In my personal opinion the failure of Darwinism to explain macroevolution is one of the strongest confirmations of the truth of Theosophy – and perhaps the single best confirmation.

While the information presented in this and previous newsletters may seem sufficient to justify that claim, there is yet more reason to support it that requires a brief digression into the epistemological nature of “proof”.

Judging the truth of Theosophy occurs in numerous ways for different people. Those ways include intuitive reaction, philosophical reasonableness, internal consistency, integrative capacity, explanatory power, and observation and study of life. Hopefully over time and lives we progress to more direct knowing of the metaphysics. In more external cases some predictions and assertions of Blavatsky can be reasonably tested with objective data. Long time students of Theosophy encounter a seemingly endless series of such confirmations during their years of study.

Obviously, her statements on Darwinism can be tested – more effectively as the decades roll on. Specifically, I am suggesting testing her claim that Darwinism is true but only a “minor” law, and that Darwinism does not account for the origin of the species.

Since her assertion was quite opposite to the accepted scientific wisdom of her time, its vindication confers all the more strength to her claims.

Her primary book making this assertion was the “Secret Doctrine” published in 1888. Darwin had published his “Origin of the Species” in 1859. By her day Darwinism had taken the scientific world by storm. By her time, any opposition to Darwinism labeled one as ignorant and worse. So, when she made her assertion in the face of all the celebration and acclaim for Darwinism, it carries all the more significance when she is finally shown to have been correct.

In a sense, the ideas of Karl Popper are similar. He promoted the value of “falsifiability” of a theory. In more detail he said the theory to be tested should make “risky predictions.” Since Theosophy is not presented as a theory but rather as an assertion – determined by eons of testing and checking by seers – we should look for a risky “assertion.” And Blavatsky’s assertions on Darwinism fully qualify as risky in the sense used by Popper.

Her assertions were not only risky in a theoretical sense but holding her view could destroy a person’s career – then and now.

Louis Agassiz is the model of what happened to scientists who tried to resist the rising tide of evolution. Agassiz’s tragedy is described in Gould’s essay “Agassiz in the Galapagos,” in “Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes.” As Gould tells it, the Swiss-born Harvard professor was “without doubt, the greatest and most influential naturalist of nineteenth-century America,” a great scientist and a social lion who was an intimate of just about everyone who mattered. “But Agassiz’s summer of fame and fortune turned into a winter of doubt and befuddlement,” because his idealist philosophical bias prevented him from embracing Darwin’s theory. All his students became evolutionists and he had long been a sad and isolated figure when he died in 1873.” (Darwin on Trial p. 182)

(His “philosophical bias” must have been that he preferred truth and knew the geologic record too well to accept Darwinism.)

While increasing numbers of scientists are beginning to express their doubts about Darwinism, in general the road is still rocky and risky for many. The August ’05 issue of Whistleblower, devoted to intelligent design, tells the following story.

The career of a prominent researcher at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington is in jeopardy after he published a peer-reviewed article by a leading proponent of intelligent design … Richard Sternberg says that although he continues to work in the museum’s Department of Zoology, he has been kicked out of his office and shunned by colleagues, prompting him to file a complaint with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. …

“I’m spending my time trying to figure out how to salvage a scientific career,” Sternberg told David Klinghoffer, a columnist for the Jewish Forward, who reported the story in the Wall Street Journal. …

[The article he published], “The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories,” cites mainstream biologists and paleontologists from schools such as the University of Chicago, Yale, Cambridge and Oxford who are critical of certain aspects of Darwinism.

We might not have thought that the Smithsonian Museum would have been this close-minded and fanatical.

To give just one more example from current days – many will have heard of the fuss in the local Kansas school board. The desire is not to introduce study of the bible. It is not to introduce creationism. It is not even to introduce the theory of intelligent design. All that is desired is to introduce into the public classroom the facts concerning problems with Darwinism. And that makes headlines in Europe and the advocates of presenting this information are pilloried in the press.

So, this issue fully qualifies under Popper’s rule of a “risky” assertion. Therefore, this vindication of Blavatsky’s view has first its inherent merits. But in addition, it becomes a greatly stronger vindication because it was so bold, so contrary, and so “risky”.

Blavatsky, of course, was simply presenting the ancient wisdom – verified in its turn by eons of seers. What we are witnessing is a very major vindication of the ancient wisdom.

-Reed Wood Carson, Co-founder of Theosophy Foundation, Inc., and this website: blavatsky.net.

---

Back to Evolution Main