Fruit Flies, Transformation, and Eternity
Since I’m on the topic of fruit flies, let me make another point. Due to the short life span of fruit flies, scientists can observe generations upon generations of them in a short period of time. Typically, a fruit fly’s entire life is about 30 days. Let’s put that into perspective: from a fruit fly’s perspective, a human being who lives for 85 years would have lived 1,034 lifetimes. For human beings to get an idea of what’s that like, trying imagining a being living 87,890 years. And then try to imagine that being’s lifetime of 87,890 years being only one generation in a long history of that species’ existence. Time becomes so vast that, from the perspective of the limited blip of a lifetime of a human being, you might as well just say it is eternal.
Trying to understand “eternity” really is impossible from our perspective. Even to say “God has always existed,” or “God exists for all time” is to, in fact, confine God to the limitations of time. You simply cannot express the concept of eternity in human language, for human language is ultimately a product of this limited realm we call “time.” When we consider the difference of perspective of a fruit fly in comparison to a human being, though, I think we can at least get a better understanding of it. One day in the life of a fruit fly is the equivalent of almost three years in the life of a human being. Recently in my life, I went through a period of three years that saw some major life-changing experiences in my family: pregnancy, cancer, chemotherapy, major surgery, recovery, birth, raising a toddler, and a long, drawn-out and bizarre divorce that lasted for 19 months.
From my perspective, as I was going through that time, those three years seemed like a hellish eternity. I thought those trials and conflicts would never end. Still, even though they have had a life-changing impact on me, those three years will have amounted to a relatively short period of time in the course of my entire life. The thing I realized in the midst of those trials was that the kinds of changes those conflicts had on me were entirely dependent upon the way in which I chose to react to those conflicts. Or to put it in “evolutionary terminology,” my Spiritual life has “evolved” (I think for the better) because I chose to respond to the inevitable conflicts in life in certain ways, whereas if I would have chosen to respond in different ways, my Spiritual life would have regressed, or ultimately might have taken a darker turn.
Genetic studies have shown us that there is already in living organisms something capable of adaptation, evolution, and transformation, that, when a certain “switch” is flipped, makes it capable of adapting to its environment for its relatively brief life. By the same token, God has “built into” human beings the ability to choose how to react to the inevitable conflicts of life; and our ability to choose, to “flip certain switches” woven mysteriously within the very fabric of our being, will determine if we in our “natural state” (what C.S. Lewis calls Bios) will transform (and “evolve,” if you will) into the higher form of Spiritual life (what C.S. Lewis calls Zoe), into not just more highly developed creatures, but into transformed beings who mature fully in Christ, and who thus will be revealed as “sons of God,” just as Romans 8:19 states, “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.”
We in our natural, time-limited states, tend to only see the immediate pain and conflict in our lives, and we can’t really get “the big picture” of God’s eternal perspective. But the evolutionary changes we see in fruit flies, within their brief, entirely natural lives can help us put our own conflicts into perspective. We are made for eternity, and although we cannot yet fully comprehend such a thing, we can see that the trials and tribulations we inevitably experience in this life shape, mold, and transform us in ways that have eternal consequences.
As long as we respond to those trials and tribulations with faith, hope and love, we can be assured that such “fiery ordeals,” however presently painful, will turn out to be fires that purify us into eternal righteousness. Yet we should also remember that if we respond to those “fiery ordeals” with hatred, contempt and bitterness, those very same fires that could purify us will end up enveloping us in our own personal hell. Strange at it may sound, evolution helps us see the trials in our lives from an eternal perspective.
