“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Darwin was faced with the proposition of a kind god who was more cruel than any human being, and with supernatural power behind him to boot—so Darwin tried to justify God’s ways to man.

Nature took the place of the devil in an insidious sleight-of-hand that initially Darwin himself never expected. He wanted to show that God was not responsible for the world’s cruelties. Darwin loved nature in all of its aspects, yet he could not reconcile its beauties and splendors with the course of its events. He could not bear to see a cat play with a mouse, without blaming God who would permit such cruelty. He tried to wipe God’s hands clean, as he understood the nature of God through his early beliefs—but in so doing he wiped the soul from the face of nature.

Darwin managed to bring out nature’s complexity, though this had been mentioned by other men—I believe by a man called Mendel in particular. But Mendel did not catch man’s imagination. Darwin then brought nature to man’s focus in a new way, for before neither science or religion had dealt with it in a meaningful manner. The full sweep and extent of the natural world , with all of its seeming ambiguities, cruelties and splendors, had to be accepted as more than a passive package delivered into man’s hand.

Why then did such a theory originate? Darwin was initially a religious man. Like many others, his religious background held out nonsensical propositions. It saw a good God, a just savior, who nevertheless never thought twice about sending down death and destruction as punishment for sin.

(Ironically, Charles Darwin’s natural selection, “the survival of the fittest,” [a phrase that Darwin himself did not originate, by the way], allows for all sorts of pain and suffering in the process — the same unhappy facts of life, in Darwin’s view, that finally turned him into an agnostic, away from a God who could allow such things to exist! As I interpret what I’ve read, Darwin didn’t deny the existence of a god of some kind, but he wanted one that would abolish what he saw as the “upward” struggle for existence. [...] Darwin came to believe that he asked the impossible of God. [...] For Darwin and his followers — even those of today, then — nature’s effects gave the appearance of design or plan in the universe without necessitating a belief in a designer or a god; although, as I wrote in Note 7, from the scientific standpoint this belief leaves untouched the question of design in nonliving matter, which is vastly more abundant in the “objective” universe than is living matter, and had to precede that living matter.

Finally, in this appendix I haven’t used the term “Neo-Darwinism” in order to avoid confusion with the familiar Darwinism that most people — including scientists — still employ. Neo-Darwinism is simply the original idea of natural selection in plants and animals updated to take present-day genetics into account.

[...] The species’ religious drives have been around a lot longer than its scientific ones, however, so I found myself looking for broad correlations between the two, in that under each value system the individual carries a very conscious sense of personal vulnerability. Before Darwinism, to use that concept as an example, man at least felt that God had put him on earth for certain purposes, no matter how much man distorted those purposes through ignorance and war. According to Judaism and Christianity, among many religions, man could seek forgiveness and salvation; he had a soul. After Darwin, he learned that even his physical presence on earth was an accident of nature. [...]

7. Charles Darwin (1809–1881) published On the Origin of Species in 1859. In his book Darwin presented his ideas of natural selection — that all species evolve from earlier versions by inheriting slight (genetic) variations through the generations. [...]

They might have seemed like even brilliant (amused) theoretical statements, my own pronouncements, but little by little you accepted them intellectually while still being emotionally bound through habit, so that indeed, as Ruburt wrote, you almost became programmed, your questions about reality based upon the erroneous facts of Darwinism, Freudianism, or religion. [...]

[...] As you know, your western world followed its own mixture of Christianity, Darwinism, and Freudian psychology. [...]

[...] When you read the news or hear it, however, because of cultural beliefs you are programmed to behave in a certain fashion, in a fashion that validates, seemingly, the concepts of Freud and Darwin, and the most unfortunate aspects of Christian pessimism.

4. The English naturalist, Charles Darwin (1809–1882), maintained in his theory of organic evolution that all plants and animals develop from their own previous forms by inheriting minute variations through succeeding generations, with those forms best fitted to the environment being the ones most likely to survive.

[...] The next year Darwin published his On the Origin of Species.

Are laws made to protect man from the self as it is generally outlined by Freud and Darwin? [...]

[...] The means, however, have helped erode that ideal, and the public interpretation of Darwin’s principles was, quite unfortunately, transferred to the economic area, and to the image of man as a political animal.

Certainly theories of evolution (Darwinism) forbid the notion that dinosaurs and man, or any kind of man, were contemporary! [...]

[...] We must remember that through Darwinism or Neo-Darwinism science tells us that life has no creative design, or any purpose, behind it; and that, moreover, this ineffable quality called “life” originated (more than 3.4 billion years ago) in a single fortuitous chance combination of certain atoms and molecules in a tidal pool, say, somewhere on the face of the planet….

[...] Poor Darwin tried to make sense of it all, but failed miserably.

Those ideas from Freud, Darwin, and even the churches, have been inherent in your civilization. [...]

(Apropos of this question, in ESP class eight days later Seth had this to say about Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution:

(10:12.) If men were considered equal, however, the ideas of Darwin and Freud came along to alter the meaning of equality, for men were not equal in honor and integrity and creativity—or heroism: —they were equal in dishonor (louder), selfishness, greed, and equally endowed with a killer instinct that now was seen to be a natural characteristic from man’s biological past. [...]

[...] For this reason, Seth explains how the theories of Freud and Darwin confine our imaginations and our abilities.

[...] In your country, this was coupled, however, with the growth of economic individualism, Darwinism, and so forth. [...]

(Wally spoke of Darwin’s theory of evolution.)

[...] If a scientist says consciousness is the result of chance, or Darwin’s theories say that basically man is a triumphant son of murderers, many people object. [...]

Now: The beliefs of [Charles] Darwin and of [Sigmund] Freud³ alike have formed together to give you a different screen. [...]

[...] Particularly since [the advent of Charles] Darwin’s theories,⁵ the acceptance of the fact of death has come to imply a certain kind of weakness, for is it not said that only the strong survive?

[...] Those men believe in evolution—that once it originated, life, as Charles Darwin proposed, has ever since been growing in complexity and “evolving” through natural selection and random mutations, or DNA copying errors, into the life and beings we see and are today. [...]