The Greater Does Not Come from the Less
I've been reading Garrigou-Lagrange's Providence. Perhaps its most foundational principle, highlighted in the first paragraph:
The greater does not come from the less, the more perfect does not come from the less perfect, since the latter is incapable of producing the effect. [emphasis in original]
Now, Providence is a great book that I highly recommend. But if would be anyway it could now be improved, it is that it could tackle more squarely some of the more recent objections to Aristotle's and St. Thomas's thought about nature.
This principle in particular has been cast into doubt in the modern world most especially by the idea of the evolution of biological species following Darwin. (In the early 20th-century France in which the book was written, the significance of Darwinism may not have been fully felt.)
Many Darwinists even deny that evolution's tendency over time is to perfect species. Perhaps the need to deny a cosmological hierarchy originates in their materialist premises. But such ideological prejudices aside, most reasonable thinkers would admit that a human is greater than an ape, and an ape is greater than a fish. So the simple-minded conclusion from evolution is that the greater evolves from the less. How can we square this appearance with the principle of Garrigou-Lagrange's book?
What that mistaken conclusion ignores is that even from Darwinists principles, species don't evolve on their own. Of the two primciples of Darwinism, random mutation and natural selection, random mutation is essentially directionless. But the other principle, natural selection, strongly requires interaction with the environment, the larger universe. And the larger universe working out all its hidden potentialities is arguably more perfect than any non-rational species.
So if you look deeper, Garrigou-Lagrange's principle holds.
Additionally, I'd like to point out that "random mutation" is like a large area rug that can hide lots of (to a materialist) unseemly dirt. Randomness basically means that we, from our limited knowledge, cannot trace back the relevant lines of causation from the effect, so we just sweep this happenstance of reality under the rug of "randomness." I'm no evolutionary biologist, but it seems fair to say that it's hard, if not impossible, to distinguish the perfecting effects of natural selection from any perfecting effects that might come from "random" mutation (whether in reality directly from God or mediated by some hidden natural cause). Actually, on further reflection, it might be possible to distinguish the two. But it would require somehow detecting that the mutations that have arisen have a preferential direction. I doubt our knowledge of the fossil record could be so comprehensive or that we could observe such a process at work today with the necessary completeness.
