humanity85 and this should become the new paradigm for our time.
9. Jesus as the Cosmic Savior
Human beings are made in the image of God and we can now say that this image is Jesus Christ who has restored the cosmic order and has transformed the entire creation through His death and resurrection. This character of the image of God is universal and transcendental. In his letter to the Colossians, Paul clearly presents Christ as the creator, the preserver and the savior for the entire creation:
He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities – all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the first-born from the dead, that in everything he might be pre-eminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. (Col 1: 15-20)
It is important to note that Christ’s salvation is for all things, whether on earth or in heaven86. All things, from the elementary particles to the galactic systems, and from the microbes to the intelligent beings, were created by him and for him. This important concept of Paul is consonant with John's conviction that Christ is the alpha and the omega of all creation (Rev 1:8). In the letter to the Romans, Paul emphasizes that the Passover of Jesus is a single historic event, “The death he died, he died to sin once for all.” (Rom 6:10) The incarnation of Jesus Christ is indeed part of the divine creation plan that is scheduled for the appropriate social and cultural settings in human history87. As mentioned earlier, the incarnation in the evolutionary perspective is not primarily for the forgiveness of human sin, but is essentially for the union of the cosmos with its creator. In other words, the salvation of Jesus Christ in this broader sense is a divine creation activity that has made its way into human and cosmic history. The Logos would become human whether we have sinned or not, although our earlier analysis shows that sin may be an inescapable phenomenon in the evolutionary context. It should be pointed out that this concept of incarnation has its root in the scholastic tradition. When Duns Scotus (1266-1308) tried to explain the concept of the unio hypostatica88, he affirmed that it was the intention of God that the world was created for Christ in the very beginning and the world should be united with Christ by the closest possible relationship – the incarnation89.
The cosmic character of the Logos is prominent in Colossians 1:15-20 90. The salvation of Jesus Christ is a once-for-all incident and its efficacy extends not only in time but also in space. This cosmic Christology of Paul is consistent with the conception of evolution that we have so far developed. Teilhard de Chardin even refers the cosmic dimension of Christ as the third nature of Christ91, demonstrating the significance of this idea that has grown from modern cosmology. The universal redemption of Christ essentially applies to all created beings, including any extraterrestrial intelligent life that might exist elsewhere in the universe. Multiple incarnations of the Logos in these other worlds are unnecessary because the earthly once-for-all incarnation of the Logos with the “blood of his cross” has made available the reconciliation of the alien beings with God. In the same way as the Israelites were chosen by God to represent the salvation of God for all nations and peoples in the Old Testament, Homo sapiens are now chosen by God to designate the reconciliation of God with the Christocentric universe. Being the very first intelligent species in the universe, we now take on the mission to bring the good news to the alien civilizations should they exist. This is scientifically feasible on account of the colonization of the galaxy by our own species in less than 300 million years. Applying the space-travel argument to ourselves, we would have colonized the entire galaxy well before other intelligent beings could successfully evolve on their home planets92. Nevertheless, as noted by Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti, the participation of the Christian redemption, be it earthly or extraterrestrial, must be guided by the Holy Spirit, “who also works in a way which is mostly unknown for us, but certainly the only one able to secure the universality and interiorization of salvation.”93
10. The Fulfillment of Human Life
From the biblical anthropology, a Christian can reflect on the way to fulfill the purpose of human life as created by God. The moral actions that he takes should correspond to the inherent values of the human person. This is the basic concept of morality94. Although an atheist can also be a moral person by recognizing the goodness of creation through natural reason, he may still fall into error by human ignorance95. The true humanity can only be known as it is given to us by the revelation of God as the Creator, especially in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, the Logos. As God himself became one of us in our history, we are assured of the goodness and value of the divine creation and more importantly the ultimate meaning of human existence.
In his book on abortion and euthanasia, Ronald Dworkin maintains that for religious people all human beings are sacred because they are the beloved children of God. He also argues that for the non-religious people every human being is nevertheless sacred because each individual human life is the highest product of natural creation as well as the masterpiece of human creation96. Scholars such as Michael Perry and Robert Grant97 disagree that Dworkin has successfully laid the foundation for the sacredness of human beings in the objective way and therefore they attempt to employ alternative secular justifications for human rights. I propose that one possible response to this opposition is to resort to the new discoveries in modern cosmology. As we have discussed earlier, evolutionary and cosmological scientists today have shown that human beings are the products of some highly improbable evolutionary processes that may happen once and for all in the history of the universe. Moreover, as Teilhard de Chardin pointed out, human beings are significant and precious because we have the greatest complexity and the highest level of organization in the universe98.
As the children of God, we should live a coherent life showing our special status and relationship among ourselves. As repetitively commanded by Jesus in the Fourth Gospel, our response to accepting God’s love is to love our neighbors as ourselves including our enemies and persecutors. In fact, the self-realization of the human person takes place through our moral acts towards other people and ourselves. The Jesuit, Joseph Fuchs, writes nicely, “…believers must translate their living faith, that is, their ‘Christian intentionality,’ into concrete living and manifest it in their lives. This is the reality of the human person…”99 The fulfillment of the human person is simply “that he live as man, that he discover himself and his world as well as their latent possibilities, that he understand them, that he shape and realize himself as genuinely human, as bodily-spiritual being.”100 I believe this is the best response to the recognition of the anthropic principle.
11. Concluding Remarks
In this paper, we have examined our current understandings of the cosmic evolution and the divine creation and presented a possible integration of these two ostensibly contradicting concepts. By investigating specific questions which concern both disciplines, science and theology can contribute to a coherent vision of reality. In particular, our investigation shows that the evolutionary worldview can help us better understand the original plan of the divine creation, the meaning of the human person as the imago Dei, and the salvific universality of the incarnation of the Logos. This is in agreement with the thought of St. Thomas that “nature, philosophy’s proper concern, could contribute to the understanding of divine Revelation.”101 The ultimate goal of scientific research is to discern the work of God and, more importantly, to know God Himself. This is also the conviction of the author of the Book of Wisdom: “From the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator” (Wis 13:5).
Our free determination to accept God's invitation becomes part of the fulfillment of the divine creative activity in the cosmic Christology. The sacrament of baptism is a symbol of the acceptance of the recipient to the invitation of this cosmic construction through the grace of God. It removes original sin in a sense that it transforms us from the state of concupiscence to a new state of creation with the fulfillment of relationships with God, other people, ourselves and nature. The transcendent and immanent God creates us not only to be the most advanced creatures in the universe but also to be His sons and daughters. This is the salvation that Jesus has brought us. It is actually a great honour for us to be able to participate in the divine creation that has taken place for 14 billion years. Nonetheless it is not an easy task and accordingly Jesus promised to send us the Holy Spirit as our spiritual guidance. God has never rested from his creative work but has been recruiting us to join the construction of His kingdom. The present realization of this kingdom under construction is also the experience of the Johannine community whose people were baptized with water and the Spirit from above. Many scholars hold that this kind of realized eschatology in the Fourth Gospel emphasizes the response of the believer who can experience the fullness of humanity now. In the cosmic Christology, the real Sabbath in the Genesis creation story is established only if the whole creation is consummated in union with the Logos at the end of the cosmic evolutionary history. This is also the time that the kingdom of God genuinely comes upon us who will then become fully the image of God. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul concludes with such an evolutionary vision: “Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.” (1 Cor 15:49) This is our true humanity.
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