They are obsessed by their evolutionary monomania that every great thing grows from a seed, or something smaller than itself. They seem to forget that every seed scomes from a tree, or from something larger than itself. Now there is very good ground for guessing that religion did not originally come from some detail that was forgotten because it was too small to be traced. Much more probably it was an idea that was abandoned because it was too large to be managed.
-G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p.96
I was thinking what I could compare this too.
How about computer technology? The seed of scratching lines on the wall of the cave evolved into the abacus, which evolved into the slide rule. From their, it gained a head and became a tube computer, then an integrated circuit calculator, then a small PC, then an advanced microprocessor and operating system, and finally it’s evolved today into cloud computing and virtualization.
The seed grew into a tree, right? Bigger ideas gradually developed? No, in fact the bigger ideas (Robots, Artificial Intelligence, near telepathic worldwide communication (cellphones and Twitter anyone?) were all there from the very beginning! Look at old science fiction written when steam engines were still running. The huge ideas have been there all along. To look at the state of computers now days and think these designs and dreams only came along recently would be to make a grave error in interpreting history. The big ideas were driving these things all along. The only difference here is that we (man) are the creators.
Perhaps the big thing (God) has been driving the state of the universe and of mankind all along as well.