Science vs Religion – and the Winner is?

THE late world-renowned evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis was one of those rare scientists who was “spiritually-minded” in the Theosophical sense.

Margulis wrote a paper “that many biologists at the time regarded as a wild evolutionary heresy,” Steven Rose reports in the guardian.co.uk, “but which has now become mainstream.”

“Typical of mainstream, she waited for more than 10 years to be vindicated.”

“Margulis expanded on an idea that co-operation is as important a feature of evolutionary change as competition,” Rose explained.  Its a view “that Charles Darwin himself would not have been unsympathetic to,” he comments, “despite the protestations of some of his more fundamentalist disciples.”

But the introduction of a sea change in Science is seldom welcome, and the new birth more often than not is accompanied by trauma and hot denial, precisely what New Age Mother H. P. Blavatsky expected and endured. “All truth passes through three stages,” Arthur Schopenhauer, the German Philosopher, notably declared: 

“First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”

“It is very difficult for a materialist, the metaphysical portion of whose brain is almost atrophied,” Blavatsky explains  in her dialogue, “to raise himself— or for one who is naturally spiritually-minded, to descend to the level of the matter-of-fact vulgar thought.”

When the high priests of material science “resolve consciousness into a secretion from the grey matter of the brain, and everything else in nature into a mode of motion,” she asserted, “we protest against the doctrine as being un-philosophical.”

Practical Theosophy is not one Science, but embraces every science in life, moral and physical,” she notes in The Secret Doctrine (1:269), and “it is clear that modern science believes not in the ‘soul of things.”

And she went on to assert that scientists would eventually be driven out of their position, “not by spiritual, theosophical, or any other physical or even mental phenomena, but simply by the enormous gaps and chasms that open daily — and will still be opening before them.”

Worldviews & Morality

“The modern scientist is confessedly and boastfully agnostic. The occultist is reverently and progressively gnostic. Modern science recognizes matter as ‘living’ and ‘dead,’ ‘organic’ and ‘inorganic,’ and ‘Life’ as merely a phenomenon of matter. Occult science recognizes, ‘foremost of all, the postulate that there is no such thing in Nature as inorganic substances or bodies.” (W. Q. Judge, Synthesis of Occult Science)

Stones, minerals, rocks, and even chemical ‘atoms’ are simply organic units in profound lethargy. Their coma has an end, and their inertia becomes activity.'” (Secret Doctrine, Vol. I, p. 626 fn.)

“Occultism recognizes ONE UNIVERSAL, ALL-PERVADING LIFE. Modern science recognizes life as a special phenomenon of matter, a mere transient manifestation due to temporary conditions.” (W. Q. Judge, Synthesis of Occult Science.)

Religion and Science waiting for change.

“One discovery follows the other,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote, “until they [scientists] are finally knocked off their feet by the ninth wave of simple common sense.” Any change that is too far ahead of its time it she insisted, “must bide its time until the minds of men are ripe for its reception. Every science, every creed has had its martyrs.”

“According to the ordinary course of affairs, a few generations pass away, and then there comes a period when these very truths are looked upon as commonplace facts, and a little later there comes another period in which they are declared to be necessary, and even the dullest intellect wonders how they could ever have been denied.”

(H. T. Buckle quoted in The Secret Doctrine 1:298)

The controversial biologist Rupert Sheldrake is just such a modern day martyr, an author of more than 80 scientific papers and 10 books, including Science Set Free. (Science Set Free: The Tipping Point.)

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“The authors of ancient wisdom have spoken from at least two whole planes of conscious experience beyond that of our every-day ‘sense-perception’ …”

– W. Q. Judge, “Synthesis of Occult Science”

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Also see: Wired Together