God, Culture, and Evolution

I believe in evolution and the genius of Darwin and I find this particular quote from him very interesting. His stance is that a belief in God starts in the prolonged creation of and exposure to culture.

“The belief in God has often been advanced as not only the greatest but the most complete of all the distinctions between man and the lower animals. It is, however, impossible to maintain that this belief is instinctive in man. The idea of a universal and beneficent creator does not seem to arise in the mind of man until he has been elevated by long, continued culture.”

-Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

It bothers me that the idea of God is often referred to in a singular manner; the creator, he, the father, etc. The idea of a collective unconscious, a universal energy that is both internal and external, unified yet separate, I think gets lost sometimes in this pretext of a male patriarch God. I don't believe that there is one super being that is like master of the universe. We are all connected, and our spirits are eternal, now if you want to call that God, well then I might agree with you.

There is a nature special that I have seen on PBS numerous times, about a species of orchid in Madagascar that is 10-11 inches long. Once upon a time after Darwin saw one, he predicted that there had to be a moth with a tongue of about 12 inches, long enough to pollinate the orchid. The documentary I refer to was about a man's quest to prove Darwin right. He set up cameras for weeks until his team finally got their golden ticket, a shot of the moth pollinating the orchid with it's ridiculously long tongue. Darwin's bold prediction, more than a century old, was finally proven to be true.

Teilhard de Chardin On the Role of Art in Evolution

Leonard Shlain uses this quote in his book Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light. It's a really interesting book on a lot of different levels, the thread being, tying the work of the artist and physicist together.

"In short, art represents the area of furthest advance around man's growing energy, the area in which nascent truths condense, take on their first form, and become animate, before they are definitively formulated and assimilated. This is the effective function and role of art in the general economy of evolution."

(Teilhard de Chardin, Toward the Future, trans. Rene' Hague pp. 90-91. Art & Physics pp.387 -388.)

The preceding quote, from the chapter titled I/We is discussing universal mind, the fourth dimension, and the role that artists play in understanding the weave that ties these things together. This idea ties in heavily with this post: Jung on the role of the artist. Artists mold the unconconcious, dream/mythos, unexpressed needs, whatever you want to call it, of culture and bring those ideas and images, words, music etc., into the physical world of expression.