To be a true evolutionist, a man must be an atheist. If a man believes in God, and [that] he has a soul and a hereafter, he is not an atheist, nor is he an evolutionist. He only thinks he is. He is only professing to believe in evolution to be considered orthodox.
JAMES CHURCHWARD, THE CHILDREN OF MU
Figure 8.5. James Churchward was not only the modern founder of Panology but also a sage and prophet in his own right.
BEYOND THE PALE
We are born to search after the truth.
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
A: With the sciences so specialized and departmentalized, knowledge has become fragmented and a bit of tunnel vision has set in. We should all be generalists, don’t you think? Probing the origin of man must be an interdisciplinary effort. But do we really know how to work together? Think together?
POE: Frankly, most of us feel that ID doesn’t qualify as a competing theory because it doesn’t offer natural explanations for biological phenomena that can be tested scientifically. Our methods must be empirical.
A: Empirical? This is precisely what evolution is not—based rather on assumptions, special jargon (which favor Darwinism), extrapolations, surmises, comparisons, hypotheses, tautologies, probabilities, computer models, and might-haves. Just for a moment, let us not worry so much if it is science but if it is truth. Darwinism was enshrined to legitimize the age of science and industry. But now we are entering a new time, the age of truth—Satya Yuga. This cut-and-dried Homo sapiens of yours is not the same person as my human being—with a soul and a mind and a heart.
POE: Even though the doctrine of ID thankfully passed away in the nineteenth century with the coming of Darwinism, here it is back again—impeding the advancement of true science, fundamentalists demanding a literal reading of the book of Genesis: the six days, the young Earth, the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, the rib, all stars made on the fourth day (Genesis 1:16), as well as the idea that Earth and species will last forever, utterly rejecting the fact of extinction.
A: Let’s not make the mistake of equating all religion with the Holy Bible. . . . Those who believe that Christian dogma is the only alternative or rival to evolutionary origins or only complainant in the court of Darwin have not looked very far—to other religions and world traditions. Creationism is not about Christianity. Forget Christianity for a moment. This is about all faiths, philosophies, and cosmogonies that admit a higher power. To understand life and death, you need to go outside the straitjacket of science. And evolution is about life and death.
GODLIKE PRECISION
POE: If you are comforted by the idea of deity, fine, that’s your business.
A: My dear fellow, it’s not a matter of comfort; it all comes down to whether we view man as an intended product or not. To me, it is perfectly inconceivable that humanity is here without reason or purpose.
POE: That is your mistake. There was nothing inevitable about it. Nature follows no purpose. Evolutionists have rightly stood together to strike anything purposive from the ascent of our species, for this would suggest planning, intention, teleology. But yes, we are here for a reason, even though that reason lies in the mechanics of engineering rather than in the volition of a deity.
Mechanical force makes the dog’s tail wag, but something different . . . makes the dog wag his tail.
GEORGE FREDERICK WRIGHT, ORIGIN AND ANTIQUITY OF MAN
A: Max Planck, the Max Planck, said all matter originates from and consists of a force, and we must assume a conscious intelligent spirit behind this force. I see theories all over the place that are trying to account for nonphysical things in physical terms.
A: Oh, brain versus mind, for one.
POE: The theory of evolution holds that the design of man, including his brain, was simply a product of life on Earth, not its ultimate purpose.
A: But design and purpose go hand in glove.
POE: Such as?
POE: Well, natural selection may give the appearance of design, but that design is often imperfect, and imperfection is a sign of struggling, hit-or-miss evolution—and a major flaw in the argument for “intelligent” design.
Whence had man his understanding, if there was none in the world?
SOCRATES, XENOPHON
If it’s unreasonable to believe that an encyclopedia could have originated without intelligence, then it’s just as unreasonable to believe that life could have originated without intelligence.
JONATHAN SARFATI, REFUTING EVOLUTION
Imperfect design, vestigial organs—all argue against special creation: for example, appendix, hernias, or tonsils in no wise reflect “intelligent” design; such imperfections and inaccurate workmanship—the screwy wiring of the retina, the sacroiliac, the wisdom teeth—are unworthy of a designer. And parts created for no use? That doesn’t make any sense. Thymus, pineal. There are too many instances in the animal world where a conscientious designer might have provided better organs, but didn’t, and species are stuck with what nature’s own process provided.
A: You might as well say we should not have been made bipedal, for all the fallen arches, slipped disks, and knee and back problems we suffer. But let me ask: Who says we can assume the Creator made things perfect for us?
POE: I’m only saying this: The idea that evolution has been guided by divine power can easily be squelched by this objection. Indeed, most lines of descent end in extinction. What a senseless effort on God’s part to fabricate species and then let most of them die out! This does not suggest the work of an intelligent designer, still less of an almighty, compassionate one. It doesn’t seem so intelligent to design millions of species that are destined to go extinct—and then replace them with other species, which will also vanish.
A: I dare say, it is not the creationists who need to explain extinction, but the evolutionists—and they have not yet done so. Besides, it seems pretty naive to think any species or any planet is here forever, or should be.
POE: If this designer is a loving, caring God, why has he given us stinging wasps, poisonous plants, slimy worms, and creeping parasites to make us miserable? Did your God, so interested in perfection, make the tapeworm? Why would a good God make the serpent or the mosquito or the germs of typhoid?
A: “The serpent bites to death. . . . This is no sin, for it fulfills its labor; it is the remnant of poison of other eras.”14 Even the lowly serpent played its part in the preparation of our world.
I made the serpent the lowest of living creatures. . . . When the earth was encircled with poisonous gases . . . I drove the poison of the air down into vegetation . . . and I created the serpents . . . and they were poison . . . thus I purified the air of heaven . . . [e.a]. Then I overcast the earth with falling nebulae, and covered up the poisons growing upon the earth, and they were turned to oil and coal.
OAHSPE, BOOK OF INSPIRATION 6:8–15
Figure 8.6. Thomas Edison—“I know this world is ruled by infinite intelligence. Everything that surrounds us—everything that exists—proves that there are infinite laws behind it. There can be no denying this fact. It is mathematical in its precision.” Thomas Edison’s parents were spiritualists; interested in the matter, Edison himself conducted remarkable experiments in clairvoyance with the Polish-American medium Bert Reese.
Science pioneers who were devoutly religious include Kepler, Newton, Boyle, Galileo, Linnaeus, Cuvier, Comte de Buffon, Pasteur, Lord Kelvin, Joseph Lister, Blaise Pascal, Michael Faraday, Gregor Mendel, Leonardo da Vinci, Lord Francis Bacon, James C. Maxwell, and Sir Humphry Davy. Richard Owen (who identified the fossils Darwin brought home on the Beagle) thought Divine Mind planned the archetypes of species and even their modifications. Sir Richard said: “It is He that hath made us; not we ourselves.”*112 In other words, things did not create themselves or organize themselves or work out their own design under nature’s umbrella. “If developing the precision instruments of an airplane requires many plans and a highly developed intelligence, how could a substantially more complex apparat
us [like the avionics of birds] have developed by itself?”†113 Louis Agassiz (Methods of Study in Natural History) expressed his disbelief in Darwinism this way: “The resources of the Deity cannot be so meager that in order to create a human being endowed with reason, he must change a monkey into a man.”
Figure 8.7. Known for his famous Sterkfontein find, Robert Broom thought you could just as well call nature’s adaptations the wonderful designs of a supreme intelligence.
“There is intelligence somewhere,” said Robert Broom in The Coming of Man. Though an evolutionist, he believed that life on Earth was the work and concern of a divine creative force.
More recently, John White in Enlightenment 101: A Guide to God-Realization and Higher Human Culture has stated, “Evolution is a divinely driven process by which God as Spirit expresses itself . . . not blind forces and random events . . . or mere chance. They happen because God wills it intelligently, creatively and lawfully. Science has recognized some of the laws of the cosmos, but has not yet recognized the lawmaker. . . . God is the creator-artist behind the entire panorama of the cosmos.”
Natural science and theology, in an earlier day, were one and the same pursuit—though on an unsure footing. I believe the twain shall meet again, but this time on solid ground and in all truth.
Thoughts on Evolution from an Oahspean Viewpoint
by Carl Vostatek
8/3/2011
As students of the book Oahspe, we learn that evolution is not a concept that fits in with the story of mankind’s beginnings on Earth and subsequent development and growth over time. Per Oahspe, each and every creature and plant was created perfect in its own time and place and did not “evolve” or change into a new form as time went on . . .
I offer this perspective because, as an architect, I am naturally inclined to look at things with an eye to design: composition; color; balance; symmetry, form and function. As a designer I am absolutely in awe and overwhelmed by the incredible infinity of shapes and colors and forms of all things. I can only imagine what a “design team” there must be up in the heavens somewhere! What an effort to come up with all the variety, all the necessary moving parts and features to deal with their respective environments, all the beauty, all the visual enjoyment. From a practical standpoint, there is simply no way all these facets could have “evolved by natural selection of the fittest” on their own. It is just too big a design project. . . . There has to be some conscious mind and conscious direction behind it all.
It is then I remember a quote from Oahspe which goes like this:
“. . . for until thou hast created a firmament, and created suns and stars to fill it, thou hast not half fulfilled thy destiny.”
As I ponder the enormity of this statement, I come to realize that one day I can be one of the “designers”; that is, I can be one of those who actually plays a part in creating the infinity of forms and shapes and colors that is found throughout the universe. For I am part and parcel of the creative force, the Creator! The Creator isn’t outside of us, He is in and of us and we are in and of Him. We and the Creator are one.
Figure 8.8. Carl Vostatek. Courtesy of Carl Vostatek.
This is the teaching Oahspe offers mankind; it further says that after due education, training, development, and spiritual growth in realms beyond the Earth plane, this is what I and all of humanity can look forward to. We can each play a part in the design and creation of new worlds and all that occupies them, from the beings to plants and animals and their multitudinous environments.
It is almost too immense to think about, too majestically, staggeringly, beyond the grasp of comprehension. But to us Oahspeans, it is real, it is reality. And in this light, evolution simply evaporates into non-existence. The alternative is a lot more inviting.
9
MUTANTS, MONSTERS, AND MORPHOGENESIS
Back to the Facts
If I lived twenty more years, and was able to work, I should have to modify the Origin, and how much the view on all points would have to be modified!
CHARLES DARWIN, ORIGIN, POSTMORTEM EDITION
THE WORM WHO WOULD BE MAN
That creatures respond, adapt, and adjust to their environment in certain ways is, I would think, a given—nothing new or profound there—and nothing so trenchant as to demystify our origins, indeed nothing “more than a statement of the obvious,” as far as author Francis Hitching is concerned.1 Empedocles of the fifth century BCE, as well as other classical Greeks, wrote about it. Darwin did not invent it or discover it.
In fact once he realized the weakness of natural selection, he actually moved away from it, preferring to pitch sexual selection; between the time of Origin (1859) and Descent (1871), Darwin switched from natural to sexual selection, the latter entailing competition among males for females. The human acquisition of a beard, for example, was presumably by sexual selection, an “ornament to charm the opposite sex.” Darwin’s concept of sexual selection was used even to define the races: selection, guided by tribal standards of beauty, would set the pace for morphological change. The sexually attractive feature would confer a higher reproductive rate on its owner, and hence eventually become incorporated in the race as a whole.
But this was overplayed, if not completely misguided. We know, for instance, that even though male bustards can impress females with their flashing feathers, this extravagance has its cost: scientists have found the most flamboyant master cocks, in fact, produce a greater amount of abnormal sperm. It has also been found that among the red deer of Scotland, the most prolific males sired daughters who had fewer offspring.
As for early humans, there was probably little competition for females among Au (Au. afarensis) males.2 In fact, sexual selection seems to work for only a few animals and none of the plants. Biologists have asked: If it really did alter the species, wouldn’t everyone be bright colored or fancy feathered in a few generations? Sometimes, too, the darn hens are not even watching the male display; even vividly colored male fish are not seen by the females whose eggs he fertilizes.
It has also been argued that fighting between males does not confer any special advantage on the winner; the “loser” simply goes elsewhere to mate. Often enough the female will mate, willy nilly, with the loser. The vanquished male, moreover, may have as many offspring as the “victor.”
Some theorists have objected to this business of sexual selection as little more than a set of out-dated male assumptions, Victorian values (masculine bias) masquerading as science. In “deep thought, reason, and imagination,” thought Darwin, the male of our species attains a “higher eminence,” while women’s faculties conform more with “the lower races.”3
Earnest Hooton, for his part, refuted Darwin’s argument that sexual selection led to hairlessness; in most species, Darwin had surmised, the less hairy female, with greater exposure of naked skin, constituted a special sexual attraction. But Hooton concluded “there are few indications that preferential mating could have brought about such profound modifications in the amounts of body hair.”4 Darwin had gone so far as to explain human language, beginning with the cries and gestures of animals, as developing out of the emotional stress of courtship—the sweeter voices of females having been acquired to attract the males! (Later in this chapter we’ll take a more realistic look at the origin of language.)
Figure 9.1. Harvard physical anthropologist Earnest Hooton was also a cartoonist and author of science fiction under a pseudonym.
Do not suffer thy judgment to mislead thee as to a law of Selection. There is no law of Selection.
OAHSPE, BOOK OF APOLLO 3:6
The ultimate question is: Could the process of natural or sexual selection or any other imagined mechanism really change things enough to produce an entirely new species? Or even a new genus? That animals can change and turn into other animals seems a bit more like magical thinking than any part of science.
Each species develops according to its own kind.
LUCRETIUS, ON THE NATURE OF THE UNIVE
RSE
Isn’t it interesting that natural selection, held as the key to the evolution of species in the wild, was so influenced by artificial selection as directed by human agents—animal and plant breeders, who hybridized preferred types by, of course, mixing! How ironic, since Darwin himself emphatically rejected the mixing (crossbreeding) model as an explanation of the varieties of men and animals. Here I might add, his own expertise was in the diversity of living animals and organisms—not man, and not early man. Darwin was a world expert on barnacles (he devoted eight full years to documenting their minute anatomical variations) and quite the master of beetles, pigeons, and earthworms. The worm who would one day be a man.
All right, natural selection is valid enough for minor changes, say, in the case of disease-thwarting genes against malaria, or smallpox, or when insects develop resistance to pesticides. But is that evolution or just modification? Sure, people of the Andes and Tibet have adapted to thin air with larger hearts and lungs and a greater volume of blood. Is that evolution? Whatever it is, it’s not speciation.
Also in the Andes, the llama once had five toes (10 kya); now it has two. Is that evolution? The llama has not changed to a different species! So what, if natural selection is the mechanism that changes the coat color of mice: they’re still mice. Enthusiasts find small differences in the wing shape of birds and call it “evolution in action.” No, it is modification in action. Horizontal changes only. They’re still birds.
We think of natural selection as tuning the piano, not as composing the melodies.
JERRY FODOR AND MASSIMO PIATTELLI-PALMARINI, WHAT DARWIN GOT WRONG
All such changes are horizontal, which is to say: DNA is encoded for changes only within the range of that species (there are limits, as discussed elsewhere). The genome is a conservative thing, not innovative. Indeed, DNA is structured to prevent vertical variation. In light of these well-known facts, it is not unusual nowadays to hear the top people confess “that early evolution was driven by forces very different to those we usually associate with natural selection.”5
Mysterious Origins of Hybrid Man Page 29
