Tuesday, September 18, 2007

On the Evolution of Evolution: Implications for Understanding How Religion Evolves

"WIE: The REAL Evolution Debate
Evolution: Science vs. Spirit?
Here, we’ve spread out the 12 schools of evolutionary thought along a spectrum from science to spirit, with scientific materialism on the far left and religious determinism on the far right."
Uploaded on January 13, 2007 by ~C4Chaos on flickr

The Baha'i worldview incorporates the concept of progressive revelation and the evolution of religion. How do religions evolve, change and adapt? Bruce Deverell in John Bryden's meaty Vox Cosmicos looks at how our undertanding of evolution itself is changing in trying to answer the question. -gw

The theory of evolution has been evolving ....

Some biologists postulate that:

*selection occurs at many levels;
*evolution has long periods of relatively little change indispersed with bursts of rapid speciation (punctuated equilibrium);
*natural selection has many different causes;
*internal drives ... and novel actions of organisms can initiate evolutionary changes ...


How does the present thinking about the theory of evolution in biology affect your thinking about how religions evolve and how they change and adapt?

Bruce Deverell, "A Creature Adapted for Wonder," in John Bryden's Vox Cosmicos

{Image licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0}

1 comment:

John Bryden said...

George, thank you kindly for the link to Vox Cosmicos. Its much appreciated! Just to avoid any possible misunderstanding, while I'm a Baha'i, Bruce Deverell is a Presbyterian minister.

Best wishes!