Martinus, Darwin and Intelligent Design – A new Theory of Evolution - book by Ole Therkelsen

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1. In Livets Bog 5, § 1935 Martinus writes:
   
   THE TWO SEXUAL POLES MERGING AND BEING'S SEXUAL TRANSFORMATION FROM ANIMAL TO HUMAN
   1935. With regard to the two poles, then the ordinary pole, that is, the masculine pole in the man and the feminine pole in the woman, has in its release centre in the sexual organs. The latent or opposite pole, that is, masculine pole in the woman and the feminine pole in the man, has its release centre in the brain organs. In the normal terrestrial human being, these two centres are still clearly separate. But gradually, as evolution progresses and the opposite pole increases, a connecting line, a kind of mental main nerve, grows between the two centres. It begins as a radiant offshoot from both centres, that is, from the brain and from the sexual centre in region of the spinal cord. These two offshoots continue to grow until they reach one another one day and immediately make a connection. This in turn means that full contact also arises at that moment between the sexual brain centre and the sexual mating centre or centre for attraction. The being becomes completely awake day-conscious in its opposite pole, which at that very moment is being overshadowed by the centre for sexual attraction. Attraction to, or love for, its own sex then arises in the being, but this love has nothing to do with marriage. Indeed, this new feeling of attraction differs from the previous sexual attraction, which was a mobilisation of energy for mating and thereby for the desire for ownership of another being that we know as "amorous love", by being true love. This in turn means an expression of energy that definitely does not aim to possess or own anyone or anything, but senses nothing but an all-encompassing feeling of pleasure in serving everything and everyone in contact with the divine laws. The appearance of one’s fellow beings as men or women is no longer the object of the culmination of love, but the "human being" in the human being is. […]
   
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2. Translator’s preface [Translator Richard Michell]
   This is a remarkable book and a timely one. It is topical on two counts. Firstly, 2009 marks a double Darwin anniversary; it is 200 years since his birth and 150 years since the publication of On the Origin of Species. Secondly, it addresses itself to the contemporary version of the perennial debate about fundamental issues currently taking place within a postmodern context that is suspicious of overarching narratives, be they religious or scientific.
   
   The title of this book is in itself intriguing, as it juxtaposes three very disparate elements. Darwin is an eloquent symbol for the power of a great idea and its part in creating our modern post-religious sensibility. Intelligent design alerts us to the reluctance among many people, particularly those to whom a religious world-view remains meaningful, to wholeheartedly accept evolution as an explanation of our origins. And Martinus (1890–1981) is, to begin with, the name of a little-known Danish writer.
   
   And yet this book deals primarily with Martinus, using Darwinism and its critics as a foil against which to bring out the stupendous cosmic vision that we owe to this Danish seer. It is time he was more widely known, not least in the English-speaking world.
   Martinus developed a cosmic model that can sharpen our awareness of what it means to be human and deepen the sense of mystery about our existence that a superficial scientism appears to have banished. And yet he was neither a philosopher, nor a scientist nor even an imaginative novelist. He was a man of little schooling who experienced a momentous enlightenment in his thirtieth year which never left him throughout his long life. He spent the rest of it, some sixty years, in expounding his ever-present vision. There seems no better word for it, for his cosmic model claims to be neither theory nor speculation, but a straightforward description of the world in its totality (not just the physical world that is the legitimate object of science) as seen from the perspective of infinity and eternity. It is this latter viewpoint that saves his vision from becoming just another meta-ideology: indeed, it respects our humanistic sensitivities while honouring our link to an open-ended matrix of experience.
   
   It would be easy, if premature, to dismiss his work on the basis of its origin, which smacks of “revelation”, a source that is rightly rejected as a basis of knowledge. However, if we venture to examine his ideas, we will find ourselves seeing our familiar world in a fascinating new light. His cosmic model bears the hallmarks of elegance, harmony, simplicity and coherence that we look for in a good scientific theory. It presents a satisfying explanation of the underlying structure of the universe on the basis of a very few fundamental principles – William of Ockham would have approved. Moreover, it offers us concepts and approaches that have the power to harmonise the most disparate competing claims of science and religion (in their best aspects) to give us a broad picture of reality. The sheer optimism of his world picture is exhilarating, as is its grounding in the twin elements of eternity and infinity (so troublesome to science and religion alike) and its surprising take on the vexed question of consciousness.
   
   One aspect of Martinus’ work does need explanation. He places it in a spiritual context, while making a sharp distinction between his spiritual science and religions. He would thus appear to plunge into the morass of untestable assertions that bedevil any discussion of spirituality. And yet, his writings breathe an empiricism that is both astonishing and beguiling – he makes us blink and look anew at what we imagined reality to be. But the avowed pantheism of this cosmic model will appeal no less to those of a secular cast of mind, simply because it transcends such categories and reconfigures them within a broader context. We should not stumble over words, but see what he means by them. After all, he had to draw the words available in his surrounding culture to give expression to a vision that by its nature represents the very crucible of pre-verbal experience.
   
   It is as if Martinus’ personal consciousness had been raised to a point at which we hear the living universe speaking through him about itself. And yet he is no mouthpiece of dubious “higher beings”, but steadfastly remains his own source: he describes reality almost prosaically, if sub specie aeternitatis, and yet in a way that resolves the deepest puzzles of existence in an appealingly human way. Simply to allow these thought pictures to pass before our inner vision is a deeply stimulating experience: there emerges a way of understanding the world which is entirely consistent with our scientific mindset while allowing us to see pre-scientific, religious and mythological world-views as symbolic expressions of a vast underlying reality that surrounds us today as much as it ever did.
   He throws detailed light onto our pre-natal and post-mortal existence in a way that weaves the pericope of a human life into a richly meaningful tapestry and shows us how we can resolve the conundrums of time and eternity in an intuitively satisfying way.
   
   His description of the evolution of human sexuality is perhaps one of his most intriguing contributions. Our contemporary culture, characterized as it is by changing patterns of sexuality and gender, gains in depth when seen from the perspective of a gradual transformation away from the male and female states to a new kind of human being who combines the best aspects of both sexes, in a process that will gradually give rise to a transfigured human body.
   His insights into the nature of health and disease are scarcely controversial in an age so aware of psychosomatic relationships. He effectively scotches the myth that ill-health strikes randomly and shows us convincingly that we can indeed be the masters of our fate, and not least of our health. In short, Martinus cosmology is a deeply inspiring well of insights into the human condition and our profound interconnections with the entire cosmos through space and time.
   
   From a humanistic angle, Martinus’ cosmic model offers a perspective that avoids the twin pitfalls of a theistic threat to our hard-won individual autonomy (characteristic of religion) and a narrow interpretation of reality (typical of scientism) that ignores the fundamentally provisional nature of the scientific enterprise. It consequently fits happily into the enlightenment project that lies at the heart of Western culture while lending it wings to expand into breathtakingly limitless dimensions.
   
   Before Darwin, so much of life appeared inexplicable that it seemed reasonable to accept the existence of a deity. In a post-Darwinian world, we can see through the fallacy of explaining the unknown by something even more unknown. The triumphant march of science since his time has bequeathed to us a rich explanatory matrix rooted in a reasoned observation of reality. It has perhaps been less successful in describing a universe in which human beings can feel truly at home. That is where Martinus comes in. His vision gives us the tools to reinterpret our scientific world-view, and not least the powerful explanatory principle of evolution, so that we begin to sense our central role as knowers within an evolving cosmos of which we are, as individuals, an indispensable and eternal part.
   
   Richard Michell, 2009
   
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   Ole Therkelsen
3. EVOLUTION AND CONSCIOUS CREATION – Darwinism and intelligent design
   6.1 HOW DID EVERYTHING BEGIN?
   In the centuries before Darwin, the Biblical understanding of nature prevailed in Western culture: In the beginning God created the heavens, the earth and all living things. Everything that was created at that time has been preserved in its original form up to the present. According to this view, the world was created 6,000 years ago. Adherents of a literal interpretation of the creation story are known as creationists. Creationists believe in miracles. They believe that God’s creation of the world took place in a miraculous way in six days. They argue against gradual evolution from one species to another. They do not accept that human beings are descended from apes. They also reject the notion that birds have evolved from reptiles. After all, God did not create fish and birds until the fourth day of creation, and reptiles, cattle and wild animals not until the fifth day. So God created birds before reptiles!
   
   The theory of intelligent design (ID) argues that plants and animals cannot have come about by gradual evolution, so there must be another cause – an intelligent one. Plants and animals must have been created by supernatural intervention.
   
   
   6.2 HOW DID EVOLUTION ENTER THE PICTURE?
   
   If we observe plants and animals only during a human lifetime, we cannot discern any sign of evolution. At first sight, it looks as if human beings, apes, lions, elephants and giraffes have always had the same unchanging form. This dogmatic, static and non-evolutionary world picture of the Christian Church was dominant far into the 1800s.
   
   In biological science of the period 1700–1850 the dogma still prevailed that species do not change. Even the Swedish genius Carl von Linné (Linnaeus 1707–1778), who created a comprehensive taxonomy of plants and animals, regarded the various species as unchangeable. In the same period, however, geologists gradually had to accept the changeable character of the earth. Geology began to formulate a completely new world picture with a modified understanding of time by virtue of the dating of the various strata.
   Thanks to industrialisation, extensive building and mining activity, more and more fossils came to light during excavation work. It was subsequently discovered that deeper and older strata contained relics of more and more primitive forms of life. As the more advanced animals such as mammals and birds only occurred in the younger strata, this was interpreted as evidence of evolution. Jean Baptiste de Lamarck (1744–1829) was the first to formulate a scientific theory of evolution. He even examined the fossils found below the city of Paris. As early as the year before Darwin’s birth, 1809, he had already published his book “Zoological philosophy”, that gave the idea of evolution its definitive breakthrough.
   
   Darwin was greatly inspired by Lamarck, as well as by British geologist Charles Lyell (1797–1875), whose book “Principles of Geology” accompanied him as reading material on his long journey of exploration. In contrast to his contemporary adherents of the creation story, catastrophe theories and sudden evolution, Lyell had the new and epoch-making idea that geological evolution was a gradual process. This was also to become one of the cornerstones of Darwin’s view of biological evolution.
   
   
   6.3 WHERE DID THE IDEA OF NATURAL SELECTION COME FROM?
   
   In connection with the concept of natural selection, the English parson and economist Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) was to play a decisive role for Darwin (1809–1882). He showed that humanity grows exponentially unless other circumstances such as war and plagues retarded this growth. At the same time, the quantity of food would set an upper limit for how many individuals could exist. Malthus’ law implies that only war, over-population, starvation and sickness could keep population numbers down. According to Malthus, who was a parson with a strict moral code, the consequence of this law was to keep laziness and other sins in check. Darwin transferred this principle from the human world to the world of nature by assigning a creative role to the inevitable process of elimination, as this mechanism would allow a gradual increase of well-adapted organisms at the cost of ill-adapted ones. Malthus’ theory of population growth described in his book “An Essay on the Principle of Population” had, in one fell swoop, explained the enormous material that Darwin had gathered during his expeditions to places such as South America, the Galapagos islands, Australia and New Zealand in the years 1831–1836.
   
   Malthus’ convincing account of the consequences of exponential growth was also of great importance to another English natural scientist, namely Alfred Wallace (1823–1913), who formulated the same theory of natural selection independently of Darwin. For both of them, the mechanism of natural selection was a materialistic cause of the evolution of species, which they were convinced had taken place.
   
   In 1858 Wallace wrote a letter to Darwin in which he described a theory of evolution that was almost identical to his own. Darwin was in grave doubt as to what he should do. But the problem was solved by the fact that his friends saw to it that summaries of both theories were read at the same scientific meeting during that year.
   Starting from his huge half-finished manuscript, Darwin then completed his theory of the origin of species and change in his book “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life” in under a year (1859). He formulated two ideas in his book:
   
   1. All present plants and animals are descended from earlier, more primitive forms and have common ancestors.
   
   2. Species evolve by means of natural selection. Some species die out while others survive and evolve further.
   
   Darwin does not explain the origin of life, but with a view to the origin of species he claimed that two different species would originate from a common ancestor in the event of geographical isolation. This isolation can take place when some individuals within a species come to live on different sides of a mountain chain or on different islands where natural selection would, thanks to the different conditions of life, gradually result in the creation of two different species.
   Darwinism is the designation for the theory of evolution and natural selection that Darwin presented in his book in 1859. The book very quickly became a great bestseller, and was reprinted in various editions. Very soon, a clash also took place between churchmen and the adherents of Darwin’s theory of evolution, and this clash still has not been finally settled today, a century and a half later. It has even blown up again after the recent introduction of the theory of intelligent design. (...)
   
   "Martinus, Darwin and Intelligent Design – A new Theory of Evolution" by Ole Therkelsen
   
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4. Personally i can recommend this book, it gives the reader an alternative and very precise picture of the development of nature and evolution, by Martinus and the Theory of Evolution by Darvin, written by Ole Therkelsen in a understanding language everyone can read. Thank you for this very interesting book.
5. Explanation of front cover
   In connection with his eternal world picture, Martinus (1890-1981) drew a series of symbols in which he uses the seven colours of the visible spectrum to characterise the different forms of energy of the universe. Religious belief is mainly based on feeling, symbolised by the colour yellow. Science is based on the energy of intelligence, symbolised by the colour green, and Martinus’ Spiritual Science is based on intuition, symbolised by the colour blue.
   After passing through centuries of superstition and belief, humanity has now, thanks to the clear light of intelligence, entered the epoch of science and intelligence. But we now stand at the threshold of a new epoch of intuition that will be based on spiritual science. The book’s three topics are symbolised by the three colours yellow, green and blue.
   Science is based on intelligence or thought processes from below, whereas spiritual science is based on intuition or thought processes from above, as Martinus puts it.
   The humane individual whose mature feeling (yellow) and developed intelligence (green) are in balance begins to gain access to intuition (blue).
   The triangle in Martinus’ symbolic language represents the eternally living being.
   
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