I wonder if anyone else has noticed Descartes' defense of theistic evolution in Meditations, written about 200 years before Darwin came on the scene!
"But it is certain (and this is an opinion commonly held among theologians) that the action by which God conserves the world is precisely the same action by which he created it; so that even if he had never given it, at the beginning, any other form but that of chaos, provided he established the laws of nature and applied his conserving activity to make nature function just as it does ordinarily, one can believe-without belittling the miracle of creation-that by such activity alone all the things which are purely material could have been able, as time went on, to make themselves as we now see them. And their nature is much easier to conceive, when one sees them gradually coming to be in this manner, than when one considers them only in their completed state."
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I wonder if anyone else has noticed Descartes' defense of theistic evolution in Meditations, written about 200 years before Darwin came on the scene!
"But it is certain (and this is an opinion commonly held among theologians) that the action by which God conserves the world is precisely the same action by which he created it; so that even if he had never given it, at the beginning, any other form but that of chaos, provided he established the laws of nature and applied his conserving activity to make nature function just as it does ordinarily, one can believe-without belittling the miracle of creation-that by such activity alone all the things which are purely material could have been able, as time went on, to make themselves as we now see them. And their nature is much easier to conceive, when one sees them gradually coming to be in this manner, than when one considers them only in their completed state."
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