Evolving Thoughts Posts

We’re in the third day, and Elohim has made dry land, but no sun or stars or moon. Still, he’s keen to see something growing, so he tells the land to produce, by spontaneous generation as it was later known, “seed bearing plants and plants bearing fruit with their proper seed inside”. Seed here is crucial – God creates things that reproduce themselves through some innate generative power, but at first they come out of the land. Augustine, in De Genesi ad litteram declared that God acted out of a secondary power here – he didn’t create these plants directly, but indirectly, by putting a potentiality in the soil. This resonates for the next 2500 years after Genesis, with naturalists like Wallace and writers in the late nineteenth century declaring that the soil, the habitat, or the climatic conditions cause things to become what they were indirectly.

Some have tried to make Augustine an evolutionist on this basis, but in fact he’s not, if only because the distinction between species fixity and species mutability is not possible until we first have a concept of living kinds (species), and this is not really the case until the 16th century. In any event, Genesis 1 is about things coming out of prior materielle via the direct magical command of Elohim.