Update 2: 2018 we don’t have a shred of evidence for demiurgic powers and I would claim that despite its complexity the ‘soul’ aspect enters in the same way everything else does, save that have no idea how that is either. I do not think Bennett’s demiurgic powers control evolution (and that would be a design argument, it is far too comlex even such, who/whatever they are: Bennett doesn’t seem to understand his own system: evolution would be a sort of Gaian process in the cascade of ‘will’ manifesting as stars, planets, biospheres, etc…that ‘silly’ system is actually someone cogent and in any case ‘evolution’ is part of cosmology, not some figment of ‘angelic’ demiurges…
(Update 2018 Bennett has a remarkable ‘tale’ in Vol IV of DU of the way the demiurgic powers bestowed man with a ‘soul’: the term soul is confused but basically clear enough, at least to anyone who is not stuck in degraded theology: issue is connected with the whole package of upgrades from homo erectus: the issue of soul is connected with mind, language, consciousness, etc, and is often wrongly contrasted to the physical. But man has a kind of spooky physics aspect that stands at the boundary of space time and perhaps the tibetan book of the dead, minus its peculiar metaphysics suggests the answer: a ‘self’ construct …or no-self self…appears as a ‘soul’ because its space time aspect is stripped off as it passes to a new state back into time. That’s why we lose consciousness in death: mind is stippd off. This must be distinguished from the ‘soul’ process of another kind known to sufis and probably christians before the lost it, the soul formation of the completed man…this blog will get to that later…these two souls are not the same, although the fact is that homo sapiens has ‘soul’ in some sense as a species characteristic…some info here at the autobiography as https:infonemonenimi.wordpress.com, the first item on top…We are hard on Gurdjieff but he seems to refer to the sufi case or is aware of it, but never shares it with his disciples, in public at least: I cant figure out if his disciples were secretly introduced to this…I passed by this and became aware of it but never really entered the game, fortunately…don’t let ‘soul’ peddlers scare you into thinking you have no soul:it comes with being homo sapiens and you see the tip of the iceberg in your mind which is part of your spacetime experience//?)
Evolution, and soul
Article on new Dawkins book
The Archbishop of Canterbury has no problem with evolution, nor does the Pope (give or take the odd wobble over the precise palaeontological juncture when the human soul was injected), nor do educated priests and professors of theology.
It is amusing that this article mentions the issue of the soul and the ‘when’. Bennett is one of the few people to address this question directly, one of the reasons for his strong anti-Darwinism. His language is a little different, and he speaks of several phases, the beginnings of consciousness, the beginnings of creativity (soul?), etc…
New Man, New Age, New Socialism 