What Johnson accomplishes is the annihilation of the materialistic (naturalistic) idea of evolution free from divine guidance. He is not alone in recognizing that scientists speak out of both sides of their mouth on the subject. Among themselves, there is almost universal recognition that the problems with their theories are immense and so far unsolved, while to the public they hold to the validity of their theories. The fatal defect in their position is that they exclude, in their deductive approach, any possibility of supernatural involvement, saying that since it cannot be measured or detected by their methods it must not be considered. They are flipping a two-headed coin and calling "heads." The poverty of the scientific position, at least the paleontological part after almost a century and a half of fossil research and analysis, becomes obvious by evaluating the concluding words of Ian Tattersall's, "Where Are We?" in his The Fossil Trail (1995).²⁰ And Roger Lewin's Bones of Contention (1987) depicts the powerful preconceptions and individual motivations that have littered the "scientific" findings and interpretations from the first. One begins to question the use of the term "science" as it relates to evolution. Speculation and hypotheses are rampant and inherent, and inductive reasoning, and certainly intuitive insight, are completely absent.

In all fields, whether it be spiritual "wineskins" or the breeding practices of elk (from the bull's standpoint), the old must be destroyed before the new can take its place. As this reality applies to the understanding of evolution, both Darwinism and creationism are the old. Johnson has destroyed them both (disdaining as he does what he calls "creation-science"). But the conservative Christian views that he would put in their place are, in the final analysis, little different from those from which Darwin's clan rightly rebelled. Johnson admits to having no "theory of evolution" to replace the one he shoots down,²¹ aside from the fact that he passionately (and accurately) believes that the supernatural has a hand in the process. But having destroyed the old without giving us anything new, he leaves us in the situation where "the last state . . . is worse than the first" (see Mt 12,45 and Lk 11,26). If we revert to pre-Darwinian religious understanding without rising to a higher perception of evolution, we will sink back into ways that are worse now, because of the needs of our age, than when Darwin challenged them in the nineteenth century.

One can investigate the libraries of both evolutionary science and theology without finding any significant reference to the intuitive revelations of Rudolf Steiner. But if the understandings of evolution imperative for our age are to be had, they must begin to move toward what this early twentieth-century prophet disclosed.

Steiner himself, at least in the works so far translated into English, could only give the guidelines to be followed, though these were extensive. The seeds of a broader understanding were sown in Vol. 1, and are carried forward in the balance of this book. And I have already mentioned the powerful anthroposophical writings of Poppelbaum and Kranich on the specific subject of evolution that demand now to be considered.

Norman Macbeth's Darwin Retried: an appeal to reason (1971, with 1978 Foreword) (DR) is similar in nature to Johnson's Darwin on Trial (DOT). One commentator calls it "elegantly impudent" in disassembling the various pillars upon which Darwinism rests. And had Johnson not come along, it could have stood in for his work, although it could not address, as Johnson has, those features of molecular biology that have been more recently advanced. It is well worth studying in connection with Johnson's work. But what is most intriguing about Macbeth's book is not what it says, but what it doesn't say. For Macbeth was an anthroposophist, elegantly qualified to go beyond and provide what Johnson could not (or at least didn't) provide, but for some reason chose not to do so. Perhaps he thought the time was not yet ripe. Macbeth belches pungent rhetoric out of the retort of his natural talent and strong liberal education forged by years at O'Melveny & Myers, a prominent Los Angeles law firm. In 1959, "living in Switzerland as a semi-invalid largely retired from the practice of law," he began to study biological evolution, which led eventually to Darwin Retried: an appeal to reason.²²

I learned about Macbeth from an anthroposophic friend who had followed him at O'Melveny & Myers. What then amazed me, after reading his book, is my discovery that he had translated Vol. 3 of Guenther Wachsmuth's writings on evolution from the 1953 German edition into English in 1961. Wachsmuth was one of the circle of Steiner's closest disciples and a member of the original executive committee of the Anthroposophic Society formed by Steiner. Wachsmuth's three-volume work comprises Vol. 1, Earth and Man; Vol. 2, The Evolution of the Earth; and Vol. 3, The Evolution of Mankind (EVM). Several years earlier I had borrowed Vol. 3 from the Rudolf Steiner Library (Ghent, NY), and now I finally see that Macbeth translated it—obviously while recuperating in Switzerland, perhaps at one of anthroposophy's Arlesheim Clinics near Dornach.

Unfortunately, Vol. 3 is out of print (though still available from that library) and Vols. 1 and 2 have never been translated. While it is beyond the scope of this essay, anyone seriously interested in understanding the evolution of the various kingdoms on Earth should study this book. That Macbeth ignored it in attacking Darwinism himself suggests his thinking—first he had to demonstrate the invalidity of Darwinism itself, and trying to go beyond and show the deep insights of anthroposophy reflected in Wachsmuth's work would have jeopardized the important first step.

Maybe Macbeth's lawyer instinct also told him there were weaknesses in Wachsmuth—and probably that is true. But times march on. The interval has given us Johnson's devastating attack on Darwinism. The scientists' position, Johnson says, is invulnerable, but only because it both starts and ends with the premise of a wholly naturalistic evolution, unguided by any divine hand; it calls the toss but uses a two-headed coin. He properly asserts that the solution to the evolutionary puzzle must come from a source that is itself vulnerable to further testing—in short, he is urging the Goethean method of letting the phenomena speak as long as possible before entering judgment, a form of plasticity or waiting if you please. Only he stops short of observing all the phenomena.

Teilhard's beautiful articulations above combine with Steiner's revelations to unravel the mystery of why no connecting link has been found between archaeology's various earlier humanoids and homo sapiens. Fossilized evidence in the rocks of time is left only by species that have hardened into crusty or bony structures. But while the spiritual plan for bones is laid first, they necessarily come into mineral existence last. Something of the relationship between the spiritual foundation and the mineral-physical condition is discussed in The Burning Bush where it speaks of the three supersensible deeds of the descending Christ.²³ The first, which laid the foundation for the human being's upright skeletal stance, occurred in the primordial Lemurian Epoch.

While cellular life surely began during the recapitulation of ancient Sun in the Hyperborean Epoch (the Earth's second Great Epoch; see I-1), the early animal forms could begin to take shape even in bony structure only as the Earth increasingly mineralized, as Poppelbaum shows. The highly fluid condition of earthly existence permitted the wide dissemination of this fossil evidence. But it was during the later Lemurian and early Atlantean Epochs that the human being increasingly took on mineralized form, divided into sexes, and eventually, by mid-Atlantean time, stood upright with skull shaped like the dome of the heavens.