CREATION OF MAN
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| By this man became alive. This passage can have a wealth
of meaning if you read it in the right spirit of faith. The process
of moulding the clay is the process of evolution that reached the
stage of the Homo sapiens. Even as the clay model lacks life, the
Homo sapiens lacked the spirit that makes man what he is. What he
breathed into man is the spirit, the immortal soul. Throughout the
Bible, in the new and old Testaments there are references to life
and death that has nothing to do with the life of the material body.
We read passages like; ‘He who believes in me never shall die”;
“If you eat of this you shall die.” The reference in these
cases is to the life of the spirit that is found only in the human
being and not the life of the body. |
| The fact that we are created in the image and likeness
of God gives another dimension to our status, another difference between
humans and other animals – the status of ‘ the children
of God’. This was one of the important messages that Jesus tried
to give us, that God is our Father and that all of us are his children.
Other primates or other animals do not share this status. Children
are those who resemble the father in some way. In a household you
may have children as well as dogs, cats and fowls. But the pets or
domestic animals do not resemble the master, only the children do.
Even so the status of the children of God belongs only to us human
beings and not to the whole creation. God created all living things
but only the soul of a human being is created to be in his likeness
and deserve the title, ‘child of God’. God is also the
supreme ruler or king according to most of the faiths. When we take
this fact into consideration our status becomes that of a prince or
a princess. This realisation leads to one very important and significant
aspect of faith, what I like to term the three dimensions of faith.
These are: faith in God as my king and my father, faith in myself
as a child of God, a prince of the kingdom and faith in others - all
human beings - as children of God, princes and princesses of the Kingdom
and thereby deserving my love and respect. |
| The Free Fall. |
| Why is there so much evil in the world? Where does
the evil come from? As pointed out earlier, we cannot ascribe all
the cruelty and evil in us to the animal origins. In the animal there
is no good or evil. No one can even suspect that evil is of divine
origin. God is goodness itself. What is the third source from which
evil could have become a part and parcel of human nature? The idea
of the tempter or devil as a person working full time to make you
fall is too simplistic. At the same time we cannot rule out the significance
of temptation in causing evil. What is important is to get a clear
idea of the nature of this tempter or temptation. One of the differences
between humans and other animals that we have pointed out earlier
is that of an elevation of status. Man has the status of a child of
God and the prince of the kingdom. |
| The rights and privileges of such a status are naturally
accompanied by duties and responsibilities. Man is charged with the
authority of ruling over the rest of the living world. To rule over
a kingdom means to look after, protect and defend it and care for
the inhabitants. In short, man is a caretaker and not an undertaker.
As all humans are the children of the same father, the same king,
we must respect each other as such. It is the duty of each one of
us to help those of us in need of help or in some form of trouble.
We cannot close our eyes to the sufferings of others. To the question,
“ Am I my brother’s keeper?” the answer is in the
affirmative. That is why Christ as well as a host of other teachers
told us to love one another. Recently I read somewhere that the opposite
of love is not hatred but indifference. We cannot be indifferent to
the plight of the children of God. This is part of the responsibility
associated with our elevated status. It is our selfishness that prevents
us from performing these duties and this is the prime cause of the
evil around us. |
| The first fall and all the subsequent falls come from
our freedom, freedom to chose what we want, freedom to act as we wish.
This is what is commonly known as free will, something that the other
animals do not have. This freedom also is part of the privilege of
our enhanced status. We are not slaves who have to obey unquestioningly
the rules or laws set down. As rulers we are free to follow the regulations
for the welfare of the others or we can give priority to satisfy our
own selfish interests at the cost of the interest of others, exploit
others and destroy others for the fulfilment of our selfish pleasures.
From this conflict of interest and selfishness comes evil. So it would
seem that the tempter is not an external agency, but something internal,
a result of the freedom of choice, which, if used properly is a great
thing in itself. Are we hence to understand that the free will, if
it is the cause of evil, is evil in itself? Will we be better off
without it? Just imagine what we will be without this faculty called
free will. We will just be like any other animal, leading a day-to-day
life led by instinct. We will be just one of the other primates. We
won’t be human. So one of the faculties that make us human is
the free will. We cannot fool ourselves saying that this is also the
result of evolution. Not at all, I would say. This is one of the faculties
of the self of man, a spiritual one - not a biological faculty like
those possessed by other animals. |
| A very interesting question relevant in this connection
is about the degree of freedom. How free are we in this context? Do
we really have any freedom of choice? Is the concept of free will
just a myth? These and similar questions arise out of what we might
call the fatalistic attitude or determinism, the belief that we are
not responsible for our actions, that our destinies were already decided
at our birth. Practices of palmistry and astrology may be brought
in as justification of such an attitude. Some others attribute the
responsibility of our behaviour to heredity, the genes, or the way
the molecules are organised in the D.N.A. If this is the case, if
we are what we are, depending on the molecular structure of the chromosomes,
then we are no better than animals. What Francis Collins, Head of
Human Genome project, the official U.S. agency that helped unravel
the D.N.A. sequencing, said in January 2001 while publishing the results
of the project is very enlightening and quite relevant in this context.
He said: “We will not understand important things like ‘love’
by knowing the D.N.A. sequence of Homo sapiens. If man begins to view
himself as a machine, programmed by this D.N.A. sequence, we have
lost something really important.” So we cannot put the blame
for our failures on the genetic makeup either. |
| To the question, ‘to what degree is our genetic
makeup or the D N A sequence responsible for our actions?’ one
could say this: In a human being, the genes are fully responsible
for all his/her actions as an animal. But as far as your actions as
a human being are concerned, where the question of right and wrong,
of good and evil, arises you are not an animal but a being endowed
with free will, and the blame or the credit cannot be placed on the
genes, but on your free will. Yes we are, each one of us responsible
for our actions. We cannot blame the stars or the genes for our failures.
We are free to do or not to do something good or bad. We have the
free will. Good and evil, found only in the human species, arise out
of the way we exercise the free will. Misuse of the free will is the
cause of evil, the cause of our fall. It may be correct to say that
evil arises from selfishness and good from selflessness. It is our
selfishness that causes us to inflict harm on others or to be indifferent
to the suffering of others. This is the cause of evil. Out of selflessness
arises true love, which is the font of goodness. |
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