The basic principles of Creative Evolution are: firstly, that the universe is inherently creative, and secondly, that this creativity appears in an evolutionary manner. These principles are based on the scientific observation of reality.
I reject the traditional concept of God. Rather I claim that an anthropomorphic creator-god -- conceived in the image of man -- does not exist, and that any validity in the idea of such a deity is properly an attribute of the natural universe as an organised whole.
In its earliest infancy, mankind believed in animism -- that all creatures and natural phenomena were animated by a conscious spirit. During the pre-industrial age the monotheistic religions came to dominate thought in the Middle East and the European West. Ever since Newton's Principia (1686) and Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) the theistic explanation of human origins, purpose and destiny has been under attack from the mechanistic philosophy of reductionist science.
If industrial civilisation is to discover a new sense of purpose and a new confidence in the rightness of its existence in the dawning information / interplanetary age of the millennium just begun, it will need to find an interpretation of scientific discoveries that throws more light on the significance of human existence than do the dead mechanisms of the Newtonian clockwork universe.
Creative Evolution is just such an interpretation of science. It provides an intellectual basis for the values of a civilisation which could grow as far beyond our present-day world as this one is beyond the village greens and draughty castles of a thousand years ago.
No philosophy or ethics which does not start from the true situation of humanity amid the vastnesses of cosmic space and time can hope to be anything more than misleading and arbitrary. Believers in some of the more intolerant of traditional religions are perfectly well aware of this fact, as evidenced by their resort to violence and murder in defence of their otherwise indefensible beliefs.
This site is devoted to essays exploring the philosophy of Creative Evolution.
Stephen Ashworth, Oxford, UK
6 May 2002 / 33rd Apollo Anniversary Year