If the Creator were conscious of Himself
God creating the cosmos (Bible Moralisee, French, 13th century)
If the Creator were conscious of Himself, He would not need conscious creatures; nor is it probable that the extremely indirect methods of creation, which squander millions of years upon the development of countless species and creatures, are the outcome of purposeful intention.
Natural history tells us of a haphazard and casual transformation of species over hundreds of millions of years of devouring and being devoured. The biological and political history of man is an elaborate repetition of the same thing.
But the history of the mind offers a different picture. Here the miracle of reflecting consciousness intervenes — the second cosmogony [ed. note: what Teilhard de Chardin called the origin of the “noosphere,” the layer of “mind”].
The importance of consciousness is so great that one cannot help suspecting the element of meaning to be concealed somewhere within all the monstrous, apparently senseless biological turmoil, and that the road to its manifestation was ultimately found on the level of warm-blooded vertebrates possessed of a differentiated brain — found as if by chance, unintended and unforeseen, and yet somehow sensed, felt and groped for out of some dark urge. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections [p. 339]
