I thought this reading from “A Year With C.S. Lewis” was pertinent to today. I remember the “chicken and the egg”, but owls pose the same dilemma.

Lewis writes:

• “You remember the old puzzle as to whether the owl came from the egg or the egg from the owl. The modern acquiescence in universal evolutionism is a kind of optical illusion produced by attending exclusively to the owl’s emergence from the egg.
• We are taught from childhood to notice how the perfect oak grows from the acorn and to forget that the acorn itself was dropped by a perfect oak.

The Oak Tree with its acorns

• We are reminded constantly that the adult human being was an embryo, never that the life of the embryo came from two adult human beings.
• We love to notice that the express train of today is the descendant of Stephenson’s “Rocket”; we do not equally remember that the “Rocket” springs not from some even more rudimentary engine, but from something much more perfect and complicated than itself – namely, Stephenson, a man of genius.

The obviousness or naturalness which most people seem to find in the idea of emergent evolution thus seems to be a pure hallucination.”

Perhaps a chimpanzee evolving into a human being is indeed an illusion!

Gibber! Gibber!

Chugley The Illusionary Evolving Chimpanzee

P.S. I would like to be as wise as an owl, however!