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Economics, Science, and Religion 2

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In 1859, Charles Darwin published his observations on the origin of species, which introduced the concept of evolution into the social discussion: not only in the field of biology, but, as a side effect, in geology as well; the world was no longer static, a completed creation, but a dynamic one, constantly evolving; or at least it had been in the past.

However, Creation itself was still in some way considered to be complete and static, at least as far as it was projected into the future; meaning that evolution may have been the way things had developed up to the present, but no further; the question why this should be so was carefully avoided.

This is just one of the many unsolved paradoxes and mysteries resulting from the incomplete implementation of the discoveries made during the era of industrialization: If the world and its human inhabitants are the result of an evolutionary process, then that process is ongoing; and if it is ongoing, it is unfinished (and always will be).

How can this then form an image, unless the process itself is the image? And if it is in the image of a creator to be worshiped, is this creator then unfinished? Does the process have a goal?

Even if such questions do not surface to the level of consciousness, they do not disappear, but subconsciously erode human self-confidence, either binding individual resources to suppress them, or dissolving the assurance of collective worship.

But there was more:


The Theory of Evolution, discarding the idea that "things had always been thus", put into question the accepted point in time of the creation of the world, and with that its temporal and spatial expansion.

And man, having just climbed upon the throne as apparently no longer as dependent on the world as before, but as its ruler through industrialization, by the same token of "progress" found himself at once reduced by Darwin to a close relative of the monkey, thrown back onto his pre-human animal origins, much further than before - and more dependent than ever.

Invention and mechanization was a form of evolution; one could not be accepted without the other. So how was it possible at all for man, an animal, to be preparing to control the elements which, until then, he had been ruled by?

And there was yet more:


As a descendant of animals, man was subject to the laws of nature, even more than to God's law, if such there be; thus the hitherto clear boundary between man, as a ruler in the image of God, and the animals ruled by him, became blurred in both directions. And to date, the problems that this causes have not been solved; in fact, they are increasing.


In consequence, and perhaps without aspiring to do so, Darwin had declared any earthly likeness of man to God - which had just seemed to have been achieved - and the idea of a creation complete, with man at its pinnacle - to be an illusion.


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