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by Donald C. Bartley (Author)
Paradise Lost: a Divine Comedy or Profane Bathos? (, Ai-ichigen) breaks the spell, awakening the dreamer. For living in our dreams, we struggle to live in Paradise. Darwin said the origin of species was by means of natural selection, the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life; & history has borne him out. Proceeding from a faulty & partial memory, it needs repeating & constant amending; yet it renders no progress: history affirms the blind & random nature of human events! Schooled that by the labors of our native intelligence, we alone could subdue Darwin, we have made nature pay for our great industry. Our mighty institutions embrace Darwinian principles making us highly competitive through fear & separation. Love & unification we spurn to maintain our competitive edge, believing that by keeping our independence, our freedom we secure; for space & time were limited. These beliefs, being empirical, we never question. But what if Darwin was wrong? if things don't evolve? if life were vouchsafed? For science avers that nature is lawless. It follows no rules in having no point or purpose. Positing a cosmic intelligence steering nature offends science. All the laws & meanings we find in nature are what science gives it. Yet were point & purpose never any part of this world, then how could we know them or even possess them in ourselves? & that includes our native wits. So, science concedes that life is deterministic &, promptly, reality dissolves; for life, we know to be uncertain & rife with choices. What we dare not question, this book answers. Strangers here we have become, thinking life in Paradise could ever be a struggle. Having turned fantasy into reality, Paradise is lost on us!
