To Teilhard de Chardin the human form arose naturally from its antecedents through evolution, yet that necessity has its ultimate origin in divine providence. The question of how this relates to the Genesis story is not my concern here: I am instead interested in how it relates to the philosophical claim that there is something in human operations transcending what can be done by other animals. For example, humans can know everlasting truths. To have such knowledge (in the most robust sense of the word "knowledge") could not be mere perception, imagination or expectation. But if the human form arose naturally from simian antecedents, then it would seem that the human way of cognizing would be nothing more than a highly developed imagination, etc. Since human cognition is as different from imagining as an infinite ray in geometry (which we cannot properly imagine) is from a finite line segment (which we can), then it follows that it is problematic to say that the human psyche is in a continuum with other animal psyches or is nothing but the product of evolution. At the same time, biology certainly seems to be finding a structural continuum between human and other organic forms.
What would be helpful, I believe, to find a way of acknowledging that humans are different from other animals and that this difference is the product of divine freedom, while at the same time and without inconsistency affirming that the material cause of human nature arose from natural evolutionary processes.
While the above may at first sound more paradoxical than plausible, it is not impossible: I know because I've thought of a way. It's based on an analogy with the sacraments. Specifically, the sacraments are a suitable analog because they illustrate how the Word Incarnate acts freely yet reliably through our speech acts and the material conditions that He has specified.
Consider also the conception of a human being: the human form seems to arise from natural circumstances, but from a more adequate perspective, something properly supernatural is at the onset of human existence. It is as if conception is an opening to a light that is ready to break into our world. There is something quasi-sacramental about conception. Just as the proper matter and "form" of a sacrament are together like the proximate matter and form through which the humanity of Jesus becomes present where there had previously been mere bread and wine, so too at our conception the Word speaks a kind of word through which human life is conceived in our proximate matter. If so, then evolution could be said to be a process through which nature learns, as it were, to speak the word that invites the Word to act quasi-sacramentally in calling human life into existence.
If all of the preceding is correct, then isn't evolution the process of creation opening itself up to the divine? Isn't the development of the material conditions of the human form like a child learning to speak? Isn't the development of the proper conditions like the coming together of the matter and form of a sacrament, i.e., an invitation to the divine to act freely in bringing humanity into existence?
The problem with this speculation is that sacraments are for Catholics an extension of the human operations of Christ. They are not like some mechanical yet supernatural switch that has to be turned on. It would seem that prior to the existence of humanity, there could be no such extension. But then again, if the grace of the Word Incarnate could in some ways precede in Incarnation, then something analogous could be going on with evolution, etc.: the antecedent intention of God the Son to take on a human nature, to take on "the form of a slave," as St. Paul says in Philipians, then something analogous could be the case with evolution as well. In such a case, however, the Incarnation would be the whole point of creation. That seems beautiful, so I'll keep ruminating over this one.
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