Tikkun Magazine, March/April 2010
A Call for Sacred Biologists
by Peter Gabel
If "the evolution of species is the greatest sacred drama of all time," as Art Green claims in his beautiful essay, then we need sacred biologists to help us witness and interpret it.
We can certainly appreciate Charles Darwin for his insight into the existence of evolution, but we must also recognize how much his view of the evolutionary process itself was cramped by the so-called "scientific method" and its despiritualized way of apprehending the world. The scientific method seeks its limited truths by standing back from phenomena and grasping the world "objectively" through what it imagines to be neutral observation, but what is in reality a biased way of looking at things with an eye devoid of spirit. Thus it was understandable that Darwin, as a practitioner of this method, would conceive that evolution could be explained by natural selection -- by the idea that the species evolve through accidental adaptive changes from a common ancestor, changes across generations that favor the material fact of survival. If there is more going on -- for example, a sacred drama in which Being is seeking to make itself manifest through love incarnated through potentially infinite historical forms -- Darwin would not have been able to see it. His neutral observation rendered the spiritual dimension invisible because it neutralized the "living things" he observed.
Natural selection is certainly part of the story -- namely, the part that pertains to mere material survival in the face of transformations in climatic and other material conditions. But if we understand the radiance of life as Art Green does, we must newly attend to the Being of plants and animals, to the extraordinary unfolding of their interior presence manifested across the generations, to the meaning of the plant's branches outstretched toward the sun, to the meaning of the panda's long and eventually successful struggle to grip bamboo with an opposable thumb, and to the meaning of the emergence of self-consciousness in humans like ourselves as an upward movement of historical awareness, of Being itself becoming aware of itself. To say it's all natural selection in the service of survival is analogous to Bill Clinton and now perhaps Barack Obama believing that "it's the economy, stupid" when it comes to the longings of human beings, human beings who in truth want not merely to survive but to become fully present to each other through love and recognition. It's a way of seeing that fails to apprehend what Teilhard de Chardin called "the within of things," the beautiful effort of the soul to manifest itself more and more fully through the unfolding of historical forms.
To understand the sacred drama of the evolutionary process, we need the help of evolutionary biologists who are not neutral observers in the classically liberal sense, but who connect the sacred within themselves to the sacred dimension of what they observe in the natural world. We need biologists who, to use Art Green's words, engage in a "letting go" that allows them to open themselves "with full engagement of the self in love and awe" to the observation and understanding of all animate life, and who understand instinctively that when it comes to scientific research, it is the quality of the awareness in the subject that determines what is visible in the object. These biologists could help us understand why plants share water during droughts (an empirical fact that puzzles materialist science); or how these same plants "lean toward the light" with branches, stems, and leaves stretching toward the sun in a sensual unity that inspires us to water and attend to them in a way that mere "photosynthesis" could never do; or the role of joy in bird flight and in the evolution of the wing (for the sanderling must be able to "whirl" with his community); or the role of love in the development of the kangaroo's pouch.
The point here is that these physical and morphological phenomena that normal science today describes in a largely anatomical and functional way (i.e., that such-and-such trait developed "in the service of survival") in truth occur in a spiritual and social milieu that must be compassionately and lovingly perceived, patiently studied, and evocatively illuminated. Only in this way will the theory of evolution align itself with the truth that spirit and matter form an indissoluble unity, and that we can only be the outcome of the evolutionary process that Darwin says we are if we are related "from the inside," via the "within of things," to the life that preceded and gave birth to us.
Peter Gabel is associate editor of Tikkun and the author of "Creationism and the Spirit of Nature: The Critique of Science and Darwinian Evolution" in The Bank Teller and Other Essays on the Politics of Meaning (available through our online store).
Gabel, Peter. 2010 A call for sacred biologists. Tikkun 25(2):45 http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/march2010gabel
