1 result for (book:deavf1 AND session:882 AND stemmed:who)
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Yet most of what I wrote in Appendix 12 is still valid, to my mind, even though I’ve always wanted to expand (and expound?) upon all of it. There are a few things I’d put somewhat differently now, given the advantage of a couple of years’ hindsight, but Jane and I don’t really want to revise the material. We’d rather let it stand as is, representing our best knowledge and feeling of that time, including the way we put to use Seth’s own information on the subject. If that “best knowledge” was groping and imperfect, then so be it. I think it most interesting that the theory of evolution is now challenged by those who, like Jane and I, simply want to know whether it has a basis in scientific fact; and that it’s also come under virulent attack by those who generally believe in fundamentalist religions. The controversy over whether evolution ever really happened—and/or is happening—is far from resolved, whether in scientific, religious, or lay terms.
But why, I asked Jane, haven’t our best minds—at least those who have operated throughout the centuries of our recorded history—been able to arrive at some sort of reasonable consensus about the “origin” of our universe (if it had one), its processes, and our human place in it? In their many forms religion and science haven’t provided satisfactory answers, nor have agnosticism or atheism. Why have so many human beings (an estimated 50 billion of them) had to exist along the way before we arrived at our present point—from which point we in our collective wisdom think we might begin to provide meaningful answers to such questions? If true, this proposition means that for all of that time, all of those people lived pretty useless lives as far as having any real understanding of their universe goes—hardly a natural situation, I told Jane. Life can’t really be that way. The whole set of questions must be meaningless in deeper terms.
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