CREATION OF MAN
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| Divine Origins - Creation of Man |
| The conclusions of the scientists or those who blindly
follow the idea of evolution is that man is one of the apes, the difference
being erect posture, larger brain, language skills, artistic and tool-making
skills and the like. To the scientist the difference between a frog
and a chimp is much greater than the difference between a chimp and
a man. To me, a believer, it is the other way round. To me a chimp,
a frog, an ant, even an earthworm all belongs to one group, the animal
group, whereas man belongs to an entirely different group of his own.
Of course there is some similarity between a man and an ape. But then
one could say that there is a similarity between a clay model of a
frog and a real frog. The similarity here is that both are made up
of the same three elementary particles, namely, proton, neutron and
electron and of course the fact that they look alike. Yet there is
a marked difference between the clay model and the real frog. This
- what the real frog has and what the model does not have - is ‘life’.
In a similar vein, we may say that man has something, which the chimp
or frog or any other animal does not have. That something that we
possess and that the other animals do not have, that which makes us
different from the other animals is the soul, the spirit or the self
of man. |
| The words soul or spirit is familiar to every one and
is very much bandied about by all sorts of people for all sorts of
purposes without giving much thought about its significance or rather
without a real understanding of what it really is. What I like to
underscore here is that the soul is not one of our faculties like
mind or intellect, or one of our organs like heart or brain. It is
the true self of a person. In other words, it isn’t proper for
one to say, “I have a soul.” One should rather say, “I
have a body.” The spirit or the self is what you are and the
body is what you possess. The imagery of the body as a boat used by
the self to cross the sea of life or the comparison of the body to
a packing case in which the precious cargo is the soul may to some
extent explain what I am trying to bring out. But one thing must be
remembered. The two, body and soul together make up this complex being
called man. It is not just one or the other. |
| The idea that the true self of a person is the spirit
and not the body is not something new that I am trying to introduce
here. Some 2400 years ago there was a man who knew this fact and tried
to teach this. The authorities of the day condemned him to death by
poison for the offence of misleading the youth. The man was none other
than the Greek scholar Socrates. On the eve of his execution his disciples
asked him how he wished to be buried. His response to this question
is what is relevant to us in this context. He said, “They cannot
kill me as I am immortal and you cannot bury me as I will not be confined
by space. But if you are referring to this body, that is not what
I am. They can do what they want with it, and you can dispose of it
the way you want.” Socrates in those days tried to teach us
of the immortality of the human soul and the fact that man is not
just an animal. You cannot expect to read about soul or spirit in
text books of science even as you cannot expect to learn about the
existence of God from books of science, simply because these do not
fall within the scope of science. Science can deal with matter, space,
energy and time and related matters. Human soul is not limited by
space or time, as it is not of matter. |
| Nor was Socrates the first one to think and teach that
the soul is our true self and not the body. More than a thousand years
before Socrates there were sages in India who held similar views.
According to them this identity crisis is the root cause of all evil.
Upanishads, the philosophic part of the Hindu Holy Scriptures, declare
that Avidya (ignorance of absolute truth) is the fundamental human
predicament and the cause of suffering. The primary manifestation
of Avidya is the erroneous identification of the self with the body.
Swami Vivekananda illustrates this with a story. A pregnant lioness
chasing a flock of sheep gave birth to a cub and died in the process.
The cub grew up with the sheep, eating grass and even bleating like
the sheep. A lion noticed this cub and tried to get him out of the
flock. But whenever the lion approached this cub it ran in terror
with the rest of the sheep. Finally, once it isolated the cub and
tried to convince it of its true identity with little success. Then
the lion took the sheep- lion to the edge of a lake and pointed out
the resemblance. Then only was it convinced. Avidya is the lion feeling
that it is a sheep or a human being not realising his true self. Vidya
is the sheep- lion at the lakeside being convinced of its true identity
as a lion or a human being realising that the body is only something
that the self possesses. |
| Accepting the story of evolution, recognising the fact
that over the last few million years, a being, not quite ape yet not
quite human, has evolved into the modern man, we must remember that
what resulted from this evolutionary process is the mortal, perishable
body and not the immortal, imperishable soul. If we believe that evolution
is a continuing act of creation, if we believe that evolution is fully
controlled and directed by God, can’t we assume that the soul
is also the result of evolution? To get an answer to this we must
recognise the basic difference between creation and evolution. Whereas
evolution is the gradual change taking place in an organism or matter
that already exists, creation is making something that never existed
before. Creation is not something that science or scientists, or chemical
or biological processes, can produce. Only God does creation in that
sense, making something out of nothing. The genesis of our universe
whence cosmic evolution began, the creation of life whence the biologic
evolution began and the creation of man, the true self of man, whence
the spiritual and scientific evolution began are three epochs in our
history, in the life of the universe. These three, the creation of
the universe, the creation of life and the creation of the soul of
man are above and beyond the understanding of science. In an article
about cosmic evolution, I happened to read, “Scientists leave
to poets and priests the question of how, whence and why the primordial
matter of the big bang appeared”. |
| Some three thousand years ago Moses, whom we could
consider a poet, priest, prophet or philosopher, gave the simplest
and most sensible answer to the questions of how or whence all these
came. Let us see what he has to say about the origin of man. In the
first chapter of Genesis, after the creation of the universe, life
in water then on land and air, God finally decides to create man.
The relevant words are as follows. “God said: Let us create
man in our image and likeness……………..
And God created man in His image and likeness.” We had been
reading this passage for the last three millennia. But have we really
understood the meaning, the significance of this passage? Was it this
body with head, trunk and four limbs that was made in the likeness
of God? Is this misconception that led our ancestors to make the images
or pictures of God in the likeness of our body? What I am trying to
emphasise here is the fact that what God created in His image and
likeness, man, is not this body, which is material, but the soul that
is beyond matter and space. Even as ‘life’ was something
unique put by God into the combination of molecules at one of the
epochs of creation, “the soul” was something new created
into the ultimate product of evolution, the Homo sapiens. |
| Even scientists agree today that the change from hominids
or our ancestors to Homo sapiens did not happen simultaneously at
various places. The Mitochondrial D.N.A. analysis of the various races
of people all over the world has shown that all of us, black and white,
brown and yellow, all are descended from one mother, whom the scientists
call the mitochondrial Eve. Hence we can strongly believe that one
day God did create a man and woman. In chapter 2 of Genesis there
is reference to God shaping man out of clay and breathing the breath
of life into its nostrils. |
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