“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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. According to the geological/fossil record, this conflict had resulted in the deaths of entire species. Darwin came to believe that he asked the impossible of God. Instead, he assigned the pain and suffering in the world to the impersonal workings of natural selection and chance variation [or genetic mutation]. 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.

1. Over the years, my outside reading on evolution has covered many often conflicting viewpoints. Whether their beliefs are rooted in the tenets of conventional biology (Darwinism), for instance, or allied with those of the creationists (who hold that God made the earth and all of its creatures, just as described in the Book of Genesis), the advocates of rival theories have impressed me as having at least one thing in common: No matter how violently they may disagree, their arguments lack all sense of humor. This is serious stuff, world! Whatever happened to the spontaneity and joy in life? For surely, I found myself thinking as I read all of those antagonistic ideas, spontaneity and joy were the very ingredients that Seth would place uppermost in any theory or scheme of life’s “beginnings,” regardless of its philosophical stance.