Darwin Never Had A Chance

It's an odd jumble of thoughts, but here goes nothing...

I am struck by the growing scientific evidence that our brains are shaped by how we think, whereas we usually think of it the other way around. Yes, we're born predisposed to all sorts of character traits and predispositions. No doubt about it. But we also by our choices and habits form our brain too. An example: it has been shown that the brains of London cab drivers are abnormally enlarged in the areas where memories of useful things like the street layout of London are stored.

But I digress... so it struck me that perhaps our choices are not only forming our brains to a certain extent but also forming, even more markedly, our very souls. That this race in life is to become spiritually fit in a very strange but real sense. We can see which earthly athletes have been training. I suspect it is just as obvious to the watching angels which earthly souls are in great spiritual health.

Some of us are dead. Some are pew potatoes. And some frail little lady praying in a cottage somewhere is the finest specimen of spiritual perfection an angel can lay eyes on. They gather to watch such gentle souls with more affection than any earthbound couch potato ever devotes to his favorite sports team. I wonder if the angels paint up their faces when she begins to pray.

On to another rambling thought. Jesus was the ultimate loser, by Darwin's reckoning. He had no physical offspring. L-O-S-E-R. Needless to say, he didn't have to die childless. But he chose to. Perhaps a blog on that one day...

But here's the strange thing. Strange thought. Jesus was indeed looking for offspring. He was playing Darwin's game, but a quantum level higher than Darwin's trifle. Jesus wanted his spiritual DNA to prosper. And ironically enough, to be the spiritually fittest it turns out to be the case that one has to play to lose the contest Darwin describes so well as it is played out in the physical realm. Everyone knows, for example, that it's the alpha male who gets the harem. But Jesus informs us that he would would be greatest must be servant to all. On and on and on and on it goes. Spiritual vitality depends upon us not playing by Darwin's rules. We have to be Darwin's loser in order to be God's winner.

The scriptures, in their own oblique fashion, give hints to this spiritual reality overlaying a more easily recognized physical one. Jesus wants us for his bride. When we agree to his indecent proposition (indecent because we don't deserve it) he forms us into his own image. What does it mean to become like Christ if not too, in so many words, take on his spiritual DNA?

Funnily enough I ran into this quote from Dallas Willard that plays into all these jumbled thoughts I've been putting to words. "You cannot be a pew potato and simultaneously engage in spiritual formation in Christ's likeness."

I know it's a bunch of jumbled thoughts. But I do like the way they play together. How ironic, that Jesus outshines Darwin at his own game and did so by seeking to lose it on Darwin's terms.

More fun with words and parallels...

The best a Darwinian devotee can do is to hope to pass half his DNA on to each physical child. The other person in the sexual union provides the other half. And each child is themselves mortal, so it's a game with no permanent winner! Closely examined, the entire enterprise begins very much to look like the myth of Sisyphus writ large. Pointless and hopeless. Is this the best Darwin can offer?

But Jesus is in it for a whole transformation, and he's playing for eternity. When Jesus achieves spiritual union with us... when Jesus gets what he wants... we are fully transformed into his image. And we don't get half his spiritual DNA. We get all of it. The results are immortal, eternal, and glorious. What's more, Jesus has achieved this union (to greater or lesser extent) with perhaps a billion people and counting.

How Isaiah could have nailed it so clearly some 700 years before Christ's birth and 2,500 years before the birth of Darwin? How Isaiah could have seen it all so clearly... is a mystery with no answers, bar this one: God revealed his secret plan to a listening ear. It is all there in Isaiah. Jesus died a loser in Darwin's game of physical propagation so as to win an even bigger contest of spiritual propagation.

Isaiah passed from the scene long before Jesus arrived. But he saw him clearly all the same.

Isaiah 53:8, 10
No one cared that he died without descendants,
that his life was cut short in midstream.
...
Yet when his life is made an offering for sin,
he will have many descendants.

Darwin, you set your sights too low, and your game was eclipsed thousands of years before you set it to paper. You described the shallow fleeting victories of the survivor of the physically fittest. But Jesus has demonstrated for eternity that he is the eternally glorious savior. The spiritually fittest.

Game, set, match.