Excerpt #123 from my book, Religion, An Obstacle to Human Progress
The first lesson of evolution was one of conflict. The lesson now is one of kinship. – Holmes Rolston, author of Environmental Ethics
Contrary to the popular misconceptions that evolutionary progress depends on competition and the destruction of the weak by the strong, a new generation of biologists, like Janine M. Benyus, are finding that life is a fundamentally cooperative enterprise. Life never exists except in relationship to other life. And the successful species are not the most ruthlessly aggressive competitors; rather they are the species that find their place of service to the whole. (From David C. Korten’s “Renewing the American Experiment”).
All larger organisms, including ourselves, are living testimonies to the fact that destructive practices do not work in the long run. In the end, the aggressors always destroy themselves, making way for others who know how to cooperate and get along. Life is much less a competitive struggle for survival than a triumph of cooperation and creativity. Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life
As Samuel Miller of Harvard once put it, “We need a reconciling image, passionate enough to burn through all contradictions to an underlying peace, hopeful enough to revive man’s trust in life, and humble enough to force him to kneel.”