Gifford Lectures

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Gifford Lectures revisited: reflections of seven Templeton laureates
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2012-06-01) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-, interviewee; Burton, Simon, interviewer; Nolan/Lehr Group, Inc., producer
Natural and cultural history on Earth is a cybernetic process, a creative generate-and-test process, resulting in our planetary wonderland of biodiversity. With the emergence of humans, endowed with unique cognitive faculties, including language and the transmission of ideas from mind to mind, this creative genesis occurs in novel and even more spectacular ways. Humans are the only species that reflects on where we are, who we are, and what we ought to do. Cybernetics generates caring, increasingly in sentient life. This cybernetic process is also cruciform. Life is suffering through to something higher. Life has its logos, its logic, its history; life has its pathos. Life is in prolific and pathetic. The fertility is close-coupled with the struggle. Biologists find life perpetually regenerated; theologians find life perpetually "redeemed." Both in the divine Logos once incarnate in Palestine and in the life incarnate on Earth for millennia before that: "Light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it."