In the mid-nineteenth century Charles Darwin corresponded regularly with Asa Gray, a Harvard professor of botany who was an evangelical Christian. Gray was dedicated to scientific empiricism, but in those days he opposed the idea of the evolutionary transformation of species. He held the traditional view that God had individually designed and created the bodily forms of living organisms.
   For some time, Darwin tried to break down Gray’s resistance. For example, in 1860 Darwin wrote to Gray:

I see a bird which I want for food, take my gun and kill it. I do this designedly. An innocent and good man stands under a tree and is killed by a flash of lightning. Do you believe (and I really should like to hear) that God designedly killed this man? Many or most persons do believe this; I can’t and don’t. If you believe so, do you believe that when a swallow snaps up a gnat, that God designed that that particular swallow should snap up that particular gnat at that particular instant? I believe that man and the gnat are in the same predicament. If the death of neither man nor gnat are designed, I see no good reason to believe that their first birth or production should be necessarily designed.¹

   Gray was quickly persuaded by Darwin’s thesis that species evolve, but in spite of many powerful arguments like this one, he stuck to the idea of divine design. He would argue that species might evolve by Darwin’s process of natural selection but God must somehow guide the process. In fact, even Darwin himself was swayed by Gray’s arguments. Once he reprinted one of Gray’s reviews of his theory at his own expense, and across the top he printed the slogan “Natural Selection not Inconsistent with Natural Theology.”

Darwin soon rejected Gray’s method of harmonizing evolution with theology, and so did many mainstream Christian scientists. As David Livingstone put it in his history of the Christian response to Darwinism, “Christians were soon to abandon this version [of Asa Gray] in favor of a more holistic design located in the regularity of natural law.”² In other words, instead of guiding nature organism by organism to bring forth specific designs, God designed the laws of physics in such a way that all organisms would emerge automatically by Darwinian evolution.
   The reason for abandoning Gray’s guided evolution is this: The laws of physics (in Darwin’s time and now) do not allow for some nonphysical agent to manipulate the course of events. Therefore, if God were to guide the natural processes to come up with particular species one by one, He would violate the laws of physics.
   Gray argued in favor of evolution by saying, “If the alternative be the immediate origination out of nothing, or out of the soil, of the human form with all its actual marks, there can be no doubt which side a scientific man will take.”³ The scientist will certainly prefer a process of evolution that follows the course of nature. But if occasional big violations of the laws of physics are to be rejected, why accept large numbers of small violations? Thus the scientist who accepts Gray’s argument for evolution is likely to opt eventually for a fully naturalistic evolutionary process that does not violate the laws of physics at all.
   For Christian theologians, this choice is not hard to justify. This was demonstrated by George Frederick Wright, a geologist, evangelical minister, and friend of Asa Gray. Wright rejected guided evolution, and he used the doctrines of Calvinism to argue that God is concerned only with the ultimate cause of creation—the laws of nature. Wright was able to satisfy physical scientists and Darwinian evolutionists by asserting that Darwinism was “the Calvinistic interpretation of nature.”

   Of course, the real laws of nature may differ from the laws of physics. In Chapter 3 I pointed out that the Vedic literature clearly supports this view. Since no scientist has ever shown that all natural phenomena obey known physical laws, students of science and religion might be wise to seek alternatives to using physics as the basis for understanding God’s role in nature. I would therefore like to describe in more detail the Vedic version of the creation of living species.
   To do this, let me return to another topic mentioned in Chapter 3—Saint Augustine’s idea of “seed principles.” According to Augustine, at the moment of creation God planted in nature rationes seminales, or “rational seeds.” In due course of time, these seeds produced the forms of living beings by a natural process of unfolding. The rational seeds cannot be directly perceived by human senses, but each seed contains the potential for manifesting a specific gross form. According to the Catholic philosopher Frederick Copleston, the idea of the rational seeds did not come from Christian scripture or tradition. Augustine got the idea from the pagan philosopher Plotinus, and ultimately it came from the Stoics.⁴
   Some scientists say that Augustine’s theory foreshadows the modern idea that the laws of physics unfold the development of species through Darwinian evolution. These scientists suggest that the physical laws can thereby be regarded as “seed principles” of creation. This is certainly not what Augustine had in mind, but Augustine’s idea does turn out to be strikingly similar to the concept of divine creation presented in the Vedic literature.
   According to the Vedic conception, Krishna brings about creation by investing His potency in seed forms called bijas. . . .

Copyright © 2004 by Richard L. Thompson