Article December 13, 1982 Issue

Christmas, Christ, and evolution

A. W. PHINNEY

Christmas comes in our hearts whatever the human circumstances. Without gifts, without family, without traditions of tree, candles, or carols, still the Christmas spirit floods in. It is one of the most powerful and persistent of experiences. "Blest Christmas morn," Mary Baker Eddy writes, "though murky clouds/Pursue thy way,/Thy light was born where storm enshrouds/Nor dawn nor day!"^{Poems, p. 29.}

Many find it difficult to say exactly what the spirit of Christmas is, but they know it is a holy thing. It is some sense of the tangible presence of goodness and the realness of love, perhaps a feeling of mankind looking up together to acknowledge, however briefly, a shining and overarching spiritual meaning.

Increasingly today, this hope and uplifted thought is challenged as childish by natural science. The theory of evolution, with its modern companion sciences of genetics, molecular biology, and sociobiology, argues aggressively that mankind has matured to the point of giving up "primitive" religious views. Mankind must realize, so goes the argument, that there is no Mind or God outside the matter that has somehow been blindly evolving mind. The conclusion follows, in effect, that people must learn to distrust their own love, moral values, perceptions of beauty, and consider them simply the genetic workings of matter, which are useful to its long-range purpose. Only half humorously some natural scientists say wryly: "A person is only a gene's way of making another gene."^{As quoted in Melvin Konner, The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), p. 265 .}

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