LECTURES IN BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES 



lowed by the appearance of Christ. This is taken to be the 

 ineffably pivotal event and the watershed of the history of the 

 cosmos. Starting from this watershed, the historical process is 

 going on towards its consummation in the Kingdom of God. 



1 do not wish to be understood as meaning that the theo- 

 logians were or are evolutionists in the modern sense of the 

 word. Excepting the Fall, the events of the history of the cosmos 

 have almost always been pictured as due to direct interventions 

 of God. Even Reinhold Niebuhr, in whose views the idea of 

 the world-historical process seems to be central, regards human 

 nature as too corrupt to aspire towards the role of an important 

 agent of the evolutionary process. 7 Any such aspiration is, to 

 Niebuhr, a form of hubris— overweening pride. The consum- 

 mation of history can occur only through an act of God's grace. 



I am not competent to argue with Niebuhr, nor is this neces- 

 sary. For what is important is that a century after Darwin, the 

 idea of evolution has become the core of civilized man's image 

 of mankind and of the world in which men live. This is not a 

 static and finished world, and mankind is on the march. Crea- 

 tion is not an event which has taken place some six thousand 

 years ago; it is a process and not an act; it is not completed and 

 it is going on before our eyes; there is hope for man, and not 

 only in afterlife but on this earth as well. 



7 R. Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man (New York, 1941). 



110 



