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Return to Home Page Return to Book Contents & Summary THE BEGINNING OF THE SELF: CREATION
How do we begin? How
does a life journey start? A traveller who
doesn’t know where he is coming from cannot have a very good grasp of what his
journey is or of what kind of traveller he is. Is
he a doctor, called out to a patient? Is he a
businessman, sent to get an order? Or is he a
son, returning to his family? Let us imagine one particular human being, one ‘traveller’, and ask ‘how does his life begin?’ Not at birth, surely. At conception then? The unique person does not exist before then: but all the cell structures, the characteristics, the behaviour patterns from which he will develop have come from beyond him. Living organisms begin from life given by living organisms. A human person is an organism which comes into being from the life of other organisms. This generation of life is quite different to the making of things. A piece of wood can become a door, a table, a cupboard; but the fertilised egg embodies and carries forward the image of those organisms which have formed its existence from their own. This is very important for our understanding of what a person is: a person receives his existence and the beginning of his selfhood from others. We are not made, and we do not make or design ourselves or others. Selves are given by, formed from, other selves. We exist from and through others. The
traveller is unique but he is also the product, the gift, of all that have gone before
him. He cannot understand himself in
isolation, with no reference to his parents, his ancestors, the story of his origins. What a person is begins with what he has
received. To see what this might be we should
go back to the very beginning of his story.
1.
THE BEGINNING OF ALL LIFE-JOURNEYS: THE BIRTH OF THE UNIVERSE Most
people know something of the scientific statements on the origin of the universe and of
man, and would find it difficult to dispute them. It
is now widely accepted that all matter is derived from an intense ‘explosion’
some twelve thousand million years ago – the ‘Big Bang’. The scientists go on to describe the formation of
galaxies, stars and their planets; the birth of planet Earth four and a half thousand
million years ago; the separation of land and sea on our planet as it cooled; the
beginnings of life from the seas, resulting first in the fish, reptiles, insects and
birds, then in the land mammals, and eventually in man.
Some three hundred and forty million years after the first life-forms emerged, the
hominid species arose which would lead, seven and a half million years later, to the
beginning of our race. This is the long line
which has led to our traveller, the ancestry without which he could not exist. This,
then, is the account of our beginnings upon which most scientists would agree, and their
judgement is generally accepted. But we have
said that each of us has a fundamental view of ourselves and our world, and this must
affect what we think about that description. The
account may confirm one person’s positive feelings of being at home in the universe
and at one with all that is in it, but may add to another’s negative view and
overwhelm him with a sense of his own insignificance in the vastness of space, time and
species.
2. DOES
THE SCIENTIFIC ACCOUNT OF THE BIRTH OF THE UNIVERSE But what if the person is a Christian who accepts the Bible and the Church’s teachings as true? Do these not contradict the scientific account? The straight answer is ‘no’, and this is a good point from which to begin our examination of how religious doctrines are meant to make sense, since it has been a prime example of their appearing to make nonsense in the context of our ordinary knowledge. The science versus religion controversy of the past hundred years has driven many good people to either deny their faith or their reason, and has done much to erode any appreciation of doctrine. Here, therefore, we must
approach the matter which has to be dealt with by anyone who wants to understand religion
– the question of how the words are meant to be understood. It would seem that in certain non-Western and
tribal societies, where story-telling is and has remained an important element of the
culture, the people have a better grasp of how religious language works than we have in
the West today. With the rise of science in
the nineteenth century and of philosophies such as Logical Positivism in the early
twentieth century, and against the background of two thousand years of Western philosophy,
language has increasingly been seen as objectively descriptive, referring literally to
facts and events in the world. Any talk which
does not do that is, according to the Positivists, meaningless nonsense. This seemingly hard-headed, rational, modern
approach was for a long time seen as the only respectable way out of nineteenth century
philosophical problems, and that Positivism was a part of that move; but in itself it was
a cul-de-sac, cutting us off from a wider understanding of what language can do. It was very much in keeping with the reductionist
and materialistic scientific ideas which were also current at the beginning of the
century, views which suggested that the world and all in it were nothing but what could be
seen, touched, proved. Needless to say that
philosophers and scientists holding such views would not be inclined to see God and
religion as anything but superstitious nonsense unworthy of enlightened minds. The effect of all this on religious people has been unsettling,
sometimes devastating. From medieval times
Christian theology and Church teaching had increasingly been presented as literally and
objectively true, in an effort to protect orthodoxy and authoritative teaching. This led towards a situation in which Christians
felt obliged, for instance, to believe that Moses had written most of the Old Testament,
and that the world had been created, as one Anglican bishop asserted, in 4004 BC. When this literal view of religious language met
the new literalist ideas of philosophy and science, the result had to be explosive. Religious leaders and academics clashed, in the
newspaper columns, in Oxford debates, in the ‘Monkey Trial’ in the Southern
States, hurling definitive statements and abuse at each other. The controversy over Darwin's theory of evolution
brought the conflict to a head and sent believers spinning off in different directions,
some to resist the scientific thinkers, some to give up their religious faith and join
them. Many were left straddling the divide,
trying to keep faith with both – and there are many still in that position today. Since
that time religious people have reacted in various ways to the inexorable spread of
scientific and secular thinking. Fundamentalists
have flatly contradicted scientific observations, opposing Creation to evolution. But when they insisted that religious language
must be understood literally they were joining their enemy rather than opposing him, since
the scientists and philosophers were also saying that language had only a literal meaning. Then there have been religious writers who have
bowed to the power of science but have tried to hang on to as much of God and faith as was
not made redundant by our increasing knowledge. This
led to the ‘God-of-the-gaps’, a Cheshire-cat-like being who disappeared bit by
bit as science filled the gaps in our knowledge previously occupied by divine action. More recently much theology and philosophy has
seemed to aim at secularising Christianity, removing the transcendent from teachings about
miracles, the Resurrection and so on in order to make them more intelligible or acceptable
to the modern mind. While these defensive movements were going on, however, certain
solid and positive changes have been taking place. Biblical
scholarship in the last hundred years has taken us far beyond the impossible literal
reading of the scriptures and into a world of understanding in terms of language and
culture, context and authorship. Now it is no
longer enough to ask ‘What does it say?’ Now
we realise that we must ask ‘Who said it? ‘When?, ‘How? And above all
‘Why? And
while this was happening in religious scholarship there were also similar radical changes
in the thinking of scientists and philosophers. The
world is no longer seen as just ‘out there’, a set of material facts for us to
discover. Now it is seen far more
subjectively, as a process of events and energies much influenced, even in a sense created
or at least organised and determined by us – by the way we see it and, most
importantly, by the language we use to describe it to each other. Quantum physics, Chaos theory, alternative
medicine, these and many such ideas have disturbed the former orthodoxies of science, just
as new theories on the use and meaning of language have transformed the world of
philosophy. Now there is room for a sense of
awe before the wonder of the universe, and a better understanding that we can never expect
to own, manipulate and objectify all knowledge. We
have gained enormous benefits from the centuries of patient scientific research and
critical thinking, and these gifts must never be lost.
But now they are to be combined with a more tentative and questioning attitude to
the nature of our knowledge, and to the part we as conscious selves play in the universe
we explore.
Unfortunately,
the news of these great changes in thinking is arriving slowly and piecemeal in the
marketplace. There are still many people,
perhaps the majority, who believe that science claims to prove things, rather than to hold
theories as hypotheses until and unless they are falsified, as is more properly the case. It has to be said that there are even scientists
who are unwilling to regard established theories in this tentative manner, and it is still
the case that anyone proposing a truly radical new theory may expect to be attacked as a
heretic by some members of the scientific establishment. Similarly
in the understanding of language the belief persists that language is ‘true’
when it is exact, factual and scientific, and ‘untrue’ when it is
‘only’ fiction. Since this is a
crucial aspect of our present study it will be worth our while to examine it carefully, in
order to see how misleading this assumption can be. Let
us consider various types of writing to see which are true and which are not: - a) A magazine article advising older people to keep mentally active, stating that intellectual activityactually influence brain health and size. b) A poem
which begins: “O my love’s like a
red, red rose” c) A
section from the Supplementary Benefits Act 1976, setting out the conditions under which d) The final
paragraph of a science-fiction novel, in which the stars and galaxies are snuffed out, e) A newspaper report on the rule of an African leader who has held his country in an iron grip fordecades through the force of his personal troops, and has enjoyed a lavish lifestyle in the midst of his people’s starvation. f) The
story from ancient Greece of how the Goddess Athena turned Arachne into a spider for g)
A
Massachusetts legend of a sailor who went to seek his fortune for the love of a beautiful h) A
newspaper article stating that in 1975 the Khmer Rouge had seized power and had i) A
section from ‘Silas Marner’, the novel by George Elliot in which a man loses his
gold but finds Which of these is true? Let us look at each of them in turn: - a) Advice
based on scientific observations: probably correct and useful, but future research could b) Is the poet
lying? Should we examine the lady for
greenfly? The statement is not literal or e) We feel
that this is true because we know how people can behave when they get into a position We can see from these examples that it is
simply not the case that facts are true and fiction is untrue. Facts and fiction are the media which writers work
in as they try to say what they wish people to hear.
In fiction, if an author has a true idea and tells it well, then what he says will
be truthful. When facts are his medium he
may have a true idea, about power, greed and oppression for instance, but may use facts
which are not correct in order to tell it. In
that case his story does not convey the truth. And
this may not be a matter of deliberate deceit; the writer may have mistaken or
misunderstood his facts. As we have seen from
our examples, each of us may perceive an event differently in accordance with our
particular attitudes and preconceptions, and we then use language to express what we
believe to be the case. So while factual
evidence can be a very persuasive medium for imparting what someone believes to be true,
we can see that it has dangers and difficulties in the matter of perception and
interpretation which are not a problem in fiction. In the
realm of facts, the scientist, the historian, the reporter, gives his view of what he has
observed, and that view will reflect his experiences, emotions and beliefs. In fiction, the writer uses the kind of events
which may occur in our lives in order to evoke some understanding or response. Facts can be correct or incorrect, mistaken or
viewed with bias. Fiction can be realistic or
unrealistic, offering us sound insights or a distorted picture of ourselves. Neither fact not fiction are ‘true’ in
themselves: both can lead us into error; both can be used to tell us truth. The writer may use either fact or fiction to
enlarge our knowledge and understanding, but we may feel that it is the great novelist,
the poet or the playwright who offers us the deepest truth, picturing our world and
ourselves to us in a way which not only allows us to see more clearly how we are but
allows us also to create new ways of being. With this understanding of fact and fiction
and their relationship to truth we are able to approach and appreciate the sphere of
religious discourse. As we have seen in
examining the various other forms of human language, it would be quite wrong to judge the
truthfulness of religious literature on whether it is factually accurate and objective. Religious writers may use facts such as historical
events in order to offer their truths and, as with all such factual writing, these may be
more or less accurate. It can happen that the
fact is an essential element of the truth. If,
for instance, Jesus did not preach and work in Galilee and die in Jerusalem much of the
Christian truth would be questioned. But if
he was not actually born in Bethlehem attended by kings, the truth offered by the writer
of that account is still available to us. To
the extent that a biblical passage or a doctrine depends for its truth on the accuracy of
its facts, to that extent it may be found to be untrue if those facts are found to be
incorrect. A great part of religious writing, however,
is not factual, and its truthfulness in no way depends on whether the events it refers to
have happened. We have seen in secular
literature that those things which reach to the very heights of human experience, or even
transcend it, are best dealt with by the poet or by the writer of great fiction. All religious writings and practices are meant to
point us towards that which transcends the apparent limits of ourselves and our world,
drawing us on towards the infinite possibility which God presents to us. The most effective and profound of religious
writings are truth-telling fictions.
People
ask themselves ‘Is the Bible true?’ Without
a satisfactory understanding of how various kinds of language are ‘true’ or
‘truthful’ it is not surprising that many would say that the Bible is partly
true and partly ‘made up’. They
rightly understand that some of the Bible is fact and some is fiction, but are unaware
that fact is not the same as truth, or that fact and fiction are both vehicles which
people use to tell truths or falsehoods. Christians
affirm that all of the Bible is true, in that all of its writings have been compiled and
offered to give us truth about ourselves and God, as the authors and editors experienced
this in their own lives. The Christian
community recognises and accepts what they have said as truth-full. A brief look at the Bible may illustrate
this way of understanding how it is true. The
first thing one sees on examining it is that the Bible is not a book: it is a collection
of books, each of a very different type of writing. We
can in fact pick out passages from the Bible, which are similar to each of the varied
kinds of writing we saw earlier:-
We have seen here examples of the various
kinds of writing which we found in secular books, magazines and newspapers. Some are, or are intended to be, factual, but more
are fictional. Even to suggest this has been
unacceptable to fundamentalist Christians, but it is difficult to see how anyone could
describe the poetry of the Psalms, for instance, as ‘factual’. The difficulty can arise only, as we have said,
from a confusion about fact, fiction and truth. Good
writers present facts and fiction to us in order to reveal something which is true. And we have suggested that the deeper truths about
human existence are better revealed through the medium of fiction, since this engages more
of the understanding and imagination of the reader.
It is
interesting to know that research in recent years has suggested that fairy tales may
perform a very important function in helping children to deal with powerful events, ideas
and emotions which would be inaccessible to them through ordinary language and experience. The equivalent form used in adult life is a myth
– a form of expression widely misunderstood in the modern world. One will hear something referred to as a
‘myth’ or ‘mythical’ when what is meant is that it is untrue. But a myth, like a poem or a novel, is an
imaginative expression of some insight into the human condition. Every culture has produced its myths, and most of
us know something of these from ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt. One type of myth which exists in every culture,
from South America to the Arctic, from Polynesia to India, is the basic statement about
man’s place in the world – the creation story.
These tales, with their giants and dragons, their battles between gods, have been
viewed by scientific modern man as the attempts of ignorant people to explain the facts of
the beginning of the universe and of our race. This
derogatory perception of human intelligence arises from a misunderstanding of what people
might find important. We in the West have
become accustomed to the idea that thinking and learning are all about discovering facts,
rather than about understanding what events and actions might mean. The great creation myths show this to be a narrow
view. What then of the story of Creation in the
Bible? Like those in other cultures it would
have evolved orally, using elements from traditional stories. It would have been passed
down from generation to generation as part of the sacred knowledge that the people needed
in order to understand themselves and their place in the world. At the point when writing entered the
culture the story would be recorded, perhaps with local variations which had developed in
different areas. Each person might take a
more or less literal view of the events described, according to their individual
experience and upbringing, but it is unlikely that they would think that this was the
point of the story. This is how the Creation stories in Genesis
would have emerged. From obvious similarities
it is thought that they were to some extent derived from stories current in the ancient
Near East, such as the Gilgamesh Epic, one of the best known creation stories from that
area. The people of the Bible would have
used and adapted that material to develop their own account of man's place in the world,
based on their community's unique understanding of God.
At some time after one thousand BC, two versions were recorded in writing, each
emphasising what that author believed to be most important and meaningful in the familiar
stories. A later edition combined these two
into the somewhat disjointed account we have today. But in view of the orthodox Christian belief
that the Bible is the inspired word of God, where, in this somewhat haphazard process, is
the place for divine inspiration? We have
said that religious language attempts to convey truth, and that Christians affirm that the
Bible does this on every page. They believe
that not only those who wrote the scriptures but also the community from which those
writers and their materials emerged had a relationship with God which revealed to them
what was true in man’s experience. For
those who believe this, the Creation stories offer us a unique understanding, God-given
through our fellow men, in the light of which we may truly interpret our own experience.
6. THE CREATION BELIEFS OFFERED IN GENESIS Now that
we have looked at how religious language is meant to work we may go back to our
‘traveller’ and try to see what the biblical Creation stories can offer us about
the beginning and meaning of his life-journey. As
we have indicated, the biblical stories and the scientific accounts are not to be set
against each other as rivals, yet neither should they be held apart as separate and
unrelated. At each stage of our study we will
look at them in parallel, in order to see where each might enrich and illuminate the
other. We
looked at the scientific description of the beginning of the universe from one vast
explosion, resulting in the formation of galaxies, stars and planets, and the growth and
spread on our planet of numberless forms of life from the seas and over all the land. The Genesis story describes a similar majestic
procession: cosmic light bursts out upon the elemental darkness; land appears from the
waters, lit by the stars; plants grow; animal life emerges from the seas to spread into
the skies and across the earth; finally man appears.
(Gen 1:1 – 2:3) It is
surprising that the biblical story should follow quite closely the lines of the scientific
description, unlike the more obviously mythical images of creation stories in other
cultures. This similarity may be unfortunate,
in that it has encouraged the idea of Genesis as an alternative factual account of how the
events happened. But the purpose of this and
every other creation myth is to set out belief about what God is like, what the world is
for and, above all, what man is and what the purpose of his life must be. It is therefore right that the biblical account
should not be a tale of elephants or turtles bearing the world upon their backs, as would
be proper in another tradition, since the world the scriptural authors are portraying is
one in which God is essentially present and involved in its actual space and time and
material reality. Throughout the Bible we see
God as One who ‘walks’ and ‘speaks with’ and ‘dwells among’
his people, a presence culminating in his life as man in Jesus. This, then, is the first truth which the
Genesis account offers us: the world is not an illusion, unimportant, unreal against the
reality of God and the eternal realm. On the
contrary, it is the reality in which God may be found.
We are meant to take it seriously, as scientists and artists do, trying to see its
reality ever more clearly, and seeing its Creator in and through, rather than beyond and
in spite of it. Unfortunately one would have
to say here, as so many times in looking at Christian doctrines, that the truth offered
has too often been obscured or misunderstood. As
a result, good people have been led to look for God and their fulfilment in some realm
beyond the real world which he made for that purpose. The next question which the Genesis story
addresses is: what kind of world is this? Is
it essentially harmful? Or good? Or neutral? Or
just the best that God could manage in the circumstances?
To take this last possibility first; it is not such an odd suggestion as it might
appear to be. Many creation myths depict
great struggles between rival gods and powers, with the world and its inhabitants
resulting perhaps from the blood spilt or the bodies divided. But the biblical story has quite a different
atmosphere, one that is calm and powerful. “In
the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
The earth was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep; and
the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be
light’; and there was light.” (Gen 1:1 – 1:3) The
writer offers us a picture of God as immensely powerful, having no rivals, able to bring
about his creation simply by an act of his will. The
refrain is repeated at each stage as he brings the universe into existence: “Let
there be……And there was…” This brings us to the next question. If God is able to make the world as he wishes, what has he made of it? Once more the story offers us its truth in a refrain repeated at every new act of creation: " “And God saw that it was good.” This universe, this earth is essentially good, not evil, not malignant, not even neutral. God made everything to be good. But if religious truth is meant to make sense in the light of our experience, how can we make sense of this? We look around and see our world, and how can we say that it is good? The writer lived in the same kind of world as we do and felt as we do. Later in the account he goes on to address the problem of evil which is so obviously present in our world. But right at the beginning of his story he states his basic faith: God is powerful and good, and all that he has made is for good. Whatever is evil is not from his weakness or his will, or inherent in the matter he has created. The problem of how evil can exist if God is
good is the challenge which all religions must face if they propose to make any sense in
the lives of their followers. So urgent and
all-pervading is the problem that most cultures have set it, and the beliefs they propose
in response to it, at the very beginning of their tradition, in their creation myth. This is what the scriptural authors have done,
and we shall be examining what they offer as truth in this, the area which most challenges
all beliefs. What is astonishing is that anyone could
assume that the Genesis stories were dealing with the much less urgent matter of the
mechanics of the world’s beginning, the assumption which gave rise to the science
versus religion debate. Admittedly there is
the question, was it created or did it just happen? In
other words; Is there a God? But this
question cannot be the subject of a real debate because there can never be any
demonstration on either side. As we said in
our introduction, your upbringing will form your basic assumptions, and these are the
pre-condition of all your beliefs. The author
of the first passages in the Bible assumed the existence of God and went on to deal with
the questions of the world and man, good and evil. The
atheist assumes that there is no God and goes on to deal with the same question in his own
way. Given the two radically different
assumptions it is absurd for the religious man and the atheist to imagine that they can
engage in debate about whether the world was created or happened. It is also difficult to understand how they can
discuss other questions, such as that of evil, since the ground of their experience will
be so radically different.
7. WHAT IS MAN? THE EVOLVING SPECIES: THE IMAGE OF GOD The authors of Genesis have offered their
truth about God and about the world he has created: he is good; he is powerful; he is
involved and present in a world which is real and good.
In presenting these beliefs they touch upon the question of evil, but as yet say
nothing more than that it is not of God. Now
they turn to the next question which must arise as we try to make sense of our lives: What
am I supposed to be? What is man and what is
the purpose of his life? Once again, if we
assume that there is a God we will assume that man must have a meaning and a purpose
designed by him, whereas the atheist will have a radically different view. He believes that we form and live out our own
purpose, whereas the religious man believes that he will reach his fulfilment in
discovering and living out the purpose for which all men and all things were created by
God. What,
then, is man? We have said that, like all
living things, we are ‘gifts’ from those who have gone before us. Most of us would wish that every child could be
the result of the gift of love between two people, overflowing and embodying itself in a
new being who is in their likeness yet unique. We
know in our hearts that this is how and why we should come into existence. Do we find that this belief about ourselves is
expressed in the Genesis account of our
creation? "Then
God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have
dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and
over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’ So God created man in his own image, in the image
of God he created him; male and female he created them.” (Gen. 1: 26-27) This is
not a picture of a manufacturer making objects for his use.
Genesis shows us God as Person, or even Persons, transmitting his own life and
characteristics into new persons so that they can live and act and be as he is. Receiving our life and what we are from his life
and what he is, we are ‘made in his image’.
This is a statement which is not easy to grasp.
We are ‘creatures’, in other words, ‘creations’ of God, just as
is everything that exists. Yet we are not
like anything else because we alone are created from him to be as he is. We are the image of what he is. As an indication of this we see God setting man
the task of continuing with his work of bringing all things to life. For the biblical writer, the truth about man is
that he is no less than the likeness of God himself.
In imparting this likeness upon him, God shares with man his own responsibilities
and his own absolute value. We will
be giving further consideration to this belief that we are ‘made in the image of
God’. For the moment it is enough to
suggest that the story of the creation of man and woman is entirely in keeping with our
understanding of how persons come to exist and of what their value must be. They are what their parents have given them and it
is their destiny to go on with the work of the world which they have inherited. As to their value: most of us would accept that
human beings are intrinsically of immeasurable value; their value does not depend on what
they possess or what they have achieved. So
we can recognise the truth in the biblical account, and in the doctrine of Creation which
developed from it. And we can see that this
truth in no way conflicts with anything which science may say, since it is expressing a
view of persons as the gift of persons, rather than describing the method of our
biological evolution. “So
God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he
created them.” It seems incredible that
this beautiful and poetic passage could be seen as a prosaic description of events, and
dismissed as inaccurate. Yet only recently an
eminent astronomer, when interviewed on television as a scientist who is also a committed
Christian, said that as the Church had now accepted the theory of evolution, “The
Adam and Eve story had been put on the back burner.”
Yet again we have the strange assumption that the two offer conflicting answers to
the same question, rather than different contributions to a wide understanding of the
human condition. The story of Adam and Eve,
representing as it does a radical step in man’s search for meaning, is now, as it has
always been, at least as important and valuable as is the description of the evolutionary
process which brought mankind to the beginning of that search. The story of the creation of Adam and Eve
tells us about what man is, about his value and about his relationship to God. The scientist who misunderstands this may say that
it is a fanciful and ignorant account of how the human race originated, and that it
contradicts the theory of evolution. On the
other hand, the religious person who also misunderstands the story as a literal account of
our origins may oppose the theory of evolution on the grounds that it belittles man in
relating him to the animals and denying him a unique and direct creation by God. The scientist has not appreciated that there are
languages with a form and purpose very different from his own which nevertheless may also
give a true account of man and his world. The
religious man may feel that human beings can only be seen as spiritual to the extent that
they are separate and different from the physical world which science studies. Of these
two misconceptions it is the latter which is the more dangerous and damaging to religious
belief. It is a denial of the orthodox
Christian belief that the material world is essentially good, and that the
‘spiritual’ expresses that which is imminent within yet transcends that world. Happily this positive view is today being
supported by our growing appreciation of nature, and our understanding that we must
respect, preserve and protect all the life forms with which we share our planet. Many people today are happy to know that we are a
part of all that exists, that our blood carries the constituents of the primordial seas,
and that our cells are made from the same materials as those of all the animals, plants
and substances of the universe. We share with
all things the value they have as creations of God, and we gain our unique value not from
being separate and different from them but from expressing their Creator to them as his
image and by accepting the duty of care for them which that image imparts. We are the product of millions of years of
evolution, and we are created in the image of God. Both
of these are true, and we need to appreciate both of them if we are to understand who we
are and where we come from. We will therefore
study the two concepts, in order to see what they may reveal to us of ourselves and how
each may echo and enrich the truth of the other in doing so.
8. MAN, THE PRODUCT OF EVOLUTION When we
trace our ancestry to its very roots we find that our cells began from the first cells of
life in the waters of the deep. Every species
of animal life arose and developed from these same cells, some contributing to and others
branching away from the line which evolved towards man.
The first forms of life emerged 350 million years ago. 200 years ago the mammals evolved. 65 million years ago primates appeared among
the mammal species. 30 million years ago the
ape family of primates emerged. 7½ million
years ago a species of ape began to walk on its hind legs – it was
‘bipedal’. This was the beginning
of the ‘hominid’ species, the species which is described as being our first
direct ancestor. Although they were not themselves human, the hominids began the long process of development which would lead to man. The earliest named hominid species are the various types of Australopithecus, a name which does not of course refer to Australia but to the southern part of Africa. Darwin suggested that the human family arose in Africa, and subsequent research has shown that he was right. All the earliest hominid species have been found in Africa, and in Africa alone. Through those hominids we are related to every animal, and also of course to every other human being of whatever race or colour. It may be possible to sympathise with those who have been unwilling to accept the other animals as their kin, although this is not a helpful attitude in the search for self-understanding; but any denial of our common humanity can only lead to the neglect or oppression of others in the name of ‘racial purity’ or ‘racial superiority’. If we
can accept and respect each other as brothers and sisters, all descended within one
family, then we may also learn to respect our cousins in the other animal species, and
come to appreciate the structures, skills and instincts we have inherited through them. We have gained some insight into this inheritance
in examining the human brain. Studies have
shown that it is composed of three layers. Deep
inside there is the central core or ‘hind-brain’ which is an extension of the
spinal cord; this has been referred to as the
‘reptilian brain’. Surrounding this
is the mid-brain, which has been called the ‘old mammalian brain’. The outer enveloping layer is the fore-brain or
central cortex, highly developed in humans and the seat of the most complex functions such
as speech, perception, understanding and memory. This
layer is obviously crucial to what we are as human beings, but we may not forget that it
can exist and operate only on the basis of the other layers. The mid-brain is vital for all the functions of
motivation and emotion, and the hind-brain controls breathing, balance, swallowing and
facial movements. It can be said that the two lower and more
ancient layers of the brain are the gifts to us of the lives of the countless species from
which our species has been able to develop its unique potential. This perception fits well with the picture of man
as he is portrayed in Genesis, and with the view people have of how a person comes into
being. The Bible shows us man as part of
God’s creation, unique only in that God has given him the gift of his own life, to
transform in man the gifts which he has received from all that was created before him. A man ‘made’ by God in a separate act
of creation, cut off from everything else which life has brought into being, does not fit
the picture of God presented in Genesis, any more than it fits the knowledge of science,
or the ordinary human experience of receiving our existence as a gift from each of our
many ancestors.
Yet are
we not unique, different from the other animals, made in God’s image? Present studies on the full range of animals, from
the insects and birds and on to the higher species such as the apes and the dolphins, show
them to have astonishing characteristics and abilities, even in those areas which we
regard as typically human, the areas of relationships, communication and awareness. In the area of relationships we find that the
majority of species form groups, either for life or for specific events such as breeding
and rearing their young. In social insects
such as the ants we see task-orientated group organisation which can result in feats of
construction and social functioning to rival our own pyramids and cities. This is in fact only an instinct-driven and rigid
form of group activity. But when we look to
the higher animals we see family groups and tribes of apes, of dolphins, of elephants,
caring for their own and each other's young, seeing to each other’s needs, working
and playing with real co-operation and within very complex relationships. If we
look at the second area in which human beings have thought themselves to be unique, that
of communication, the picture is similar. Studies
in this century have opened our eyes to an amazing range of communication skills in every
species. We are now able to appreciate
something of the complex chemical signalling of the insects, and the songs learned by
individual birds, beyond their inherited calls. We
have been astonished by the ‘waggle dance’ of the bee, whereby it describes to
others in the hive the distance and direction of a food source, using angles off the
vertical and numbers of wing-beats like mathematical indications. We are now only beginning to grasp the complexity
of the vocal and body language of the higher animals, and we are awed by the songs of the
great whales, differing from one year to another and transmitted over hundreds of miles of
oceans. In studying the abilities of some of
our closest relatives in the ape family, scientists have succeeded in teaching chimps to
‘talk’ with us through sign language or word cards, the animals communicating
their needs and thoughts in correctly formed grammatical constructions. If the other animals are so skilled in areas
such as relationship and communication, areas which we have regarded as particularly
human, does this not indicate that we are not unique?
Answering even from the scientific perspective we can say that as far as our
present knowledge indicates, we are indeed. Although
the other species do have amazing skills even in areas which we think of as constituent of
human existence, it is clear that our development of these goes far beyond anything seen
in other animals, and that our potential appears to be virtually unlimited. In the matter of vocal communication, our physical
structure is unlike that of other animals, the larynx being much lower in the neck than it
is in any other species, thereby permitting a much larger range of sounds than they can
achieve. In the wider area of communication,
anthropologists have suggested that image-making is evidence of a sophisticated level of
development. Even our closest relatives among
the apes have so far failed to produce anything which could be interpreted as a drawn
image, in spite of much encouragement, but in man this ability appeared suddenly about
thirty thousand years ago, in both Europe and Africa.
We may see evidence of this unique development in evocative and expressive
prehistoric paintings such as those in the caves of Lascaux in the Pyrenees. These images are the precursors of all the images
communicated since that time, including those imparted in the language of Shakespeare and
Dante. Nothing we have seen in the study of
animals suggests the beginnings of such a development. The other animals’ lesser ability in communication is, however, really a matter of degree, as it was in the area of relationships, and we may still be forced to wonder whether we are in any way different in kind from other species. Here science can offer another, always tentative, ‘yes’. In the third area of characteristics and abilities, that of awareness, we can say that while all animals are conscious, we alone, as far as we can tell at present, are self-conscious. What do we mean by ‘self-consciousness’? It is a matter of being able to read one’s own mind, and of having a sense of one’s own self. It is important for the survival of animals that they should be able to understand and predict the behaviour of others; they all do this to some extent but it would be an enormous advantage if an animal could imagine what it might do in the same circumstances. Such an ability to read others’ minds by reading one’s own would be a major evolutionary breakthrough. Do animals have this sense of self? Tests have been carried out in which an animal
becomes familiar with the reflection it sees in a mirror, and then has its head marked
with a red spot. If the animal touches the
spot on seeing it in the mirror, this shows that it does recognise the image as its own. Chimpanzees and orang-utans do so, whereas
gorillas and monkeys do not. In the area of
deception, which can also be an indication of self-awareness, baboons and some apes appear
to practice deception, but orang-utans do not. It would therefore appear that there are
some traces of self-awareness in our closest animal relatives; yet it may be said that
these do not constitute true self-consciousness, since they have no impact on the emotions
and do not give rise to speculation on meaning. Only
in man does the sense of self extend into the emotions, resulting in such feelings as
empathy, sympathy and compassion. We have
seen that the higher species do have complex and close relationships, and yet it has been
observed that the feeling of sympathy is not well developed even in chimps, and that it is
less so in other primates. And animals do not
know about death. Seeing death in others and
relating it to oneself is regarded as a key element of self-consciousness, and it appears
that not even chimps have such awareness. In
the record of man’s prehistoric past we get clear indications of death awareness, in
the evidence of deliberate burials, possibly from as early as one hundred thousand years
ago. It is argued that once consciousness
passes the threshold of self-awareness and death-awareness, then the human questions
arise, and the search for meaning begins. Then
for the first time an animal species asks questions of itself. What is the meaning of my life? What is the meaning of the world in which I find
myself? What happens at death? The anthropologists describe this as the beginning
of mythology and religion, and say that these have been an essential part of human history
ever since. Here, in our need and ability to
reflect upon ourselves and our lives, here the human being is unique.
10. MAN, THE IMAGE OF GOD: PERSONHOOD In this
chapter we are looking for an answer to one of those questions, an answer which our
traveller needs in order to make his life journey well.
We are asking ‘What is man?’, and we are looking for an answer which will
match our own experience and the findings of science, and which may be illuminated by the
biblical account of our creation. We have
seen our unity with and dependence upon the other species, but now in looking at
consciousness we have approached the concept which suggests that our nature transcends
that of our animal ancestors, defining us as being ‘in the image of God’. This is the concept of personhood. What do
we mean when we speak of a ‘person’? We
would accept that it must imply consciousness, the capacity for thought – but how
much and of what kind? It is unlikely that we
will want to define personhood by the amount of mental ability. Few would accept that the cleverer you are the
more of a person you must be. If that were so
then the young, the uneducated, the mentally impaired, might be treated as non-persons, or
at least as very low quality persons. By the
same token, if someone has not yet begun to think, or has lost some or all of that ability
either temporarily or permanently, through illness or accident, we would surely still see
them as persons, beings who are essentially conscious by nature though prevented from
using this capacity at that time. We describe personhood not by the amount but by the type of consciousness. As we have said, all animals are conscious, but we alone are self-conscious. My cat ‘knows’ that he is hungry, that he is threatened, that it is night time. But he cannot reflect on knowing these things; he cannot think about himself experiencing them. The scientists and philosophers will tell us that if he could his behaviour would show that he did. It is, after all, a very strange thing to be able to watch yourself doing and thinking. If you are watching yourself, who is doing the watching? But without this ability to turn and face yourself you could not plan your future or form meaningful memories of your past. An animal remembers, and bases its present behaviour on its past experiences. My cat knows that if he sits by the fridge at certain times of the day, food will be produced. But without self-reflection our experience would be on this hour-to-hour basis, without the complex patterns of hopes and fears and dreams which we weave and inhabit. No other animal can perceive their past or
imagine their future as we do; they do not fear or try to understand death because they
cannot foresee it. No other animal creates
poetry, music and art to express nostalgia or remorse over the past, despair or courage
for the future. Even more importantly, no
animal has that sympathy and love for others which can come about only as the self
recognises its own needs. This is the sure
area of personhood: a person is self-conscious, able to reflect on his experiences and to
create images to express them, and able to feel compassion for himself and others. We are persons.
If we were to find those qualities in any other species, we would have to begin to
consider them as persons. The whole of creation expresses the Creator
in its order and variety and beauty. Humans
alone mirror him in that we are persons able to reflect on and express its meaning, in the
lives we lead, the work we do, the ideas and objects we create. Does this mean that we
have been raised above our fellow creatures and can use, abuse or forget them as we reach
towards our fulfilment? The Christian view of
this has been presented by St Paul in his letter to the Romans, in which he says: “For
the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for the
creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who
subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to
decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God.” (Rom. 8 : 19-21) We are not meant to discard and leave behind
all those whose gifts have contributed to our being, but to take them with us to be
fulfilled in God. Looked at from a physical
point of view, since they have contributed to what we are, our future is their future. And it is a feeling common to people’s
experience that what we love endures and is not lost.
In the selves which we have received from all of nature before us, and in the love
and care which we give to all that exists in our world, we take creation with us. To speak in terms of ‘heaven’ but
somewhat lightly, we can say that if we go, they go.
To speak in fully Christian terms, at the end of time all creation will return, in
Christ, to the Father.
If man
is unique among the species, created in the image of God, at what point did this
phenomenon occur? Where in the chain of
evolutionary history is the moment when this new species, this new creation, emerged? It may be that those who accept the evolutionary
nature of our origins may yet look for an ‘Adam and Eve’, some ancestor in whom
the momentous change occurred from conscious animals to self-conscious persons. Obviously
we can never really know how or when this happened, and yet the recent work of
palaeoanthropologists such as Richard Leakey, assisted now by the findings of geneticists,
has begun to offer us a much clearer picture than we might have thought possible. The earliest species of our hominid ancestors yet
discovered, found in Ethiopia in 1994, was estimated to be four and a half million years
old. The next oldest known species, popularly
known as ‘Lucy’ from the name given to a particular female specimen, has been
dated at about three million years. In the
following million years two main lines developed: one consisted of small-brained species,
and these died out about a million years ago; the other consisted of larger-brained
species, and some of these were of our own genus ‘Homo’. Our immediate ancestor, Homo erectus, has been
dated at about one and three-quarter million years. Populations
of Homo erectus walked out of Africa and spread out over Europe and into China and
Indonesia at about that time. There is
controversy about the next step, the development of our own species, Homo sapiens. Some anthropologists believe that Homo sapiens
developed simultaneously from various regional populations of Homo erectus. The other view, known as the ‘out of
Africa’ theory, suggests that modern Homo sapiens evolved from just one particular
population of Homo erectus in an isolated area of East Africa. From here our species spread out across the world
in a second migration from Africa and became eventually the only human species remaining
when all other descendants of Homo erectus died out, the last to go being Neanderthal man,
extinct after 32000 BC. This is the more
widely accepted view, and it has been supported by the ‘mitochondrial Eve’
theory put forward by geneticists and publicised in 1986.
This suggests that all of us can trace part of our genetic inheritance, in our
mitochondrial DNA, to a single female who lived in Africa some 150,000 years ago. She was, as the newspapers called her, ‘the
mother of us all’. At what
point, then, in this evolutionary process did man, the ‘image of God’, appear? Richard Leakey, in his book ‘Origins
Reconsidered’ (1992 with Roger Lewin), has said that everything earlier than Homo
erectus was apelike, while everything after was distinctly humanlike, in behaviour as well
as in form. The beginnings of a
hunter-gatherer way of life came with Homo erectus, together with standardised tools,
fire, expansion beyond Africa. Leakey
suggests that the rudiments of language, and perhaps even self-consciousness, were
produced in that rapidly expanding brain. (pp
46-47) He feels that in Homo erectus humanity
seems to have ‘arrived’, with the dawning of compassion, morality and
self-awareness, engendered by language. We may accept Leakey’s suggestion that
Homo erectus showed the characteristics of true humanity, but there is another body of
opinion which sees Homo erectus as the last stage of evolution leading to the full
emergence of humanity, and that this occurred in 150,000 BC with the origin, in that
isolated group in East Africa, of the new species Homo sapiens, the only direct ancestor
of the modern human race. It is accepted that
self-awareness was not present in our first ancestors, the hominid species. It may indeed have been developing in Homo
erectus, but we have said that self-awareness confers a real biological advantage in a
species’ struggle to survive and develop, and it therefore seems likely that the Homo
sapiens group which emerged from East Africa to replace all other Homo populations must
have developed this awareness to an outstanding degree.
Some scholars have suggested that there was a sudden flowering of cognitive ability
which produced modern humans, and they describe this as the third of the great steps in
human history – bipedalism, the big brain, introspective consciousness. They point out that this was a unique and
particular development, and not one which was bound to evolve eventually. This is apparent from the fact that it did not
occur in any of the other populations of Homo erectus which had spread from the first
migration out of Africa.
If we follow this suggestion that the dawn of humanity occurred quite suddenly on the evolutionary timescale, and that it can be located and confined to a particular place and population, we may paint a speculative picture of how true selfhood might have emerged. We may suppose that 150,000 years ago in East Africa, by a lake in Tanzania, a group of our Homo ancestors had settled. This was an extended family group, all related to one female and her mate or mates. As may happen in families, the group had a special gift or talent, much as we have seen musical genius running in a family. This family had a talent for forming and sustaining close relationships. To understand the implications of this we
may look at indications offered by developmental psychology. Studies of infants have shown
that although they are born with the potential for self-awareness, they develop it only
gradually in the first months and years of life. At
first the baby does not distinguish between himself and the world, or between himself and
others. Only as he begins to experience the
otherness of things, and most especially of his mother, does he begin to experience
himself. It would appear that his self-image
is not formed in introspection or isolation, but through his relationships with others. Selfhood is precisely individual and yet it can
begin to exist only in relation to others. We
have seen in looking at the higher animals that those with the greatest mental ability
appear to have developed their capacity because of the demands of social interaction. Relationship with others, it would seem, is the
most powerful agent of mental development and it is the necessary condition for the growth
of the sense of self. Returning
to our ancestral group, we may suggest that they had an extraordinary gift for instituting
and sustaining complex and enriching relationships. In
the course of such relationships, whether between mates or between a parent and child, one
individual ‘sees’ the other as other, and therefore sees himself, herself, as
seen by the other. This perception grows with
every encounter and experience, and is communicated to and developed in others. Our supposed group grows in awareness of each
other and of themselves, displaying a gift which is unique yet which could emerge only
from the ground supplied by the lives of their ancestors in earlier species, much as the
unique flowering of human genius in the arts and sciences of the Renaissance had its roots
deep in the preceding centuries. Any suggestion that the scenario pictured
here detracts from the Genesis account of our creation would seriously underestimate the
magnitude of what is portrayed. From the
slow procession of species over millions of years the first selves have emerged, the first
beings to see and know that creative process, and to know themselves as part of it. Formed from the material of the universe, a
creature has received the divine spark which transforms that dust into a person, into the
image of God. Those who were affronted by the
theory of evolution felt that it denied a unique creation of man, but the picture
portrayed here is compatible with that belief, while contradicting nothing of the
scientific findings. Science and religion
speak, each in their own language, of the same awesome event, the one telling of Homo
sapiens stepping into a unique place among the species, the other showing us God sharing
his selfhood as his finger touches the finger of Adam. Just as the author of the Genesis passage
sets out the creation of the universe in seven days, so also does he set out the creation
of man in a single moment. In neither case
are we meant to take the time as factual or essential to the meaning. The writer neither knows nor concerns himself with
the length of time involved; his purpose is to show what the world and man are, in
relation to God. Self-awareness is, as we
have seen, a developing faculty, and not something received whole and complete, once and
for all. Yet the gulf between having it and
not having it is immense. We know how
suddenly an important realisation can strike us; it is possible to imagine the awakening
of human selfhood as happening to one individual in just such a single moment of
inspiration. However it may have occurred, if
the religious person describes this dawning of self-awareness as the gift of the Holy
Spirit this is no contradiction of the physical events but rather an attempt to express
the fullness of their meaning.
13. THE THREAT
OF SELF DESTRUCTION : THE FALL OF MAN Now we come to the second part of the Genesis story, a story written, as we have said, to express the beliefs of the author and his community about how the world is and why it is so. He has already faced the question of whether God created the evils and suffering in the world, and has given his answer firmly in the repeated phrase ‘And God saw that it was good’. Now he must pursue the question. We have
said that the sense of self is a developing rather than a once-for-all faculty, and it is
interesting that Genesis appears to show man’s self-awareness as emerging in two
stages. First we were created in God’s
image, male and female, persons each reflecting selfhood to the other. We were able to name the animals, and were set to
tend the garden as God’s stewards. But
then the first humans, ‘Adam and Eve’, ate the fruit of the only tree forbidden
to them by God, the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
As a result they became differently self-aware, even what we would call
‘self-conscious’, seeing themselves as naked, shameful and guilty in the eyes of
each other and of God. And as a consequence
they came to see everything in their world differently; things like work, childbirth and
death which had seemed natural to them before were now experienced as punishment and
suffering. If we
look at this part of the story in the light of scientific understanding and of our own
experience, we may find that it displays remarkable insight. We have seen earlier that self-awareness brings
with it empathy, sympathy, compassion for others. But
one point we have not yet touched upon is that with self-consciousness comes the
possibility of choice. All animals choose
what they will do, yet they are not in fact choosing freely but only as programmed by
their instincts for the best chance of survival and procreation. In some species such as the insects and birds,
their actions are quite rigidly determined by inherited instincts and patterns of
behaviour, while in others such as the primates there are general patterns of inherited
behaviour which individuals and groups can then adapt to suit differing circumstances. Man also has inherited instincts, but most
scientists would now agree that his ‘nurture’ has an even greater effect on him
than his ‘nature’. What we
experience, and what we make of those experiences, influences and even changes the
directions laid down for us in our inherited patterns. Humans
are different from all other species in that they are persons, and an essential
characteristic of personhood, resulting from self-awareness, is a sense of good and evil
and the freedom to choose between them. This may sound fairly obvious, but for a time
science did not accept that we have that freedom. When
the psychological view known as ‘Behaviourism’ was first developed in the early
part of this century, its followers said that human beings are virtually programmed to
react to their environment in predetermined ways, and that there is no such thing as free
choice. But since that time those following
the Behaviourist line of thinking have altered their view considerably. They now accept that our mental activities do play
a part in what we do and that we can therefore be spoken of as acting, rather than as
simply reacting. Other schools of psychology
never subscribed to the determinist view and have always said that we do make choices,
willing to do one thing rather than another. Their
studies have also shown, however, that we are startlingly susceptible to being swayed and
influenced by others, so that it is difficult for us to be sure when we are acting freely
and when we are not. It does
appear that we alone have the power to choose, and one striking example of our using free
choice when other animals do not is our ability to choose what does not appear to be in
our best interests. We alone among the
animals disrupt our lives, and the lives of those in our families and society, by crime,
treachery, drug abuse, child abuse, war……..
It is true that studies have shown that animals can ‘lie’ and
‘steal’. C. A. Munn, in a 1986
article in ‘Nature’, described how members of two species of insect-eating birds
would make the alarm call for ‘predator’ and, when the flock scattered, would
seize all the food for themselves. Among
primates, baboons have been reported to behave in ways that strongly suggest they are
consciously deceiving others. More
disturbingly, there is now evidence from recent studies that some young male chimps have
ambushed and ‘murdered’ other chimps for no apparent reason or benefit. These few instances, however, are not a great deal
to put against the evils done daily by so many of the most dangerous species on earth -
man. But if
we can choose to act in this strangely destructive way, we are equally strange in being
able to choose to do good against our self-interest or the interest of our family. Some animals will expose themselves to danger to
protect the herd, and many animals will protect their young at great risk to themselves. But here again the instances are examples of
instinctive species preservation. Most humans
would risk their lives to save their own or even other people’s children, and
countless thousands have given their lives for their friends, their country, their
beliefs, for freedom, for justice, for every kind of cause.
Many more have given their daily lives, their hopes and comfort to the care of a
disabled child, an elderly parent, or for the sick, the poor, the unloved and the unlovely
of the world. Instinctive nature would surely
see these weak members of society as a dangerous drain on scarce resources, and would
allow them to die for the good of the strong and of the species. These deliberate choices to act against our
basic survival instincts, whether for harm or good, are at least difficult, perhaps
impossible, to explain without accepting that human beings have a unique ability to will
and act freely. Even when we have taken into
account all the environmental influences, all the cultural programming, all the dependence
on others, we are still left knowing in our heart of hearts that there are moments when we
choose. This is, as we have said, a direct
result of self-consciousness and a necessary aspect of personhood. Being self-aware we can reflect on our actions and
their possible consequences, and can decide what an action will mean to us. If we
now look back to the second part of the story of man’s creation we will see how the
writer expressed this understanding of what man is and what this suggests about God in
relation to the problem of evil. ‘Now
the serpent was more subtle than any other wild creature that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say,
‘You shall not eat of any tree of the garden’?” And the woman said to the serpent, “We may
eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the
fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch, lest you
die.’” But the serpent said to the
woman, “You will not die. For God knows
that when you eat it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and
evil.” So when the woman saw that the
tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be
desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her
husband, and he ate. Then the eyes of both
were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and
made themselves aprons.’ (Genesis 3 : 1-7) Here we have a picture of human beings emerging from their animal ancestry, still retaining the ‘innocence’ of the animals, that inability to see their actions or the circumstances of their lives in terms of good and bad. The writer depicts this innocence in saying that Adam and Eve were unaware of their nakedness. No animal perceives itself as naked because this requires self-awareness and the conscious ability to give value and significance to aspects of oneself and the world. For the same reason that it does not perceive itself as naked, no animal perceives something as beautiful or ugly, true or untrue, good or evil. Equally, it can work to get food but cannot think of itself as toiling; it can suffer through disease, accident or giving birth but cannot feel anguish or resentment about such experiences; it can die but, as we have said, it cannot have any knowledge or fear of death. The writer of Genesis shows all these perceptions as coming only with the dawning of self-awareness and the subsequent construction of a system of values – the ‘Knowledge of good and evi |