Do science and scripture see things from different perspectives?
Roughly speaking so with respect to science there is an inherent debate does science offer as a reality or does it offer as a model of reality and in the past till the last 20th century science did have that idea that we are giving you a reality that there is a atom, that atom is made of electrons and the electrons are going round and round the nucleus, so that was till the 20th century but after that as quantum physics developed and then relativity developed both of them are so contradictory that there is just no way to reconcile it and that's why today most scientists they say that science does not talk about reality, we can only talk in terms of models of reality so whichever model works they use that, so quantum physics is a model which works in certain things and relativity is a model which works in certain things and using different models that way is not all that all that far fetched if we consider even our own body allopathy offers a particular model of the body Ayurveda offers a different model of the body Ayurveda talks about the whole concept of heat in the body in allopathy there is no concept like heat now there are certain things which are in agreement in both the models but beyond that the two are different ways of looking and then whichever so how do most people whichever treatment works for them they take that if I have to take a medicine I am not going to do a PhD level analysis of which is correct is allopathy correct or Ayurveda correct even doctors don't do that you know I know many doctors they are themselves allopaths but sometimes they get Ayurvedic medicines and there are Ayurvedic doctors also sometimes use allopathic diagnostic methods so we basically live and work based on what works so like that with respect to cosmology certainly it is not just not just imagination it is conceptualization of a reality at a particular level and there is a description of Maitreya Muni it is a major part of of the planetarium background knowledge that Maitreya Muni he in a trance it is described in one of the Puranas that he rises up and he goes to a particular place in the universe like atop the Meru mountain and from there he sees the Bhagavatam as it is he sees the universe as it is described in the Bhagavatam so the point is that vision is also possible and that vision Shukdev Goswami had and he shared that with everyone but Shukdev Goswami himself did not bother he was also at that time practically everyone knew some amount of astronomy astrology so he did not bother to try to reconcile that with this or to even say that this is wrong and this is right he just left it as it is so same way the Bhagavatam's cosmology is true at a particular level of perception or rather it can be understood to be true at a particular level of perception now at our level of perception when we are unable to perceive how it is we understand that the Bhagavatam is describing from a different scale and that's why we don't say that it is wrong because the materialistic tendency this is all some imagination, this is all some mythology and Prabhupada strongly rebuts that saying that great sages had no need to write mythological imaginations they had serious work to do so we reject that idea that Bhagavatam is mythology fifth kind of cosmology we definitely reject that but that does not necessarily mean that we have to put that cosmology at war with the present cosmology it's a different model of reference and this is a different model and in today's world actually Jiva Swami in the Tattva Sandarbha while establishing the authority of Bhagavatam he states that the Vedas are so vast and much of the Vedic knowledge is today lost so if we consider the Vedas there was a lot of Aparavidya in the Vedas which is lost and that's why without all that to understand the Bhagavatam's cosmology today is difficult so what we should focus on is we have to live in the world and if science offers a particular world view when it becomes a problem is that we accept science authority for everything and when science says there is no God yes Karishye Vajnamata no science has its authority in its own field and if we accept that authority in that field and we don't have more confidence in science and think that because science does not agree with scripture so scripture is wrong then it becomes a problem but we understand that scripture is giving us the ultimate knowledge about life's purpose that is something science cannot provide then more of it is science offers us knowledge in a particular field which we use as operational there is operational knowledge and there is what is called ontological knowledge ontological knowledge is nature of reality that science does not offer and that is something that is not something we say even scientists acknowledge that so by recognizing that science offers us a model of reality and Bhagavatam offers us a reality that is perceivable at a different scale of perception we can have we can maintain our faith in the Bhagavatam and at the same time focus on pursuing the essential purpose of the Bhagavatam does that address the question? you need to answer so any other we have time yes Krishna do soldiers.