Who Guards the Tree of Life?
06/13/2003 The phrase tree of life appears in the first, last, and middle books of the Bible; it is the centerpiece of the garden of Eden, the multi-fruited tree lining the river of heaven in Revelation, and a metaphor for wisdom and joy in Proverbs. Solomon spoke of wisdom, righteousness, a wholesome tongue, and hope fulfilled all as being a tree of life. These days, the phrase means something quite different. Charles Darwin s only illustration in The Origin of Species was a diagram of organisms branching into a tree-shaped array, all descended from a common ancestor. This concept expanded during the Darwinian revolution to represent a view that all life had arisen from a warm little pond, without design, without God, without a creation, and without a heaven. Rather than being a source of righteousness, hope and wisdom, Darwin s tree of life stood for a world of uncaused, purposeless natural processes that presumably had led, quite by chance, to the great diversity of living creatures
