“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.

There is no such thing, in your terms, as nonliving matter. There is simply a point that you recognize as having the characteristics that you have arbitrarily ascribed to life, or living conditions. For there is no particular point at which life was inserted into nonliving matter.

(My position after writing this appendix is that in scientific and religious terms we know little about our world [and universe], its origins, and its amazing variety of forms, both “living” and “nonliving.” Our own limitations may have something to do with our attitudes here, yet Jane and I have become very careful about believing science or religion when either one tells us it can explain our world, for each of those disciplines ignores too much. No matter what the source of this camouflage reality may be, our conscious lack of knowledge and understanding as we manipulate within it, through naïve realism or any other system of belief or perception, ought to make us humble indeed; all arrogance should be transcended as we become more and more aware of the limitless beauty, complexity, and mystery that surrounds us, and of which we are part. Jane and I just don’t think it all came about through chance! The mind can ask too many questions to be satisfied with mechanistic explanations, and nurturing that characteristic of dissatisfaction alone may be one of the most valuable contributions the Seth material can make.

5. According to my interpretation of this sentence, Seth stops short of telling us that in our reality all species — man, animals, and plant life (and viruses and bacteria too, for that matter) — developed from a single primordial living source. Evolutionary theory maintains that such a source spontaneously came into being, riding upon various protein molecules (or certain other kinds of molecules) that had themselves chemically — and miraculously — evolved out of nonliving matter, then demonstrated the ability to duplicate themselves. (When Seth came through with this 44th session, neither Jane nor I had enough background information about theories of evolution to ask him to be more specific. Proteins, for instance, are very complex chains of amino acids, and consist of nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, and/or certain other elements. They exist in great variety in all animal and vegetable matter; in the body each protein supports a very definite function.) But the view that all life had a common origin, that by pure chance it originated on the earth — just once — without the aid of God, or any sort of designer, is today accepted by most scientists in biology and related disciplines. Such thinking stems from the work done in the 19th century by the English naturalists Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace.

It’s often been claimed that Darwin’s natural selection, while ruling out any question of design or a planner — God, say — behind living matter, leaves unexplained the same question relative to the structure of nonliving matter, which in those terms obviously preceded life. I’d rather approach that argument through another statement Seth made in Chapter 20 of Seth Speaks (in the 582nd session): “You are biologically connected, chemically connected with the Earth that you know….” How is it that as living creatures we’re made up of ingredients — atoms of iron, molecules of water, for instance — from a supposedly dead world? In the scientific view we’re utterly dependent upon that contradictory situation. No one denies the amazing structure or design of our physical universe, from the scale of subatomic particles on “up” (regardless of what cosmological theory is used to explain the universe’s beginning). The study of design as one of the links between “living” and “nonliving” systems would certainly be a difficult challenge — but a most rewarding one, I think — for science. I have little idea of how the work would be carried out. Evidently it would lead from biology through microbiology to physics with, ultimately, a search that at least approached Seth’s electromagnetic energy (EE) units and units of consciousness (CU’s). Yet according to Seth, both classes of “particles” are in actuality nonphysical; as best words can note, they have their realities on scales so minute that we cannot hope to detect them through our present technology….

Nor can solar energy be thought of as the agent that directly turned nonliving matter into its living counterpart; in those terms, life required its intermediate molecules, which sunlight is not able to construct. Life needs protein in order to “be,” and to sustain it through metabolism — then it can use solar energy! Darwin’s theory that life arose by chance poses a basic contradiction: What made the protein that sustains the processes of life, before that life was present to make the protein?