Some scientists admit that when all the Quantum and Newtonian causes are done in our minds, we have free will.  Isn’t that the end purpose of our evolution?  That we give, freely, our love, praise and abilities to others and our Creator?  Otherwise, what’s the sense of creating us, if not to bring joy to our peers and Creator?  I mean, it doesn’t take an eight cylinder brain to figure that one out.

Western Civilization has had some great thinkers, some of then the modern secular commentators don’t dare mention.  I mean thinkers like St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. John the Apostle, and others.  (I will say the physicist Brian Greene shows a surprising familiarity with them.)  They believed in a God who John said is Love.  I love simple statements, such as Einstein coined, and that statement got to me.

It goes back to Western Civilization.  Not Aristotle, not Plato, not Socrates had the effect on it that a Galilean itinerant named Jesus Christ did, and the last two thousand years are the bread of that mill.  You like that bread?  You like being able to read this?  You like life now?  Show him an act of gratitude.

It comes from the Latin word for grateful, and I think it is the most endearing of all human (and some animal) expressions.  Some life-changing decisions have been made, either because someone wanted to express it or because someone else showed it.

My sons’ displays of it touched me to the core, and one incident comes to mind, my youngest son’s purchasing of a dental bridge so I could enjoy my meals better.  He volunteered to get me dental implants, which are expensive, but didn’t prove feasible because of my jawbone structure.  Nevertheless, the will was there, and while we can attribute his action to love, I think it was love born of gratitude.

It is even more precious coming from someone unexpected.  A whale recently freed from enveloping fishermen’s nets by a scuba diver with scissors, returned the following day to his boat and floated next to it in gratitude.  Gratitude is a mover of humankind especially, though.

Evolution definitely is not the denying of religious belief.  True, it shows that the story of the Garden of Eden is not literal truth, but a storytelling device known as allegory.  That means each character represents something, though the role of the Creator speaks for Himself.  The story of evolution, in a rough way, gives us an idea as to how, how the Creator let the living homo sapiens be formed.  For that knowledge we are grateful to Darwin.

That means free will also evolved.  It is possible that free will evolves in the living human being.  For example, nobody would hold a two-year old responsible for pulling the trigger of a handgun he got hold of.  By the same token, someone suffering from dementia is not guilty of everything she says.

So the wonder of it all is how did we arrive where we are able to read this with different levels of comprehension?  How did we even decide to read this?  At this stage, it must surely be free will.

I taught English from the 7^th through the 12^th grades, and the most beautiful story I taught was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Evangeline, the story of her search for her betrothed Gabriel, during the displacement of the Acadians of Nova Scotia, a few years before the American Revolution.  Her finding him in a Philadelphia hospital during a pandemic did not hit me as hard when I was  young and taught it, but that hospital might as well have been an old-age home, I realize now. 

Gabriel had been struck by the virus, and he breathed his last in her arms.  It might as well have been then, because she was now a dedicated Sister of Mercy, no longer free to marry him.  The pathos of that simple love story far outdid Macbeth, which I taught in ninth or twelfth grade.

You can’t make this stuff up.  Real life, where people act out their thoughts, and are helped by God in ways they know not, of course upstages Longfellow’s story, which was nevertheless based on fact.  How good to live real life.

Darwin had no idea of how humankind developed language, but he guessed it evolved from their song.  Anthropologists still don’t know the answer to that one.  However, Darwin had a co-discoverer of natural selection, a lesser known man with the name Alfred Russell Wallace.  Wallace had the solution, but the obstinate science community wouldn’t accept it.  Wallace said, “We must therefore admit the possibility that in the development of the human race, a Higher Intelligence has guided the same laws for nobler ends.”  He was referring to the blind laws of evolution.

The same Higher Intelligence, if we have watched it through the ages, has a predilection for the humble, the ones you’d least expect.  Witness who made the above observation, not Darwin himself.  Who communicated at Fatima, Portugal, with the Blessed Mother, not some Archbishop, but three shepherd chidren, no older than ten.

Who is reading this? It’s not some noted scientist, but you, a member of the common flock.  Rejoice, you are part of the chosen ones, those favored by the Higher Intelligence.