“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

1. Recently, I bought two books written by “scientific creationists.” The authors strongly disagree with ideas of evolution. I’ve read halfway through one of the books, and have discussed it with Jane to some extent. After the session I suggested that she start reading it also, in order to acquaint herself with theories radically different from the “ordinary” scientific ones espoused by evolutionists. Very briefly: The creationists believe that God created the universe (including the earth, obviously) around 10,000 years ago. They maintain that all of the earth’s living forms have remained essentially unchanged since that prime creative event; they can account for the disappearance of the dinosaurs, for example, and the vast number of other life forms we no longer see around us. On the other hand, evolutionary science believes that the universe came into being between 10 billion and 20 billion years ago; that the earth itself is about 4.6 billion years old, and that according to the fossil record and other evidence, its living organisms first arose and began evolving at least 3.5 billion years ago. Science also believes, however, that the study of a “first cause” involves not scientific but philosophical and theological questions. For instance, why did the universe we think we know so well come into existence at all, and what was the cause of that beginning?

I know that Jane is interested in the book in question, but also a bit afraid of it: “I don’t want to be so influenced by it—or by any other book—that it starts coming out in the material,” she’s said more than once recently. I agree, since I think that in their own ways the views expressed by the scientific creationists are just as limited as those held by the conventional scientific establishment. But Jane has an excellent critical mind. I’m not concerned that anything she reads will unduly influence her—or Seth.

[...] Her feelings about it are both ambiguous and funny: “You’ve got to watch those guys,” she said more than once, meaning the creationists, “or they’ll lead you right where they want you to go. [...]

However, aside from being in outright conflict with the theory of evolution [and the idea of an ancient universe], the beliefs of the creationists do pose a number of questions that are quite intriguing from our joint viewpoint. [...]

“The creationists put down other species, as do the evolutionists, taking it as fact that no other species is capable of conceptual thought, where I think that statement is extremely dubious generally, and even specifically in light of the work being done with dolphins, for example. [...]

(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. [...] 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.

(I think it more than a coincidence that in these excerpts from Seth Speaks, Seth mentions Darwin’s theory of evolution and the Biblical story of creation in the same sentence, for those systems of belief represent the two poles of the controversy over origins in our modern Western societies: the strictly Darwinistic, mechanistic view of evolution, in which the weakest of any species are ruthlessly eliminated through natural, predatory selection, and the views of the creationists, who hold that God made the earth and all of its creatures just as described in the Bible.

(Jane and I certainly do not hold creationist views [see Note 1]. [...]

If man paid more attention to his own subjective behavior, to those feelings of identification with nature that persistently arise, then half of the dictates of both the evolutionists and the creationists would automatically fall away, for they would appear nonsensical.⁴ It is not a matter of outlining a whole new series of methods that will allow you to increase your psychic abilities, or to remember your dreams, or to perform out-of-body gymnastics. [...]

[...] The theories of both evolutionists and creationists strongly suggest and reinforce beliefs in the consecutive nature of time, and in a universe that begins in such-and-such a fashion, continuing on to such-and-such an end—but there are horizontal events that appear in the true activity of nature, and there are horizontal entry points and exit points in all experience. [...]