1956 Geloof en Wetenschap : Orgaan van de Christelijke vereeniging van natuur- en geneeskundigen in Nederland - pagina 237

TOWARD A THEISTIC CREATIONISM

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the record wants us to know that instead the Lord our God took recourse to potential. Eve was not made out of nothing, she was made of the most likely raw material available, namely, human tissue, still warm and alive. The mother of all the living was not the result of sheer irruption (6). Recourse to inherent potential is part of the Genesis report concerning the origin of man; „And Jehovah God formed man out of the dust of the earth and breathed in his nostrils the breath of life" (2 : 7). God took to hand certain raw materials when He set about to make man; and man as a finished product we should not attempt to factor without due attention to whatever potentialities were inherent in this raw material (7). If Jehovah God made progressive use of His creative power and if in the use of it He constantly took recourse to inherent potential the question may well be asked whether we do not have to do with a constantly enlarging potential. It is not irreverent to suppose that every new expenditure of creative energy stood, as it were, upon the shoulders of its predecessor. God each time took raw materials, raw, that is, with reference to the contemplated end-result; but may He not have used as raw material for a later form that which constituted the finished product of an earlier creative episode? (8). Specifically, did God use advanced forms of plant life as raw material when He created low-form animal life? And did He use low-form animal life when He created advanced-form animal life? Pointedly, was it „primitive" dust out of which God created man? Or was the „dust" already functioning in the mysteriovis teamwork of forces that we encounter wherever living tissue is? The question of continuity between man and the lower animals presents itself at this point. What was the raw material in this case upon which the Almighty expended creative energy? (9). Evolutionism would of course insist that that raw material was a creature belonging to the order of the primates. The evidence put forward thus far in supporting this view of the evolutionists is not convincing. The evidence so far, it seems to the present writer (who acknowledges that he is but a lay-man in the field of historical anthropology) the evidence so far leaves ample room for the believer's conviction that no matter how much the dimension of process is in evidence in the creation of man the dimension of the irruption is there also. The fossil record has as much to say about discontinuities as about continuities (10). Because the believer does not depersonalize nature, as does the man who allows only for the processional dimension, therefore he believes that he sees

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