Harmony and Conflict in the Living World - Alexander F. Skutch [10]
The genesis of species by gradual changes promoted by interactions between themselves, surrounding organisms, and the physical environment provides a key to the understanding of evil. As long as people believed that each kind of living thing had been created
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in its finished form by an Agent at once omnipotent and beneficent, strife and evil remained inexplicable, or could be explained only by means of unconvincing myths. For a Creator of unlimited power and perfect benevolence might have established each species in all its perfection, adjusting the relations of each one to every other, and of every one to its environment, so harmoniously that strife and discord would never arise. Actually, however, they have been self-created, formed by this very attrition and interplay that special creation might have obviated.
Apart from life, the disharmony we behold in the universe is more seeming then real. Matter flows ceaselessly from form to form; body collides with body; the smaller mass fuses with the greater and loses separate identity. Solar systems no less than molecules are constantly changing, dying, being born anew. No composite thing is eternal, nothing immutable, nothing fixed for all time. Strife has been called cosmic; but are the collisions and the often violent transformations that we witness in lifeless matter actually strife? Strife is essentially a conflict of wills, an attempt to alter or destroy that which stubbornly strives to preserve its present form. But in inorganic matter we detect no strong will to exist as a separate entity. Lifeless bodies rarely sheathe themselves in an insulating integument as in a coat of armor; it appears immaterial to the crystal, the rock, the mountain, the planet, or the solar system whether it continue in its present form or be transmuted to something else. These compound bodies evidently lack the will to perpetuate themselves. Far from resisting the closest union with others, the micropsychic atoms of which they are composed readily seek such union to satisfy their social nature.
''Cosmic strife" would be more aptly characterized as a cosmic dance. The dancers are marshaled in companies of the most diverse sizesof atoms, molecules, crystals, drops, oceans, continents, planets, solar systems, and galaxies. Each company is ceaselessly shifting its place, meeting others and uniting with them; or else great armies separate into smaller bands. And within each company the platoons, squads, and individuals are in constant happy agitation, following the immutable rules of the dance. In all
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the vast concourse, everyone appears to be in a tranquil mood; there are, as far as we can discern, no hatred, no anger, no jealousy, no vain strivings, no sighs, no regretsno tragedy evident to our human eyes and minds. Strife springs from individuality, from the effort to preserve separate identity by beings that try to insulate themselves from the rest of the universe and that are not minutely guided by a single comprehensive Intelligence.
Contemplating the countless ills that arise directly from organisms' need to insulate themselves from their surroundings, one sometimes suspects that life represents a miscarriage of harmonization, which in producing living things somehow went astray. Yet the very intensity of the movement to create them and lift them to higher levels of organization suggests that they are indispensable for the fulfillment of the world process. It seems that only in a community of individuals can harmony, in its highest sense, prevail. If harmony were simply unruffled uniformity, such as is found in a body of pure, still water or among the pages of a closed book, the whole creative process is a mistake;