From Influence to Inhabitation

Dialogue Concerning Life: Abiogenesis, Biogenesis Or Creationism: Religious Response

“…By contrast, Charles Lyell, an English geologist advocated the notion of multiple centres of creation established at various times and in different places (Stockwell, 2002). A third view was held by Louis Agassiz, a Swiss-American naturalist who denied that species originated in single pairs, whether at one or multiple locations (Avery, 2014;Shiller, 2004;Christie, 2019). Agassiz argued instead for the simultaneous creation of multiple individuals in each species with all distributed over the ranges God meant for them to inhabit.…”

What's in a name: the etymology of astrobiology

“…In this work on anthropology, astrobiology signified the stage of human development in which human societies subscribed to animistic or vitalistic interpretations of natural phenomena in parallel with a certain degree of astronomical knowledge, and a belief that the latter shaped terrestrial phenomena (Berthelot, 1938; Lemarchand, 2010). Although Berthelot's conception of astrobiology has altogether fallen out of use in the 21st century, it was employed in hoc sensu by French intellectuals up to the late 20th century (Christie, 2019, p. 4).…”

“…In this work, he envisioned astrobiology as ‘ loi qualitative de l’énergie ’ (Lagrésille, 1902, p. 540), i.e. as the ‘qualitative law of energy’ (Christie, 2019, p. 4) 8 . In the only instance where astrobiologie (astrobiology) explicitly appears (Lagrésille, 1902, p. 541), a rough translation of that passage is furnished below: You can thus conceive that today's astronomy only offers celestial mechanics, and therefore provides only the abstract framework of a more concrete science, in closer conformity with [living] beings – namely astrobiology – which, if it were possible, would adopt the essence of astrology, not unlike how chemistry superseded that of alchemy.…”