On the Ability to See the Past and the Future

In Darwin’s Century, in the second chapter, titled “The Time Voyagers,” Loren Eiseley wrote that until humanity grasped the long history of the earth and the origin of the species through natural selection, humanity saw itself “as having emerged from an unknown darkness and as passing similarly into an unknown future.” He added that until we grasped the long history and origins of life humanity was trapped in the present and was “addicted to a naive supernaturalism” and imagined nature as the workings of “baleful or beneficent beings which were often, in reality, the projected shadows of our hopes and fears.”

In Loren Eiseley’s description here, the ability of humanity to see the past and the future liberates us from belief in God. It facilitates atheism.

And yet, when Darwin thought about this ability to see the past and future, he found himself believing in God, even if only tentatively. In his autobiography he wrote, “I feel compelled to look at a first cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a theist.” What compelled him to say this was “the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capability of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity.”

In Darwin’s thoughts, the ability of humanity to see the past and the future liberates us from disbelief and facilitates faith, which is the opposite of its effect in Eiseley’s thoughts.

Something other than the content of evolution, other than the ability to see the past and the future in the way we see it in evolution, must determine whether the ability to see the past and future supports faith or not.

Darwin and Eiseley on Faith

When, in the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin thought about humanity’s capability to look back into the past and ahead into the future, he found it difficult to believe that the universe is the result of chance and necessity and he wrote, in his autobiography, “I deserve to be called a theist.” This is what theologians call a confession of faith or a statement about a person’s belief.

When, in the twentieth century, Loren Eiseley thought about humanity’s capability to see the past and future, he found it difficult to not feel lonely because humanity is the only animal that evolution has given this capability. In an essay, The Long Loneliness, he wrote “There is nothing more alone in the universe than man.”

Eiseley wrote, “Animals are molded by natural forces they do not comprehend.” He observed that they do not know their past or their future. We were shaped by the same natural forces, but we do know the past and future. We know our history, he wrote, “until the day of our death.” We are alone with that knowledge. We are alone with the knowledge that natural selection, a natural law built on chance and necessity, is the creator of our species and theirs. That is the confession of Loren Eiseley and it is ours.

In Darwin’s century it was still possible to think of God in connection with life and humanity, even for the man who discovered that natural selection, not creation, accounts for the origin of the species, even though belief in God had begun to wane. In Eiseley’s century it was more difficult to think of God in that connection.

After reading Darwin humanity learned to look to the tree of life to understand itself, rather than to the heavens. It was our relationship with Nature, not with God, that we sought to understand. It was with animals, not angels, that we began to compare ourselves.

Humanity could once confess, “In life and death we belong to God.” We were alienated from God by sin, but we were not alone. Now we confess, “In life and death we belong to Nature.” Although we find our origin in Nature, which like God is greater than ourselves, we are alienated from Nature as we were from God and the alienation is deeper and more complete than it ever was from God. In Eiseley’s version of our confession, knowledge of the past and future separates us from the other creatures in the tree of life. We know what they do not know. We have eaten from the tree of knowledge and our eyes are opened. Now we know: we are alone.