Tresmontant, in discussing Chance-plus-Time as the possible source of the emergence of life and its astonishing orderly complexity, reminds us that modern materialists, as distinct from the Greek pre-Socratic philosophers such as Parmenides, no longer have available to them the categories of infinite time and space and an infinite quantity of matter, when they consider cosmic and biological existence.33 Most thinkers (such as the eminent American geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, the biologist Pierre Lecomte du Noüy, and the astronomer Arthur Eddington) who have given any attention to the issue are aware that the statistical probability that life as we know it has emerged by undirected chance, through incremental mutations and natural selection, is effectively nil.34 The fact that the implications of this observation are rarely faced up to by materialistic evolutionists35 is another disturbing commentary on the level of thinking in this discipline.
Michael Ruse maintains, however, that Richard Dawkins has “scotched” this argument according to which random mutation cannot of itself ever produce adaptation or design-like effects.36 There is a big difference, Ruse points out, citing Dawkins, between a computer program operating by cumulative selection, where the program is jigged so that a successful move toward adaptation is remembered and built upon, and a program using single-step selection of the sort referred to above, where every new attempt to work toward a target is a fresh one. The obvious objection, acknowledged by Dawkins, is that in nature there is no ascertainable prior goal, as there is with the computer program. To this point Dawkins replies simply that if selection is factored into an evolutionary process, one has an entirely different trajectory—a very effective one, in fact—from that of the infinite randomness that, he admits, cannot possibly produce a design-like effect. This is certainly true, but it solves nothing, since the question remains as to how selection could ever come to be factored into the process in the first place.
Tresmontant, by metaphysical analysis, takes the discussion much further. Observing that living beings are not just more or less complex combinations of atoms, he draws on the concept of substance in the Aristotelian sense of a form, or identity (to be distinguished from a physical body), that subsists through the constant change of atomic matter (atoms in a living organism are continuously flowing in and out and being renewed) and that integrates, by its own proper activity, a huge number of elements and functions in a synthetic unity. He writes:
Living beings are substances, beings that subsist even while their integrated matter is being constantly renewed; they are substances capable of action and reaction; they are psychic entities; and finally, with the last animal that has appeared [man] they are psychic entities capable of conscious reflection—what we call persons. . . . It is because they have not perceived the philosophical, metaphysical dimension of the problem that so many thinkers remain focused on the mathematical analysis of probabilities in connection with the composition of genetic messages. But again, a genetic message in itself is not enough to explain the existence of a substance that is a psychic entity and, finally, a person. This is of another order.37
An aggregate of elements, no matter how complex, does not make a living creature with its own proper activity capable of self-repair, assimilation, elimination, and reproduction. Along with the questions of the very existence of matter and of the nature—energy—of the matter that exists, there is the question of the information of matter, constantly increasing all the way up to the emergence of living beings and on to man. The passage from an aggregate of elements to a substance/subject is a mystery. A living being is constituted from its conception by a form, an idea, an organizing genetic message that is the principle of its activity and operations and that endures over time until the organism’s death, whereupon it turns into the mere aggregate it never was while living, with the inevitable result that it disintegrates.38 Where does this integrating principle of life come from? There can be no recourse here to random mutations as an explanation of such a radical novelty; and to give the cause as natural selection simply begs the question, as we have seen.
A correlative mystery involves the passage from a generic type, normatively coded—cat, say—to a particular individual cat. From an essence (cat) to an existent (this cat) is a move quite beyond our ken. This cat—and how much more so this man or this woman!—will be distinct, with unique peculiarities within its species-normative genetic code. The move from a fertilized human cell to the particular human individual it will become—from the virtual being, through the becoming, to the actual being—involves an inconceivably complex process of embryonic information of which the dynamic—the vital principle—remains utterly mysterious.
All this, then, and much more is involved when we say, with the inspired writer of the Genesis text, that “God created humankind, male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27). It is clear that if men and women are created beings, they are essentially dependent on their Creator, both for their existence and for their maintenance in being. God does not impose on us a conscious awareness of this reality, because he wills that our relation with him be one of freedom, with no trace of a master-slave dynamic. The human being-as-creature is changeable, vulnerable, mortal: as created, he/she is an absolutely different order of being from the eternal, omnipotent being who is the Creator of all that is. What is important to see is that both the biological life of human beings, and the eternal life that they are offered (by virtue of Christ’s redemptive work) to share with their Creator, are gifts.
Man (man and woman) is not his own author; he is not and cannot be autonomous. Any creating he does, impressive and splendid though it may be, is derivative and secondary, using materials already at hand. Human beings cannot be original creators, since they themselves, and the world they inhabit, are already there as givens. Everything we have, we have received, as the apostle Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 4:7 in an effort to show the members of the church he is writing to that pride has no place among Christians (and should have none among men and women in general), since our very existence, and our existence as individuals with particular qualities, talents, and vocations, are gifts and come from God in the first place.
At bottom, what theologians call original sin is a refusal of this truth and of the God behind it. As Creator, God is responsible for our existence; as creatures, we are responsible to him for our existence. And this sets moral and material limits to our being and our doing. It is these limits that we refuse, and it is this refusal that generates all our human counterfeits of the creation and the re-creation that God accomplishes through his word. These counterfeits are simply attempts at self-creation and self-salvation.
There is no reason for human rebellion; it is irrational. The pretension behind it, with the infinite suffering it has entailed in the course of human existence, is bewilderingly stupid, given the enormous intelligence human beings are equipped with and deploy in other areas of their existence. But precisely that fact points up sin’s irrationality. Our will, much of the time, is not synchronized with our reason. By political and technological means (now including the possibilities offered by biogenetics, organ replacement, designer babies, reproductive cloning, and cryogenics), human beings, with mounting intensity and purpose (finding here, perhaps, the sense of purpose we have lost in losing sight of the providential God), seem determined to recreate their kind, to start, as it were, from scratch (obviously an impossibility), to do over God’s original blueprint, deemed faulty (because we perceive it through the distorting lens of the refusal of our createdness and the catastrophic consequences of our rebellion). The ultimate aim of this enterprise, of course, must be to overcome death itself.
It is important to see that this determination is not, at bottom, properly therapeutic, though an exaggerated therapeutic concern can lead in the same direction. It is of quite another order. We are talking about a remake, a re-creation. Modern man, to the