If on the other hand all these things have meaning, and the human mind can have judgement to decide between a good argument and a bad one, if human subtlety can persuade a fellowman to tell stupid obvious lies, which turn a jury’s stomach, if it is possible to outwit your opponents in battle, then thought can influence matter. And that means that in the animal and human kingdoms thought is likely to influence genetic change to some extent, and with humans to control and guide evolution to some extent too. Why is it that highly intelligent people cannot see this? Or is it that they can see it, and will not, or cannot admit it? Anyway, whatever the answer, it is a crowning mercy that there are men like Marshall Foch, skilled in their profession, highly regarded by almost everyone, who can still be obsessed by an absurd professional idea. But then it is difficult to see things through the eyes of others.
In Chapter 35 of “Man’s Relationship with God”, in order to encourage the reader to try to look at things through the eyes of a creator, I wrote, “If you sat down to manufacture creation, I suppose you would begin…”. So in order to tell the reader that the actual creation must have been unimaginably different from anything he or I could conceive; I used the absurd notions of sitting down, and manufacturing, to indicate how limited my conceptions were. The writer of Genesis, who most assuredly believed that God existed, had the Creator speaking a word, and matter coming into being. Speaking another word, and matter organizing itself. Why should the Creator bother himself about details? Why not, if you are all powerful, simply tell matter to organize itself, and it does so? Why not tell matter that it must grope towards greater consciousness, and leave it to matter to work out a mechanical system that was good enough to cope, until man’s thought was able to take a hand in it too? It is a great mistake for people who have never created anything to imagine that they know what it must be like to do so, and what the limitations are. It is a bit like people before Copernicus insisting the sun went round the earth, and dismissing the hypothesis of Heraclitus that actually it was the other way round. The Universe is a more wonderful place than any of us realizes, probably more than any of us can realize. Try as we will, we cannot take it in; so we invent theories to describe this bit or that bit, but actually our theories never measure up to reality as we find it in Nature or in Life. Just as Clausewitz says that in War, your theories never match the reality of war as experienced by the soldier.
No-one has ever made a tree, or a plant, or a flower; you can grow them, but not make them, not yet anyway. Up to date the nearest we get to creation, is in the world of the mind and imagination. In art, in architecture, in music, even in advocacy, you create. But not in science, which is all mechanical? Or is Dampier Whetham right that it is the greatest creation of the mind of man? In a sense art is illusion; painting tries to reproduce on a flat surface what the eye sees as solid.