This book is written out of the conviction that most of us by virtue of living in the time we
do suffer under a default world-view whose basic assumptions are so deeply buried in us that
we are not even minimally aware of them. Furthermore these assumptions radically distinguish
the intellectual and spiritual life of our time from that of previous eras. In order to unearth
these assumptions and show up their error it is necessary to dig deep. The tool used for this
must of necessity be the tool of our time - of our default world-view. This necessitates a
delicate balancing act one in which materialistic science is used to overthrow scientific
materialism in which reason leads us in march-step to the brink of the formless and
incoherent. It is my hope that this balancing act can succeed I find in our time no other way
to arrive at a place which in other times was the place of origin. The individual ideas in
this book are not original but have been developed and plumbed for centuries and in some cases
millennia by thinkers far more talented than I. Their combination in this form however I have
not seen elsewhere and it is my hope that this may be of some value. I have refrained in
general from stating the original sources of ideas by now well in the public domain in the hope
of keeping this book less cumbersome and pedantic than it would be if loaded with references
and footnotes. When I have borrowed an idea from a contemporary writer however I have noted
this. I will often refer to Darwinism though without differentiating between the different
strands of thought that go by this name or a slightly modified version of it (e.g.
neo-Darwinism) nor have I delved into the controversies still raging between evolutionary
biologists and philosophers of biology over exactly which strand is most coherent. For me it is
enough that natural selection be seen as an indifferent purposeless algorithm that favours the
development and retention of those characteristics of organisms that promote reproductive
advantage in the environment in which they find themselves and that it be understood as the
vehicle which produces the 'designs' found in the natural world. It seems to me that any view
that goes by the name of Darwinism must see natural selection in this manner and so I believe I
am justified in using the term in this rather undifferentiated way.
