In high school, it was, unexpectedly, exposure to biology that first awoke me from the dogmatic slumber of atheism. I had taken the truth of scientific materialism as a given, assuming with the confidence of a zealot that whatever phenomena had not yet been explained by perfectly rational means would be so soon. While no doubt in part an adolescent, contrarian reaction to the christian fundamentalism that was the dominant form of spiritual expression around me, religion just seemed . . . well, silly.
However, the more I learned about how much was actually unknown in biology, concurrent with an exposure to to intellectual traditions that took spirituality seriously, theosophy and Joseph Campbell in particular, the more I realized, at the very least, how premature my verdict was. As a professor later replied to me regarding a direct question about his belief in God, “Well, a whole lot of people a lot smarter than me have taken the idea very seriously.”
So while I ‘believed’ in evolution, or rather, the ability of the theory of evolution to explain observable facts with greater clarity, simplicity, consistency and beauty than any other theory, I saw no discrepancy between such a belief and the possibility of an intelligent order inherent in the universe. In fact, it began to seem more like evidence of such.
When a classmate followed up my affirmation of evolution with what to her was an obvious and unavoidable consequential, “So you’re an atheist?”, I was surprised and thrown. Part of the reason the Theosophical Society quickly became such a home for me was that they took it as a given that evolution was both a material and spiritual story.
Does that mean Theosophy is Intelligent Design?
This is a question I’ll be exploring in my next blog post, a response to Will Thackara’s Evolution & Creation: A Theosophic Synthesis.
In the meantime, I’d like to start hearing your thoughts on the debate between evolution, creationism and intelligent design, and theosophy’s place in the discussion.
I guess that most theosophists believe in some combination of evolution AND intelligent design. I’m still on the fence on this one – but it does seem to me a weird thing that consciousness might arise without help from matter. And even though I believe that matter itself must have some consciousness, it’s still not enough in my mind to explain the kind of intelligence most humans have.
As an observation, an evolution which requires consciousness as a prerequisite to form is not the same as intelligent design. Intelligent design assumes a designer, a being if you will. As commonly popularized, this being is none other than any anthropomorphic deity who has appeared on the world stage over the last several hundred thousand years. I can’t pick on the Christian God too much here because unlike HE has lots of company. It gets kind of crowded in God land…a form of spiritual row housing, but I digress.
Theosophy, rather, posits a consciousness which is the basis of existence, and the “design” is nothing other than the law of cause and effect, i.e. karma. How much different is that from the blind watchmaker of Richard Dawkins? Quite a lot actually. In Dawkins world forms evolve because they are most suitable for their environment, well that is a kind of karma. But where it splits off from our point of view is that from our point of view, different forms appear primarily as a result of processes begun in universal consciousness. The effects look very similar, but the causes are as night and day.
Joe
Hi,
Just stopping in to tell you I’m thanking you Chris, and linking to both our community blogs, on my lens thanking people who link to my blog All Considering: http://www.squidoo.com/spiritual-friends
[...] is partly a response to Chris’ Evolution and Creation part 1 Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Truth, atheism, quantum mechanics, the Bible and a [...]
[...] 14, 2009 by Chris In my last blog post I raised the question of the relationship between Theosophy and Intelligent [...]