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Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V |
Part V: A Christian World View: The Framework of History A Stage for the Drama THE WORLD was made for the body." How true is this? It is a curious fact that man still makes the best "measure of all things," to use Dryden's phrase. It may be an outmoded philosophy to maintain that the Universe should have its significance ultimately and only in the light of man, because we are so repeatedly assured of man's total insignificance. Nevertheless, virtually every assessment of every natural process or product is still being made ultimately with reference to man as a measure of its meaning. Perhaps it is not too surprising to find a Christian writer saying this kind of thing. For example, William Tinkle says, "We value plants and animals by the degree to which they can be exploited by man." (252) But it is quite common also to find non-Christian writers using the same standard of reference. When Karpechenko's attempts to cross a radish with a cabbage supposedly produced a mongrel vegetable that was said to be quite useless, (253) having neither the "useful" leaves of the cabbage nor the "useful" root of the radish, naturalists were unconsciously following the same principle of making man the measure, for in what other way could one define the term "useful" or "useless" in this context? To say that the leaves were useful to the cabbage 252. Tinkle, William, Heredity: Study in
Science and the Bible, St. Thomas Press, Houston, Texas,
1967, p.137.  pg
1 of 6  would really be meaningless,
even though the cabbage could not live without them. But since
the cabbage was developed to servc man's needs and not its own,
the leaves are only useful in terms of man. So great is the temptation
to view everything thus that even Julian Huxley finds it difficult
to avoid implying that the whole of evolutionary history has
merely been a prelude to the appearance of man. (254) And L.eComte du Nouy
is quite forthright on this point. (255) In one of the Doorway Papers we have set forth a
proposal, a kind of reconstruction of prehistory of the earth
before man, which is an attempt to shov that the stage upon which
the human drama is performed was prepared by a slow, orderly,
meaningful process, the evidence for which can be interpreted
either as purposeless and evolutionary in the strictly deterministic
sense or as purposeful and developmental, involving specific
creative acts throughout. (256) How one sees the evidence depends upon the initial
bias one has. In itself the evidence is not decisive, although
if negatives can prove anything, the existence of many discontinuities
would favour the idea of direct creation in the process. 254. Huxley, Julian, Evolution in Action,
Chatto & Windus, London, 1953, p.144. His conclusion: "A
second major concept is the primacy of the human individual,
or, to use a better term, the primacy of personality. This primacy
of human personality has been in different ways, a postulate
both of Christianity and of liberal democracy, but it is a fact
of evolution" [his emphasis]. pg.2
of 6 chemically and electrically
in a certain way � in short, to be a human being. To enable
him to do this, he needed a certain kind of central nervous system,
(257) posture,
hands and feet, vision and hearing and sound emission, life cycle,
appetite, thermal regulation, digestive system, manual dexterity
and tactile sensitivity, bodily manoeuverability, taste and smell
�- indeed, to be special in virtually every aspect of his
physiology and anatomy. 257. E. L. Mascall refers to this fact, quoting
Julian Huxley as having said, "Conceptual thought on this
planet is inevitably associated with a particular type of Primate
body and Primate brain." See his Importance of Being
Hurnan, Columbia University Press, N.ew York, 1958, p.7.
pg.3
of 6 This
is especially the case for man at high temperatures. Scattered
over his body are about two million eccrine sweat glands. Each
of these is composed of a little glomerulus deep in the skin
which is connected with the surlace via a small spiral tube.
No animal, not even the horse, is supplied with this mechanism
for the maintenance of body temperature. This spiral tube carries
the purest watery fluid in the body from the little glomerulus
reservoir to the surface where it spills out and evaporates,
cooling the skin in the process. The movement of this fluid to
the surface is mechanically effected by a peristaltic wave of
contraction which moves from the root of the gland to the surface
thus pushing the fluid ahead of it. Thousands of muscle fibers
are probably involved in this peristalsis and it is likely that
their refractory time is about 1/100 of a second, so that the
wave can move along the tubule with a very high frequency if
necessary. It should be borne in mind also that these fibers
must contract in precisely the right order to ensure unidirectional
movement of the fluid. The spiral of the tube is a necessary
structural feature which serves the purpose of preventing its
over-stretching and rupture if the skin is moved relative to
the tissue beneath it. It is analogous to the cord on the telephone
which is coiled for flexibility. One of the differences between
human and animal skin is that the former is stretched comparatively
tight while the latter tends to be loose. In the wild, an animal
wound that causes a tear in the skin does not gape open and will
heal without suturing. But this very looseness makes it impossible
for a sweat gland system which man has to be workable in animals,
even in the primates supposedly nearest to man. For a tubule
supplied with muscle could not be constructed to accommodate
itself to the tremendous freedom of lateral movement observed
in animal skin. pg.4
of 6 that man does over the
whole periphery. They may have it in the ears (rabbits), or in
the tail (some rodents), and so forth, but it is not systemic;
and as a consequence of its limited effectiveness, animals are
restricted to the kind of environment for which they have been
designed. pg.5
of 6 a uniqueness which he
equates not withoult reason with man's ability for conceptual
thought, "is inevitably associated with a particular type
of Primate body and Primate brain.'' (260) In other words, man is not an angelic creature who
happens to have the kind of body he does and who might just as
easily have been equipped with any other kind of body. He is
a creature whose uniqueness from the point of view of his manhood,
both in terms of culture and aspiration, is as much dependent
upon the structure of his body as it is upon the nature of his
soul. It is quite wrong to imagine that man's body is incidental
and that he might have been structured like a giraffe, a mouse,
or even an ape, and still fulfilled the role for whic.h he was
created. The fact is that God's purposes for man required that
he have a certain kind of physiological and anatomical structure,
and the preservation and maintenance in health of this particular
body which he indwells required in turn a certain kind of environment.
This environment involved not only the right kind of atmosphere
but the right kind of temperature, the right kind of seasonal
variations, the right kind of gravitational forces acting upon
him, the right kind of materials at hand or extractable for his
building a civilized life, the right kind of food, the right
kind of shelter, and even the right kind of territory to challenge
him and to call forth his wonder, and to allow him to exercise
his ability to dominate, to order, to arrange, to govern and
to beautify the earth, and to turn it into a garden -- and thereby
to become a co-worker with God. 260. Huxley, Julian, Importance of Being Human, Columbia University Press, New York, 1958, p.7. pg.6
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