Sunday, March 22, 2009

Matter in Motion

Consider for a moment one of life's fundamental philosophical questions: Which came first, mind or matter?

For all human history before Darwin there appeared to be only one sensible way to answer it. For how could Thought have emerged from incogitative matter?

Yet Darwin's theory decisively swung the balance in favour of the other, neglected answer to this conundrum. The probabilities weren't just adjusted, they were inverted.

If you accept natural selection, but still wish to retain some sort of Divine presence within your cosmogony, you are surely going to have to put up with the fact that He will never be a completely comfortable presence within it: for the rather obvious reason that His mind is going to have to have a completely different explanation.

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