A Walk in the Jardin des Plantes

 

A Walk in the Jardin des Plantes

(4 Oct 2022)

Is there a Divine Plan for the created universe?

This was the question raised by the formation, at Napoleon's request, of a collection of all the world's living creatures – animal and vegetable, present and past – assembled in Paris in the years of Terror after the French Revolution, in a botanical park known as Le Jardin du Roi, renamed Jardin des Plantes and already housing a magnificent Museum of Natural History. Twelve professors examined and classified the spoils of overseas war and a wealth of confiscated aristocratic collections of curiosities, live animals, stuffed specimens, dried flowers and plants, fossils and bones. The professors were united in wanting to define the nature of life itself, to answer the great questions about creation and the origin of species. But they were not of a single opinion; especially over the already widely discussed suggestion that life might not have resulted from a single creative act, but rather have changed with time according to laws made, not as set out in the Bible, but imposed by nature itself in the manner of mathematical certainties. Decades before Charles Darwin was even born, battle lines were already drawn between those who believed the book of Genesis gave the one true account of the matter, and those who saw evidence, in these vast collections, of similarities and subtle differences between different species, suggesting that rather than appearing ready-made in a single event, all life had a tendency to transform and evolve, responding to changes in their surrounding environment.

Matters came to a head in the year 1800 when Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Professor of Insects, Worms and Microsopic Animals, gave a public lecture in the Museum of Natural History which voiced a new vision of nature as an an ever-changing flux - la marche de la nature - an evolution from the simplest forms towards the more complex. Although the mechanism of this change was not defined, there was no place for a divine plan in Lamarck's vision of nature. Creatures merely struggled to survive, with varying rates of success.

How far have we moved since? Darwin came up with the mechanism which explains the changes in bodily features far better than Lamarck's vague suggestion that water birds' legs get longer in response to the need to wade in deeper water; Darwin showed that accidental changes can work selectively to improve the adaptation of species to changing circumstances. But to his own regret he could not provide proof that nature's changes are planned. In fact, his evolutionary theory completely undermined the creationist belief that God did everything in seven days, and then intervened occasionally, when it suited those who prayed, or Himself, in an arbitrary undefined manner.

Science is the art of the verifiable; and since Darwin's day nobody has come up with a verifiable proof demonstrating divine intervention in human affairs. The discovery and analysis of DNA has only massively reinforced the opposite conclusion.

But are we perhaps looking in the wrong place or imagining that there has to be intentionality in the way nature is organised? Does there have to be a plan? God's inentions may have nothing to do with survival of the fittest, Perhaps we should be looking in a different dimension, one which has everything to do with morality in human behaviour, and nothing to do with a reality in which numbers are absolute, and choices for change can only be consciously made by aware beings within a framework that never changes. Who has consciousness? - God, the Devil, and Me. Is this the title of the chronicle in which we should be looking for an answer?

We need to turn again to our Bibles for guidance. Here are a few clues:

God blessed them. God said to them, "Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the earth." (Genesis 1:28)

This, then, is how you ought to regard us: as servants of Christ and as those entrusted with the mysteries God has revealed. (Corinthians 4, 1)

Feed my sheep. (John 21,15)

Surely, if God does have a plan, it is for man to take responsibility for mastering his environment in order to preserve it, managing the creation, preventing its destruction. This is the meaning of his injunction, to pick up our cross and follow Him. It gives meaning and purpose to the universe if we accept the moral dimension, the imperative to look after the widow and the orphan, the instruction to love one another, not as oppressors, but in the service of those entrusted to our care. Like our late Queen. Or Jesus himself. And surely, finding meaning in the universe, was the raison d'être of all the collections in the Jardin des Plantes, where we started our perambulations today..

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"O God of our fathers and Lord of mercy, who hast made all things by thy word,

and by thy wisdom hast formed man, to have dominion over the creatures thou hast made,

and rule the world in holiness and righteousness, and pronounce judgment in uprightness of soul -

give me the wisdom that sits by thy throne, and do not reject me from among thy servants. 

(Wisdom 9, 1-6)