Is seeing believing 1 – Even science explains the visible with the invisible

[Talk to IIT Kharagpur students, Kharagpur, India]

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Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna. I am grateful to be here amongst all of you today. And in the next three days, I will speak here on the topic of science and spirituality.
And the theme I take is how science and spirituality both take us from the visible world to the invisible world. And I was asked to speak on two topics, one is science and spirituality, the other is inter-religious understanding. So, that I will speak in three parts at the other voice.
Now, here I was mentioned, I just came two days ago from a tour of America, UK, Canada. So, I was at Stanford and I spoke over there at all, the missing self in the selfie. So, the topic was basically how technology has advanced and people are eager to take the selfies.
But, you know, who is the self? People are, technology is advancing, but internally people are getting more and more distressed. So, there I was, we had very vibrant question and answer session after the talk. And one common question which people ask and come up at that time.
Okay, if there is something spiritual, you know, why should we believe in it? Seeing is believing. So, then I told that if seeing is believing, first thing you have to do is stop studying science. Because science progresses by proposing invisible principles for explaining visible phenomena.
I was at Cambridge and we passed by the same, when I was going there to speak on science and spirituality, we passed by the tree where Newton is said to have seen the fruit falling. According to some religions, the fruit fell in front of him, others say it fell on him, whichever one it is. But, when Newton saw the fruit falling, he asked the question, what made the fruit fall? And we often in the history of science talk about his brilliance in coming up with the theory of gravity.
Now, gravity is invisible. The fruits falling is a visible phenomena. And the incident that is considered to be the propellant of the engine of modern science, the incident from which progress began in the modern scientific sense of the word progress, that incident is defined by moving from visible to invisible.
In fact, at that time, Newton extended his theory to talk about how the same principle of gravity can explain the movements of planetary bodies also. There were other scientists at his times who strongly criticised him. So, one of his contemporaries was Leibniz and he said that, actually how do you propose a force that goes mystically through space over millions of miles and acts on other planets? This is spooky action.
And, now of course, he basically said this is unscientific. Now, of course, he didn’t use the word unscientific because the word science itself had not come up at that time. Newton never identified himself as a scientist.
The word science came much later in the 89th century. So, at that time, he was called natural philosopher. So, in fact, his book itself is? Natural philosopher.
Yeah, exactly. So, he basically considered, now what does a natural philosopher mean? Natural philosopher means that they look at nature philosophically and try to understand what makes nature work the way it does. So, Newton said that I don’t know, I am not talking about ontological causes.
I am just giving a mathematical equation and a conceptual explanation for an observed phenomenon. So, science progressed by moving from visible to the invisible. And that is how human knowledge in general progresses.
We do look at the visible, we acknowledge what is visible, but the visible world is so complicated that we can’t make sense of it if we just keep looking at every visible phenomenon. Say, for example, now if I go to Canada. Now, Canada, the local language over there is French because France had occupied it.
English is there and French is there. So, now every instruction there will be English and French. And the airport, all the places.
So, now, if I meet a person over there and they tell that immediately I know this person is French. I may not know French, but if they don’t know English, then I look for someone who knows French and I will get them as a translator to talk. The point I am making is that if each person we are not able to put into some category, it will be very difficult to deal with them.
If somebody is speaking some strange language, you don’t know what that language is. Okay, this is French. You have to find a French person to talk with.
You may say, oh, this person is a Bengali. They talk in Bengali. If they don’t know English, I have to find a Bengali translator.
So, the variety of phenomena in the outer world are unlimited, huge. And we try to process them in a way that doesn’t cause us intellectual overload. And one way we do it is by putting the variety of the outer world into convenient categories.
Science also does the same thing. We see various phenomena and it tries to analyse these phenomena in terms of some unifying principles. Puts them into some categories.
Now, these categories are based on principles. And those principles themselves are not visible. So, seeing is believing is actually unscientific.
If Newton had followed his critics and accepted his critics’ criticism and abandoned the theory of gravity, he would have been faithful to seeing is believing. But then science would not have progressed. So, the defining quality of human intelligence which separates human beings from non-human beings is that our understanding is not bound to our vision.
Our perception and our comprehension are connected but they are not limited. Our comprehension is not limited to our perception. That means, our comprehension is not limited to our perception means an animal sees a mirage and thinks there is water and goes there.
We human beings see a mirage but the perception is it’s a water. But the comprehension is no, in a desert it cannot be water. So, in fact, seeing is believing if followed by a person in a desert will cause the death of a person.
It is only when the person evaluates what they are seeing with their intelligence. Now, we are not saying that seeing is not disbelieving also. It’s not that seeing is false.
But the point is neither in science nor in day to day life nor in spiritual life do we rely only on seeing. We see not just with our eyes but whatever we see with our eyes we evaluate with our intelligence. And based on that we actually see.
In the scriptures, in the Bhagavatam, a verse comes or a fragment of a verse comes several times Pashyan Api Na Pashyati Pashyan Api Na Pashyati means one who sees yet does not see. The word see can have different meanings. Can you see that plane in the sky? Can your eyes catch it? Do you see it? But I see what you are saying.
I see what you are saying means I understand what you are saying. So, see can be used in the sense of perception and see can be used also in the sense of comprehension. So, seeing is believing is an unscientific idea because science does operate based on perception.
But to make sense of the perception to move from perception to comprehension it uses principles that are not perceivable in themselves. And as science moves forwards in broadly speaking in the history of science there were two schools of thought or two branches we could say that is what you could call as empiricism and rationalism. Empiricism in a broad sense can be correlated with what we in the tradition call as Prateksha Pramana.
And rationalism can be called as Anumana Pramana. Now, Pramana is a valid way of acquiring knowledge. So, Prateksha Pramana means we observe and arrive at a proper understanding of things.
Anumana Pramana means we analyse and we arrive at a proper understanding of things. So, historically speaking science started primarily as an empirical body of knowledge. Francis Bacon was the pioneer of the empirical method and he observed the world and then tried to understand it.
So, he said that when we observe and learn he said the world is not to be shrunk so that it fits into our understanding. Our understanding should be expanded so as to accommodate the world. So, you observe and don’t observe the world with preconceived filters.
Just take in the world as it is and then expand your understanding based on the observation. So, this is you could say the empirical way of looking at things. Now, the empirical way of looking at things does work in certain ways.
If I am going on a road and there is a ditch ok, there is a ditch, let me walk. There is a pothole, let me walk this way. Let me walk that way.
So, we cannot function without empiricism. But at the same time like I said the mirage the empirical does not necessarily lead us to a correct understanding. I can see a mirage, if I chase after it, I will stay lost.
So, in science the other school of thought is rationalism the broad branch of thinking and this was pioneered by many people but Rene Descartes was one of the prominent persons and he said ok and we look at the world out there now how do we really know that the world out there exists? Science requires faith. What is the faith that science requires? That the senses give us a reliable picture of the world. Albert Einstein is attributed to have said that the most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible. What do I mean by this? That let’s start from a from a atheistic world view which many people think of as scientific. It is not.
But if everything in existence is the result of unguided natural processes whatever be the name we use for those processes if they are entirely unguided then one unguided natural process led to the formation of the world out there. Another unguided natural process led to the formation of our minds. Why should the world out there and the mind in here have a correlation? Why should nature work in a way that our mind can understand? This argument is very different from the design argument.
The design argument argues design argument for the existence of God argues that there are certain features in nature which cannot have come by unguided processes. And therefore design is required for that. It talks about specific features of nature.
That’s a useful argument in some context. But what we are talking about here is something much more fundamental. The design argument holds that science cannot explain certain things and therefore we need God as a designing principle for explaining those things.
But what we are talking about here is that God is not the explanation for unexplainable. God is the explanation for explainability. God is the explanation for explainability.
What do I mean by explanation for explainability? That why is the universe explainable at all? If Newton discovered F is equal to gm1m2 upon r square Now square, we can multiply two numbers but the idea of squaring a number it’s a mental construct. We go deeper and deeper into mathematics square root of minus 1 when you name it, it’s an imaginary number. So imaginary number means, who has imagined it? It’s the human mind that has imagined it.
So if something is a construct of the human mind why should it be usable to describe the behaviour of nature? Why should the way nature functions correlate with the way the mind thinks? Eugene Wigner is a Nobel laureate scientist and he wrote a paper called The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Study of the Natural Sciences. The Unreasonable Effectiveness Why Unreasonable Effectiveness? Because maths, especially abstract mathematical conceptions they don’t really exist in nature. Triple integral calculus Now it may be used to describe nature in some ways but the idea of triple integral calculus is a human mental construct.
So why should something which is a construct of the human mind be correlating with the way the world functions out there? So when Einstein says that the most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible It’s comprehensible means our mind can make sense of the world out there. Science operates on the foundational assumption that things make sense. I was at a programme in Princeton and after that a person came and said I don’t believe in God.
Which God do you not believe in? I don’t believe in God. Okay, but what is the conception of God? Which is the God that you don’t believe in? I don’t believe in a God who sends people to hell if they don’t surrender to him. He says, if that is your definition of atheist, I am also an atheist.
Because people there are reacting to fundamentalist Christianity. Then I asked, okay So I took that point further. You don’t believe in God.
If that is the conception of God, I also don’t believe in that God. Okay, then I took it further. He said, now if any kind of God exists, why do bad things happen to good people? I said, why should bad things not happen to good people? What do you mean? Good things would happen to good people, bad things to bad people.
Why? He says, if the world is operating entirely by unguided natural processes, why should there be a correlation between cause and effect? Isn’t it? So, atheists may argue the problem of evil. Oh, there is so much bad in this world, therefore God can’t exist. But in the atheistic world view, there is no such reason why good things should happen to good people.
In fact, going even more fundamentally, if we take the totally atheistic world view, there is no conception of good or bad also. Because everything is simply the laws of nature acting on insentient fundamental particles. So, what do I mean by the laws of nature acting on insentient fundamental particles? According to the atheistic world view, you and I, your conception of your personality, my conception of selfhood, all these are simply illusions created by our brains.
And all that happens all the time is simply certain chemicals flow around in the brain, triggering some neurochemical changes in the brain and our synapses get activated, certain sensations are felt. So, if this is simply, if everything that happens is simply the activation of electrochemicals, then in that what is good and what is bad? There is no such thing as good or bad at all. The idea of good and bad is based on the presumption that there is someone who will evaluate this is good and that is bad.
But if consciousness itself is a product of chemicals, then there is no conception of good or bad at all. Now, Einstein was profoundly troubled by the implications of scientism. There is science and there is scientism.
So, scientism is science plus imperialism. It’s a portmanteau, portmanteau is two words come together, like smoke and fog, it becomes smog. So, like that portmanteau, two words come together, science and imperialism.
That’s called scientism. So, scientism, it holds that, you are saying something? Science is centred. Scientism means science is the highest of all.
Yes, science is the highest. Thank you. Actually, scientism, it goes even further.
Not that science is the highest body of knowledge, science is the only source of knowledge. It’s the only source of knowledge. Only those things exist which science can find.
Now, interestingly, there is no scientific proof for scientism. Science will observe the world around us and explain why things happen the way they do. But whether something exists beyond the observable world or not, something exists beyond the natural world or not, science cannot know about that.
If we are existing, say, if somebody is in a closed balloon in space, where they have no way to interact with the outer world, they use whatever technology, light, laser, whatever, they can’t penetrate through that balloon. Then their whole life is inside that balloon and they may explain, okay, this happens like this, that happens like that, that happens like that, but they have no way to know whether anything exists outside that balloon. Similarly, science, when it observes the world, it looks for natural explanations for natural phenomena.
That is the operational principle of science. In the later session, I’ll talk about whether science and God are actually in conflict. But science does not talk about God.
Laplace was a famous mathematician and when he wrote an elaborate mathematical treatise and he presented it to the French king. And the French king asked him at that time, where is God in your theory? So, he replied famously, I have no need for God. Now, what does he mean? Now, this can be seen in Laplace of the atheist, but his point, I have no need for God, means that God has made the world in such a way that it is causally complete.
om pūrṇam adaḥ pūrṇam idam pūrṇār pūrṇam udakṣati pūrṇasya pūrṇam ādāya pūrṇam evāvaśiṣyati So, this world is explainable by phenomena in this world. Now, why is it explainable, that’s a different question. I’ll come to this point a little later, but let’s focus on this point that if you go to a particular hotel, or say a holiday resort, and you find everything works perfectly, especially if you go to, in the western world, things are automated.
You come near a door, the door opens automatically. You go into the bathroom, the bathroom lights turn on. You go under the shower, the water starts coming.
Of course, that’s not always good, if you don’t want to take a bath. But, if everything works well. Nowadays, there is this internet control reality.
So, you can just press a button, change the temperature of your room, you can do so many things. So, if everything in a place is working very systematically and professionally, and you don’t need to call anyone to complain, this is not working, that is not working, please fix this, please fix that. What does it mean? Does it mean that it does not require any explanation? It does not, it requires explanation.
There are some very efficient managers there, who have set up things in such a way that no intervention is required. So, in a sense, the best managers are those who are making themselves unemployed. That means, they set up systems in such a way that they don’t require to manage.
That’s the most efficient system. So, the world is arranged by God in such a way that God doesn’t have to intervene all the time. There are mechanisms set up in this world.
Maya Adhyaksheda Prakriti, this is not intervention, this is supervision. He is supervising and he set up a system in such a way Maya Adhyaksheda Prakriti Suyate Sacharacharam Hetu Nanena Kaunteya Jagadvi Parivartate Hetu Nanena means, by the system of cause and effect within the material world, the material world functions. So, the cause and effect system is there in this world.
The atheistic world view has no explanation why there should be any cause and effect at all. And so, why should good things happen to good people? Why should bad things happen to bad people? Fundamentally, if say I drop this phone, obviously I won’t drop it, but if I drop this phone, why should it fall down? Why should the law of gravity act at all? So, this has no explanation. So, the science operates on the assumption that nature functions according to certain laws.
So, why are those laws there at all? Why are those laws there at all? Now, you may say, no, no, they might just be there. You could say, for argument sake, somehow they are there. We will discuss about this again later.
But, okay, these laws are there, but also those laws are such that we can comprehend them. If one set of unguided processes has led to the formation of the world out there, another set of unguided processes has led to the formation of the human mind, why should there be a precise correlation between the functioning of the human mind and the functioning of the world? To give an example for this, suppose we wake up one day and find we are lost in some strange place. We look around, what do I do, where do I go? I look and I see, as I am looking around, I see that a piece of paper just keeps floating by.
And on that piece of paper are given directions. And they are written in a language that I can understand. And they are exactly the directions I need to get back home.
So, what would this mean? First of all, that message is something which I can understand. That message is something which I need. And that message is there when I need it.
So, the content, the timing and the language, all three are such that they are usable to me. So, if we look at the world around us, nature functions in a particular way. Our mind thinks in a particular way.
When we are living in the world, we want to make sense of why things work the way they do. And our mind can understand certain concepts and nature works only according to those concepts. Or nature works largely according to those concepts.
Why is that? So, why is nature’s code, we could say, written in a language that we can understand? We didn’t write that code, obviously. It was existing. So, I said that God is not the explanation for the unexplainable.
He is the explanation for explainability. Why is science able to explain the universe? He is the explanation for explainability. So, from the atheistic worldview, there is no reason why our mind should function in a way that correlates with the way nature functions.
And that’s why, what Einstein said is the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. So, the universe is out there and it is functioning according to a particular code. And our mind, unlike this, why have this code in it? Another example to illustrate this.
Again, a simple example. Suppose, we come to a house and we find there is a lock over there and we look around and find a key over there. We find a key lying nearby.
We pick up the key and we open the door. Oh, the key works. We open the door, we move forward, we find another door with a lock over there.
We look around, we find another key lying over there. And then, we open it again. Oh, this also works.
We find not one, not two, but dozens of doors and we find the key is right nearby. So, scientists discovering the laws of nature is like we finding the key to open the door. Finding the key to open the door is important to move forward.
But finding the key to open the door does not explain where the door came from, where the key came from and how the key happened to be there where the door is. So, by the key, I mean the human concepts. The door refers to nature.
And the key and the door fitting means nature is working and human mind’s functioning is exactly the same. It is not just once, twice, hundreds of times. All of scientific progress is based on this driving assumption that the universe is comprehensible.
If now, so science also requires faith. So, I was in Silicon Valley and there one PhD professor, she asked a question that, now science doesn’t require faith, it just works on assumptions. I said, okay, you can use whatever words you want.
What is the difference between assumption and faith? She said, no, assumption means you tentatively accept it is true and if it is false, you reject it. Okay, so that’s fine. So, scientists may say, okay, this theory we tentatively accept it.
If it works, we will go ahead with it. If it doesn’t work, we will reject it. That is fine.
We could say that is an assumption. If that is the way you are using the word assumption. But, underlining all these assumptions is the understanding that some theory will work.
The very idea that some theory will work, that is not an operational assumption. That is a foundational faith in science. The question we are asking is, why should any theory work at all? Why should nature be explainable by the theories conceived by the human mind? So, this is also another way we understand that science moves from the visible towards the invisible.
Now, I have talked about multiple steps over here. So, one idea is that we move from a, to explain the visible phenomena, we talk about invisible principles. And the idea that these invisible principles can explain the visible phenomena, that is a theory.
Specific theories which may be right or wrong, but foundationally the idea that some principle will explain the phenomena, that is a foundational faith of science. Now, the question comes, what is the basis of this faith? We move from the visible phenomena to the invisible principles, but what justifies our notion that some invisible principles will work? So, where do those invisible principles come from? Prabhupada says in a conversation, that if you want to trace backwards, we have to trace backwards till the final point. If, say, we come across a car accident, a car crash.
So, when we see, this was the place where the car crashed, and the car hit into this tree, and that’s how it got damaged, and the person was killed. Now, investigators want to find out, what caused this car crash? And was it that the driver was drunk? Or was it that some other person came along the way? Then they go back and they find, oh, actually the brakes of the car have failed. Now, that is a valid explanation, but is it a complete explanation? Is it a complete explanation? If the brakes have failed, naturally the question will come, why did the brakes fail? If the investigators investigating the car crash and the death of a person, they come to the conclusion, oh, this person died because of a car crash, and the car crashed because the brakes failed.
If this is brought up or cross-examined in a court, naturally the other attorney will ask, what caused the brakes to fail? If the police want to cover up, they’ll say it’s an accident and the brakes failed. But if they want to do a serious investigation, why not? Was the brake fail an act of sabotage done by someone in order to cause harm to this person? So, when we trace backwards, we need to go to full distance or at least we need to go as far as we can. So, science does go backwards.
We look at the observed phenomena and we go back to invisible principles. But, in science we don’t ask the question, where did these principles come from? Why are there principles to explain the phenomena? Why does nature work according to laws? So, that’s why it does not go to the ultimate questions. And scientists may say yes, that is not our scope.
We are looking for natural explanations for natural phenomena. So, we have found a natural explanation that is good enough. Now, why nature has those features, that’s not our scope.
If that is the answer, then this should be told, that there are questions which science can’t answer. Peter Madever is a Nobel laureate scientist and he wrote a book called Advice to Young Scientists. And there he says very clearly that there are many questions that science can’t answer.
And to claim that the questions that science can’t answer are not worth asking or are silly, this is arrogance of the highest degree. And scientists should avoid this arrogance. So, science can answer questions and to the extent it answers questions, it is valuable, it is powerful.
At the same time, if people start believing that science can answer all questions or that the questions that science can’t answer are not worth asking or things that science can’t discover are not worth talking about or worse still they don’t even exist, then that is not at all scientific. So, can science prove the existence of God? The word prove has many different meanings in different contexts. And again, I’ll talk about this in future.
Say, if I tell right now, say the time in Phoenix, Arizona is 5.05 in the morning, 5.05 am. Believe it or not, you can just go on Google and check it. If I tell you right now, it’s raining, you can go out and check whether it is raining.
It is an easy way to… So, if I will prove that it is raining now, I open the window and show you it’s raining. But, if I ask you, does your mother love you? She says, of course. Prove it to me.
Well, how can you prove it? You cannot prove it in the same mathematical way or same factual way. You can say, she did this, she did this, that’s why she loves me. It’s an inference.
It’s an inference. We, if I say, if I tell you my height is 5 feet 3 inches, you may say, I don’t believe it. Okay, I can prove it.
Get a metre and prove it. But, if we say that my mother loves me, she will tell you, prove it. Well, I can’t get a love-o-metre and put it in my mother’s heart.
See, this rating is so high, therefore, my mother loves me. I gave a series of seminars in Columbus in America on overcoming fear. So, I studied various kinds of fears that people have.
And, how the fears have changed 18th century, 19th century, 20th century, 21st century. So, two fears have been added in the 21st century. One is the fear of terrorists that bombs will just go off any place.
And the second is the fear of rejection. Fear of rejection means that nowadays in the western and westernised world, people form relationships on their own. Arranged kind of relationships are becoming very less.
And, this has led to a place where everybody has to look good, act good, smart, act smart and try to attract the other person. And even if they attract someone, whether that person will stay or not, you don’t know. So, there is a lot of fear that the other person may not consider me worthy enough to stay with me.
So, there is a fear of rejection. And, why would the other person reject? Because they don’t love me. The people, when they want to form a relationship, they are really concerned to know whether the other person really loves me, really cares for me or just wants to use me.
Now, with all our science, this is one of the biggest fears that people have in their relationships. But, with all the technological advancement that we have, can we make a love-o-metre? If two people are considering forming a relationship, before they form the relationship, they take a love-o-metre and put it on each other’s heart. Do you really love me? Do you really love me? Love is a very real experience, but it cannot be measured.
You might say, there are certain chemicals in the brain, but it doesn’t work as simple as that. Initially, scientists thought that there are so many neurones and there must be one neurone correlated with one memory. And that’s why we can’t remember an infinite number of facts.
Our neurones get full. Just like sometimes our computer gets full, we cannot put any more data over there. They had this idea that our memory works like that.
One-one neurone, one-one memory. Now, neurones are full, you cannot memorise anything more. But then, they found when they started doing imaging of the brain, and they found, peculiarly, that in different experiences, the same neurones got lit.
Of course, there are certain areas of brain which are associated with certain kind of functioning. But in many different experiences, the same neurones got lit. And they got confused.
How is the brain actually working? So, then, now the current understanding, or the current theory is that our memories are stored not in the neurones, but in the patterns of connections between the neurones. So, the neurones are brain cells, and they are linked together by synapses. They have a protrusion called dendrite.
Protrusion is called dendrite. When they come together, it’s called synapses. So, in the patterns of synapses, the memories are stored.
So, now, scientists talk about the idea that one neurone is associated with one brain in a derisive way. It’s called the grandmother neurone theory. What do you mean by grandmother neurone? That means that there is one neurone which contains all the memories of your grandmother.
And if that neurone was zapped, you will forget your grandmother. You will forget everything about your grandmother. It’s not that simple.
Hemispherotomy is an operation in which almost half of the brain can be removed. And still people function. So, there is this idea of right brain, left brain.
One part of the brain is more logical, other part is more creative. And some people are more logical, some people are more creative. It is true that some people are more logical, some people are more creative.
But it is not that you can divide the brain into simple categories. Left part of the brain is connected with this function, right part of the brain is connected with this function. There are people who have greater capacities, either creative or logical.
But that does not necessarily mean that you can map out functions. There are people who are very logical and one part of their brain is removed, left part of the brain is removed, still they remain logical. It is not that they are logical and become sentimental.
So, again, the point which I am making over here is that when we are trying to understand reality, what do you mean by understand reality? When we want to understand if somebody loves me or not, there is no physical metre by which you can check whether that person loves you or not. You cannot say that this part of the brain is lit, that means you love me. No, it does not work that simple.
Now, emotions are a reality. In fact, love is the emotion that drives us in whatever we want to do in life. But this is a reality that cannot be quantified or measured by science.
Its effect can be measured. There is a paper, science and spirituality kiss each other. What is that paper about? It is a little provocative title.
But the idea was that when people feel loved, then that improves their health. So, love is not a scientifically measurable phenomenon. But when people are loved, loved not in a sexual sense, loved in a sense of being truly cared, valued, treasured, then they recover faster from sickness.
Even if they have some sickness, that sickness does not worsen, they have more impetus to recover. And this has been correlated. The same person, if they have a loved one close to them, how quickly they recover from sickness and the same person, they do not have anyone close to them.
They recover. I won’t go into that whole correlation. But here, the point I am making is that love is a reality.
Love is an emotion that we want to experience and it has real effects on well-being. But it itself cannot be scientifically quantified. So, again the point is that science moves from the visible to the invisible.
So, now we can see, now we are going to a second kind of correlation and this I will elaborate in tomorrow’s class. I will stop briefly after a few minutes. You can have question and answer.
See, I talked about, first we can move from the visible to the invisible. We can infer or science assumes that there is an order and that order requires something beyond. Now, the other is we are looking at whether the invisible affects the visible.
So, love is not a visible in the scientific sense. It is not a measurable quantity. But it affects us.
So, that means there is something more to life or a lot more to life than what is perceivable by the world of science. And that bigger reality which is beyond what we perceive through the eyes of science that is what spirituality talks about. And thus, both science and spirituality are meant for the same purpose to expand human understanding.
Science expands human understanding in a particular way. Spirituality expands human understanding in another way. But, neither science nor spirituality can progress if we insist on seeing the visible.
Seeing leads to understanding based on our intelligence. And that intelligence is based on many things apart from what we see also. So, thus, science and spirituality both point in the same direction.
Einstein has said that the sciences, the arts and the religions are fruits of the same human understanding of human knowledge. So, they are all fruits of the same tree. He was at a time when religion was equivalent to spirituality.
Now, religion and spirituality are considered very different. But, basically what he was saying is we humans can look at the world in different ways and we all can get deeper and deeper understanding of the world. So, science and spirituality can both help us to gain deeper understanding.
Neither science requires us to reject spirituality nor is it that spirituality requires us to reject science. Both, we use them using our God-given intelligence and both can help us to gain deeper understanding of different aspects of reality. So, I’ll summarise.
I spoke today on how science and spirituality both take us from the visible to the invisible. I started by believing. In science, this visible phenomenon of fruit falling led to the postulation of the invisible principle of gravity.
In day-to-day life also, when we see a mirage, we don’t follow it. Human intelligence means we don’t simply believe what we see. We evaluate and we make sense based on our intelligence.
So, a defining difference between humans and animals is that humans and animals are inextricably locked together. We can comprehend better than what we can perceive. We comprehend bigger things.
Then, we talked about when science moves from the visible to the invisible principles, on what basis does it do that? Why does this concept of invisible principles exist? Because it assumes that there is some order in nature. And then, those who say that because science can’t explain this, therefore, there is God. This design, it could not have come automatically, therefore, there must be God.
That is one way of looking at God. But God is not the explanation for the unexplainable. He is the explanation for explainability.
So, the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. If we are lost and we find a place to stand containing directions that we need, it raises the question where did it come from? Or, we come to a house and we find the key which enables us to open the door once, twice, dozens of times. Then, finding the key is brilliant.
But, that doesn’t explain where the key came from, where the door came from and how the two happened to be together. So, the door is like nature. And, the two working together is like a key fitting in the door.
So, Eugene Wigner said, why does it work? Why does maths work in understanding nature? We don’t know. But, it does work. So, science may have different theories as operational assumptions.
But, it has a foundational faith that some theory works. So, the most reasonable explanation is that actually both the human mind and the world out there are reflections of a higher intelligence. That inference I’ll elaborate later.
But, if we don’t accept this, then, if we go towards atheism, not only can we not explain why there is a correlation between mathematical constructs of our brain and the way the universe works, but also we can’t explain why there should be any cause effect connection at all. Why should good things happen to good people and why should bad things happen to bad people? Why there is any conception of good or bad also? If everything is simply a result of electrochemical stimulation of the neuronal cells, then, there is no conception of good or bad. So, the scientistic, not scientific, scientism, the adjective is scientistic.
The world we live in, therein, we have emotions as a reality, for example. And, where do those emotions, what are those emotions? If somebody says, can science prove the existence of God? I explain, proof has different dimensions. Empirically verifiable, measurable things, we can test if a particular statement is true or not.
Whether it is raining, whether someone loves someone, how do you empirically measure it? It is real, but it is not measurable empirically. Similarly, God’s existence is not empirically measurable or quantifiable. But, we conclude by saying that from the visible we can infer the invisible and how the invisible affects the visible.
How people who feel loved, their health stays better or they recover faster. So, that means something invisible, love is affecting something visible. So, in this way, science and spirituality, both are tools for us to gain better understanding of the world, different aspects of that world, by both postulating the same principle of going from visible to invisible.
If we believed in seeing is believing, then we would not grow spiritually and nor would we be able to grow scientifically. So, we go from seeing towards that which can’t be seen. And that’s what spirituality takes us to ultimately, as does science.
Thank you very much. Hare Krishna. So, are there any questions or comments? How much time do we have? 6 minutes.
Hare Krishna. You just told that what our mind is thinking and whatever the mathematical stuff in our mind is there. So, it is correlating with the nature.
But many times, whatever the scientist has said, it’s not correct because we know it’s speculation. So, what is the security that mind is correctly correlating with the natural phenomena? Okay. So, what is the guarantee that the mind is correlating correctly with natural phenomena? Yes.
There is no guarantee of that. Science does not claim to give us ultimate truths. Basically, if you go into philosophy of science, which most science universities or Indian universities don’t talk about, science basically offers us working models of reality.
Reality is too complicated for science to process. It takes certain parameters of reality and tries to explain Now, specific theories that scientists come up, they may be true, they may not be true. That is something which has to be evaluated in the light of evidence and experience.
At the same time, there are certain theories which do work. Right now, I am speaking because the mic is amplifying the voice. So, there is some theory of sound and its amplification when we fly in the planes.
We go from one place to another. We get to there. So, from an operational point of view, scientific theories do work.
So, it’s a… Now, yes, scientists can also be wrong. Certain observations may… Certain observations may lead to certain inferences which may not be true. And scientists are also human beings.
So, that means, they are also fallible. Sometimes they may come up with… They may just make up some experiments or just doctor some findings so that it can fit their theories. Or sometimes they may just be guessing.
They may just arrive along inferences. These are all possibilities of error. So, what we are talking about is not that what scientists find is necessarily correct.
But there are times when it is correct. And how… What scientists find is correct. Even when what scientists find is correct, what is the basis because of which they are able to find it correct? That’s the question which we are asking.
So, we are not saying here that every single mathematical construct will necessarily correlate with something in nature. Or every single scientific theory necessarily has to be true. Some are true.
And even those are true, what is the basis for their being true? That is the question which we are discussing. You answer the question? Yes. So, there is no need to demonise science by saying it is speculating.
We are saying there are different strategies which you can use at different times. So, what you are saying is even when you speculate, even when you get it right by speculating, how do you get it right? That is the question. As you are saying that the emotion cannot be explained by science.
But if you studied on all the 10th or 9th rows, that time if there is a patient has chemicals, you know, purine and the pancreas that is known and hormones and with basically some amount of that level the emotions are created. Like adrenaline and release of toxins. Yeah.
Adrenaline and so on. So, how can you explain that? Ok. So, scientists have found that certain hormones are associated with the feeling of emotions.
There is a difference between an explanation and a correlation. A correlation means when A happens, B happens. So, for example, if I am smiling, you may say, oh, this person is happy.
So, now a smile and happiness are correlated with each other. But, why am I happy? Oh, you are smiling, that’s why you are happy. That’s not an explanation.
There is something which has made me happy and that is expressed through my smile. So, a smile is correlated with happiness. A smile is not an explanation for happiness.
Just as a smile is a facial correlation with the emotion of happiness. There are certain chemicals whose secretion in the body correlates with the presence of certain emotions in the brain. Certain emotions that we experience, not in the brain, certain emotions that we experience.
But, those chemicals alone don’t comprise that emotion. So, anything that happens, there will be some, because we are functioning through the body right now, so everything that we do, it will have some physical correlation. So, the physical correlation is not the explanation because A and B are correlated together.
But, that doesn’t explain why A happens at all or what A is in the first place. So, emotion, again, I said that the invisible can produce some visible effects. So, it’s the same point.
When we are angry, certain chemicals are present in the brain. When we are happy, certain chemicals are present in the brain. But, those chemicals themselves, what are they? They are just atoms and molecules.
They are no consciousness. So, if I start having those same chemicals, when dopamine is secreted, we feel a sense of stimulation. That’s fine.
Will all of you get stimulated? You say, no, no, but there is no neurochemical network where it is experienced. That’s fine. But, dopamine is just chemicals.
That doesn’t explain. So, our brain is made up of chemicals, cells, and dopamine is made up of chemical cells. So, why should the secretion of certain chemicals in another set of chemicals lead to the experience of emotions? That’s a fundamental question that has no answer.
It points to some reality beyond the physical. So, there is a very significant difference between correlation and explanation. Science can find neural correlates of human conscious experiences.
But, it doesn’t explain those experiences. Any other questions? Yes, please. Okay, you have a mic.
Sir, so, the thing you told that though love exists, science cannot explain it. Sorry? Though love does exist, we cannot scientifically explain it. But, what is the basis of saying that love actually exists? Because, what your perception of love is might be different from another person’s perception of love.
So, how do you even say something called as love or happiness or emotion is something that exists? Okay. So, how do we know that love or happiness or emotion exists when different people’s conceptions of love and happiness and emotions can be so different? The subjectivity of experience is different from reality of the experience. That means, say, if I have eaten some very sweet item, say, I have eaten some gulab jamun and then after some time somebody offers me some lemon juice.
It may not appear very sweet to me. And say, you just come outside from and you get some lemon juice. You feel so much, so sweet, so delicious.
So, the way you perceive the lemon juice and the way I perceive lemon juice is different. So, our experience will be different. But still, there is something called a lemon juice and there is something called sugar or some kind of sweetness in it.
So, subjectivity of the experience does not necessarily mean, does not necessarily disprove the objectivity of the experienced reality. There is a reality that is experienced. How it is experienced is different depending for different people.
But the reality itself is there. So, let me complete this point. if there is an India-Pakistan cricket match going on.
So, a Pakistani batsman hits a sixer. Hitting a sixer is an event. It’s a real event.
How it is perceived by an Indian and how it is perceived by a Pakistani will be different. But just because the perception is subjective, does not mean that the event was not objective. So, now, what applies to physical reality, we can also apply to self-satisfied reality.
What different people call as love may be different. No doubt about it. And what most people call love nowadays, it is a very touchy feely kind of very sentimental very physical kind of love.
This is true. But that love exists is a universal objective reality. If love did not exist, there was no reason for our mothers to go through the labour pain when they carried us in the womb.
Why did they do that? They could have just aborted us. I don’t want so much pain. When we were drinking milk from our mother, at that time, we bit her breasts.
And she could have said, child, I am feeding it, why is biting my breast? I will not feed it. We would have starved to death. So if love had not been there, we would not even exist.
So if you want to talk about love, you can say, love can be expressed in various ways. One is service, sacrifice, going out of your way to care for others. I gave a class in Portland in America, can we love someone whom we hate? So there are about five different meanings of love.
Love can mean attraction, I am in love with her, that means I feel overwhelmed with attraction for her. Love can be expectation, you don’t love me anymore. I expect you to do something but you are not doing it.
Love can also be action, intention. I am going to love this person, what does it mean? I want to act in a loving way towards this person. Love can also mean emotion, I feel so much love in the person.
So the word love can have so many meanings. Expectation, attraction, pleasure, warmth or caring or action or intention. So the love word itself can have many different meanings.
So as rightly said there is a lot of subjectivity in what we mean when we use the word love. But just because there is subjectivity in the experience that does not mean that there is no objective reality that is being experienced. The objective reality is being experienced in subjectivity.
There is something else in mind? I understand we cannot negate the existence of love because the perception is different. But yet we cannot isolate and find out that actually there is something called love which exists. How do we understand that there is something called love which exists? That was the question I was trying to answer.
So how do we understand that something called love exists? For example you told that if there was no love then the mother would not have given her child to a particular thing. That is the definition of love. How can we actually understand that something called love exists? How do we know that love exists? There are different levels of reality and they all are perceived in different ways.
If you go backwards, turn the question around, how can we know that you exist? How can I know that I exist? If I tell you do you exist, you will be outraged. Does your intelligence exist? Why are you asking such a exist because our conscious experience of our self-identity is the basis of all our knowledge. I can analyse whether something else exists or not.
We can discuss whether love exists or not because we exist. Now, how can you mathematically prove that you exist? Well, we can prove that you occupy certain space in nature. That’s your physical body exists.
But whether you exist at all? You say, okay, actually, but I have a sense of I-ness. If you go to the physical level, where does the sense of I-ness come from? Now, scientists thought that there may be the medulla oblongata or something in the centre of the brain. Whichever way sense of I-ness is an illusion.
So, if we start looking for starting, we have to understand that how do I know that I exist? That is because I can experience the reality of my existence. I can experience the reality of my consciousness. Then I can go forward and ask how do I know that others exist? How do I know that you as a conscious being exist? You could simply be a robot programmed to create the illusion that you are a person.
How do I know that you are a conscious being? In fact, there is a philosophy called solipsism. Solipsism is the idea that solipsism is the only person whose existence we can know is our own existence. Everybody else’s existence is an inference.
So, whether you exist or not I don’t know. If I have to prove that you exist, how do I do that? You as a person, as a conscious centre of awareness, as a conscious agent who chooses to act in particular ways, how do I know that you exist? So, we can’t apply the same standards of proof for different realities. So, as far as love is concerned, the way to understand it is through inferences.
Sometimes those inferences can go wrong. Sometimes when in crime, they find out, okay, this person was murdered by this and this person. Okay, found as A, B, C, these are correlative, these are evidences which point to the fact that this was murdered.
This person was the murderer of that person. That’s circumstantial evidence. You cannot, in most cases of murder, you cannot ask the person, please come back, murder this person again so that we can catch you in camera.
So, that doesn’t mean things can’t be proved. So, there are different levels of reality and there are different methods of proof. So, from certain inferences, we can infer that love exists, certain actions we can infer that love exists.
There are definitely possibilities where there may be no love. As you rightly said that nowadays there is a whole idea of hiring out wombs, that when women, they want to have a child, but they don’t want, especially in the western world, for some reason they are not able to conceive or for other reasons they feel that bearing a child will spoil their figure. So, they want to have a child, so they get an egg out of their body, and then they get a semen out of their lover’s body, and then they have it united artificially, and they send it to the womb of some woman in India, and that woman acts as a hired womb for them, and then when the child is born, they say that the child is ours.
People earn a lot of money through this, and many times what happens is the woman who is bearing that child, she gets attached to the child, and when the child is born, the parents say, I want this child, I don’t want your money, and the this is not legal, not so systematic legal, they can’t take legal action also. So the point I’m making is that sometimes it may be that a woman might just be hiring out her womb, and in that case there may not be so much affection for the child, but that is occasional. In general, there is love, just because certain situations the inferences may not work, that doesn’t mean that inferences are always false.
Any other questions? So we know that dating science is that we have dating science that one hour assumptions will work, but that can also be assumptions So if we say that one of our assumptions will work, that is also an assumption, well then what is the difference between faith and assumption? Then you can just say faith and assumption are synonyms. Assumption is something which is provisional, which you are ready to give up. Faith also could be provisional.
So, okay, I have faith in this doctor, I tried the treatment for one week, it didn’t work, so I don’t have any faith anymore, I’ll go to some other doctor. So then if we are going to talk about that, you can just use them as synonyms and say faith can also be provisional, assumption can also be provisional. What we are talking about is that beyond the provisional acceptance of certain theories, there is an enduring acceptance of the idea that something is for real, that there is a correlation between that, that there is some explanation for way things work in nature and that is what we are calling as faith.
So, either, I didn’t make the difference between assumption and faith, because this person said that this is assumption, if this is assumption, there is something foundational. So, assumption is something more provisional, faith is something more enduring. Ultimately, words, where are their meaning stored? In English, the word run, it has 632 meanings.
So, run has run amok in the dictionary. So, now, are you going to run for the elections? This means you are going to run for the elections? Obviously not, isn’t it? So, basically, the words are verbal tools, terms are intellectual, words are correlated. But, there is no intrinsic or inalienable correlation between them.
So, you could say, words are like handles, if you are carrying a suitcase. So, the suitcase is like the term and the word for the term is like the handle for the suitcase. Without the handle, it is very difficult to operate the suitcase.
But, the handle is not the suitcase. When I was in America, to repair a suitcase is more labour than to buy a new one. So, the devotees gave me a new suitcase.
And, usually, I don’t carry my luggage. I have wheelchair assistant or other people carry it. So, what happened by the time I came to the baggage claim and suitcase started coming out, because it was a new suitcase, I forgot what the suitcase looked like.
So, basically, the handle is something which is connected to suitcase. But, same handle is connected to suitcase. So, we are not going to get into terms over here.
We are looking at concepts. if somebody uses the word assumption as something provisionally accepted, then, we are saying that faith refers to something which is not provisionally accepted, which is universally underlying all provisional acceptances. So, if for that also you use the word assumption, then, that’s up to you.
But, the point is that, what is the basis of that? That is the question. Okay. One question.
My question is that, suppose one man is told that Krishna is the ultimate god, and he immediately accepts and believes. So, my first part of the question is, is it scientific? And the second part is, is it scientific to encourage him? If somebody is told that Krishna is god and they believe it, is that scientific? And is it scientific to encourage them to believe like this? Good question. So, all of us have different psychophysical natures, all of us have different driving needs, and accordingly we function in life.
Some people who are more rational, they need explanations. Some people don’t need explanations. They now, all, there are millions of people now in the world who use cell phones.
Now, if you tell a person, you press this button, this button, you type this number and you can call your friend who is in America. Okay, but how can you do that? That’s how it works, do it and try it. It works, very wonderful.
Now, if you tell them that unless you understand the theory of electromagnetics by which you are able to talk with someone, you are accepting in your cell phone that it’s unscientific. Some people need that explanation. Most people don’t need that explanation.
So, it’s not what is right or wrong, it is what is required. So, we, in our day-to-day functioning also, we have finite brains and we have particular interests. So, if a particular area interests us, we will enquire about it.
If a particular area doesn’t interest us, we won’t enquire so much about it. Some people, one of my friends is a doctor and he says, some patients, they just come and take medicines and they go. And some patients, they just ask so many questions, what about this, what about that, what about that.
And nowadays, with the internet being available, what happens is, the patients evaluate the results internet is sick. And then, so the doctor says, some patients, we can just answer a few questions and that’s enough for them. Some people have a lot of questions to ask.
That’s just the way people are. So, we can’t legislate this is right and that is wrong. So, if people have an intellectual nature to understand by asking questions, that should be facilitated.
Some people don’t have that nature, that doesn’t have to be imposed on them. Of course, some amount of caution is required if a person is going to a quack, a quack is a fake doctor and they are taking medicine which are actually not curing them, which are going to hurt them, then they have to have their intelligence to ask. This really makes sense.
If I have a stomach pain and I go to the doctor and the doctor says you have to do surgery to amputate your leg, what? Does it make sense? So, at least I have to have that intelligence to ask that question. So, if something obviously doesn’t make sense, then asking questions is important. But some things fall in place for some people.
So, now, some people, for them, things fall in place because they have made spiritual advancement in their previous lives and certain concepts are already fit in their consciousness. For some people, with their upbringing, they may be biassed and that’s why they tend to accept things uncritically. But then, they may also go in an unwanted direction, where they may just accept anyone and everyone as God or whatever.
So, some amount of careful thinking is good and that can be encouraged. But it cannot be imposed. Everybody has to be facilitated according to what their particular needs are and what their particular nature is.
So, how many of you have questions? I don’t think we have time, but I just want to understand. One, two, three, four, five. So, we will continue.
Is it tomorrow or day after? Tomorrow is there also. So, you can keep your questions noted down somewhere if you want. You can ask them tomorrow.
We will continue at that time. Thank you very much. So,