The literary foundations of Christianity were laid in the Hebrew Bible. One of the outstanding features of the God of the Hebrews is their unity, although different sections of the text use different names, Yahweh or Elohim, for the same being. Yahweh - Wikipedia, Elohim - Wikipedia
We like to think of ourselves as the pinnacle of creation, and we attribute this to one of our obvious super-powers, imagination. While se see animals like sheep living from day to day in the same groove, we like to see ourselves on a creative trajectory, and we place particular emphasis on artistic progress, new must, new cinema, more generally, new literatures, reflecting our new perceptions of our relationships to one another. This is where the action is. We see it in the creative drama in all its forms. The key idea is to place people in difficult and tense situations and work out how they behave. This paradigm runs from comedy to war and all the possible mixtures of these genres. All our media concentrate on what people are doing.
We may divide the world of literature into two broad categories representing two roles of roles of imagination. The first category we might call seeking the meaning of life, whose basic problem is the stark divide between pleasure and pain, between peace and war. This informs the science of theology whose consequences are the practices of religion, efforts to encourage the mysterious forces that guide our lives to traeat us benevolently.
The second category we might call engineering, the practical, rather than spiritual activities necessary to survive. In practice engineering runs from the technology of war, weapons and defences, through gathering and hunting, grazing, farming and horticulture to butchery, cookery and health care. The full spectrum of the practical arts. While theology has to do with the invisible and unpredictable behaviours of the forces that surround us, engineering seeks to take advantage of predictable things like the strength of materials and the behaviour of animal and plants to devise means for the survival and reproduction of our communities. It is the beginning of science.
Theology, as the name suggests, is the study of the influence of gods on human affairs. An early and comprehensive theological document is the Iliad, a long poem describing the last phase of the mythical Trojan War. This war involved complex interplay between gods and people. The Gods in this story are passionate people with certain super powers who take sides in the war and support or oppose the humans in a complex interplay of divine/human politics. Classical Greek literature gradually evolved through poetry and drama to philosophy and theology. On this site the high point of Greek philosophy and theology is the work of Aristotle, which, 1600 years after his death became the foundation of the medieval Renaissance of Catholic philosophy and theology. This led to the Summa Theologiae Thomas Aquinas which remains a fundamental text in Catholic theology. Iliad - Wikipedia, Aristotle - Wikipedia, Thomas Aquinas - Wikipedia
The principal document in Western theology is the Bible. The Hebrew theological tradition reflected in the books of the Hebrew Bible tradition began around the same time as the Iliad. Like the Iliad and other elements of the Greek Epic Cycle, the written Hebrew Bible was probably preceded by a long period of oral tradition. Unlike the very human gods of the Greek antiquity, the Hebrews were resolutely monotheistic. Their god Yahweh laid down the law in the Preamble to the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20: I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Hebrew Bible - Wikipedia
Miles (1996)The Hebrew Bible ended not with a bang but a whimper, the Book of Job. The book is a compilation of different texts and is not very coherent. Satan taunts God by claiming that Job, a wealthy man, would no longer be faithful to God if he lost the wealth, family and property that God had given. God disagrees, and to prove his point God lets Satan kill Job's children, deprive him of everything and inflict him with painful boils so he is left among the ashes scratching himself with a broken pot. Job remains faithful. God wins, Satan has lost but Job then becomes righteously angry with God for treating him so badly. God does not apologize, but rebukes Job for having the temerity to question his behaviour. Book of Job - Wikipedia
Miles, in an extended exegesis of the Jobs last words (pp 306 - 238), suggests that Job, rather subtly, points out that God, by emphasizing their power, fails in justice. The trouble starts in the Septuagint which translates Jobs last words as Therefore I despise myself / and repent in dust and ashes (42:6). Miles writes:
In the Hebrew, however this verse is ambiguous, and in the RSV resolution of the ambiguity no word has less support from the original than the world myself This last word, supplied in the Greek of the Septuagint and, in one way or another, in nearly every translation since then, might be described as the thin air to which is anchored the filament from which hangs the thread by which the traditional interpretation dangles. Against the traditional interpretation it is likely that though Job is in the grip of profoundly changed and negative feelings about something at this point, the something is not himself.
God has already established a reputation of senseless violence. The punishment of the first people in paradise was manifestly excessive, as was his decision to drown every living thing that upset him with the flood. At Mount Sinai, as they laid down the law, God required Moses to have all the worshippers of the golden calf slaughtered.
We hear no more from this God after they are defeated by Job.
This feature of the traditional divinity is central to cognitive cosmology. There we begin with an omnipotent God who is absolutely simple, that is, from a cybernetic pint of view, completely uncontrolled. This God creates without limit, producing unlimited random variation. It is only when we introduce the second half of the evolutionary process, selection, that the action of this God is controlled. Everything that exists in the universe has been tested by selection to show that it can sustain itself and so become an element of the world of reality. As explained on that site, variation is created by random unitary evolution in the Hilbert space domain of quantum mechanics. The need for unitarity is explained by the mathematical theory of communication which demands that communication sources act probabilistically as complete systems of events like the sides of a die. Claude Shannon (1949): Communication in the Presence of Noise, Collectively exhaustive events - Wikipedia
Paradise was lost in the Book of Genesis by the original sin. The writers of the New Testament construct a happy ending to the Hebrew bible, but only after recording another act of gratuitous violence: The Father , the successor of the God of the Hebrew Bible, arranges to have his own Son tortured to death in order to appease himself for the original sin in Paradise.
The life of Jesus is told in the Gospels and is depicted as the realization of Old Testament prophecies pointing to the appearance of a Messiah or anointed one. In the context of the Roman occupation of Jerusalem and the surrounding country, many interpreted this messiah as an avenging warlord who would free them from the Romans. From this point of view, Jesus was a disappointment, although he had miraculous powers to heal the sick, change water into wine and perform other deeds which gave credibility to his claim to be the Son of God. His most convincing act was to rise from the dead and ascend into Heaven
The Gospels and the other books of the New Testament were written years after his death and reproduced eyewitness accounts of the life of Jesus framed by the Old Testament prophecies and the overall conception that the murder of Jesus had redeemed the human race from the punishment inflicted on us by God for the original sin. The Book of Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse paints a mystical vision of the end of the world and the return of the Universe to its initial condition before the original sin. It is believes that the dead shall rise again and be reunited with their immortal souls, the good shall be rewarded with an eternity of bliss with the vision of god in heaven and the evil shall be confined in Hell in an eternity of pain, another manifestation of the violent and vindictive nature attributed to God.
Two of the most revered literary works in the English language, John Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regain'd provide a more comprehensive account of the events in Heaven before the Fall, and consolidate many of the points of the system of beliefs extracted nearly 100 generations of commentators on the Old and New Testaments. Paradise Lost - Wikipedia, Paradise Regained - WikipediaBack
Christianity thrived in the political and intellectual milieu of the Roman Empire and involved a large number of the leading intellectuals of the age. They formed a next generation of Christian authors after the evangelists and other writers of the New Testament and became known as the Fathers of the Church. The Patristic Age, extending until about the seventh century produced an enormous volume of literature known as the Greek and Latin Patrologia. Patrologia Graeca - Wikipedia, Patrologia Latina - Wikipedia
As Christianity spread and grew it began to organize and clarify its doctrinal foundations. At first it met some hostility because it rejected many of the traditional gods upon which the population relied, but by about 300 AD it had become so widespread that the Emperor Constantine decided to establish it as the religion of his empire. He encouraged the Christian Bishops to produce a definitive statement of belief. This led to the Councils of Nicea which became the Nicene Creed. Constantine the Great and Christianity - Wikipedia
Since that time the Catholic Church has grown and consolidated its power. Its doctrines have been developed by about 20 councils, a large number of papal encyclicals, many universities and a rapidly growing theological literature. It has about 1.5 billion adherents, many thousands of bishops and hundreds of thousands of priests. It has defined itself as an infallible and absolute autocracy ruled by a Supreme Pontiff whose Power is defined by the Code of Canon Law. Canon 333 §3 declares that No appeal or recourse is permitted against a sentence or decree of the Roman Pontiff. Like many human creations, it is a purely political construct, with two fatal flaws. First, there is negligible evidence for its doctrines; and it second, it has very little respect for human rights and justice. Code of Canon Law 333, University of Minnesota Human Rights Library: Ratification of Human Rights Treaties - Holy See, Kieran Tapsell (2014): Potiphar's Wife: The Vatican's Secret and Child Sexual Abuse
The theological literature described above is a magnificent work of collective imagination which has become a political, economic and social reality in the form of the Roman Catholic and many other Churches. Close examination, however, reveals more drama than fact. Intense archaeological research over the last few centuries has correlated some of the mythology with physical realities. The site of Troy many layers of development over 3000 years of occupation and many signs of destruction. It seems almost impossible on the other hand to find archaeological evidence for the Genesis story of the creation of the world and the fall of humanity. Troy - Wikipedia
John Milton's magnificent fantasy Paradise Lost gives us the backstory of the events recounted in Genesis in the farm of the war in Heaven between the loyal and the traitorous Angels. In the end the matter was settled by the omnipotent Son of God is their role as heavenly bouncer, expelling the Fallen angels to their new home, Pandæmonium. There is absolutely no chance of getting any evidence to support Milton's hypothesis. Pandæmonium (Paradise Lost) - Wikipedia
The scientific foundation for the history of the Universe from the beginning to the present day is built around the theory of evolution. Charles Darwin and his contemporaries, by combining observations of the effects of domestication on plants and animals with paleoontological evidence, showed that new species can evolve by variation and selection over geological periods of time by natural selection. Artificial selection can be used to change traits in domestic plants and animals over periods measured in years and decades. Charles Darwin (1875, 1998): The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication , Darwin (1859): The Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life
The only difference between fantasy and science is evidence. Science is thus an implementation of evolution. Variation occurs when a scientific discipline is faced by an intractable problem and people set about imagining hypotheses that might solve the problem. The principle criterion for an hypothesis is that it be consistent with what we know already and decidable through evidence. Once a suitable hypothesis is distilled from the possibilities, strategies must be devised to test it. Wu Experiment - Wikipedia
Evolution works in the same way. Genetic variation gives rise to a variety of offspring. Natural or artificial selection decides which of these varieties may go forward to introduce some of its characteristic into the next generation. As environments change, the criteria of selection change, so that species effectively sense their environment and follow it. The principal difference between this process and hitting tennis ball is the time frame in which it is executed. Science follows a similar path as we learn from its history. Hypotheses are frequently rendered extinct by new visions reality revealed by the story so far.
The Roman Catholic Church is a massive rigid organization which has carried many of the ancient evils of class and power from the distant past to the present. Them most prominent and devastating of these is its conviction that woman are unfit to play any priestly role in the Church. The most recent affirmation of this was made by Pope John Paul II in 1994. John Paul II: Ordinatio Sacerdotalis: Apostolic Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Reserving Priestly Ordination to Men Alone
Although this constraint on women is specific the Roman Catholic Church, it has deep roots in mammalian evolutionary history which accounts for its ubiquity in human communities around the world. It is characteristic of the males in many species to compete for opportunities to mate with the females. This leads to a winner take all situation where one male may be the father of many children. From a evolutionary point of view this may be a good thing, since has a tendency to enhance the competitive ability of the children. On the other hand it may not be so good from a social point of view since may lead to violence and in some cases males may kill the existing children of a newly acquired female. Infanticide (zoology) - Wikipedia
We may have similar tendencies which have been of interest to psychologists, at least since the days of Sigmund Freud. Human men are in general bigger and stronger than women so they generally prevail when situations turn to physical violence. Violence by men against women is very much greater than vice versa, even in democratic countries where the rule of law is well established. Sigmund Freud - Wikipedia, Catalano, Smith, Snyder & Rand: US Bureau of Justice Statistics: Female Victims of Violence
Domestic, workplace and casual sexist behaviour directed by men against women is much more prevalent than physical violence. An inquiry into the treatment of women at the top level of the Australian Government has revealed high levels of bullying, sexual harassment and sexual assault, and this situation appears to be typical of workplace behaviour as a whole. Australian Human Rights Commission: Set the Standard: Report on the Independent Review into Commonwealth Parliamentary Workplaces (2021): Executive Summary
Women are responsible for the by far the largest proportion of unpaid work in the world. The situations listed above may be considered de facto historical disadvantages that have accrued to women which are now becoming better known in those parts of the world where women can vote and have political power. There are many situations where for institutional reasons women are rendered powerless and suffer severely as a consequence. UN Women: Women in the changing world of work: Facts You Should Know, International Labour Organization: Global Estimates of Modern Slavery: Forced Labour and Forced Marriage: Executive Summary
Two other evils that point fo prevailing attitudes to women's rights and agency are honour killing and female genital mutilation. Honour killing - Wikipedia, Female genital mutilation - Wikipedia
The Roman Catholic Church, apart from seeing itself as essentially autocratic, infallible, in no way subject to modern demands for human rights, democracy, evidence based policy also regards it as irrevocable dogma that women cannot hold priestly roles within the Church. We might say that it prides itself on being the mother of autocracy, sexism and denial of reality. John Paul II (22 May 1994): Ordinatio Sacerdotalis: On Reserving Priestly Ordination to Men Alone
Paleoontological evidence shows that our species evolved in Africa in Africa in stages beginning about two million years ago. Modern humans arose in Africa about 300 000 years ago and began to disperse around the planet beginning about 70 000 years ago. We can imagine that these people travelled in relatively small groups and that their language and culture differentiated as they lost contact with their ancestors. Since they shared modern intelligence, we can imagine that their cultural development was equivalent to our. The indigenous population of Australia arrived approximately 60 000 years ago and modern studies suggest that their spectrum of languages and beliefs was as detailed and specific as the modern large scale religions of Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and Christians. Richard Klein (2009): The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural Origins, Major religious groups - Wikipedia, : Friday essay: how Indigenous songs recount deep histories of trade between Australia and Southeast Asia
The Hebrew Bible and subsequent biblical research gives us a glimpse of the variety of religions present in the in Hebrew history and records the origins of the notion of monotheism that developed in contrast to the plethora of godlike beings to be found in other religions. Monotheism - Wikipedia
The writers of the New Testament created an almost irresistible pitch for membership of their Church. This was a combination of fortuitous circumstances, perhaps the most important of which was the Roman invasion and occupation of Jerusalem. The parasitic imperialist warlords of Rome depended on expanding their zone of pillage to support the armies they used to sustain and expand their Empire. Bye products of this destruction were the creation of a zone of relative peace and easy communication in the Mediterranean region. Much of this Roman conquest acquired territory which had been controlled and developed by the Greek Alexander and was informed by echoes of Ancient Greek intellectual culture. Alexander the Great - Wikipedia
Septuagint - WikipediaThe predominance of Greek culture led to the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible beginning in the third century BCE. The writers of the New Testament built their story around a messianic interpretation of career of Jesus of Nazareth derived from numerous prophetic passages in the Hebrew Bible. The Roman occupation of Palestine suggested that the Messiah would be a charismatic military leader who expel the Romans. From this point of view, Jesus was a disappointment, but his murder by the Romans and apparent resurrection provided the foundation for a much more powerful literary interpretation his life. He became the omnipotent Son Of God, sacrificed by the Father to obtain satisfaction on behalf of humanity for the original insult delivered to God in Paradise. He became the Redeemer of mankind, winning the grace from the Father which enabled our salvation, the right to enter Heaven. Septuagint - Wikipedia
The Catholic Church claims its divine role as a consequence of the Great Commission which appears in all three Synoptic Gospels:
18 Then Jesus approached and said to them, “All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.”Matthew 28:18–20, Great Commission - Wikipedia
The credibility of the New Testament narrative was greatly enhanced by its connection to the Old Testament and to the miracles, theophanies and popular acclaim that surrounded his life. The most powerful incentive for belief was the claim that Jesus arose from death and ascended into Heaven. Christianity began as a variant of Judaism and the long history of Jewish connection with Rome and the Roman empire facilitated the spread of the new variant which promised a much more desirable outcome than its predecessor. History of the Jews in the Roman Empire - Wikipedia
The Hebrew God, who had fallen silent after the book Of Job, had reappeared in the flesh to assure us that the original loss of paradise was only temporary and that the benevolent God would restore everything in the end. The last book of the New Testament provide a dramatic account of the end of days when all would be restored to its pristine beauty. This dream is recorded explicitly in the recent edition of the Catholic Catechism. For a believer the promise of Christianity is irresistible.Book of Revelation - Wikipedia, Catholic Catechism p1, s2, c2, a7, I: He will come again in glory
One of the fundamental controls on human activity is the axiom that might is right. Wars have been a dominant influence in shaping human histroy to the extent that many histories are simply a catalogue of wars. Constantine is said to have made Christianity the religion of his empire because his mother saw a vision that the Christian Cross was the standard that led to victory. Christianity, like many of the major world religions, has spread by military conquest. The high point in this history was the series of wars we call the Crusades. Our current incarnation of the historical warlord, Vladimir Putin, has been been supported in his criminal and genocidal attack in Ukraine by Patriarch Kirill of the Christian Russian Orthodox Church. The Roman Catholic Church often styles itself as the Church militant fighting against those elements of human behaviour that it considers to be the work of Satan. John Miltons masterpiece of Christian literature is built around the war in heaven between the good and evil angels. A redeeming feature of Milton s work is that when Adam, given by God the choice of abandoning Eve and enjoying eternal life, chose to die with his beloved (9:896 sqq)
The non-violent alternative to the military approach to propagating peace, supported by the United Nations, is built around human rights. The foundation of these rights is understood to be truth, universally understood to be the first casualty of war.
The Catholic Church claims to have received the gift of ultimate truth about human life. From a logical point of view, this is not possible, as described on Cognitive Cosmology, page 5: God's ideas, cybernetics and singularity. Insofar as any God is consistent, the theorems of Turing and Gödel tell us that it must be incomplete and incomputable, and therefore not itself in possession of ultimate truth. John Paul II (14 September, 1998): Fides et Ratio: On the relationship between faith and reason
The fact that, from a scientific point of view, most of the claims of Christianity are untestable hypotheses reinforces this theoretical position. It therefore becomes necessary to develop testable hypotheses about the nature of human life. A source of such hypotheses may be a combination of modern cosmology, the theory of evolution and our personal experiences of life.
As described on the site Cognitive Cosmology, the Universe is a layered structure of increasingly complex symmetries or laws, beginning from an omnipotent initial singularity of pure activity identical to the traditional God developed by the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas and still current in the Catholic Church. Thomas Aquinas, Summa, I, 2, 3: Does God exist?
We can understand the creation of the universe by considering our own creative intelligence which has been revealed in history by our creation of languages, cultures, arts and sciences. We watch each of our newborn children slowly assimilating the culture of the environment into which they are born. As soon as they learn to speak they begin to create new sentences and long before that they are capable of motions, gestures and expressions that they have never used before. After a sufficient period of education, they can begin to contribute to the public wealth by making things from music to
We want to be like God. To do this we need to understand Gof. God is our univese and go is ourselves so the whole story of creation and salvation stands before us writen inthe uniberse, which speaks in the voice of fog. A Babel of religions %%%
Like the thin skinned dictators of every age, Yahweh was inclined to throw a tantrum whenever "his" people became too independent. This happened in the Garden of Eden. He was provoked again by the 'Tower of Babel':
And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. Tower of Babel - Wikipedia
We now understand the multiplicity of human language to have evolved during the hundreds of thousands of years it took us to populate the Earth. Although our multitude of languages causes some difficulty, we can readily translate from one language to another because they all refer to our common foundation of human experience.
The variety of languages and cultures on Earth enriches our experience of ife, particularly when we travel. There are probably about as many theologies and religions as there are languages. The world is in turmoil because theology and religion are failing. Athough we know there is but one God and one Universe, our religions have revealed themselves as sectarian rather than inclusive. They have become sources of war rather than causes of peace. They are in conflict because many incompatible fictions are held as a matters of indisputable faith.
The plan here is to make theology into a real science in two steps. First, we assume that the Universe is divine, so that all human experience is experience of God, so that theology can become empirical. Second, we use mathematics to build theological models because it is a universal language that loses nothing in translation.
Because the only property constraining God is consistency, and this same constraint operates in mathematics, we guess that there must be a link between God and mathematics. We bring this into focus by applying fixed point theory to God and guessing that the fixed points in the divine dynamics can be mapped onto mathematics, ie an isomorphism. This idea is supported by Wigner's observation. Eugene Wigner: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences
Christians believe that the writers of the Bible was inspired by God. This inspiration is considered to be the guarantee that the Bible is truly the word of God. Since God is held to be invisible, we have no scientific way of checking the credibility of this claim. The prophets may be in fact just like any other writers, recording their mental states to communicate them to others. If the Universe is divine, their thoughts and feelings, like those of everybody else, are derived from their experiences of God. In this they are similar to everybody else, and have no special authority to guide us.
I talk about the Catholic Church and its defects, because it is the one I know. But I feel that there are lessons here for all ancient institutions which base themselves on historical documents rather than contemporary observation. Using scientific methods, we are able to reconstruct some of the undocumented history of our ancestors and see how they slowly climbed the literary, technological and scientific ladder toward our present state. History of writing - Wikipedia
%%%And then we work our way through the Summa II, I.
The
One of the most obvious features of our world is the force of gravity. We meet it, often painfully, as soon as we begin to move around, particularly when we first begin to stand up and fall down. Gravity plays a role in every move we make, and we can see that it affects all structures on earth from plants and animals, to ourselves, buildings and bridges. Everything has to be strong enough to stand up. Gravitation holds everything onto the round Earth so that the people at our antipodes do not fall off.
Gravitation dominates life on the surface of the Earth but Isaac Newton was able to extend its influence to the structure of the solar system by formulating the law of universal gravitation which tells us that gravity is a force which both arises from and affects mass according to the relationship:
F = G (M1 M2) / r2
He used this formula to describe the motion of Earth's satellite the Moon, orbiting with sublime and mysterious serenity in the sky. Its circular motion creates a centrifugal fore which pulls it away from the Earth which is exactly balanced by the gravitationsl attraction between the Earth and the Moon, so that it stays in its orbit, guided by invisible forces. Newton's law of universal gravitation - Wikipedia
Newton's law describes motions in the heavens and on the Earth quite precisely but not perfectly. The problem is that he misunderstood the relationship between space and time. He thought they are completely independent, but this is not so The problem was solved by Einstein's special theory of relativity which takes into account the fact that it takes time to travel across a distance. If it takes half an hour to travel to school, you must leave half an hour early to get there on time.
Consciousness The trojan war Genesis Paradise lost Christianity Some problems A solution Wikipedia: The gods of Greek religion The religion had no founder, and was not the creation of an inspired teacher, which were popular origins of existing religions in the world.[3] The individuals were free to believe what they wanted, as the Greek religion was created out of a consensus of the people. These beliefs coincide to the thoughts about the gods in polytheistic Greek religion. Adkins and Pollard (2020/1998), agree with this by saying, "the early Greeks personalized every aspect of their world, natural and cultural, and their experiences in it. The earth, the sea, the mountains, the rivers, custom-law (themis), and one's share in society and its goods were all seen in personal as well as naturalistic terms."[4] As a result of this thinking, each god or goddess in Polytheistic Greek religion is attributed to an aspect of the human world. For example, Poseidon is the god of the sea, Aphrodite is the goddess of beauty, Ares is the god of war, and so on and so forth for many other gods. This is how Greek culture was defined as many Athenians felt the presence of their gods through divine intervention in significant events in their lives. Oftentimes they found these events to be mysterious and inexplicable.
Reproduction is a form of chain reaction, and is capable of growing exponentially. Since each newborn individual requires resources to live, and the resources of Earth are finite, unbounded reproduction will eventually be halted by famine, overcrowding, pollution or some other constraint. In such a situation, not all the offspring can survive and there will be a selective process which will favour those better able acquire the resources for life. Malthusianism - Wikipedia
Charles Darwin knew that centuries of selective breeding had created a wide variety of domesticated animals and plants. He imagined that natural selection could do the same in the wild world. In the domestic realm the breeder seeks to mate individuals that are tending in the desired direction with an eye to the desired end result. Charles Darwin (1859): The Origin of Species; By Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for LifeIn the wild mating is rather more random, since in the wild there is often room for choice by the participants themselves. In a divine world, natural selection is effectively a judgement from God, and it operates at all scales from the quantum of action to the Universe as a whole. Every time I act, my action is judged. If I make a fatal error, the action will fail. A lesser error may lead to a limited result, an error which may possibly be repaired. In each case, the individual action is judged by its interaction with its environment.
Our scientific understanding of the tree of life exhibits the work of natural selection. Darwin had far less information to go on, but was able to discern the general pattern and publish it in The Origin of Species. His work stirred even greater controversy when he applied his theory in The Descent of Man. This work was understood to directly contradict the Catholic doctrine that God creates a new immortal soul for every child born. Charles Darwin (1871): The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Catholic Catechism: 366: Every spiritual soul is created immediately by God
Variation and selection enable organisms to adapt to environmental change. If the change is so fast that a species cannot keep up it will probably become extinct through failure to reproduce. Human anthropocene activity, by making swift and massive changes in the planetary environment, may have been been responsible for tens thousands of extinctions since our footprint began to explode. Anthropocene - Wikipedia, Fred Pearce: Global Extinction Rates: Why Do Estimates Vary So Widely?
In the theological language suggested here, adaptation means listening to God and acting on what we hear. We listen through the sciences that tell us how God works, and the arts that communicate these ideas to us in images, symbols and machinery.
Variation and selection apply in all environments where competition is induced by a shortage of resources. In general survivors are the ones who can gather abundant resources or learn to live with less. Creatures adapt through the slow process of genetic evolution, the faster process of the epigenetic emergence of instincts, and the fastest process, cultural development. %%%
In the mysterious / literary page [ l4l02_mysterious] the point to make up that the awareness at the human level presented in literature operates without any real understanding of the physical underpinning which maintains society [possibly because the literary classes are maintained by servants and have no real awareness of how they are supported]. We have lots of literature from the Roman Empire but know almost nothing about its economy. The key to the green revolution is to make us aware
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of our foundations and this requires science to guide our imagination. Roman Economy - Wikipedia
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