Spring forward, fall back

I read once that former US President Calvin Coolidge was a man of very few words, something that those close to him understandably found frustrating. Once he returned home from church and his wife tried to engage him in conversation. "What was the sermon about, dear?". "Sin", replied Coolidge. "And what did the preacher say about it?". "He was agin it".

I'm inclined to think this story must be apocryphal; surely anyone who hated talking that much would never have persuaded the nation to vote for him in the first place. But it does provide me with a jumping-off point for this post. What if, instead of "Sin", Coolidge had said "Evolution"? Would the preacher have been "agin" that too?

I'm not talking here about whether evolution is a fact or not, because the evidence for it is absolutely overwhelming. Rather, I'm asking: given that all of life in fact did develop in this way, should we regard that as a (partial) fulfilment of God's plan?

Michael Dowd, author of Thank God for Evolution, would I'm sure give an enthusiastic "yes" to that question, as would the "Einstein of consciousness" Ken Wilber, whose many books present an inspiring vision of the long journey from biological life to self-awareness to ego and beyond to transpersonal realms that most of us have only ever glimpsed. Wilber's catch phrase for the developmental process is "transcend and include": at each stage of development, whether personal or corporate, we need to transcend our current stage, which is almost bound to involve temporarily rejecting some of its perspectives; but then we need to include those perspectives in the new, wider level of consciousness we have reached. As a child grows to adulthood, he or she passes through adolescence, and it is normal and healthy to reject at least some parental values quite decisively in the process. But as adults, we all need to come to a mature evaluation of our parents, appreciate their struggles and limitations, and include in our own lives the really valuable things they were able to offer us.

But Dowd's and Wilber's perspective is not the mainstream Christian view, as I understand it. The early chapters of Genesis talk of the Fall of humanity. Eve and then Adam chose to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, an act of disobedience that resulted in their relationship to God being broken or, to put it another way, their spirits dying. Traditionally, this has been viewed as an unmitigated disaster, from which the only recovery was by means of sin being forgiven through Christ's death on the cross. Watchman Nee, in The Normal Christian Life and The Spiritual Man, is very clear that the Fall was not what God had intended, but a departure from that intention. The anonymous author of Meditations on the Tarot argues in the same way. And anyone who believes humankind evolved from other forms of life must I think, if they give any credit at all to the story of the Fall, regard it as a metaphor for some important step in consciousness taken by our remote ancestors. Long ago we had no "knowledge of good and evil"; then, somehow, we did; and in important respects at least, that was seen as a Big Problem.

And this poses a major dilemma for me, because I have the greatest respect for Dowd, Wilber, Nee and the author of Meditations, all of whose books I have found inspiring, thought-provoking, and a significant help along my spiritual path. I would love to get all four of them in the same room to discuss the matter, but unfortunately, only the first two are still with us, and all four of them are probably busy doing other things. So I will try to address the question in future posts. Now would be a great time for you to leap in with a comment if you are so minded.