Heinlein on creation

Also from Stranger in an Strange Land

Heinlein on the universe

From Stranger in a Strange Land

When Gaia leads

Theistic evolutions entertain the naive view that somehow the unmixable can be mixed: a personal creator and a random material process.

This is where it gets you:

As soon as we look carefully, nature is neither nurturant nor benign. She is immensely indifferent to suffering and immensely profligate in the expenditure of individual existences. Vast numbers of sperms are wasted so that one ovum may be fertilized. Countless weaker animals are sacrificed to feed the few stronger ones. The evolutionary process as a whole wastes thousands of species as it selects the very few who will survive. It is this understanding of nature that we must appropriate. We will then also understand that, in the final analysis, life and death are one and the same, and nothing matters beyond the endless thrusting of the (Gaia) divine energy.

Gaia has another face. It has been revealed most fully in India. It is there given the name of Kali-Durga, consort of Shiva, the goddess who both gives and destroys life. She manifests herself naked, four-armed, her mouth gaping to show bloody fangs. In her four hands she holds a noose, a skull-topped staff, a sword, and a severed head. She is dancing on a mountain of corpses. Many people, perhaps even you, think they are not yet ready for this vision. But I assure you it is the future to which she calls us; it is the future that we have already embraced.

Peter Berger, "The Other Face of Gaia" First Things, Aug-Sep 1994