The Incomparable Chesterton -- "Orthodoxy" (#1)

In Chapter 9 of Orthodoxy, Chesterton speaks about something that used to intrigue me in various anthropology classes: The lists of "proofs" used by secular anthologists to reject any notion of a Creator God, were, to me, the exact same items I would put on a list to indicate the presence of a great Creator God -- same arguments and evidences,  same proof texts -- different conclusion. 

 One of these so-called "proofs" was the similarity, especially symmetrical design, of both animals and man.  To me, it was an indication of a "common Creator." To my atheistic professors, it was  "proof" of evolution,  random development by chance, without any Intelligent Design.

Here Chesterton talks about the physical similarity between man and beasts:

     If you leave off looking at books about beasts and men, if you begin to look at beasts and men themselves then (if you have any humour or imagination), you will observe that the startling thing is not how like man is to the brutes, but now unlike he is.

     It is the monstrous scale of his divergence that requires an explanation. That man and brute are like is, in a sense, a truism; but that being so like they should be so insanely
unlike, that is the shock and the enigma.

     That an ape has hands is far less interesting to the philosophers than the fact that having hands he does not do anything with them; does not play knuckle-bones or the violin; does not carve marble or carve mutton.

     People talk of barbaric architecture and debased art. But elephants do not build colossal temples of ivory even in a rococo style; camels do not paint even bad pictures, though equipped with the material of many camel's-hair brushes.

     Certain modern dreamers say that ants and bees have a society superior to ours. They have, indeed, a civilization; but that very truth only reminds us that it is an inferior civilization. Who ever found an ant-hill decorated with the statues of other celebrated ants? Who has seen a bee-hive carved with the images of gorgeous queens of old?

     No, the chasm between man and other creatures may have a natural explanation, but it is a chasm.

     We talk of wild animals, but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type. All other animals are domestic animals, man alone is ever undomestic, either as a profligate or a monk.

     So that this first superficial reason for materialism is, if anything, a reason for its opposite; it is exactly where biology leaves off that all religion begins.


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I enjoy reading Chesterton --- he always has a different way of looking at things -- it's not that we are so much like animals - the true marvel is that we are so different!!

...the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul....Genesis 2:7