Dr. Seyyed Hossein Nasr - Darwinian Evolution

now today we're going to be discussing one of the most crucial and important subjects in the relationships in religion or science and there is a question of evolution between the Newtonian Revolution of 1917 century Scientific Revolution which culminated in Newton until the 19th century which was the Age of Enlightenment supported by the new physics based on the mechanical view of the world the history of science was essentially one of the application of Newtonian views to different fields fill of chemistry to the geology and as far as the natural history was concerned this rational approach purely rational approach the study of nature came in the form of classification very intense interest in classification classification of plants classification of animals classification of minerals this was the 18th century was the age of the great natural historians of European scientific history like before previa and came out in the 19th century with Louis Agassiz the last of them really who migrated from Switzerland to Cambridge Massachusetts was a famous professor zoologist Harvard University after and the museum of natural history of Harvard is named the way a BC Museum here represents the last of these great natural historians who but not newtonian in the sense of trying to create a mechanical view of the natural world but who applied the use of reason and rationality to as a classification beginning with Linnaeus the great swedish natural historian who classified most of the route of the natural world to Louis Agassiz was ruthless and in great classical natural historians however something else was gradually simmering and that is the question of trying to reduce the origin of life and life itself to accord with that mechanical view of the world there is the primacy of quantity Darwinism came upon the weight of this transformation that was taking place in Europe in the 19th century Charles Darwin did not begin in a vacuum it was not the only person to be spoken about the evolution of life form we have also Wallace and others but more than that there was a philosophical way upon which really Darwinism wrote you might say and for that reason also of all the theories that have come out of modern science the only one that is really turned into a pseudo religion is Darwinism Darwinism is an ideology it is not science in a certain sand people think in high school you say oh this is science but I'll show you in a moment that in fact there's no scientific proof of macro-evolution whatsoever it is in fact a way of looking at the world is the ideology of the modern world it's the main peg of the tent of the modern world you remove that unattentive Parata and what he said and that's why nobody wants to discuss it scientifically it's not like quantum mechanics it's called a quantum astronomy quantum cosmology theory of relativity various theories of chemical bonding all of the other theories are existence of various Sciences if you oppose the theory of evolution and the biologist you probably not be promoted to associate professorship your articles will not be published and leading journals and most likely will be kicked out of the field there's no other field of science that is like this for example the interpretation of quantum mechanics foundation about modern science the people who's openly opposed the Einsteinian view of quantum mechanics Einstein was the great god of modern physics but the functioning of the doing fine and the treated as scientists as long as that provides scientific opinion whereas when the professor of comparative zoology at Harvard University Douglas do er de w AR but written a number of very very important texts and essays on comparative anatomy and zoology which are published in the leading journals American journals learn the journals he wrote a book called the transform his delusion trying to show from purely zoological points of view that in fact macro-evolution is an impossibility and that Darwin was wrong that book was published by the mulberry mouse borrow press at Tennessee was not published in Cambridge Massachusetts it's very very telling the fact of 20th century history and of course you see this going around all the time for example every television program you see in the world of nature is not only a program on nature but it's also the gospel our exhibits the gospel of Darwinism that is behind it a particular way of preaching about the world of nature let me give an example the Discovery Channel films on the natural world the wonders incredible wonder of the natural world if you look at it with 60 minutes about 55 minutes you see animals eating other animals they're always eating each other now what do they finish up news about for a few days I knew the animals left in the world but the impact of the idea is that you have this constant strife and always the world first evolutions brought about 156 times every three seconds because of evolutionary reasons this animals eating the other animal and so forth and so on but then why don't they finish off there must be something else in nature what has the Platypus been around for 15 million years of history was going to each and all the time or eating something else so the view is given which is really as I said a gospel hour in a certain sense and no other theory of science in the last 400 years as it has done such a thing it forgot in sort of crept out of out of biology to influence not only the other sciences but also the social sciences and funny religion itself and I shall come to that in a moment but first of all let's go back to the theory of evolution I'm not going to go over in this class about the lack of Charles Darwin but the voyage of the Beagle the writing of the classical work the origin of the species war either read about this or heard about this but that's not important for this class after going on the voyage of the Beagle and the 1850s to a set of islands in South America which an incredible diversity of animal and plant life Darwin came back and all the Wallis that expresses argue before but Darwin got the credits he wrote the book the Origin of Species in which he denied the immutability of species in nature and denied also that there was any divine force in the bringing about of various species I said that in fact the reason we have different species is because of the survival of the fittest that exists in a struggle for life and certain forms of life adapt themselves to environments which then makes them change and become new species and the tail end of that of course is man well evolved from what Darwin thought was the monkey now these are the Givens if you really think seriously about this not in a sloppy manner but then rigorous philosophical thought what it really implies the follow there's no doubt that we do have the diversity of species except thanks to a modern man been destroying that diversity but it still some of it is around every time we have a class here by the time the class finishes several hundred species of animals and plants have been destroyed in the world you cannot imagine every 60 minutes about a hundred species are destroyed in the world unbelievable what we're doing to nature but the diversity is there still is there there are all religions and I mean all religions there are no exceptions considered the origin of life to be divine when you said what about these primal religions which saw Mother Earth but Mother Earth was a cell divine mother earth it was not a piece of rock gaya was not just piece of rock was a cell the divine reality which gave birth to life and I want to cut rather the basis of this pseudo ecofeminism right now which which claims that if she just take the feminine pole and talk about the earth rather than the Sun and the heavens and put aside the paternal athlete of religion that religion will have no contradiction with the evolutionary idea because everything comes from out of the earth this is just a pseudo philosophy of there were strongest lacking rigor completely the primal religions which speak about Mother Earth more than the later religious more than Christianity and Judaism and Islam and Zoroastrianism and other whose horizons the earth is an angel in fact in tourism texts but those old religious lights in Navajo religion Hopi religion African religions Aboriginal religions that a lot of people not talk about and a lot of this revival of witchcraft in the United States and England Wicca called Wicca against the more dominant Christian religion which existed for two thousand years or fifteen hundred years in Europe is always the idea of reviving the religion of the earth the earth is now very much favored this is not what the biologists were talking about it's only shoddy thinking that can make this confusion confusion because that earth which these religions talked about itself is divine it represents min in a certain sense the talk about Chinese cosmology and young so that but that's quite something else but what Darwinism really implies is that all that the religions had said concerning the creative power of the divine is now taken from the divine and given to matter Darwin didn't speak very much about what the origin the first origin of life was but that really didn't matter he was he was afraid to talk about a really materialist but very soon weather but everything was agnostic about this and didn't know that's inconsequential he believed that after that whatever that first event was what religions had considered to be the creative power of the divinity or of the agents of the divinity like the Angels or like the Devas in Hinduism for like these supernatural beings that you have let's say Navajo religion that was no longer true the creative power belong to the material forces of love which with which we deal on earth that is like forces that is the most important transformation that took place that is if Newtonian mechanics if the Principia cut off the hand of God from the world of nature by reducing him to the clockmaker Darwinism did that for the abode of life and therefore tried to derive the various species from other life-forms which were not that species without any divine intervention now there is such a thing as theistic evolution a number of Christian theologians and some Jewish thinkers mostly Christian theologians start in the 19th century and goes on very much today claimed that all we accept Darwinism except that the change from one species to it the other comes to divine intervention that is neither Darwinism nor is it traditional Christian theology because the question the ultimate question is I don't want to get into theological discussions who has very very profound and important but the ultimate question is does the horse have a reality or is it just our imagination of taking from the flow of time cosmic flow a particular cut and saying this is a horse someone I'm saying that is four million years ago the horse were not divorced and the million years from now it will not be divorce so what we call the horse in fact is nothing but a moment in the flow of this river of time that's what it is so the consequence is that God doesn't know anything in a certain sense as the classical placer and theologians understood it because there's nothing to know because as I said other people have tried to say no God can know things he just knows the flow but there is no object to God's knowledge furthermore all religions and again I make no exceptions consider that everything in the universe comes from its divine origin even in Hinduism where we talked about the world egg DeHerrera Garvie in Sanskrit I said that that's not like saying that gradually the amoeba evolves into the Orang goat on all of those creatures that are in the cosmos are contained potentially in this egg which is really divine egg is not material there's a lot of misconception today between the Hindu Hera Garba and the original super molecules the person is the same thing it's not the same thing at all it's not at all the same thing but the super molecules which is the later stage of the theory of evolution is nothing but at what molecules are according to us now that is purely quantifiable materially defined entities and there's nothing divine about the molecules the nothing divine about the original soup whereas in the traditional cosmologies either you had the Fiat Lux God Himself creating the world and the species or you had luck in Hinduism got a divine reality which then gradually develops and this is what has fooled many Indians to thinking that evolutionism is also Hindu no other religion in the world has been duped as much by evolution of outside of the West as Hinduism and that is the reason for it now of course not their author laws on traditional Hinduism Banaras but you will never find an Indian in Delhi who is not a revolutionist because of the power of British education and is also very telling wherever the British went in the world the Tod Darwinism where the French and the Dutch and other European colonizers went they were that much interested in it now that there were no defenders of Darwinism but Darwin was an Englishman and became an English hero and that a lot to do with this I remember once I gave a lecture in Darwin Australia I gave the Charles from memorial lectures in 1917 Australia and then all the way north in Australia oh god I'm sorry I forget this really what I represent condition itself all the way north of Australia there's the city of Darwin which is named after Charles Darwin by Newton Massachusetts named after Sir Isaac Newton and it was very difficult giving a lecture in Darwin against Darwin local here of the city you can't talk against them so it's very interesting that in India and Pakistan this was pushed into the minds of the people there because a British education this was not the case of North Africa put Hinduism aside there are at least a dozen books written by Indian Muslims or Pakistani Muslims defending the theory of evolution there's not one by Moroccan Muslim for an Algerian Muslim very very interesting we had to do with the fact that this became part and parts of the educational system but going back to Hinduism Hinduism because that the idea of the development of the whole cosmos from an original being called the divine egg during a Garba many people take understood that well this is just what we were saying and try to jump on the bandwagon really of evolutionism in the Islamic world the number of both philosophers and Sufis where we spoken in a language which some people think is Darwinism Aboriginal baloney as I told you are discovered the transformation of seeds into a land our land into the sea the significance of fossils and speaks about older geological ages in which the whole geology of the earth and the collisions were different and you have the very famous poet Jolla lady Rumi which is been misconstrued by contemporary Muslims a million times the famous poem that begins with the verse as Jamal D more de mon ami Sodom that is I died from being a mineral and became a plant by dogs from the plants and became an animal I died from an animal and became a man a day will come when I shall die from manhood and reaches states which no angel can even conceive and then it ends with the worst possible Mirim case amor de Kamp's allah then let me die when when have I ever been less to dying now this is a purely mystical understanding of the human state and nothing to a revolution whatsoever absolutely because this is a vertical revolution from the time that we are in the groins of our Father and mother's womb until we become a human being to go through all of these stages but that is not evolution and Darwinian sense and this one is wrapped another very important point to all the traditions which spoke about this always believe that nothing can become what it is not potentially nothing can become what is not potentially that is the pair is an actualization of what the seed is potentially that is not evolution a Darwinian sense that is the actualization of the potential possibilities in anything and the whole process of nature is based on the actualization of possibilities it is this way of thinking that Darwinism opposed completely so a traditional philosopher would say that if you only have the original cosmic soup after the Big Bang occurred after which then everything gradually evolves coats and coats then somehow Christ must have already been in that soup if there's nothing outside of the universe that will come into it and everything is a sewage generis movement unchanged and transformation within that universe which the cosmologists say start with the super molecules and everything that develops later on must have already been there if you're innocent closest to that soup you must somewhere here the b-minor massive bomb they are done manifested itself yet but the b-minor master Bach is nothing that the original soup could not have come into being from the original soup otherwise you cannot talk logically there's no intelligible way to talk and let's not talk this is precisely what happens when you talk about evolution and the intellectual challenges to it it ends up when I talk by not talking so you have you not another Li evolutionism cut off you might say the hands of God from the creative process but it also tried to change the way that all philosophies and all metaphysics had thought about the question of development of movement of transformation in the world of nature now to be more specific because evolutionist Theory began in Great Britain in a Protestant and Lincoln country and the first responses to it were from anglicanism Catholicism was at first opposed to it we had to wait for the present talk at the end of his life to make that very strange statement about the evolution of the body to which then the soul is added for some remarkable way which has been you know the big outcry by many Catholic biologists in Europe against that statement somebody probably handed it to the club to read it anyway now let's get to the concrete situation of the great rest of the 19th century where of course being an Anglican denomination by and large the Catholics were almost all destroyed during the time of Henry death there's a few Catholics surviving and the other churches the Presbyterian the Methodist churches if they were not in the majority there were the state's religion under where most of the intellectual activity was was in anglicanism Americanism of course like other major branches of Christianity had interpreted the book of Genesis until that time to mean that God was the creator of the species you read the account of Genesis that God created the heavens and the earth on the first stages and the second day third day so fourth and seventh day he created man the theologians in Great Britain like those in the rest of Europe and all great Christian theologians they were quite aware of course that the day da why did none in 24 hours and was a parody of that that this sound the scientists trying to attack religion for bringing out nor theologian believed that day meant that especially since the first day there was not the Sun on the moon so how would you measure the day obviously so it could not have been 24 hours he meant periods but there was the belief that the creative power is argued with the divinity the punctuation of 7 which is very very significant to be logical in from now it's very interesting the 18th century Cuvier film is French natural historian after but what a greatest of up scientists over who lived in 18th century had also divided their cycles of history on earth that is a geological study into seven periods corresponding in ascent to the seven days of creation but that's not important what important point was that creativity resided in the hands of the Lord and all species were created by God Judaism all traditional Judaism holds that the two fundamental functions of God are the creations of the species and the preservation of the species there are hundreds and hundreds of Jewish texts on this for example marriage of human beings was considered to be always a religious act and it still is one of the few things that remains that religion modern society is walking down the aisle on this birth marriage and death these three elements I still have something with the religion for most people to stuff in Judaism marriage was seen as always being an act of the Lord to preserve the species somebody said joking in a Jewish theologian he said God is the main marriage counselor and person who finds pay parents were for to put them together to propagate and continue the human species and of course the religion all religions when they made this statement was supported by nature and this denobula feels very very strange too because it will be not taught in schools that is just a fundamentalism religious fundamentalism and this is not science but nature is the preserver of species nature resists even small changes you know biologists have charged to bring about evolutionary change by creating changes in thousands and thousands of insects with the hope of getting a new species that never happened you always get what's called micro evolution there's small changes that is still within the boundary of the species yes for example a parasite can turn from brown to red or something like that I wish to say jokingly clap my class and there's a word before Clinton tried to be holier than down bad and smoking from the world the pretty stone if evolution is correct should all be born with it still holding on our lips for for the cigarette that I've had 500 years of smoking it but I said jokingly but if I'd make sure does not do that the species may die but nature resists changing the species and worse than that from the point of evolution is that paleontology is the enemy of Darwinian evolution exactly in contrast to what we are taught in schools the gap have look at all dependent illogical record or a look at it you never have these intermediate forms you always have sudden appearance of species how many times have you read about missing links I don't have to make any comment about that visitors still talked about all the time I studied one full year paleontology at Harvard used to go to the Agassiz Museum all the time I memorized all of the stress graphene layers all this trilobite all of these little bugs there is some have been around for five hundred million years without changing at all about that that has not taught you and I could never get my teachers to explain why is it you always have a jump I mean for these pictures you've seen all your elementary school books of the horse gradually evolving into the horse that's utter nonsense utter nonsense because you don't have any of these intermediary fossils it is true that there were animals on earth that don't exist anymore then I have to wait for these Hollywood movies to show that there were dinosaurs around dinosaurs were not known but we have classical text written by Muslim geologists saying that there were certain animal have disappeared in Hinduism completely outside of geology there's the view that in every cosmic site appearance you have animals and creatures corresponding to that period so what if we don't have any let's say are unicorns now that doesn't mean they were no unicorns around and the argument is that of course I couldn't find any fossils for them yet it means that what you do not see doesn't exist which is of course absurd but there are also many things which for which we do have fossils so that's not the problem that there were animals that existed which do not exist now but when you look at the record the dinosaurs appear suddenly in the current illogical record and with under the biologists have the greatest difficulty showing this gradual evolution because if there's gradual evolution of gradual changes the funniest one of course is about ourselves you've all seen these pictures Museum Natural History all of these as there are churches for this for the student relation you have first of all a monkey and then gradually gets up a little more and gets a little more and of course his forehead gets bigger and bigger until it ends with us I've always said go to this anything I'm a big American city city of Washington City of New York right now in this city there are sizes of craniums all the way from what was supposed to be our great ancestors in the jungles of Africa to ourselves and this is just nothing but imagination all of these links of man pills town man all of these a picking man you know all of those that were hoaxes and stories in fact we have never seen never been able to prove a link the human being appears on earth immediately that's why now certain modern geologists like Gould at Harvard has a new theory totally from the classical Darwinian theory and still trying to stick to evolution that's not evolution anymore he says you have spurts of evolution that you have a sudden revolution very quickly and a form appears and then it lands for a very very long time it doesn't evolve at all which is a way of trying to preserve the name Darwin of evolution without it it's not evolution among what are their forces what is it that is doing this you said it cannot explain what survival of the fittest but we do know that forms that is biological forms appear all of a sudden and the paleontological record shows this so you have two facts first of all in the world of nature in which we live now nature is very obstinate to preserve the species we can change it a little bit you can breathe for example so we get an Arabian horse which runs fast but we and we can do some interbreeding you end up at the mule but then the mule cannot propagate itself you have to go back and mate a horse and a donkey together the next mule and it's unbelievable how resistance nature is look at our bodies how they fight to remain what they are our bodies in fact do not evolve as we think they do yes we get used to heat we get used to cold I mean for example you might say every time you go to the Middle East or to India your stomach evolves the first for 24 hours you get a stomachache but that's as far as the evolution goes and so you have these major major problems which have in a sense wounded the theory of evolution scientifically and much more so in the last 4050 years than before you have two currents going opposite each other on the one hand the theory of evolution is the only theory to come out of modern science which has become universalized in modern culture would you always talk about the evolution of things you don't talk about anything anymore always evolution even of technology evolution of the dress of soldiers in American military history you name it and this is a word that is all over evolution and art style everything is seen from this point of view and is penetrated more and more into the domain of religion I'll get to that in a moment on the other hand you've had within the scientific world more and more opposition to the theory of evolution I want to talk about the secondary moments and then I go to the first dissatisfaction of the tree of evolution with 20 of biologists began early in the 1930s at a time when this had dog become such as Furman Dogma as it is now although by that time I had already established itself I mentioned you the case of Douglas door but the anglo-saxon world in general that is American England he did much less this type of criticism I believe for purely cultural reasons so the main thrust of scientific writing against Darwinian evolutionary theory came from Europe as continental Europe and today for example you have a number of very prominent biologist stir-fries in Italy in Germany but brought up a new idea they do not at all talk about theology or religion God disappears a scientific study of life forms they said we do not believe in evolution there is what occurs in nature is what are they called I'll mention his French term for you guys was coined in French it's called la revolución organicist that is if you were transferred transferred to English not organic but organic cystic revolution that is if they said if you remain faithful to just observing what has happened on the basis of the paleontological record and the geology and the diversity of life forms in different continents today that if you ready take zoology botany seriously without a dogmatic prejudice in fact what you do you see is revolutions out for what the kernel can assist that is sort of vital or revolutions of life life spurts for new the species come then species are round then again life spurts for new species now this theory of course is very strongly opposed but people like Simpson Mayer the great classical exponents of Darwinian evolution and by many many people in this country in the American social advancement of science and America of science but he also has many proponents and then you've had books which criticized even the possibility of Darwinian evolution from the point of view of Anatomy comparative anatomy like Jakob Denton at the book of door and those who criticize it from the point of view of molecular biology and this field has been devastating to evolutionists because everybody thought that ever that molecular biology would be the link between physics chemistry and biology and would show that bio forms are nothing more than complicated chemicals complicated molecules extremely chemical molecules which themselves are then atoms to be discussed in physics and we thought this was part of the missing link in science she were to materialize everything but it has happened just the other way there is a book that has come out which has been like a firestorm through the scientific community the last year scientists color first on my mind for being who's professor of molecular biology and Lehigh University Pennsylvania one of the leading figures in his field and he has come out with a book called Darwin's black box Darwin's black box which is absolutely devastating it's a complicated book if you have not studied biology or science to have trouble going through it because in very hair is not just sort of romantic writing it is very heavy scientific stuff and what he says was that one of the foundations of Darwinian theory was that evolution goes from the simple to the complex from the simple cell to our brain I remember that the greatest heresy in evolutionism to talk about design there is no design in nature there is no purpose to nature it just happens by accident but it goes from simplicity to complexity so how do you explain this incredible fact that when I won my right hand to move I move and I have two eyes and not three eyes and all of these incredible things that would feel as if they were design we keep saying that our brain is a computer he always reduce ourselves to our own creations now our body is a machine after the invented the machine our brain is a computer when I was at I go to university 3040 years ago we didn't have but brain was not a computer whether computer I'm not gonna invent it but now it's the brain is a computer all right this is so the computer is designed it didn't evolve out of a gum of a tree you know it was designed but somebody with intelligence is that undesigned it but the evolution would say ah no that's not so give us enough time and you hop through the process of evolution is simple to the complex without any design you end up with the brain this is why the fundamental thesis of evolutionism is the denial of design and evolution from simplicity to complexity now BAE has shown that through microbiology we can see that the simplest units of life simplest single unit of life itself has a come complexity beyond imagination and in fact life does not at all go from the simple to the complex life starts with incredible complexity and this is a deathblow if one takes it seriously to this whole enterprise so there's been a lot of criticism from many different angles there's all different mathematics because from information theory important information theory we could never get more information out of the unit that you can put into it it's the foundation of information theory of all computers of everything together unit a in a box the amount of information can put in which also means structures in modern science I don't mean information a sense of telephone numbers the whole structure you can never get more information out for them now this already is damning to any view which claims that through some kind of a temporal change there's more information coming out of this unit than going in and that's why the most important criticisms of evolutionary theories of it before Bay came along but had to be taken seriously by biologists was that of mathematicians mathematicians who claimed that this is against all the principles of mathematics this cannot work so a single creature cannot evolve in what we call higher because evolved always for us means higher very interesting because the idea of evolution was combined with that of progress in the 19th century and therefore anyone who's who criticizes it is really relative to the realm of being a simpleton or a or someone stupid and he will have the image the so-called famous monkey trial in which had one of the most brilliant American lawyers on one side and some simple fellow on the other side who looked who lost out and so we are gonna remind the division that all intelligent people believe in evolution anyone who doesn't believe is stupid and this is actually a propaganda of modern society that's not at all the case but it must be understood in that context this whole question of evolution and the racial religion of science must be understood in the cultural context for example the mass media none of them would dare ever say anything against the theory of evolution because then it would be identified with the Christian right with fundamentalism with mr. Robertson's program on television and so forth and so on would be categorized in such a way that he could get into his office the next morning but that would be the end of him so whatever it is in his heart that will never be said but the debate is not between fundamentalists from Georgia and brilliant Harvard biologist from Cambridge Massachusetts is not like that at all it's a much much more profound and serious problem but the theory of evolution since the time of Darwin for the first time is really a lame duck but nobody is willing to discuss it openly in Europe and at least in America and England because of the cultural forces there are cultural factors this professor Bailey has got into a lot of trouble since fortunate tenure the full professors lehigh they can't kick him out but he wrote an essay in the Lehi alumni journal which I saw in which he said everything since that happened neither one you have a large number of the newspaper reporters coming and talking to him that has sort of been receiving the cold shoulders from many colleagues for having betrayed his profession as if science should not be the quest after the truth we're looking for in particular a field now we come to what is much more important for this class is the other side of this and that is the crisis caused by the field revolution in religion which the Western religion and the responses of Western religion to it the crisis with religion in England began not with Charles Darwin but with Thomas Huxley we serve the propagandist of the Darwinian view and wrote openly denying all the Christianity and thoughts about man of course but not even men and women that we are created in the image of God that we have an immortal soul we have moral responsibility and that in fact Christ taught something totally opposed to the Darwinian idea of the survival of the fittest Christ did not preach to the fittest nor did he ask us to be the fittest by which means the strongest he always supported the meek and humble on the weak so the preaching of Huxley was really a kind of new religion and it split English intellectual society in half and very very bitter debate ensued which lasted for about a century finally people got tired of it and put it aside the meanwhile of all the different scientific theories had been propagated nothing caused more than evolutionism tearing away from religion and agnosticism and destruction of religion in the West nothing there are today in England a number of vocal biologists who are out and out atheists of whom the most famous is Dawkins Dawkins is a preacher for atheism the ghost of the university to university preaching atheism as a biologist saying that all of this is bunked the Hall of religion is nonsense and I wrote somewhere because the names rhyme that how different situation is today with physics even a person like Stephen Hawkins who wrote the history of time said that it was not known for being an innovator theologically inclined the religious inclined he said we cannot really conceive of the universe without having the hypothesis of God present and as a long journey from hockings to dockings Dawkins is a Maryland an aggressive atheist doesn't only say we do not know he says anyone who thinks of religion is deluding himself and this is all nonsense and we can explain how everything develop in the cell and there's no such thing as free will for nothing as such no sign in spirit and so on and so on this is in a sense the result of those bitter debates that went on in the late 19th century in Great Britain and it's interesting of all the countries of the West no country has been as deeply concerned and as deeply wounded by the theory of revolution as Britain where Darwin was born where these debates first took place of course the hadrons effect everywhere all in America and the rest of Europe and now the rest of the world but especially in Great Britain anyway after these bitter debates of the late 19th century theologians tried to sort of a juxtaposed opposition those who were called fundamentalists and the term fundamentalism was not used for Catholicism as users for Protestantism is that American phenomena does not exist in England's now gone back to England and those who when Protestantism called fundamentalist clung to the theory of creation which is called creationism and this goes back precisely to the attacks made by evolutionism in the late 19th century upon the Bible they are cleared in America a movement in the late 1890s saying that the text of the Bible sacrosanct is the Word of God and we will not accept any evolutionary interpretations of it or evolution to our historical method which went hand in hand with Darwinism that is historicism which tries which would try to reduce the Bible to simply a text which is of interest because it reflects the social conditions of the eastern Mediterranean war on the 1st century AD or something like that the New Testament and the rest of a few thousand years before isn't that kind of view they refused and they called themselves fundamentalist the term which on has become very pejorative because it become demonized the press demonized it in the late 1970s considered Islamic world and now you have Jewish fundamentalism Christian for Elizabeth pejorative sense for a Hindu fundamentalism but the original term fundamentalism was really an attempt to defend the text of the Bible that's what the fight was so these peoples in the text of the Bible says that God create the heavens and the earth and create the plan separate the animal separated man the create creativity must belong to God and they rejected Darwinian evolution the other groups are rejected it for the traditional Catholics and traditional Catholics were in the vast majority until 1964 when the Second Vatican was held it was after 1964 that evolutionary Catholic theology came to the fore I'll mention that in just a moment so your heart this is was one position that was taken by the churches that is simply rejecting Darwin that those who belong to the more liberal wing so-called of the Protestant movement they try to accommodate their teachings to that of evolutionism and most of them vied for this position which is called a theistic evolution send us yes we accept that this such a process but God's hand is in it which analyzed philosophically would find even have to reduce it to one of those two positions if God's hand is in it what is the hand of God means that means actually it is he who creates the species which is going along with the flow of his own creation but the word versus hand doing in fact this coming issue of Sophia there's a major article by dr. Rama kamaswami of Indian origin and a traditional Catholic on this type of evolution theistic evolution which really gives the cooler glass to this position yes no no process theology comes with the flow so after North Whitehead will create the process philosophy but the two meet you're right Francis theology believes that God is not immutable and permanent and ultimate but in a sense himself is is in the process and himself in a sense of changing and evolving and the universe small marks the continuous evolution of God himself that's what process theology and process philosophy are anyway the Detroit accommodate themselves before creation was concerned and they underground almost all the churches even those who accepted our inner evolution believe them when you came to man you had a higher law than the law of the so-called law of the jungle in which the weak are dominated by the strong that is it did not give up Christian ethics he was however other moments in Europe anti religious European movements which took on evolutionism as a prop for the program even if the answer is first of all European colonialism when the British call about talk about white man's burden then believe that they were helping the process of evolution Herbert Spencer said so the famous British philosopher the great loss of evolution the late 19th century and of course we know the idea of the superior races or race in the case of Nazi Germany and all of this pure purity of race and so forth based on the underpinning ideas of course and but Christianity never accepted from its mainstream the idea that the law of the jungle should be substituted for the ethical teachings of Christ because that was the law of nature they tried to advance the law of nature human law is different but they were fighting a defensive battle because people that argue as well we are also part of nature Russia and the law of nature are applied to us and the great struggle ensued which the wounded Christian ethics to a large extent in his practice of course and still goes on it's very funny we talk about the laws of jungle the Amazon before modern man got into it with the world biggest jungle and it survived for a long long time an incredible harmony none of the species destroyed the other species completely it is catholic portuguese who was supposed to follow another law than the law of the jungle that destroyed the jungle and of course the covetousness are people not very far from us from this room it's not only their poor portuguese and farmers but also the money behind that that came from north america so it's the idea of the law of the jungle whose are accepted never criticized but Christian ethic structures keep separate self from it the other religions of the world didn't bother very much with the theory of evolution here permission has very little impact upon the Islamic world and upon Islamic thought and save upon Buddhist thought the only exceptions break religion of the world outside of the West were afraid to some extent by it was a particular strand within for reasons that would be very complicated and I try to summarize for you very briefly partner to this English education I'm part of in this traditional Hindu cosmology of these vast cycles and developments of the cosmic history which people thought could be much more easily interpreted in terms of Darwinian evolution than let's say the Quranic or the biblical account of the creation of the world but in India India produced the only famous important religious thinker we tried to combine evolution in theory with Hindi with religion and his name was Sri Aurobindo his name you should know what a remarkable man he lived at the end of the 19th century I was the height of his activity he died around the first world war ii world war he originally was part of the indian national movement along with mahatma gandhi with ananda coomaraswamy with Tillich many important figures were the founders of modern India and then he retired after having had a vision of Krishna from public life and retired to little French colony called Pondicherry in the east coast of India under the recipe to make the rest of his life practicing yoga and trying to create what he called integral yoga Anna wrote a lot of poems you know English very well in a great master of the English language and he wrote a very very important forms and he wrote the three-volume major work called the life divine the life divine in which he talks about about the divine from the point of view of life which means there was something that changes and his in time and the divided life itself penetrates into the cosmos and the cosmos therefore is in the process of evolution and change I'm not doing full justice to what he says is a very complicated book but anyway it's not Orthodox and traditional Hinduism is the sense of melange of Hinduism which we know well and evolutionary theory he assembly around himself a number of Europeans in fact his wife was also Shakti because practice Tantra yoga was a French woman called now the mot mother and at the moment that his death sri aurobindo told the person whom i knew that as i noticed by one link he said when i was young krishna promised me the supreme vision but he has never come i'm about to leave the world and i now discovered that my Shakti is the Lamia the mother was blocking me until now and anyway he died and this woman took over was considered to be a kind of holy woman a French woman called the mother and there they built organ that is named after or a window this city of the future I don't understand you have seen the architecture is quite incredible visionary City but it in a sense that man will evolve his consciousness will evolve to into that higher plane and all of this talk in Asia of the consciousness of evolution of consciousness to the Superman and so forth comes from a Wyndham and his ilk and his group of course Nietzsche that time has already spoken about the Superman ubermensch in Germany which was about morality his famous book on Beyond Good and Evil and this was connected by this type of thinker with the great saints and sages who were not of the past but not we would all evolve into that and it created a kind of pseudo synthesis between evolutionary theory and religion which is very powerful and is still very much in our world you all think that because we live in the 20th century there some are more perfect that people live in the 19th century how many times have you heard that you say further the Bosnian war took place they say oh how medieval that is this is this taking place in 1992 we are not supposed to be doing this thing through the Middle Ages did that thing of course the 20th century has killed more people than how centuries of human history combined but that's besides the point we had this idea that man evolves into higher place and then this was taken over completely by the new age this idea well most of all these journals that come out you know sedona tries to call all the journals that fill the racks in borders bookstores have to be new aged almost all of them are based on the idea that they're going to be devolving into a higher plane of course that would take place in California where that's beside the point but background it comes actually from the work of Sri Aurobindo and a kind of pseudo Hinduism that then comes out of India always talking about evolution if you go to any of these Vedanta centers as so many of the people who the lecture they think of the talk in these terms ever in the West will become attracted to them they talk about the evolution of humanity evolution of humanity this has to do with the second important figure books were banned in the Catholic Church until 1964 was the Catholic priest paleontologist who tried to combine Catholicism with evolutionary theory and he talked up Christ as the omega point but that matter would evolve into crust the action said that that matter would evolve into Christ and that we're all actually the process of evolution who gradually evolved into no sphere what he call into noosphere from the biosphere into noosphere n oo sphere from the Greek news and that there was a vast evolutionary scheme starting with the prana matter which graduated with evolved and Christ represents the when it comes to the last next time the same coming of Christ but he called the omega point of history after 1964 tallada sheldon gained a lot of followers in europe and was one of the most powerful forces with the destruction of two mystic theology in the catholic church to the current and now he's died out somewhat that they're tailored Chardon societies in france and england in in the United States and Italy very very popular for two three decades and there's some extremely influential people today within the Catholic Church portal Aviance what many people have written against them in my book knowledge ins and the sacred the chapter called eternity in a temporal order in which I give a critique out for the frontier the traditional religion of the theory of evolution have spoken extensive about to allow each other under many books and reference which I refer there in case you are interested you can go on with the footnotes and pick up those books anyway these are the two most important moments in which a kind of theology related to a materialistic evolution the evolution of matter drawn from Darwinism were created and the both have had very great impact 100 in the world and through its upon two largest and by the New Age movements in America and one in the Catholic world of course there are many Protestant theologians who also believe in evolution but they're not had such an impact and there are so few Muslim thinkers including Mohammed Abad who was in a sense fooled by this but he that did not be getting major contributions so nobody took that very seriously

Channel: Illuminated Scarfaces

Views: 30,720

Keywords: Hossein Nasr (Philosopher), Evolution (Idea), Darwinism (Ideology), Islam (Religion), Humanism (Idea), Renaissance (Art Period/Movement), René Descartes (Author), Galileo Galilei (Author), Intelligent Design (Ideology), Richard Dawkins (Author), Israeli–Palestinian Conflict (Film Subject), Atheism (Religion), Richard Dawkins (Academic), Avicenna (Physician), Al-Farabi (Author), Al-Kindi (Inventor), Islamic Science, Islmaic Studies, Zionism (Political Ideology)

Id: mpMbnyRtHgA

Length: 61min 11sec (3671 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 30 2014