Even the tiniest plant that blooms for a fortnight and then is seen no more is vaster in its metaphysical roots than the entire cosmos in its visible form: for these roots extend into eternity. And how much more does this apply to man!

Created beings come to birth in time: they enter the world, as it were, at some particular moment. Each creature, in its cosmic manifestation, is thus associated with its own spatio-temporal locus: it fits somewhere into the universal network of secondary causes. But yet it is not created by these causes, nor is its being confined to that spatio-temporal locus: for its roots extend beyond the cosmos into the timeless instant of the creative act. That is the veritable "beginning" to which Genesis alludes when it declares: „In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram”. It is "the day that the Lord God made the heaven and the earth, and every plant of the field before it sprung up in the earth, and every herb in the ground before it grew." [To be sure, this "before" is not to be understood in the sense of temporal precedence: that would be to miss the entire point! The precedence in question is ontological, or causal, as one could also say.]

 

Let there be no doubt about it: the creature is more —incomparably more!— than its visible manifestation. It does not coincide with the phenomenon. Even the tiniest plant that blooms for a fortnight and then is seen no more is vaster in its metaphysical roots than the entire cosmos in its visible form: for these roots extend into eternity. And how much more does this apply to man! "Before I formed thee in the womb, I knew thee." (Jer. 1:5).

 

Here then, in the scriptural and metaphysical teaching of the omnia simul, we have the definitive answer to evolutionism. With the adoption of an authentically metaphysical standpoint the seemingly interminable debate between the evolutionists and the so-called creationists has at last been put into perspective: it now becomes clear that both sides are in fact looking at only half the picture: the outer or phenomenal half, one could say, forgetting that things have also an inner dimension, an essential core which transcends the plane of the phenomenon.

 

From this truncated point of view, moreover, the riddle of origins becomes truly insoluble—for the simple reason that things ultimately derive, not from the phenomenal plane, but from the side of transcendence. Likewise, they grow and unfold their potential from inside out: the essential, in other words, has primacy over the phenomenal, whatever the empiricists might think. Metaphysics, therefore, is neither a luxury nor an idle speculation; it is there to complete the picture, and is needed if ever we are to make sense out of first origins or final ends. One might add that its neglect in modern times is both a symptom and cause of our contemporary intellectual predicament.

 

Getting back to the subject of evolution, no one doubts that living forms have emerged successively as evolutionists insist: this is an empirical fact, after all. Indeed, it is precisely what the fossil record does permit us to conclude.

 

What is objectionable in the evolutionist position, on the other hand, is that it oversteps what we actually know, first through the transformist hypothesis (for which there is no evidence at all), and secondly by maintaining that the process of speciation can be accounted for in terms of molecular accidents (an assumption which is not only unfounded but astronomically improbable to the point of absurdity).

 

The fact that these unpromising postulates have nonetheless commended themselves to countless individuals derives no doubt from the circumstance that in conjunction they seem to offer a rational means of approach to the mystery of life for minds closed to the metaphysical outlook. As one evolutionist has said: "It is better to think in terms of improbable events than not to think at all."

 

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Wolfgang Smith: Teilhardism and the New Religion

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