Thanks very much indeed for coming along tonight and I hope you'll be challenged by
what I have to bring.
I would like to start by a word of personal testimony in a sense because when
I was an undergraduate, which is some while ago, and I was studying ancient
history and classical studies, that's what I end up qualifying in
teaching and researching in.
And when I was going through the classical philosophers, Greek philosophers,
I kept coming across references which caught my attention, which seemed to be
earlier understandings pointing towards evolutionary theory.
So I sort of collected a few of those references, didn't do much more about it
at the time, but it kept buzzing away in the back of my mind over a number of
years.
And it was in the last years I began to seriously dig around and go on a quest
researching, particularly in the last three years in the National Library here
in Edinburgh, and tracing things through.
So it's actually been, I suppose on and off, a 25 year search for me.
And what I discovered caused me to have a long look at my understanding of
evolutionary theory.
Now just looking at this, this first slide exposing the roots of evolution part one.
So you might be in different positions tonight, you might think well you don't
necessarily agree with evolution or you partly agree with it or you might think
it's absolutely fantastic and it's foolproof and it's sort of like two plus
two is four or the law of gravity or something like that.
Well I want to give you first of all a quotation from Julian Huxley who was
descended from Charles Darwin, sorry from Thomas Huxley who was Charles
Darwin's bulldog, that was he was a main spokesman for Charles Darwin at the time.
He said, Darwin's theory is no longer a theory but a fact.
And it might be that some of you are absolutely convinced of that.
And that's one position.
However, some scientists take a completely different view, in particular in the last
ten years.
Here's a quotation by Professor James Shapiro who's a leading bacteriologist,
University of Chicago.
He says, for those scientists who take it seriously, Darwinian evolution has
functioned more as a philosophical belief than as a testable scientific hypothesis.
This quasi-religious function of the theory is, I think, what lies behind many
of the extreme statements that you have doubtless encountered from some scientists
opposing any criticism of neo-Darwinism in the classroom.
It is also why many scientists make public statements about the theory that they
would not defend privately to other scientists like me.
Now that is quite a challenging quotation.
And I don't know how you regard that, whether your blood's boiling or what's
going on when you see a quotation from a leading scientist.
As far as I know he has no particular religious axe to grind whatsoever,
but this is his observation as a scientist.
Before we get into the talk, I really want to look at what is evolution to make sure
that we're actually batting on the same wicket, as it were.
And so I've taken an Oxford English Dictionary definition.
The origination of living things by development from earlier forms,
not by special creation.
In other words, there's been a long process from amoeba through to
philosophers to us today, but not any divine supernatural intervention that
brought it together in the first place.
Now I regard natural selection and adaptation as being very clear scientific
principles because they can be observed, they can be repeated, and they can be
examined thoroughly.
However, the theory of evolution is actually really quite open because the
fact is it's impossible yet to recreate a universe and to observe everything
happening and take notes on it.
So we can actually assume things, we can aim at things, we can have a good
sort of intelligent guess at things, but we cannot say necessarily that
evolution and its whole thing from the cosmos right through to biological
evolution is concrete science.
The purpose of this talk, though, is not really to look into the science of
it.
Other people speak on this subject, and last week we had Professor John Walton
from St. Andrews who was speaking on the origins of life.
Was it evolved or was it designed?
And by the way, you can click onto his talk which is now available on our
website, edinburghcreationgroup.org.
But I'm here to demonstrate that evolution has its roots in an ancient philosophy
going back thousands of years and to trace that philosophy to its modern day form.
Now you might think that it all began with Charles Darwin.
I remember studying biology at school and I thought that was it.
Charles Darwin was this amazing scientist.
He went off to the Galapagos Islands and studied wildlife out there and he wrote
his book Origin of Species and published it in 1859.
It had a world impact and I thought it all originated with him.
And probably most people actually going through the education system would think
the same.
I've certainly asked a number of students here and they are under the impression
that Charles Darwin really came up with it.
But that is simply not true.
Often in major paradigm shifts, as they're called, change of thinking,
there have been many people before and somebody happens to come along and develop
the mechanism and launch it and publish it.
So let's look at a quotation from Charles Darwin himself.
He said, until recently the great majority of naturalists believed that species were
immutable productions and had been separately created.
This view has been ably maintained by many authors.
Some few naturalists, on the other hand, have believed that species undergo
modification and that the existing forms of life are the descendants by true
generation of pre-existing forms.
Passing over the allusions to the subject in classical writers, the first author who
in modern times has treated it in a scientific spirit was Buffon.
He was a chap from the Enlightenment period, the 18th century.
He was influential, along with people like Voltaire and others, for David Hume,
who became the father of the Enlightenment movement here in Edinburgh.
But this is the Origin of Species, 6th edition, 1888.
Now it seems to be that Charles Darwin was under pressure from a number of people to
say, look, put all the cards on the table.
It wasn't just you.
The credit is not just you, but there was actually a whole lot of other people
before you who were discussing the subject.
In fact, Charles Darwin, in his preface to the 6th edition, lists 21 or 22 scientists
before him who held to this theory of evolution.
The passing over of the allusions to the subject in classical writers is what's
going to be my thing I'm going to retarget on tonight.
And he does actually in his footnote mention Aristotle.
He says, we see here the principle of natural selection shadowed forth.
And one of those references to Aristotle's physics.
And Aristotle is actually quoting something from a chap centuries before him
called Empedocles.
Talking about teeth, he's talking about animal forms evolving by chance.
Well, he doesn't use the word evolving and discusses the development of teeth.
Let's look a bit further on.
Let's wind the clock further back than the classical Greek philosophers, right back
to 1200 BC in India.
Now India had their own sort of enlightenment period which went on for
centuries.
And here is a classic case of one chap, I guess he was an agnostic.
And he's saying, whence is this creation?
The gods came afterwards with the creation of the universe.
Who then knows whence it has arisen?
Whence this creation has arisen?
Perhaps it formed itself or perhaps it did not.
The one who looks down on it in the highest heaven only he knows or perhaps he
does not know.
So you might be a person just like that tonight who's agnostic.
You're not quite sure whether there's an intelligent designer behind it or whether
it all evolved by itself.
Well, you're in the same boat as this guy 3,200 years ago.
Now, we're going to look, and this might be quite strange for you, to even consider
looking to Indian Brahmins into Hinduism going back thousands of years ago.
And I'm looking at this section now, what I've called the rise of the
pantheistic evolutionists, who, in my understanding and research,
were the forerunners of evolutionary thinking.
Now, pantheism, just in case you're not sure what that means, is basically the
Hindu or pagan concept that God is everything.
Nature is God.
And so we will now look at a quotation, just so you see.
And it's an interesting thing.
When I began to research, I came across others who had actually gone before me and
done research.
And it's really nice when you actually find others confirming stuff that you've
been digging around yourself in the long hours in libraries.
But here's a quotation from Sir Monty Williams, who is a professor of Sanskrit
at the University of Oxford, and generally regarded as one of the leading experts in
the study of Hindu philosophy and Sanskrit, both in the 19th through to the
early 20th century.
He says, indeed, the Hindus were Spinoazists 2,000 years before the birth
of Spinoza.
Darwinians centuries before the birth of Darwin, and evolutionists many centuries
before the doctrine of evolution had been accepted by the Huxleys of our time.
And before any word like evolution existed in any language of the world.
Now that's quite a statement.
So now let's look at the source material of the Hindus.
Well, they have a number of writings, the main ones being the Rig Vedas written
between about 1400 and 1000 BC, the Upanishads written between about 800
and 400 BC, Bhagavad Gita about 500, Laws of Manu about 200 BC, and Mahabharata
between 400 BC and probably about AD 100.
And within these scriptures of the Hindus is a combination of both religious thought
and philosophical thought that come together.
Bear that in mind as we go through.
One of the first things you have to point out, if we're looking first of all at the
cosmology before we even get into the biological understanding, is that the
Hindus had an idea of an eternal universe, a cyclical universe.
In other words, it's depicted there, as you see, as a serpent with a tail in
its mouth, kind of like a circle going round and round and round.
The universe has an apparent beginning, has an end, starts again after a gap,
has an end, has a beginning, has an end, and continues.
Interesting enough, people like Sir Fred Hoyle, who was a very well-known
astrophysicist, was very keen on the idea of an eternal universe.
People sometimes called it an oscillating universe, or other names were given to it.
And no doubt, and I've seen some articles in Scientific American and also in New
Scientist, that there are people even discussing the possibility of an eternal
universe all over again.
The popular view at the moment is singularity.
Big bang begins and it has just one start.
But watch that space.
So that's what the Hindus and most of the pagans believed in.
Now then, let's look at another thing.
Now in Hindu understanding, you had what's called a Tramurti, which is the gods of
Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva.
Now for the religious people, they were seen as gods, but for philosophical
Hindus, Brahmins, they were also seen as principles.
Brahma was seen to be the creative principle, Vishnu was seen to be the
preserving principle, and Shiva the destroying principle.
And if you see this diagram here, you see the circle representing the
eternity of the universe.
Within that, you're supposed to have the sort of equilateral triangle of the three
gods or three principles.
And our present universe takes place within those principles.
Now let's have a look at one of the early quotations of the Hindus.
The beginning of our present universe, an atomic particle.
It says, he, that's Brahma, that's a creative principle, becomes a size of an
atomic particle and brings to life this whole universe.
In other words, you have this understanding, it began, our present
universe is a tiny particle and all that was needed within that particle for the
whole universe and life and everything was contained within it, in that creative
process, and everything came from it.
They have a kind of a big bang.
It says here, and this is a reference about probably about 3,400 years ago from
the Vedas, after hundreds of millions of years, he, that's Brahman, Brahman by the
way in Hindu thinking is the entire universe with a consciousness within it,
split the egg, as they refer to, into parts, making heaven out of one and
the earth out of the other.
A lot of the pagan cultures referred to a cosmic egg as the beginning.
They had quite poetic and different explanations of it, quite amusing
accounts, but essentially over and over again there was that kind of understanding
in a kind of a simple form.
They had an understanding of this expansion, expanding universe.
It says by tapas, that's the heat or power of meditation of Brahman, which is the
universe, attains expansion and then comes primeval matter and from this comes life.
In other words, what you have within the universe itself, Brahman, you have both
consciousness and you have this creative principle at work, which is not the same,
by the way, as a supernatural creative thing about God outside the universe
creating it, as the Judeo-Christian understanding, but it's contained within.
It expands and primeval matter and life comes from that.
They have a concept that it doesn't just start as an atomic particle and expands
and blows apart, but you also get this thing.
It says here, these, that is the creative processes that the universe goes through,
in succession acquire the attributes of the immediately preceding ones from which
they have originated.
Each has not only its own special attribute, but each succeeding one has the
attributes of all the previous ones and that's from the Mahabharata.
So that principle is contained right from the beginning at the start of our
particular present universe and is contained within the whole process,
including life, that what was before is built on.
So in other words, there were more simple forms and more complex forms were built up
out of it through a process.
So what do we say about the Hindu cosmic evolution in a very simple understanding,
not like our complex ideas today?
The universe is cyclical.
Motion involving consciousness causes an atomic particle to appear.
The particle or the egg as it expands and explodes, forming the universe.
Out of this there is an evolutionary progress, progression from particles to
philosophers.
This process takes billions of years.
Sound quite familiar, even though this is such ancient philosophical understanding.
Let's move on now to Hindu biological evolution and reincarnation.
Now if you look on the right hand picture is a picture of reincarnation.
In one sense reincarnation has got nothing whatsoever to do with evolution because
what you have is a person dies and the soul leaves the person and ends up in
another life form.
It could go up and become another lighter skinned human being or it could go down in
animal form depending on karma, whether the person's done good deeds or
bad deeds and so on.
That's very much written into Hindu religious understanding.
But before you just cast aside reincarnation, there's another point which
also is grafted in with reincarnation understanding.
It's an upward tree.
It's often referred to as a tree of life.
You find this often in ancient cultures, what's called the tree of life.
And you have simpler forms developing up a tree until they become more and more
complex.
And that thinking is what we'll trace through tonight.
Let me just give you... we'll follow that through as we go through tonight.
And I'm going to now look at some of the other things in understanding of Hindu
thinking.
One of the things they believed in was the concept of life from non-life,
what we call spontaneous generation, which was accepted for thousands of years
right up to 1869, I think, by Louis Pasteur.
It was regarded as being one of the best proofs of evolution and many of those who
at the time of Charles Darwin accepted it.
Now they had a more sophisticated understanding of it concerning bacteria,
but the more primitive understanding of it was this, that things like mosquitoes,
gnats, lice, flies and maggots, other species of this sort, originate from
heat, are born of sweat or moisture.
This was known in the Egyptian understanding.
Aristotle later also took it through into the Western understanding.
In other words, life can come by itself from non-animate to animate and that is a
very important link as we look through.
Now here's some quotations from some of the Hindu writings.
This one, they, the plants, have an eternal consciousness.
In this terrible cycle of transmigration, that's another word for reincarnation,
which moves relentlessly on and on, the levels of existence are said to begin
with Brahma, that's the creative principle remember, and to end with them,
laws of Manu.
Another one, whatever creation is born is resolved once more and is moved again by
the merits and demerits acquired in that life and enters into another body
resulting from its deeds, his habitation always resulting from nascence,
desire and acts.
He migrates from one body to body, leaving off one another repeatedly,
urged on by time, like a person leaving house one after another in succession.
So you have that reincarnation thing but you also have an upward push that's going
on, driven on by desire.
And we'll find this also mentioned in what's called the Padma Purana.
It says that there are 20,000 species of non-mobile plants, Svara, 900,000 species
of aquatic creatures, 900,000 species of amphibians and reptiles, a million species
of birds, three million species of other creatures such as animals, 400 species of
anthropoids, as called Vanaras, after which the human species Manjusha of
200,000 varieties comes into being and man then engages in purposeful activity to
attain perfection.
Now what they're saying through that is this, this tree of life coming from a
simple form of plants through aquatic creatures, through amphibians and
reptiles, through various animals, through to anthropoids, monkeys,
through to apes and so forth, through into the human 200,000 varieties, which is
rather a lot, and man engaging in purposeful activity to attain perfection,
which is all about the yoga system, which I mentioned just briefly at the end.
But also in the Rig Vedas, going back a long time, they also had an understanding,
the evolution, when it came to man, you then had the caste system.
You had the Sudra, which were the dark-skinned African or aboriginal human
beings, and then this evolution took place through into then the Vaisya, which is a
lighter skin, through to the Ksatriya, which is more the warrior caste,
lighter skinned again, and finally the Aryans, the white-skinned Brahmin,
who were the philosopher kings and the priests, as it were, of Hinduism.
Now interesting enough, when you look, and I'll be dealing with this in a second
talk I'll be doing in November, you will see something of that after
Charles Darwin was accepted and through into the 20th century, culminating sadly
with the final solution and Hitler's kind of ideas.
But you see this whole drive with a supreme Aryan, the top of the evolutionary
understanding, and in those days, the time of Darwin and through to the 20th
century, it was told by some people that you could never possibly have,
say, an African being a professor of science or something or government or
anything like that, because they were not highly evolved enough.
As I said, that's quite a touchy subject, but we're going to look at that,
fruits of evolution, later on in the series.
But just to show you the roots of some of these things.
Swami Vivekananda was a famous Hindu expert and scholar who came over and wowed
Britain in his tours, and also in America and Chicago.
A quite extraordinary man, incredible memory he had, and he seemed to be one of
these people who could dip into all sorts of things and memorise things so quickly.
I wish I could do that.
But this is something he said as a leading scholar representing Hinduism and speaking
to the West.
What is the cause of evolution?
Desire.
The animal wants to do something, but it does not find the environments
favourable and therefore develops a new body.
Who develops it?
The animal itself, its will.
You have developed from the lowest amoeba.
Continue to exercise your will and it will take you higher still.
The will is almighty.
If it is almighty, you may say, why cannot I do everything?
But you are only thinking only of your little self.
Look back on yourselves from the state of the amoeba to the human being.
Who made all that?
Your own will.
Can you deny then that it is almighty?
That which has made you come up so high can make you go higher still.
That was a speech in London, 1895.
And of course, the end product with evolution, once you go through all this
spiritual evolution right through the whole lot, you end up with the spiritual
evolution of yoga and they have so-called seven energy centres in the body beginning
at the base of the spine right through to, you have probably seen Hindus with a red
dot on their heads, the third eye.
An enlightenment where you become as God, you merge with Godhood and that is the
ultimate in Hinduism and that's the spiritual evolution part of it.
Well, now let's look at going west and Pythagoras.
Now, he's probably known most of you probably because of theorems to do with
mathematics or in some cases, some of you may have heard of his understanding of
music or sound and that type of thing.
All quite fascinating.
Not much is actually particularly known about him because he didn't actually leave
any writings but his disciples wrote about the things he taught and his philosophies
and his ideas.
He spent 22 years in the Egyptian pyramids, well with Egyptian priests,
studying under their philosophy and religious ideas.
Then he went to Babylon and for 12 years he studied under the Chaldean priests and
the Persian magi and others.
But what's particularly interesting, as I dug around, I found that he also
studied with the Brahmins, the Hindus.
And here's a reference from Clement of Alexandria who studied, he was a Christian
but he studied at the famous school of Alexandria which was a neoplatonic school
in Egypt in the third century AD.
And he said Pythagoras was a hearer of the Galatai and the Brahmins.
And Iamblichus was Pythagoras's biographer some centuries after.
Pythagoras travelled widely studying the esoteric teachings of the Egyptians,
the Assyrians and even the Brahmins.
And there are two of them, there are other references too in ancient sources to
Pythagoras being influenced by the Brahmin Hindus.
We can see some of the influences in Pythagoras's practice.
He believed in reincarnation which is very clearly a Hindu root.
Asceticism, very much like the Hindu gurus practice today.
Vegetarianism, it was a taboo to eat certain kinds of beans.
You might think that's a bit odd but anyway they did that and you would find in
also some Hindu understanding some of the gurus same thing.
They weren't allowed to cut their nails or their beards or their hair.
And again if you look at some of the gurus they have the same understanding.
Mathematical theorems were discussed and worked through.
The same with Vedantic philosophy in ancient India and the music and study of
sound also likewise with the Hindu Brahmins.
Just in case you just think I'm getting too carried away, here's some of the
leading scholars who did some investigation concerning this.
And the first quotation is from Sir William Jones who was a pioneer of western
study of Sanskrit.
And he kept in touch with a chap called Lord Monbodo actually from the
Enlightenment period here in Scotland.
We'll hear more about him later, he's a key figure.
Back and forth they wrote letters and he said to Lord Monbodo the analogies between
the Greek Pythagorean philosophy and the Sankhya school are very obvious.
Sankhya was basically, there were two main schools of philosophy in ancient India.
One was Vedantic, the other was Sankhya.
So that's his understanding.
Professor Rawlinson was an archaeologist, Victorian period, and he said,
it's more likely that Pythagoras was influenced by India than by Egypt.
Almost all the theories, religious, philosophical and mathematical taught by
the Pythagoreans were known in India in the 6th century BC.
In fact, centuries before Pythagoras was even born, those things were being
discussed in India and the Brahmins travelled and discussed them with other
people and loved to debate with people in the marketplace.
Let's move on to another figure.
Pythagoras and Plato and later we'll look at Aristotle, the key people in founding a
lot of the Western understanding and philosophy.
Now, Plato was a disciple of Socrates and Socrates, we read in some of the ancient
writings, debated with some Brahmin philosophers in the marketplace in Athens.
Socrates himself believed in reincarnation and some of the ideas you follow through,
through Plato's writings, when he's speaking as a mouthpiece for Socrates,
are very similar to the Hindu understanding.
Plato was of course influenced by others.
He went through studying different philosophers, Heraclitus who said that
everything came through fire and various other ones.
But he spent a lot of money buying some very ancient books in his collection on
some leading Pythagoreans, all about physics and science and metaphysics,
and philosophy.
And he had a great influence from Pythagoras as well as Socrates.
Now, he said in Timaeus, in his own writing, these are the principles on which
living creatures change and have changed into one another.
The transformation depending on the loss or gain of understanding or folly.
Now, he understood, just as the Hindu Brahmins had, that living things can
change.
They are not fixed, but they change.
They go through a process of fluidity, they change.
And he understood that, one to another.
But he didn't have the kind of understanding we look about in Darwinian,
with just purely natural selection and environmental pressures and so on.
They were looking at something internal because they believed in the
consciousness.
Plato believed that God created the world, but it was the same, but the universe was
also co-eternal, which was quite difficult to hold those two things together,
but that's what he did.
He had very much this Hindu Brahmin concept, which followed through later on.
Other scholars, when they looked at Plato, they realised that the influences,
again, have come from a Hindu Vedantic school.
And Sir William Jones, again, this is a quotation of him writing to a letter to
Lord Mombodo from the Enlightenment here in Edinburgh.
And he wrote, I have seen enough of it to be convinced that the doctrines of the
Vedantic school are platonic.
Another chap, Professor Irwick from the University of London, said, I affirm very
confidently that if anyone will make himself familiar with the old Indian
wisdom, religion of the Vedas and the Upanishads, he will shake himself free
from the academic attitude and limiting Western conception of philosophy,
and will then read Plato's dialogues, he will hardly fail to realise that both
are occupied with a self-same search, inspired by the same faith, drawn upwards
by the same vision.
Let's move on to Aristotle.
He was a disciple of Plato.
And many of his ideas, Plato, I think, thought he'd be a carbon copy and carry
all his ideas through, which he didn't necessarily, because Aristotle thought for
himself.
He gained a number of his own ideas, but also a lot of his writings were taken
straight from the thinking of Pythagoras, and the writings of Pythagoreans before
him.
Now, a chap called Professor Arthur Lovejoy gave a series of lectures at
Harvard University, one of the leading universities in America, in the 1930s,
and he wrote this book, The Great Chain of Being, a Study of the History of an Idea.
And what he did, and it was really to find this book, is he did my work, tracing
through Aristotle, right through to Charles Darwin.
And, as I said, gave that series at Harvard.
Let's look at Aristotle.
Unfortunately, the first quotation, I was digging around, I didn't put it in
there.
But here's a quotation from Aristotle's writings.
Nature gradually, step by step, developed from inanimate substances to
living creatures.
And again, other bloodless animals, generating from decaying earth and
excrements.
Now, it's the same kind of concept we had with the Hindus beforehand, about
spontaneous generation, living things coming out of non-living things,
in a progressive upward thing.
And it was what was called the Scala Naturae, the ladder of nature,
from the lowest forms to the highest forms, up to humans.
I won't read through that one, it's just a quotation of an encyclopedia
of philosophy, just confirming what I just said.
Well, let's have a look at the rise of the naturalistic evolutionists.
Now, what happened?
A chap called Thales, we don't know very much about him, but he believed that
everything could come about by itself, through natural processes.
And he was contemporary with Pythagoras.
Remember I mentioned, for those who just joined us, Pythagoras came via Hindu
understanding, and he was a pantheist, that he believed that God was the eternal
universe.
Now, Thales broke away from that route, and he decided everything came by itself.
And then we have a number of other people that came through this line, Anaximander,
who said that animals come into being from moisture evaporated by the sun.
Humans originally resembled another type of animal, namely fish.
Now, you begin to get a few things you can recognize here concerning evolution.
Empedocles, he was a chap that Aristotle quoted.
And Aristotle says, Empedocles says that the greater part of the members of the
animals were generated by chance.
In other words, he went that it was not some consciousness, it was a chance
randomness process that was going on.
And then he said that many races must have been unable to beget and continue their
kind, for in the case of every species that exists, either craft or courage or
speed has from the beginning of his existence protected and preserved it.
And like the Pythagoras, he believed in reincarnation.
So even though he was very much a naturalistic philosopher, he held on to
that Hindu, Pythagoras, Plato kind of understanding.
Democritus.
I'm not going to give you any quotes, otherwise we'll be here all night.
But he was generally regarded as the father of the atomic theory.
And he said, basically, that atoms appeared all by themselves, and through
the process of randomness, the universe came into being as the atoms built up and
through eventually to life forms and so on.
He also spoke about the evolution of language.
And he said that human beings, first of all, they grunted like animals.
And they went from that to a state of language through that long process.
Epicurus, you may probably come across.
Again, he talked about everything coming through a random process, natural process
through atoms.
Natural selection he spoke about.
They didn't use the phrase natural selection.
But you read their writing.
That's exactly what they're talking about.
And Pliny the Elder, who was a Roman later on, a bit of a fan of Epicurus,
he said, chance takes the place of God.
Well, we move into the time of the early church, and now into the second and third
centuries AD.
And there was a famous school of Alexandria, led by a man called Ammonius
Saccas, who had a great influence at that time.
And he's very well known because at that time, there were great big squabbles
between the followers of Aristotle and the followers of Plato.
And one lot was saying, oh, well, it's more by observation.
The others were saying, it's more metaphysical.
And they were arguing back and forth.
And he solved the division of these followers by saying, actually,
they both had their foundation from Pythagoras, as we've already discovered
tonight.
There were two figures in the church, Clement of Alexandria on the left-hand
side, and Oregon, his disciple, on the right-hand side.
And even though they were Christians, what they did is they brought in an
allegorical method of interpreting the Bible.
And they brought with them some of the ideas of Plato and so on, that became
essentially the door that opened up the way for liberal thinking within the
church.
Later on, getting to the 1200s, Thomas Aquinas, a well-known monk from
that period, wrestling, as they were, with a sort of a kind of rise revival of
Aristotle and Plato's thinking.
And he was trying to work it out with his understanding of scripture.
We get into, I'm whizzing through these people quite quickly, because it would
take too long.
You get to Leibniz, the German Plato, as he was called.
And he was called German Plato, obviously, because he based a lot of his
thinking on Platonic philosophy.
Tudor John Locke, an English philosopher, famous philosopher.
And these kind of ideas about Aristotle and Plato, and the forerunner of
evolution, were being discussed in this period.
Now, we get to an interesting part.
And Sir Francis Bacon, founding the Royal Society, and modern Freemasonry.
You think, what on earth has that got to do with evolution, that we've been talking
about, and these ideas which go right through from the early times?
Well, Francis Bacon was regarded as being a founder of modern Freemasonry,
particularly Scottish Rite, and also being very much in founding the Royal Society in
London in 1660, along with Robert Boyle and Sir Robert Murray.
By the way, Murray House in part of Edinburgh University Education Centre is
named after him.
And you have to bear in mind, Christianity after the Reformation, and so on,
was very strong.
And any ideas which were contrary to that, philosophies tended to go underground.
In other words, you're Aristotle, you're Plato, Pythagoras, going back to
the Egyptians, Babylonians, all that kind of stuff.
So some people kept a veneer of Christianity on the outside, but within,
a hard core was still the philosophy was kept alive, the ancient philosophy was
kept alive.
You see this, for example, even in Edinburgh.
If you go to George Street, you'll see the Grand Lodge of the Freemasons.
And on the outside, you have a sculpture of Christ carrying a cross.
So you think, oh, it's a Christian thing.
But actually, when you go into Freemasonry, you discover it's not
actually a Christian thing.
Everything is interpreted through a very ancient philosophical system.
So, bear in mind too, the Royal Society, wonderful as it is, because a lot of
empirical science, and that's fantastic and great, was also very much founded by a
bunch of people who were very much forerunners in Freemasonry.
Now, here's a quotation straight from a lecture of an initiation of a 32nd degree
Freemason.
You don't tend to get this kind of information very often, but here it is for
you tonight.
It's supposed to be kept secret.
But here we go.
In a Scottish rite, you will be taught that our ancient ancestors who knew all
the mysteries left enough traces so that today, with diligent labour and teaching,
like we're trying to do tonight, may renew them and bring them to light for
your enlightenment.
We now come to the great symbol of Pythagoras.
Our symbols have descended to us from the Aryans, which is like the Hindu Brahmins,
and many were invented by Pythagoras, who studied in Egypt and Babylon.
We've already discussed those things, so they already knew this.
And this philosophy, this understanding, was kept and preserved within Freemasonry,
in what's called speculative Freemasonry.
And within Freemasonry, you have this understanding of a sort of an evolution up
the ladders to a higher degree.
On the left-hand side, you have what's called the Scottish Rite, 33 degrees.
And on the right-hand side, the York Rite.
And they debate about their ancestry and so on, but we won't get into that.
Now, let's look at French Freemasonry and Enlightenment in the 18th century.
And if you look at those pictures, the one on the right is from the first
edition of French Encyclopedia.
And on the left-hand side, you probably can't make out very well, but you've
got...
here, these are ionic columns.
And here's where the light comes, the Enlightenment comes.
And these are all women down here.
And this woman here, who's kind of veiled, represents truth.
And at her feet are philosophy down here, and theology is somewhere down here.
I can't...
somewhere along there, anyway.
And there's a whole bunch of these different ideas and so on, and science and
everything else.
But the light is coming from the ionic philosophers.
Who were the ionic philosophers?
Were those Greek philosophers I was mentioning earlier, those ones I was going
through?
So, the French Academy of Science came via that line, and most of the people that
wrote, that were there on the board, the committee for the French Encyclopedia,
were Freemasons.
So, in other words, you have this philosophy that comes right through the
founding of that.
Voltaire, of course, who was a very famous person in the French Enlightenment,
had an influence on David Hume here in Edinburgh.
And he said, when I first read Plato and came upon the gradation of beings which
rise from the lightest atom to the supreme being, I was struck with admiration.
So, in other words, and he, of course, was a Freemason too.
And he, again, was referring to this Plato, this understanding, that quotation
I had very early on, about from one form evolving through to another form.
This philosophy was there within them.
Now, we come to home ground.
And James Burnett, or Lord Mombodo, who is a High Court judge, quite an
eccentric character, he used to take air baths, which in case you don't know what
they are, he used to run around like real men with nothing on, he thought,
in his garden, in his home, and he'd take ice baths, which in the winter,
and it was even colder in those days, Edinburgh, and so he'd have a bath in his
garden, break the ice open and have an ice bath, because he thought it was being like
the Spartans, really tough.
Now, there's a poem by a chap called Lord Neves, who again was a High Court judge in
Edinburgh.
Though Darwin now proclaims a law and spreads it far abroad, oh, the man that
first a secret saw was honest old Mombodo.
The architect precedence takes of him who bears the hoddo, so up and at him,
land of cakes will vindicate Mombodo.
That land of cakes, by the way, is Scotland, saying, it's not Charles
Darwin, he may have studied medicine here at Edinburgh University, but give a credit
to Lord Mombodo, he's a man from Edinburgh, a true Scots.
So, let's have a look at this character, Lord Mombodo.
Now, here's an interesting photograph, a painting rather, of the Canongate Lodge,
which is a Freemason lodge down the bottom of the Royal Mile.
It's the oldest Masonic lodge building in the world.
And here we have Robert Burns, who became the national poet.
He was a 32nd degree Freemason, very high up, and real notables and
intellectuals and the powerhouse behind the Enlightenment, because most of the
Enlightenment was spread through the Masonic lodges, both in France and Germany
and here in Britain and Edinburgh.
Now, down here, that's Lord Mombodo, James Burnett, looking on what's going on.
And so, there we have him.
Now, who were the great influences of Mombodo?
Well, he tells us in his own writings, which you can find in the National
Library.
Those whom I truly call philosophers, such as the Pythagoreans, Plato and
Aristotle.
You see, the common theme that keeps coming through again and again.
He says, now, I think it's not all probable that the Indians invented so
great a science.
It came from Egypt.
You see, a lot of the Freemasons at the time were convinced that Egypt was a great
thing, because you had all these hieroglyphics on the monuments there,
and they thought, it's only a question of time.
If only we could crack the code, we will be able to understand great
science.
Of course, when the Rosetta Stone was discovered with Greek as a translation of
it and everything else, the code was cracked, and now we can translate
hieroglyphics.
And there was nothing of the sort coming out of Egyptian philosophy, much to Lord
Mombodo's dismay, I would have thought.
But, as I mentioned before, it was Sir William Jones, who was writing from India
to communicating with Lord Mombodo, said, no, it was a Brahmin Hindus who were
the originator of the theory of evolution.
Now, here's some quotations from Lord Mombodo.
He says, the orangutan, that's an animal betwixt a monkey and a man.
1768, he said that.
Another one.
There are, I know, many, there are, I know, many who will think this progress
of man from a quadruped and an orangutan to men such as we see them nowadays,
very disgraceful to the species.
But they should consider their own progress as an individual.
In the womb, man is no better than a vegetable.
If therefore there be such progress in the individual, it is not to be that there
should be progress, is it not to be that there should be progress, also in the
species from the mere animal up to the intellectual creature.
1795.
Now, we're getting to Erasmus Darwin, we're getting closer to home.
Erasmus Darwin was the grandfather of Charles Darwin.
Charles Darwin, his father and his grandfather all studied medicine at
Edinburgh University.
Erasmus Darwin was a key philosopher and scientist from the Enlightenment period,
and he came here and he was initiated into Freemasonry, and he attended the same
Masonic Lodge as Lord Mombado and those other men there, and he was influenced by
Lord Mombado.
In fact, in his own writings, he quotes and gives reference as an authority to
Lord Mombado.
Now, what does he say?
He wrote a book called The Temple of Nature in 1803, which is actually a poem.
Well, it's actually, he died before then, but it was published in 1803.
And you have here this poetry.
Unfortunately for us, it has philosophical footnotes, so you don't have to try and
guess what he's saying in his poetry, this esoteric poetry.
But he says, in the Eleusinian Mysteries, which came from Egypt, the philosophy of
the works of nature with the origin and progress of society are believed to have
been taught by allegorical scenery explained by the Hierophant to the
initiated, which gave rise to the machinery of the following poem.
Now, you're looking here.
You can't really see it very well, but you have to take my word for it.
There's a woman behind a veil with three breasts.
And you've got two women here who are unveiling this.
And down here in the back, there are all these people in worship and great
celebration, ecstatic over the revelation of truth and so on.
Now, you think that's a bit of an odd thing for Charles Darwin's grandfather to
have in his poetry.
Well, all will be revealed.
Some quotations from Erasmus Darwin about evolution and Pythagoras.
Here's a quotation from his poem.
So, as the sage, he's referring to Pythagoras, with scientific truth,
in Grecian temples taught the attentive youth.
With ceaseless change, how restless atoms pass from life to life, a transmigration
mass.
And then he says, in the other book he wrote, Zoonomia, which is a scientific
book, this idea of the gradual generation of all things seems to have been as
familiar to the ancient philosophers as to the modern ones.
So, he's saying there's nothing new with modern day philosophy.
And bear in mind, he was before, obviously, his grandson.
I guess, well, he didn't...
not sure about the actual date we would have met his Charles Darwin, wouldn't we?
Because I think Charles Darwin was 1809 when he was born.
But, that sort of time.
And there he is, he's saying, look, you think this is new?
No, it's not.
It's been around for thousands of years.
Here's a bit of a quotation from Temple of Nature.
God, the first cause.
Bear in mind, he was... he believed that God triggered off everything at the
beginning.
But he also believed in an eternal universe like Plato.
But he said, God, the first cause, and his terrine abode, young nature lists
he is a child of God.
From embryon births, her changeful forms improve, grow as they live, and strengthen
as they move.
A time began from flaming chaos hurled, rose the bright spheres which form the
circling world.
Earth from each sun with quick explosions burst, and second planets issued from the
first.
Then whilst to see it their co-evil birth, surge over surge involved in shoreless
earth, nursed by warm sunbeams in primeval caves, organic life began beneath the
waves.
And he says about, hence, without parent by spontaneous birth rise the first specks
of animated earth.
From nature's womb the plant or insect swims, and buds or breeze with microscopic
limbs.
So basically, he does have a first cause, a sort of understanding of God,
but as a deist, which meant basic cause there and everything carried on.
But nevertheless, you have evolutionary understanding in here.
And that last quotation there from philosophical footnotes, the temple of
nature, basically says he believed an eternal universe had a beginning.
He talks about like a big bang, explosion, and out of that comes the
system, solar system out of the sun and everything.
And then he says that comes to an end, and then it starts all over again,
and on and on, just like the Hindu way of thinking.
Now here's a quotation from his scientific work, Zoanomia, 1794.
He says, from thus meditating on the great similarity of the structure of the
warm-blooded animals, and at the same time of the great changes they undergo both
before and after their nativity, and by considering in how minute a portion
of time many of the changes of animals have above described have been produced,
would it be too bold to imagine that in the great length of time since the earth
began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of
mankind, would it be too bold to imagine that all the warm-blooded animals have
arisen from one living filament or cell which the first great cause, the great
first cause endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts
attended with new prospensities, these old words, directed by irritations,
sensations, volitions and associations, and thus possessing the faculty of
continuing to improve by its own inherent activity and of delivering down those
improvements by generation of its posterity world without end.
So he's basically saying that all life, all living things came out of one single
cell.
That's basically through a process of evolution.
I won't read that but basically he refers to David Hume, the atheist in Edinburgh,
who also thought everything could have evolved by itself but through completely
natural processes.
Both Erasmus Darwin and Lord Mombardo, Lord Mombardo was friends of David Hume,
disagreed.
He said there was some sort of cause, a sort of a deity of some sort,
whereas David Hume said there was some sort of first cause but not, you know,
some sort of supernatural something.
And that's a kind of a similar idea we've got there.
Conclusion then.
The theory of evolution came originally from the Hindu Brahmins.
We've seen that as we've gone through tonight.
Secondly, this pantheistic form of evolution, that is pantheistic for those
who weren't here means that God is everything, the consciousness in
everything, was passed down by Pythagoras to the Greeks.
Thirdly, that Thales and his Ionic school of the naturalistic Greek philosophers
branched out from the pantheistic evolution to naturalistic evolution.
Plato, part four, Plato and Aristotle's evolutionary ideas were dispersed through
the Alexandrian school in Egypt in a time when Christianity was coming to its
ascendancy.
The ideas were followed through into the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and into
Freemasonry, where they were preserved.
Bear in mind, I mentioned to you, Christianity had become very strong,
so the ancient philosophy of this whole thing was kept, but it was kept within the
secret societies.
Freemasonry and Enlightenment, bear in mind as I look there, the
powerhouse for the Enlightenment in Europe were the Freemason lodges, and there was a
rebirth of this philosophy of evolution which developed.
And here in Edinburgh, Lord Mombodo, who many regard, a lot of Scots regard as
being a father of human evolution and anthropology and evolution of languages,
and Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, carried the philosophy
forward.
Until we get to Charles Darwin, who developed the idea, and as I said
right at the beginning, we started with Charles Darwin, we've ended with Charles
Darwin, and in his first edition, 1859, of Origin of Species, it would
appear that he was the guy that came up with the whole idea.
But as I said, a number of scientists pressed him and said, you weren't the chap
that came up with this idea.
It's been around a long time before you.
So I think grudgingly, in his sixth edition in 1888, he lists 22 scientists
before him.
And he even, as I said at the very beginning, made allusions to the classical
writers, the classical Greek philosophers.
And for those who weren't here at the time, I pass through from the classical
there to the Hindu Brahmins and trace the Greeks through this whole process.
So what do I think about this?
My personal conclusion is that evolution is a development of a religious philosophy
rather than science.
Here's a quotation from Professor Wolfgang Smith, University of Oregon.
He said, as a scientific theory, Darwinism would have been jettisoned long
ago.
The point, however, is that the doctrine of evolution has swept the world not on
the strength of its scientific merits, but precisely in its capacity as a Gnostic
myth.
It affirms, in effect, that living beings create themselves, which is in essence a
metaphysical claim.
Thus, in the final analysis, evolutionism is in truth a metaphysical doctrine decked
out in scientific garb.
In other words, it is a scientific myth.
Very hard-hitting quotation from a professor of mathematics at the
university.
But there we are.
My personal understanding is this.
I feel that natural selection and adaptation, as I said at the beginning,
are scientific principles.
They should be taught within the scientific departments.
Evolution, I see rather as the philosophy, ought to be taught in the department of
philosophy.
That's my hope and desire.
And I hope you've been challenged tonight by what I've said.
And if you have any questions, please fire ahead.