By: Chandrasekaran s/o Sivasubamaniam
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Scientific and religious paths are like two streams of the creative human mind. In Bhagavad-gita (3.3), Lord Krishna says, “O sinless Arjuna, I have already explained that there are two classes of men who try to realize the self. Some are inclined to the process of empirical, philosophical speculation, and others to the process of devotional service.” In deeper sense both scientists and spiritualist or religionists are engaged in search for the ultimate meaning of life and the universe. The scientific path tries to explain the nature of reality within rationality, whereas the religious or spiritual path does so within and beyond rationality.

However there is a common principle found in both which is called, “faith”. for example, when a scientist plans to set up an experiment, he has already mapped out within his mind how he will tackle the problem before him. Out of several possibilities he will select one and perform that experiment in which he has the greatest faith. In the religious context, this would correspond to the faith that such an idea or vision has come to his mind by the mercy of the Supreme Lord. In another example, someone may say that he believes the Darwinian evolutionary model of life or the Big-Bang model of the creation of the universe. That too, is his chosen faith. After all, there is no final and definite scientific rationale for these theories or speculations, nor can they be verified by experimentation. On the other hand, someone else may have genuine faith that life and the universe are products of an all-powerful and all-knowing God.

A third example shows that faith is a natural quality of the human mind and is the main driving energy behind all human activities. Whenever we board an airplane, or even a bus, whether we are scientists or religionists, we are “blindly” putting our faith in the pilot or driver, in the engineers involved, and the airplane or the vehicle itself. Generally, we do not personally check the safety conditions in detail but assume that the operators have some dependable maintenance system in place. Without a certain degree of trust or faith, we could become too fearful to even board a bus. So, faith is a reality we all live with in daily circumstances. The real question lies in where we choose to put our faith and more fundamentally the aunthenticity or validity of the source of knowledge upon which we base that decision. Ultimately the test of faith lies in seeing or experiencing whether the desired result is obtained or not as predicted.
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Although faith in their own belief systems is common in both processes, there are fundamental differences in the way knowledge is acquire in the two systems of thought. In religion, knowledge is primarily revealed or received from a higher authority that is transcendental to, or beyond, the material realm. In science, however, knowledge is primarily empirical or derived from our direct experience. Indeed, science rejects the principle of revelation in its quest for knowledge. Knowledge, in scientific thinking, must abide by the principle of reproducibility i.e it can tested and verified time and again.

The Vedic tradition accepts both empiric and revealed evidence. But revealed knowledge (orginating from Divine source and recorded in the Vedic scriptures) is taken as absolute and superseding. Perfect and higher than any other method, including the empiric process. It is received in disciplic succession where a sincere seeker of knowledge acquires perfect understanding from a perfect seer by following certain disciplines laid down in the Vedic tradition. He then transmits the perfect understanding that he has acquired to another sincere seeker who has similarly followed the laid down disciplines. Since knowledge is acquired from a higher authority, the revealed knowledge is also referred to as descending knowledge.

In this system of understanding, knowledge which is descending from a qualified authoritative source, is held to be more reliable than that attained by one’s own efforts and sensory experiences. Therefore, in Vedic system both revealed knowledge, direct experience and empiric knowledge have interdependent roles to play in the understanding of reality.

However some modern scientists tend to dismiss all too quickly things religious as being merely unverifiable “faith” or “belief” without acknowledging that such things also exist acceptably in scientific studies, such as mathematical axioms and physical theories. The idea that everything in the universe, including life, is completely mechanical has become the dogma of today’s science. How ever it is ironic to note that although their paradigm has no scope for anything non-empirical still these same scientists put faith in physical laws. Religionists go one step further. they also have faith that the physical laws are created by the Supreme Being.

Tho who put all their faith in observable empirical data should realize that this procedure has two inherent limitations. In the first place, our senses are limited in their ranges of perception, and are also prone to error and illusion. Secondly, many phenomena exist that are inconceivable to our limited mind. For example, we do not have a scientific basis or mechanism to explain how a mother has such an intense love and affection for her child. We take it for granted. Therefore, when we restrict ourselves to that which is observable and conceivable only, we are leaving out a great portion of reality. Consciousness, the soul and the mins for instance, cannot be seen directly, but they are real. The great Vaisnava philosopher Srila Jiva Goswami advises that we should acknowledge the existence of acintyasakti, or inconceivable potencies. Faith beyond reason is therefore, an important part of reality and this principle is a commonality between science and religion and the acknowledgement of this can bring them together.

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Millions of young students throughout the world are misdirected towards an entirely materialistic and reductionistic understanding of the world. In ths paradigm, life is considered to be nothing more that a product of the interactions of material particles, small and large. this idea has been accepted and taught as if it were an unquestionable fact. Although actually it is merely a theory that cannot stand the test of true scientific analysis. Darwinian and neo-Darwinian models of life, such as the chemical evolutionary model, have been very blindly popular in the twentieth century but they are all entirely based on materialism. There is a total neglect of the inclusion of divine or spiritual elements in such models. Such thinking patterns erode the sense of God-loving values and morality in human society and hence bring about even more decadence and loss of culture and graciousness in our youth.

In popular works and in textbooks scientists present their account of the material origin of life as the only possible scientific conclusion. They claim that no other theory can be scientifically acceptable. And so everyone is taught that life gradually arose from chemicals, a “primordial soup” consisting of amino acids, proteins and other essential ingredients. Yet in their journals and private discussions, the same scientists acknowledge that their theory has grave, sometimes insuperable difficulties. For example, certain features of the DNA coding mechanism cast serious doubt upon the substance of evolutionary thought. The noted biologist W. H. Thorpe writes, “Thus we may be faced with a possibility that the origin of life, like the origin of the universe, becomes an impenetrable barrier to science and a block which resists all attempts to reduce biology to chemistry and physics.”

The highly committed evolutionist Jacques Monod has pointed out these same difficulties. Theodisius Dobzhansky, another prominent advocate of evolution, can only agree: “Our scientific knowledge is, of course, quite insufficient to give anything like satisfactory accounts of these transitions [from no life to life, from no mind to mind]. Biologists as basically different in their… views as W. H. Thorpe and Jacques Monod agree that the origin of life is a difficult and thus far intractable and unsolved problem. I concur.” Dobzhansky goes on to call the origin of life “miraculous.” These admissions by Dobzhansky, Monod and Thorpe are by no means unique. Yet in popular presentations and textbooks one finds little hint of such widespread doubt.

Nobel prize-winning physicist Eugene Wigner has shown that the probability of the existence of a self-duplicating unit is zero. Since the ability to reproduce is one of the fundamental characteristics of all living organisms, Wigner concludes that our present understanding of physics and chemistry does not enable us to explain the phenomenon of life. Herbert Yockey has demonstrated by information theory that even a single informational molecule such as cytochrome c (what to speak of complex organisms) could not have arisen by chance in the estimated lifetime of the earth: “One must conclude that, contrary to the established and current wisdom, a scenario describing the genesis of life on earth by chance and natural causes which can be accepted on the basis of fact and not faith has not yet been written.”

Some scientists still promote the belief that the sun, stars, planets, galaxies and conscious life suddenly sprang from a “big bang”. Dr Edwin Godwin, a Princeton University biologist, has compared the chances of a planet such as ours arising from a “big bang” to the likelihood of an unabridged dictionary resulting from an explosion in a printing shop.

As we can see, on the one hand many scientists have a deep personal commitment to the concept that life comes from matter. On the other hand they admit that they do not have the evidence to corroborate their conviction, and that their theory is beset with intractable problems. They are convinced that life arose from matter and is reducible to matter, yet at the same time they must confess to having scant scientific grounds for their conviction. Thus their theory is a priori: it supersedes the scientific method and science itself. Their fervent, almost messianic hope is that someday, somehow, someone may be able to validate it.

Science has progressed to a point where even scientists have begun to realize that although science may produce many magical things, it does have its limitations and cannot provide solutions to all of mankind’s problems as had been boldly claimed all too often in the past. In fact, we see today that some of the world’s worst problems stemmed direcly or indirectly from the so-called advancements in science. For example, deforestation, excessive use of natural resources and pollution from industrial and nuclear wastes have caused environmental hazards and climatic changes such as global warming and the greenhouse effect and thereby adversely affecting all life forms.

In this connection we would like to quote from an historic document entitled, “Preserving and Cherishing the Earth - An Appeal for Joint Commitment in Science and Religion”. Headed by the well known cosmologist Carl Sagan, more than thirty leading scientists from around the world, including a number of Nobel laureates , made a sincere appeal to all the religious leaders of the world. A part of this appeal says:

“We are now threatened by self inflicted, swiftly moving environmental alterations about whose long-term bilogical and ecological consequences we are still painfully ignorant - depletion of the protective ozone layers; a global warming unprecedented in the last one hundred fifty millennia; the obliteration of an acre of forest every second, the rapid-fire extinction of species; and the prospect of a global nuclear war that would put at risk most of the population of the Earth. There may well be other such dangers of which, in our ignorance, we are still unaware. Individually and cumulatively they represent a trap being set for the human species, a trap we are setting for ourselves. However principled and lofty (or naive or shortsighted) the justifications may have been for the activities that brought forth these dangers, separately and together they now imperil our species and many others. We are close to committing - many would argue we are already committing - what in religious language is sometimes called Crime against Creation….

“Problems of such magnitude, and solutions demanding so broad a perspective, must be recognized from the outset as having a religious as well as a scientific dimension. Mindful of our common responsibilities, we scientists - many of us long engaged in combating the environmental crisis - urgently appeal to the world religious community to commit, in word and deed, and as boldly as required, to preserve the environment of the Earth…”

Two hundred and seventy well known spiritual leaders from eighty-three countries responded to and signed the appeal and presented it at the Moscow meeting of the Global Forum of Spiritual and Parliamentary Learders, held on January 15 to 19, 1990. This I believe makes it very apparent to all of us that there is indeed a great need for synthesis between sience and religion, because by working together they can bring about the greatest good for humankind.

Indeed throughout history, the greatest of thinkers and scientists, have always acknowledged the hand of God behind all physical phenomena. Albert notes: “Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe - a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we, with our modest powers, must feel humbled.”
Other great thinkers too in their works have expressed similar convictions as Einstein. Shopenhauer, Kant, Hegel, Emerson, Thoreau, Schweitzer, Pasteur, Newton, Pythagoras…the list stretches back into the Vedic age.

As true scientists - they examined knowledge from all sources, material as well spiritual. Their pursuit of knowledge without bias as to its source led them to explore some of the Vedic scriptures. Einstein wrote: “When I read the Bhagavad-gita, the only question left is how God created the universe. Everything else seems to be superfluous.”

Upon reading the Bhagavad-gita, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1848: “I owed - my friend and I owed - a magnificent day to the Bhagavad-gita. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spake to us; nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent; the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us.”

Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden Pond: “I bathed my intellect in the vast and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad-gita…in comparision with which our modern world and literature seem puny and trivial”.

While partaking the ghastly scene after detonating the first nuclear test in the desert of New Mexico on July 16, 1945, the scientist who designed the atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer, immediately recalled Lord Krishna’s ominous warning while being overwhelmed by the realisation of the dangers unleashed by his scientific invention. Oppenheimer described his feelings at the event: “A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. There floated through my mind a line from the Bhagavad-gita in which Krishna is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty. ‘Time I am - the great destroyer of the worlds…’. I think we all had this feeling more or less.”

The Vedic scholar, His Divine Grace AC Bhaktivedanta Swami Srila Prabhupada, who brought the Vedic knowledge out of India into America and spread it throughout the world through his International Society for Krishna Consciousness, felt very strongly that there is a big gap in modern education, especially in the teaching of the sciences. It was he who pointed out that although there are so many department of study and research in the numerous prestigious universities of the world, there is not a single department that is dedicated to the scientific study of the spirit soul. According to Vedic wisdom, the study of the nature of life and consciousness, or , in other words, the study of the soul constitutes the most important aspect of knowledge without which all our other knowledge remains incomplete. If spirituality is included within the academic curricula then education would be more meaningful in reaching the desired goal of real happiness.

We also see that throughout the world today many thoughtful persons are concerned about morality, ethics and quality of life in general. In many parts of the world, concerned leaders are organizing conferences and meetings for generating global ethics and global peace and harmony. Therefore, all these efforts suggest that we have to bring in the study of spirituality and religion within science and vice versa.