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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #evolution
To establish evolutionary interrelatedness invariably requires exhibiting similarities between organisms. Within Darwinism, there's only one way to connect such similarities, and that's through descent with modification driven by the Darwinian mechanism. But within a design-theoretic framework, this possibility, though not precluded, is also not the only game in town. It's possible for descent with modification instead to be driven by telic processes inherent in nature (and thus by a form of design). Alternatively, it's possible that the similarities are not due to descent at all but result from a similarity of conception, just as designed objects like your TV, radio, and computer share common components because designers frequently recycle ideas and parts. Teasing apart the effects of intelligent and natural causation is one of the key questions confronting a design-theoretic research program. Unlike Darwinism, therefore, intelligent design has no immediate and easy answer to the question of common descent. Darwinists necessarily see this as a bad thing and as a regression to ignorance. From the design theorists' perspective, however, frank admissions of ignorance are much to be preferred to overconfident claims to knowledge that in the end cannot be adequately justified. Despite advertisements to the contrary, science is not a juggernaut that relentlessly pushes back the frontiers of knowledge. Rather, science is an interconnected web of theoretical and factual claims about the world that are constantly being revised and for which changes in one portion of the web can induce radical changes in another. In particular, science regularly confronts the problem of having to retract claims that it once confidently asserted. ↗
The dynamic, future-oriented, ecstatically inspired state of the evolutionary impulse is the new enlightenment that I am speaking about. The inner eye has become compelled by the ever-unfulfilled promise of creating the future at a higher level than what exists in the present moment. When the awakening to this powerful spiritual urgency becomes one’s irrevocable attainment and permanent state, one has surely landed on the yonder shore, where the evolutionary impulse has become the driving force of fundamental principle guiding the vehicle called the body, mind, and soul. . . . God is only as powerful in this world as those of us who have the courage and audacity to awaken in this way—to become one with our own impulse to evolve. That’s the awesome significance of being a human being who is awake. When you realize this for yourself, you discover what an extraordinary blessing it is to be who you are, in this world, right now. In fact, the whole point of the creative process is to be here—to participate fully, radically, consciously in the Universe Project. In this evolutionary context, the point of enlightenment is not merely to transcend the world so that you can be free of it but to embrace the world completely, to embrace the entire process as your self, knowing that you are the creative principle incarnate, and you have a lot of work to do. As an individual, you are instantaneously liberated, simply through taking that step, but your personal liberation is a mere by-product of finally embracing the awe-inspiring burden of the Universe Project, which in truth has been yours all along. ↗
Let us accept the possibility that there is, at death, not an abrupt cessation of energy, rather a dispersal. This seems more than reasonable to me. Mind you, I've owned a series of old cars, and I"m used to turning off the motor only to experience a series of rumblings and explosions that would shame many a volcano. This is the sort of thing I'm conceptualizing, a kind of clunky running-on. And just as some cars are more susceptible to this behavior, so people vary in the length of time, and the force with which, their energy sputters and gasps. . . My example is overly dramatic, but it is not wholly unreasonable, and it serves to make this genetic mutation a player at the evolutionary table. You see what I'm getting at: a biologically and evolutionally sound model for the soul. (I didn't say I'd achieved it.) Let's conceive of the soul as an aura that human beings wear on their backs, cumberson as a tortoise's carapace. Some are larger than others. ↗
#science #soul #spirituality #death
You felt, in spite of all bureaucracy and inefficiency and party strife something that was like the feeling you expected to have and did not have when you made your first communion. It was a feeling of consecration to a duty toward all of the oppressed of the world which would be as difficult and embarrasing to speak about as religious experience and yet it was as authentic as the feeling you had when you heard Bach, or stood in Chartres Cathedral or the Cathedral at León and saw the light coming through the great windows; or when you saw Mantegna and Greco and Brueghel in the Prado. It gave you a part in something that you could believe in wholly and completely and in which you felt an absolute brotherhood with the others who were engaged in it. It was something that you had never known before but that you had experienced now and you gave such importance to it and the reasons for it that you own death seemed of complete unimportance; only a thing to be avoided because it would interfere with the performance of your duty. But the best thing was that there was something you could do about this feeling and this necessity too. You could fight. ↗
But after living in Communist China for the past seventeen years, I knew that such a society was only a dream because those who seized power would invariably become the new ruling class. They would have the power to control the people’s lives and bend the people’s will. Because they controlled the production and distribution of goods and services in the name of the state, they would also enjoy material luxuries beyond the reach of the common people. In Communist China, details of the private lives of the leaders were guarded as state secrets. But every Chinese knew that the Party leaders lived in spacious mansions with many servants, obtained their provisions from special shops where luxury goods were made available to their household at nominal prices, and send their children in chauffeur-driven cars to exclusive schools to be taught by specially selected teachers. Even though every Chinese knew how these leaders lived, no one dared to talk about it. If we had to pass by a special shop for the military or high officials, we carefully looked the other way to avoid giving the impression we knew it was there. Pg. 90 ↗
#communist-china #corruption #cultural-revolution #maoism #death
Even if we have a reliable criterion for detecting design, and even if that criterion tells us that biological systems are designed, it seems that determining a biological system to be designed is akin to shrugging our shoulders and saying God did it. The fear is that admitting design as an explanation will stifle scientific inquiry, that scientists will stop investigating difficult problems because they have a sufficient explanation already. But design is not a science stopper. Indeed, design can foster inquiry where traditional evolutionary approaches obstruct it. Consider the term "junk DNA." Implicit in this term is the view that because the genome of an organism has been cobbled together through a long, undirected evolutionary process, the genome is a patchwork of which only limited portions are essential to the organism. Thus on an evolutionary view we expect a lot of useless DNA. If, on the other hand, organisms are designed, we expect DNA, as much as possible, to exhibit function. And indeed, the most recent findings suggest that designating DNA as "junk" merely cloaks our current lack of knowledge about function. For instance, in a recent issue of the Journal of Theoretical Biology, John Bodnar describes how "non-coding DNA in eukaryotic genomes encodes a language which programs organismal growth and development." Design encourages scientists to look for function where evolution discourages it. Or consider vestigial organs that later are found to have a function after all. Evolutionary biology texts often cite the human coccyx as a "vestigial structure" that hearkens back to vertebrate ancestors with tails. Yet if one looks at a recent edition of Gray’s Anatomy, one finds that the coccyx is a crucial point of contact with muscles that attach to the pelvic floor. The phrase "vestigial structure" often merely cloaks our current lack of knowledge about function. The human appendix, formerly thought to be vestigial, is now known to be a functioning component of the immune system. ↗
One reason might be that if I hadn't tripped, I'd have been hamburger. When this sort of thing occurs, people often say that there was some power greater than themselves at work. This sounds reasonable. I am just suggesting that it is not necessary to equate "greater than ourselves" with "stretched across the heavenly vault." It could mean "just slightly greater." A cocoon of energy that we carry with us, that is capable, under some conditions, of affecting physicality. Furthermore, I conjecture that the totality of all these souls is what constitutes the Godhead. I mean this in the same sense as the "Leviathan" of Thomas Hobbes, whereby man, that is everyone together, creates "that great Leviathan called a Commonwealth or State, which is but an artificial man, though of greater statute and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defense it was created." And that leads me to my Insight: God was not there at the beginning of evolution; God is what lies at the end of it. ↗
#god #soul #spirituality #nature
You are the only one who can do this. That’s the ultimately challenging and profoundly liberating truth you discover in Evolutionary Enlightenment. Any individual who is committed to this path has to know, at the deepest level, that he or she is the only one who could possibly do this. And that is because there is no other. You have discovered that fact, directly, for yourself. From the absolute or nondual perspective that emerges in spiritual revelation, there is only ONE. There literally is no other; there is only One without a second. To truly understand conscious evolution, you must grapple with the profound implications of that fact. I believe we can only consciously evolve to the degree that we have realized at the deepest level of our being that we are that One without a second. In an evolutionary context, facing into the truth of nonduality—that the many is the One and that the One is ultimately who we always are—forces a confrontation with any relationship to the life process that is less than whole, complete, and fully committed. To consciously evolve is to surrender unconditionally to the truth that there is no other and at the same time to accept responsibility for what that means in an evolving universe—a cosmos that is slowly but surely becoming aware of itself through you and me. That One without a second is simultaneously awakening to itself as it develops, as it evolves, and it is that One, as you and me, alone, that can now begin to take responsibility for endeavoring to consciously create its own future. Of course, in this manifest dimension, where the One is expressed through the many, those of us who have awakened to our repsonsibility for the process then begin to engage in this heroic endeavor together. But each individual has to be willing to be the One. This is the spiritual physics of Evolutionary Enlightenment. It works only if each one of us knows without a doubt that I am solely responsible. And nothing puts greater pressure on the separate self-sense than that. ↗
#god #one #relationship
