Tag: homo sapiens

Cave painting, hands

I Draw Man Forward . . .

August 21, 2025

 

What I had been told about Creation still bothered me and I was relieved when God started talking about the process of evolution.

“Lord, do You have to will creatures to evolve into homo sapiens or does it just happen by natural processes?”

That’s not a well-conceived question.  It rests on a false dichotomy.  Remember that nature is itself teleological, except it is much more complicated than that apparently simple statement.  I provide—I am—the telos or purpose, and I follow the telos as well.  However, I draw man forward to greater development in the very process of interacting with men (people).  At the time of early man, I am not yet sure what is missing.  I am not fully developed Myself yet, since I have not encountered beings who can call forth My full latent nature.  For the moment, call it a dialectical evolution responding to My need for development.

Here and elsewhere, “man” has the older sense inclusive of both women and men.

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“The Personal is essentially interpersonal.”

October 23, 2024

God was telling me about His interaction with the earliest animals, long before homo sapiens.

 It is mainly an instinctual unselfconscious rapport that we have.  But (I feel) a great excitement at the process of life and evolution itself.

“Why isn’t that enough?”

In a sense it is.  Animals do have uniqueness.  Each animal is distinct, has its own soul.  But they lack self-awareness, and that is true even of cats and dogs and apes.  You can interact with them but there is no second-order reflection, hence a very truncated sense of time—just a sense of temporal motion, of passage from an immediate moment-just-passed to a next moment anticipated.  And even that cannot be thought about, represented symbolically or made available to self-consciousness.

So I cannot develop solely through interacting with them.  It is static, inert.  We just are together.  I could not become a Person without there being other persons.  The personal is essentially interpersonal.  Like a child who first lives in an undifferentiated world, in which other people are merely contents of his or her own oceanic flow of consciousness, I needed to separate Myself from other persons.  And so I created mankind.