08.29.11
Posted in Booknotes, The Axial Age at 1:16 pm by nemo
I just wrote an initial take on Bellah’s new book Religion in Human Evolution. I promised to return to the review (if Amazon posts it) for upgrades over time. But I wanted to make an initial appraisal given the clear suspicion Bellah is being ‘bashful’ about Darwinism. I cannot figure out his views of Darwinism, which puts the whole book on hold, up in the air. A fascinating book in any case.
4.0 out of 5 stars Evolution and the Axial Age enigma, August 29, 2011
By John C. Landon “nemonemini” (New York City) – See all my reviews
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This review is from: Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Hardcover)
This is a massive book I am still studying, one filled with some novel perspectives, among them that rarity: scholarly acknowledgment of the existence of the Axial Age. There is so much that is of fascinating interest that one could/should resolve to spend a good period of time going over the rich details. But there is an instant problem here. For better or for worse, if you mention ‘evolution’ and the ‘Axial Age’ in one breath, it is easy to close in for the ‘kill’ if author’s motives are murky and/or he is too ‘scare d cat’ to challenge Darwin. So for that reason, suspicions aroused, I can easily begin a preliminary review of the overall aspect of the book, a review to be revised and extended perhaps.
The book deserves commendation for even mentioning this data on the Axial Age. And it is good to raise the issue, but fatal also. As most scholarly propagandists probably realize, to even mention the subject means the jig is up, make as many mistakes as you wish, but the data will come to demand a real analysis, one that will endanger current paradigms. So in that sense I praise this fine book for its lesser audacity: the jig is up, and it is only a matter of time before the question of the Axial Age and its revolutionary implications become clear.
I could be wrong. Karen Armstrong almost succeeded in completely asphiaxiating this topic, and as a result the jig wasn’t up.
It is almost taboo to even refer to this phenomenon. But unfortunately, as with Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation, one is reminded of the classic barb: ‘we have not come to praise Caesar, but to bury him’. The scholarly community, if it can’t suppress this data, will absorb it into something that will confuse it completely, as with Karen Armstrong’s book, a tour de force that summoned up the ‘Axial Age’ and left the subject beyond recognition.
Bellah’s book seems like a more sophisticated version of this tactic. Is this fair?
The first question must be, has Bellah perused John Landon’s book World History And the Eonic Effect: Civilization, Darwinism, and Theories of Evolution Fourth Edition and resolved to produce his own take and/or save the world from that underground text, and without any reference to it (and such reference being the end of one’s public reputation)? It is hard to believe the author is not aware of, and wary of, that book with its comprehensive view of the Axial Age. Which book demands a larger pattern of ‘axial ages’, a new view of historical evolution, evolution in history, and thence of the descent of man, and, yes, the ‘evolution’ of religion, which is not Darwinian. The Axial Age shows us precisely the kind of ‘macrovevolutionary’ process at work in both the evolution of religion and of civilization. You cannot compromise with Darwinism once you grasp what is happening with the Axial Age.
And this makes us ask, what is Bellah’s take on Darwinism? Examine this book and you will have a hard time knowing where Bellah stands on the question of Darwin’s theory: plus and minus are most cleverly braided together in one unified sophistry of scholarly legerdemain, far more polished than Karen Armstrong’s idiotic venture here.
I can see Bellah’s problem: evolutionary psychology is a hopeless mess on religion, but to say so is risky, and indirect methods are required. I can’t really determine his stance (there is even a reference to natural selection, which is fogged out), and that is unfortunate, because the suggestion is still left that in the final analysis the Axial Age is just a smorgasbord of cuteness, not the real insight into global teleological macroevolution that the data demands.
That’s thrown out as a caution as I continue to study the book, which is well worth reading, and which has many interesting takes. Unlike too many books on the Axial period, this one gives a real discussion of the Greek Axial, not shunting it to one side in a kind of ‘generalized age of revelation’ treatment of religion.
The real Axial Age is an elusive totalizing process that rises beyond religion to the whole question of civilization, and from there to the question of evolution as such. The data must force us to suspect that Darwinism is totally off the mark, and that real ‘evolution’ shows this kind of discontinuous near planetary top-down process that operates metagenetically. That is the kind of heresy that drives people to cover up what the Axial Age is showing us.
In the nonce, as I study this book further, it must be seen as a remarkable innovation (beyond that of WHEE already cited) attempting to do justice the original insights of Karl Jaspers (who did not however seem to understand his own book on the Axial period). No doubt the impudence of Bellah in writing a book on the Axial period will cause the book to be ignored. We will see. In the worst case it will join the underground of post-Jasperian historiographies.
Let me say that harsh judgments here can be unfair. Grasping the Axial Age is NOT easy, and requires a new mode of thought. Bellah goes part way here, what more can we expect?
Much more to be said here: we can continue the discussion over time.
John Landon
World History and The Eonic Effect
Civilization, Darwinism, and Theories of Evolution.
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01.30.11
Posted in Evolution, The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 1:48 pm by nemo
A New Model of History: Eonic Evolution
The eonic effect shows a spectacular process of evolution in action, but the focus is not on cultures or civilizations, but on a master sequence that transcends those, operating on transitional pivot areas in short different time-slices, as with the Axial Age.
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10.24.10
Posted in The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 2:26 pm by nemo
Does the Historical Jesus Matter? (yes, he does)
…Jesus is certainly among the great axial age figures…
This statement is a fallacy: the whole point is that the ‘Axial Age’ or ‘interval’ was a short period in which the seeds of many future elements were sown, among them the creation, later, of Christianity (and Judaism). But it is misleading to say that these later religions were created in the Axial Age. The question is important because we can see that these religions are human creations, and not the mysterious process we see in the ‘eonic sequence’, of which the Axial interval is a part.
Religion and Empire
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09.07.10
Posted in cosmology, The Axial Age at 2:30 pm by nemo
The reason I look askance at multiverse theories, or one of them, is that history gives us an example of ‘spectrum’ multicultures in parallel during the Axial Age, and the issue there is not the physical replication of physical universe variants, but the exploration of religious and cultural potentials in different modes, in related but varying systems of value.
It is ironic commentary on the physics flounderings of string theorists to consider that the Axial Age produces a multiverse (so to speak) of differing art forms, religions (theist/atheist), political constructs and civilizational frameworks. It is a long way from the real multiverse concept, but the analogy is exact. But the issue if the evolution of parallel worlds from the perspective of values, not just of facts.
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08.31.10
Posted in Fourth Edition, The Axial Age, World History and The Eonic Effect at 3:32 pm by nemo
A passage from an email to a new reader of WHEE. For the online text, starting up, go to history-and-evolution.com
The theory is more in evidence in the third edition, while the fourth uses only what I call an ‘evolution formalism’ which is just to one side next to a world history, starting in Chapter Four.
The eonic model is deep and elegant and shows a direct correlation to a Kantian idea, but I have never met anyone who understood it!
So I replaced it with a simplified ‘evolution formalism’, which is simply a variant of the punctuated equilibrium macro/micro distinction, which was invented but not understood by S.J. Gould. We can use this to optionally connect the old model to the evolution formalism. But this is not ‘theory’, but a device to describe the remarkable set of punctuations and the semi-equilibrium bewteen them, in world history.
The eonic effect is (descriptively) a remarkable case of ‘punctuated equilibrium’, inthe dictionary sense of the words. The terms should have been used for this from the start.
To get the idea of the old model: ‘Evolution in quotation marks’ appears as the intermittent macro sequence, while the historical component appears Janus-faced as ‘History’ in the micro stream. It is a unique and beguiling variant of a type of dynamical alternation model, which can be expressed as an ‘evolution of freedom’.
To see the strange reality of this relationship of ‘system’ and ‘agents’ I often give the example of a ship and the passengers, and a distinction the Action of a System (the boat, the macro) and the ‘Actions of the Individuals’ (inside the boat, the micro). This relation of a ‘system action’ and the ‘free activity’ of people related to that system is actually an idea we have in our repetory, but the minute you explain it to the centipede he gets confused and can’t walk.
Armed with these concepts we can unravel the mysteries of, e.g. the Axial Age, which as you saw Karen Armstrong couldn’t get straight.
We don’t understand what we are seeing world history.
Don’t worry if this isn’t clear at first. Just follow the logic of the outline of world history, and its embedded transitions.
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08.23.10
Posted in Evolution, Science & Religion, The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 3:09 pm by nemo
Properly read, the Bible should make you … an atheist?
So our review of The Christian Delusion continues in fits and starts (though mostly in fits).
This time I set out to review John Loftus’s essay “What We’ve Got Here is a Failure to Communicate” (a phrase I first encountered not in “Cool Hand Luke” but in Guns ‘n’ Roses’ “Civil War”) but I only got as far as the second sentence.
Like most of the contributors to The Christian Delusion John sets out fists a flyin’ with a cold slap from Isaac Asimov who barks out:
“Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.” (181)
It is right there that I got held up. Let’s call this sentence the “Village Atheist Challenge”. In order to analyze it, allow me to present a parallel. I call it the “Tree Hugger Challenge”:
“Properly driven, the Ford GT is the most potent force for horseback riding ever conceived.”
(As you all have probably inferred, the car pictured here is the GT, not to be confused with the equally beautiful, and much more historically significant, GT 40 of the late 60s.)
The Old Testament is actually a book that should in the book zone of the modern secularist. Its core history of Israel/Judah, with a few corrections from Biblical archaeology, is a classic depiction of a transitional era in the Axial Age, and also records the birth of a new religion, another classic evidentiary data set for students of the evolution of religion.
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08.21.10
Posted in The Axial Age at 2:53 pm by nemo
Why Did People Change in the Axial Age?
What caused people to change in the Axial Age?
This article was written a year ago, and seems to play dumb, as did Karen Armstrong, on the issue of the Axial Age, because what it shows can’t be allowed into public discourse. That may be unfair, since the issue is obviously researched superficially, as if for the first time.
What is being evaded is the connection to evolution, and the mockery made of Darwinism by looking at world history.
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07.31.10
Posted in The Axial Age at 3:54 pm by nemo
From yesterday: popular post, as usual: The Axial Age and the fine-tuning of Greek tragedy
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07.30.10
Posted in The Axial Age at 12:36 pm by nemo
Art, Evolution And The Tragic Genre
Since the post on this material of Greek Tragedy’s apparitional appearance in the Axial Age is extremely popular here (see previous post on popular posts) I am linking to the old 3rd edition page on the original material.
It is hard to accept that the Axial Age produces these stunning cultural transformations, but the evidence is clear.
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07.25.10
Posted in Science & Religion, The Axial Age at 2:29 pm by nemo
Karen Armstrong’s attempt to make a sausage of the Axial Age is critiqued by Prothero.
Stephen Prothero, best-selling author and Boston University religion professor, has ruffled some feathers with his new book “God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World and Why Their Differences Matter.” He criticizes respected religion scholars Huston Smith, Karen Armstrong and others, who he says have soft-pedaled the differences among the world’s religions in favor of finding their commonalities. He takes on the attitude that gained popularity after the Sept. 11 attacks that all religions are one, just different expressions of the divine. Prothero argues that religious differences are profound and shouldn’t be dismissed.
Read the rest of this entry »
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07.14.10
Posted in The Axial Age at 5:01 pm by nemo
Does the Sacred Need Saving?
At a conference devoted to this question, a scholar finds himself wondering if it’s the study of religion that needs help, not religion itself…
Contemporary culture is so confused on the subject of religion that it is almost a lost cause to enter discussions of any kind.
The question of the Axial Age is especially problematical. The Axial Age needs to be understood properly, as a general stage in human history, beyond even the questions of religion.
Secularism was also born in the Axial period. And Christianity was not a part of the phenomenon, but a later product in its wake.
The question of the Axial Age suggests that as we enter a new era of modernity, the religions of the past will go into decline as a new attempt is made to grapple with the issue of religion/secularism.
Meanwhile, the term ‘sacred’ has reached terminal uselessness.
Material on the Axial Age
People like Karen Armstrong et al. have spoiled the issue of the Axial Age. Starting over in light of the eonic model can help to restore some discipline to the study of the subject.
Taylor’s sacred is not that which appeared in the so-called Axial Age, that period in history when the so-called great “world religions” of Buddhism, Christianity, Prophetic Judaism, Upanishadic Hinduism, Daoism and such emerged? It is not the sacred known as Nirvana, Yahweh, Atman-Brahman, the Dao and such that Taylor seeks to “save” so much as another which he believes may be said to be a worthy successor to them in “our secular age.” It is not the sacred that Taylor himself, as a Roman Catholic, primarily holds dear, as he informed the assembled. For him, that remains the sacred of the Christian participation in the revolution of the Axial Age.
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06.21.10
Posted in The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 1:08 pm by nemo
The previous link http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/06/21/were-adam-and-eve-real/ cites this essay at Biologos: http://biologos.org/blog/adam-and-eve-literal-or-literary/
I find it hard to grasp that liberal non-fundamentalist Christians at this point could still get stuck here, but the perception of history created by the Old Testament is no doubt to blame, despite the subtle nature of that text.
Please without fail sit down and real the material on the eonic effect at history-and-evolution.com, especially the material on the Old Testament and the Axial Age. http://history-and-evolution.com/whee/intro1_1.htm
You will note the double character of the Old Testament: the book was written over a period of time, several centuries, in a very complex history partially unraveled by Biblical Criticism, and the nearly final version seems to have crystallized around the period of Josaiah, then actual text we have set by the time of Nehemiah/Ezekiel two centuries later.
The tale is a ‘universal history’ and ends up thus bifurcating in half: from t=0 to the about the time Abraham, and everything after that. The first part is mythical, and everything after Abraham is (pseudo-)historical. Abraham and Moses, et al., might well have some historical basis, but there are partially mythologized.
In fact, the real division is about -900 BCE and everything before that. Again much of that history onward might be pseudo-history, but its basic format is different from the first part of the Old Testament: it is the history of an actual Canaanite culture, divided into North and South, and their eventual demise at the hands of the Assyrians, and their successors.
Simple as that. Note that this is about the period after -900 BCE, which doesn’t include Abraham and Moses, and the two latter are on shaky grounds, but just as Achilles just might reflect a distant historical someone, so Moses just might reflect a real person, how we have forgotten. It ought to be obvious that the first part is tacked onto the second, but I guess it is not obvious to devout Jews/Christians.
This leaves the status of Solomon, and David, et al. in limbo, also, like Moses. It seems there were real persons, but that their history, before -900 BCE, just before, is borderline history, turned into myth.
It is no accident that the rest approaches historical chronicle (and is almost boring as a result). Good archaeologists should challenge this point, but the chronicle aspect does reflect a reasonable historical substrate with fair correlation. As we get closer to -600 BCE the record becomes more historical still and reflects known events in the Middle Eastern milieu.
Note that the core section of the Old Testament from ca. -900 to -600 with another extension from -600 to -400 reflects almost exactly the pattern of the so-called Axial Age and is studied in detail in the so-called ‘eonic model’ at the link at history and evolution.com. The correspondence is so exact that we can infer roughly what is going on here: we see the effect of the Axial Age in a small corner of Canaanite, and the gestation and birth of a world religion, albeit still in its ‘tribal nationalistic’ form.
Sadly, yet optimistically, this new account will not take with traditionalists and will make better sense to postreligious secularists who can grasp the subtety of the eonic model.
The result is far more remarkable than the miracles-and-myth ‘Hollywood’ religion of the OT in its traditional form. And the study of the Axial Age shows the context on a Eurasian basis of what is happening.
Sadly neither Darwinists, New Atheists, or traditional religionists of monotheism will be able, it seems, to figure out what the Old Testament is really talking about.
Canaan and ‘Israel/Judah’: The Old Testament Riddle
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06.16.10
Posted in The Axial Age at 12:25 pm by nemo
Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation
The appearance of The Great Transformation by Karen Armstrong has introduced a new set of confusions into the question of the Axial Age. Our previous remarks about a so-called ‘Second Axial Age’ show how the analysis can go awry if we identify the Axial period with the phenomenon of religion. Thus the subtitle of her work, “The Beginning Of Our Religious Traditions”, is already a distortion of the broader balance we can see if we take into account the total phenomenon, especially the at first anomalous case of the Greek transition. Armstrong’s distinction of mythos and logos, with the comparative puzzlement or denigration of the later, shows the result of the misplaced emphasis on religion. This prejudice against rationality is a reflection of the current postmodern critique of the modern theme of reason so evident in many New Age attacks on modernity, as they call for a new era of spirituality. Armstrong, evidently aware of the first edition of World History and The Eonic Effect, seems uncertain how to proceed, on the one hand noting the modern transformation and yet pointing to the need for a second Axial Age to solve the problem of the dreaded ‘rationality’ spawned by Greeks, the black sheep of the previous Axial Age. The rise of the modern is that ‘second’ Axial Age and it is about a different business than religion.[i]
Read the rest of this entry »
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05.23.10
Posted in Booknotes, Evolution, The Axial Age at 3:40 pm by nemo
My Amazon review of The Rape of Troy came online.
Applying random evolution thinking to Greek history is a dangerous thing to do. The Greek Axial Age is a spectacular episode of non-random historical evolution.
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Posted in The Axial Age at 2:01 pm by nemo
Karen Armstrong on the Axial Age
Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation is one of the most confused books on an important subject, and may have succeeded in destroying the whole subject.
Society, and reductionist science, doesn’t want anyone to know what the Axial Age really was, and Armstrong managed to completely confuse the whole idea.
I reiterate this because the following post is one of the most popular here, week after week, month after month:
http://darwiniana.com/2005/11/20/karen-armstrong-on-axial-age/
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05.21.10
Posted in The Axial Age at 4:08 pm by nemo
After reviewing today a book on evolutionary psychology and the Homeric Greeks, I would suggest getting clear about the Axial Age and the Greek version especially: Archaic Greece: The Clue
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Posted in The Axial Age at 3:57 pm by nemo
The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer [Paperback]
Gottschall Jonathan
Review: Archaic Greece, the Axial Age, and Darwinian confusions about history, May 21, 2010
By John C. Landon
I review this piece of evolutionary psychology dealing with Homeric Greece. It looks plausible on one level, but the question of the Greeks, thence the Aryan Indo-Europeans isn’t so simple, and the soon to arrive Axial Age shows us what real ‘evolution’ is about.
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This review is from: The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer (Paperback)
Applying evolutionary psychology to the world of the Greeks (evidently the Greeks of the Mycenaean or earlier ages) has a superficial plausibility in one direction, but the facts of history show us something extraordinary about the transition from Archaic Greece to its brief flowering in the Classical period: its correlation with the phenomenon of the Acial Age, which gives us a glimpse of ‘evolution in action’ on a stupendous scale, showing us a face of ‘evolution’ that is operative on the highest level of culture, including that of art and literature. What is the meaning of evolution in this context?
The problem here in this regard is that the ‘world of Homer’ is ambiguous: the actual world of Homer is precisely that of the Axial Age Greece with its spectacular creation of literatures, beginning with the redaction of the Homeric corpus, and climaxing in Greek tragedy. The creations of Homer are a part of this Axial Age phenomenon. This is not the world of ‘evolutionary psychology’ along Darwinian lines. Another problem with speaking of ‘evolution’ with the early Greeks is that the periods of time are compressed and the relation to the world of primordial Indo-Europeans is unclear. Could the culture of the early Greeks warriors be a late development after their separation from the Indo-European mainline, and how does any of this fit into the more general portrait of Aryan migrations?
In general it does not make sense to apply Darwinian explanations to world history, because we can see two levels at work, as in the perception of the Axial Age, and its more general pattern of dynamic macro-evolution behind the stream of ordinary history. In general Darwinism fails given the counterevidence of evolutionary dynamics behind history. The world of the violent Indo-Aryan Greeks was not ‘evolving’ in any real sense. Its contribution to world evolution occurs later, in the mainline of the Axial Age, when its fertile latencies flower into an remarkable set of cultural innovations.
The example of the spectacular rapid emergence of Classical Greece, in parallel with the other sectors of the Axial Age should induce caution with respect to reductionist explanations.
For more on Axial Age Greece, and theories of historical evolution cf. World History and the Eonic Effect: Civilization, Darwinism and Theories of Evolution, 3rd Edition
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Posted in Evolution, The Axial Age at 11:47 am by nemo
The Evolution of the Confucian Way
The Confucian way didn’t evolve (in the sense here), it appeared in relation to the Axial Age.
Arnhart uses provocative descriptions that ruin everything he touches, but does make a superficial case for Darwinian idiocy:
I see the debate over evolutionary ethics as showing the contrast between two opposing views of ethics–Platonic/Kantian transcendentalism and Aristotelian/Humean empiricism.
These are four different types of thinkers. To speak of Kant using the term ‘transcendentalism’ is misleading. His perspective is ‘transcendental idealism’, which isn’t really transcendental in the usual sense.
Kantian ethics actually has ‘will’ in the ethical agent, something Arnhart’s pseudo-ethics can’t manage.
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05.20.10
Posted in The Axial Age at 5:10 pm by nemo
Archaic Greece: the clue
The great irony: the Axial Age, in showing the Greek Axial period to be a correlate of the Israelite, shows that there is a unity of sacred and secular.
Both side of the Darwin debate fail!
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05.19.10
Posted in The Axial Age at 5:13 pm by nemo
Look beyond the celestial and discover sacredness of Earth’s ecosystems By Other Voices
May 12, 2010, 4:01AM
Interesting but flawed reasoning on the Axial Age. The problem is that this period is something far broader than the question of monotheism, or religion
The steady hemorrhaging of oil into the Gulf of Mexico is an urgent invitation for all of us to not only make a fundamental shift in our energy policy, but also a profound cultural shift that restores the sacredness of the Earth.
Our current cultural symptom of systematic degradation of the planet is a side effect of philosophical and spiritual assumptions that were set in place around 500 B.C., during the Axial Age. At that time, the basic understanding of the relationship between the sacred and the Earth was shifted from a worldview in which both Earth and sky were sacred, to a worldview in which the sky and a transcendent God above were considered of greater value than our ecosystems. For this reason, Greek temples were imagined as forms on Earth below that could draw down divine power from the heavens. For this reason, 1,700 years later, the gothic cathedrals were imagined to raise up fallen creation toward the divinity of the sky. For this reason, 2,500 years later, we casually, smugly continue to ignore the preciousness of all life, even as we undo the world our grandchildren will inherit.
The Axial transitions
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Posted in The Axial Age at 4:20 pm by nemo
One of the most popular posts on this blog:
Karen Armstrong on the Axial Age
The public is curious, but stymied, on the question of the Axial Age. The mainstream Darwin camp refuses to even discuss this phenomenon in our historical backyard. Armstrong’s analysis is hopelessly flawed.
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05.17.10
Posted in Evolution, General, The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 1:42 pm by nemo
We already linked to Dembski’s post at UD: Ulrich Mohrhoff on the Hindu alternative to materialism and ID, and there is another link:
Beyond Natural Selection and Intelligent Design: Sri Aurobindo’s Theory of Evolution
Ulrich J Mohrhoff
Abstract
An outline of Sri Aurobindo’s theory of spiritual evolution is presented. Ultimate Reality relates to each world (ours need not be the only one) as the substance that constitutes it, as a consciousness that contains it, and as an infinite joy that expresses and experiences itself in it. In our world, Ultimate Reality is “playing Houdini,” enchaining itself as best it can, challenging itself to escape from self-created darkness and inertia, to rediscover its true self and powers, to affirm itself in conditions that appear to be its very opposite. Sri Aurobindo calls the process by which these conditions are created “involution.” Once we have a sufficient grasp of this process, we are in a position to understand the true nature of evolution, which is not finished: man is a transitional being, his greatness lies not in what he is, but in what he makes possible.
I will cheerfully listen to anyone who can seriously try to explain the difference between evolution and involution, but I must confess at this point that I tend to skulk away from the concept of involution. It smacks of a late response to secular skepticism, an attempt to recast ‘creationism’ in a philosophical concept that was free of theistic implications, and abstract enough to sound profound. The reality is that it is a distorted translation of some ancient concept that meant something else.
In any case, we never observe involution. All we see is the spontaneous appearance of complexities that are hard to account for.
We never observe involution behind the veil of the noumenal boundary to the phenomena of evolution. ‘Involution’ is, I think, a confused take on the ‘mechanism’ of evolution, which is beyond observation.
Look at the Axial Age: it looks like involution is at work. But in fact it makes better sense to think in terms of evolution.
Involution as a concept is good example of the way that secular Indian religious figures will corrupt their own tradition.
Someone find the history of the term, and its correlates, if any, in ancient thought.
I wouldn’t mind someone trying to debate this. But I fear the concept of involution has already been invested in false authority, which means there is still another group of religious idiots with whom I will not be on speaking terms.
The issue then is ‘evolution as phenomenal manifestation before a boundary of a noumenal limit’. It is the latter that is confused with involution.
In the eonic effect, speaking of human evolution, the distinction is ‘System Action’ and ‘Free Action’. The first is macroevolution, and the second is technically ‘microevolution’, better called ‘history creation’ as ‘free action’ realizing ‘system action’. Think of a play, an involution from some source, an author, and its realization as ‘free action’ by actors as their ‘evolution’, not a very good example, but it might help to see how artificial is the concept of ‘involution’. So drop it.
My usage is better: consider the Axial Age. It is a System Action that is macroevolutionary, but its sources spring from behind a noumenal limit that is expressed by individuals as ‘free action’. This distinction is the reason why the myth of the age of revelation is so confused, yet won’t go away. The larger Action is real, but unobserved, all we see is the free action of men (ancient Israelites) creating a primitive religion. This mixture of high and low in primitive religion creation is the source of our perplexities as we look backward. The careful accounting of the distinction in my eonic model can help to sort out the two levels.
The concept of involution won’t help here.
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05.10.10
Posted in secularism, The Axial Age at 3:13 pm by nemo
On the Axial Age
A careful study of the Axial Age in light of the eonic effect (in this passage from the third edition, about to go offline as the fourth edition appears) can show the way that the myths of revelation were right and wrong in ways that many non-religious secularists also get wrong. We can see better now what they got right, and where they went wrong, and also see that Archaic Greece was a more stupendous revelation, if we must use those terms, than the Hebraic. And that the issue is not ‘god’, but the mystery beyond evolution itself.
In any case, religion and secularism were born simultaneously, so we can dispense with the differences.
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03.29.10
Posted in Evolution, Science & Religion, The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 2:54 pm by nemo
Mysterious Drumbeat
Reconciling religion and evolution (as opposed to Christianity and Darwinism) is quite easy if you examine the evidence of the eonic effect and its perception of evolution, and the emergence of religion, in tandem, in the same model of historical evolution.
The question of the Axial Age is crucial here.
This is not a matter of belief in the particular phases of religion, but a perception of the real significance of religion at each stage of its history, including the phase of secularism.
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03.26.10
Posted in Evolution, The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 5:44 pm by nemo
History And Evolution, Darwinian Or Eonic?
The question of ‘evolution in history’, visible in the Axial period and its gestation of religions is one of the most elusive answers to the question of evolution and religion. And yet the scientific/Darwinian substitute is unable to penetrate the logic of religious history/evolution.
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03.15.10
Posted in Evolution, The Axial Age at 1:04 pm by nemo
Top ranked post this month: Evolution and the Tragic Genre
The idea of the evolution of morality is matched in the Axial data (thus the eonic effect, as ‘eonic evolution’) by the sudden appearance of the tragic genre. This is a spectacular example of the fine-grain of evolution, something unexpected, which will forever after caution us against stupid reductionist explainations of things like art or morality.
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Posted in Evolution, The Axial Age at 12:22 pm by nemo
The Axial Transitions
The last post on Ruse expresses the nausea that arises from Darwinian accounts of morality. The garbage from Nietzsche, ‘god is dead’, is such a botched phrase, and shouldn’t ever enter the discussion.
OK, set aside ‘god’ as a concept/term, but the question of the evolution of morality remains a non-trivial process that we have little information about, but the phenomenon of the Axial Age, as it spawns two world religions in parallel, and much else, shows us at least the kind of large scale evolutionary process involved in the complexities of human evolution.
To say that all this happened via natural selection is a kind of sophmoric pipedream about how reality works.
Ruse is not the worst offender, but his book on science and spirituality is rendered worthless with this kind of foundation.
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03.08.10
Posted in Science & Religion, The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 3:59 pm by nemo
Stream and Sequence: The ‘Axial’ Transitions
To find the grounds for a perspective that is both religious and scientific requires a whole new perspective on science and a complete debriefing of religious monotheism.
A look at the eonic effect, and thence the Axial Age, shows how that could be done.
It is too easy to be a prisoner of two mythologies, the Darwinian, and the Old Testament Biblical.
The forces of propaganda won’t give you a break, so when you are ready to become a social drop out, you can deal with this issue. Til then all you have are the lies created by propagandists on both sides.
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02.15.10
Posted in liberalism, Science, Science & Religion, The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 4:13 pm by nemo
The Case of the Missing Centuries
We already commented today on Ferris’ new book The Science Of Liberty. I haven’t read the book yet, and on one level his thinking may be straightforward, but it is NOT true that science led to the emergence of liberalism. The parallel independent emergence of liberalism and science is one of the enigmas of modernity, one that can be better understood in light of the eonic effect.
The mystery of the history of science is the way it correlates exactly with the eonic sequence, and the way it nearly dies out after the period of its first Axial Age flowering. The point here is that the dynamic of the history of science, and that of liberalism is macrohistorical, strange as that might seem at first.
We can see that science by itself can’t ensure its own survival, what to say of the generation of liberalism.
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