“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(From the beginning, then, Seth has referred to evolution in his material. He attaches his own meanings to it, however, and as I show in this appendix, does not imply that all life as we know it on this planet evolved from a single primeval source. [See notes 5 and 7.]

(Many creationists believe that the Bible is literally true. [An undetermined number of scientists hold creationist views, by the way, but I have no statistics to offer on how many do.] The Bible certainly advocates at least a relative immutability of species, rather than a common ancestry in which a single cell evolved into a variety of ever more complex and divergent forms. In between these opposites there range all shades of meaning and interpretation on evolution. Theistic evolutionists and progressive creationists, for example, try to bring the two extremes closer together through postulating various methods by which God created the world and then, while remaining hidden, either helped it to evolve to its present state in the Darwinistic tradition, or, through a series of creative acts, brought forth each succeeding “higher” form of life.

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.