Creationism or evolutionism?

In an image such as the one from Persephone and Eros we can observe what is impossible to put into words in one glance, even when we use many words.

The effort to think evolution in a reversed way made me  look at the origin of species not as a development from the most simple  to the most complicated species, but gave way to a possibility of seeing the most complicated being – and that goes far beyond what we know in our time as homo sapiens sapiens – at the beginning of the development of species. The different living beings that have been there through times and the ones that still exist, could be seen as branches in the forming of mankind that develops from the original living idea. In this line of thought the image of mankind as a comprehensive developing organism came up, but reality made it necessary to see another impulse in development. That exactly is the differentiating impulse.

The more one thinks in this reversed way, the more one puts the point of view of these thinkers who call themselves creationists against the one of those who call themselves evolutionists. The creationist sees a Creator as the basis, the spring of creation.

I would not want to take such an extreme opposite point of view, because in independent thinking about these questions it becomes clear, that the facts that are found in evolutionary science have a great value and are true. Only the interpretation of these findings could be different from the usual. One would indeed see a Creator, but one would look at the evolution of species as the deed of the Creator.

The perfect idea of mankind in the beginning of creation points to a Being who has this idea. Now our imagining is naturally too much human, too narrow-minded to imagine such a Being as the Creator. Man has the tendency to enlarge himself to a perfect being, with a perfect thinking, feeling and wanting, and thinks that God has to be something like this, that God has created man to the image of man, not to the image of God Himself. Thus one comes back to himself as a human being.

Or one puts himself at the point of view from the other extreme, and says: To man God is unimaginable and it is a sin against one of the ten commandments when one feels the urge to imagine the Creator. Like one can come (by thinking) to an experience that the question ‘What is mankind’ can not be exclusively answered by the theory of evolution, but neither exclusively by the creationism and that one actually would want to fertilize the one with the other; thus one can also experience that there has to be a living 'in between' between the powerless image of God similar to man, and at the other side the prohibition of an attempt to come to a reverent image of the divine.

A great religious thinker wrote the following:
‘Thus  actually we must say, that we acknowledge God at the end of the thinking process as the unknown, because then the spirit is found in the most complete way in acknowledging God, when that spirit acknowledges that Gods being goes beyond everything, what we are capable of to understand while thinking.

Even though the eye of the night bird does not see the sun, the eye of the eagle sees the sun.
Although it is a tiny little detail, what the knowing spirit can understand of God, still this is his last goal, more than the complete knowledge of the lower knowable.

As much as man surrenders to fathom wisdom, as much he already has part in true glory.’ (Thomas Aquinas)


God as an architect (Bible moraliséé, 1245)Creationism or evolutionism? by Mieke Mosmuller