Do we need spirituality in an age of science?
I will take this in three parts, first I will talk about the commonality between spirituality and science.
Then I will talk about the divergence and then I will talk about their convergence. So you have this power point, where is the operation, who is over, okay fine, keep moving ahead. Yeah, please move ahead.
Yeah, so first thing is that science is a particular way of looking at the world. That is and science by its very definition looks for matter and material explanations for things. So this principle in science is called as methodological naturalism.
It's not an absolutely essential principle in science, but it is a mainstream principle. Now what does this mean? Suppose somebody goes for fishing and they have a fishing net whose holes are say 1 inch by 1 inch. So then no matter how long the fishing net is kept in the water, any aquatic that is smaller than 1 inch by 1 inch will never be caught.
So because the instrument itself does not have that capacity. So when science looks for material things, spiritual truths slip out of its reach. So that is the reason why often it appears as if there is incompatibility between science and spirituality.
So a couple of other examples, now we can do an x-ray or various other scans to try to know about people's health, but with the x-ray no matter how sophisticated the device, we cannot come to know about the personality of the person because the device and the object to be known are incompatible. Or even simpler example is if you have a black and white TV, no matter what we do, we cannot see a colour image in that. So that is why science basically looks for matter and it finds matter.
It does not look for spirit at all. So it looks for material explanations for material phenomena. Next please.
So now in this also, all science is not born equal. What does this mean? That actually often we hear that say some scientists or actually some atheists use the credibility of science to claim that the universe came from an explosion or all of us came from particular source. When these theories about origins are talked about and if we say, oh, spirituality is a different explanation for this and then we say there is a contradiction between the two and especially because there is so much technological wizardry around us which we see, we may often think, you know, how can science be wrong? If science is saying that the universe came in a particular way, then how can you say that it is wrong? But actually there are different branches of science which have different levels of credibility.
So for example, if I use internet or if I use mobiles, now this is based on principles of physics which are observable and repeatable in this world. So for this, science uses what is called as inductive reasoning. Sometimes people ask, can you prove the existence of God? Now if you look at the concept of proof in a mathematical sense, the way things are proven, then mathematically we cannot prove that we ourselves exist because mathematical proof is not possible for humans.
Albert Einstein said that the more things become mathematical, the more they become disconnected from the reality found in nature and the more we come close to the reality found in nature, the more they go away from mathematics. So deductive reasoning is not really possible in real life. So most of science operates on inductive reasoning.
Inductive reasoning means scientists do a certain amount of experiments and based on those experiments, they find some patterns and then they conclude, okay, this is the truth. And then they infer that it is true for future also. So Newton saw a fruit falling and he thought, okay, a stone also falls, a glass or whatever other objects also fall.
Therefore, there must be a force that attracts two objects to each other. And so induction means we do a finite number of experiments and extrapolate from that for the future. And then we also, by that repetition of experiments, we conclude that this is what has happened.
This is the normal way which science works and this mode of acquiring knowledge in science is very powerful. It gives us a fairly reliable picture of the world as it operates. But when science goes to origins, now how the universe came about, we cannot tell the universe, please create yourself once again so that we can observe and do an experiment.
So here when science goes to origins, there is no repeatable experiment possible. So science does not use inductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning means observe repeatedly, conduct controlled experiments and arrive at a conclusion.
So science has to adopt an entirely different methodology when it is going to study origins. And that methodology is called as abductive reasoning or it is inference to best explanation. That means we observe what all information is there and what is the best explanation for it.
Like if sometimes we have a mystery novel in which, okay, there was a room in which a person was murdered. The person was alive at 3 o'clock in the afternoon and the person was found dead at 9 o'clock. Then we look at the security camera and find out who are the people who went inside that room in between those 6 hours.
We find there was one small boy, 4 years old, 7 years old. Now he could not have put the knife in the stomach. One elderly lady was a housemaid.
She also could not have put the knife in. And there was a butler who went in. Then, okay, now if the murder has happened, we cannot tell the murderer, please commit the murder again so that we will be able to catch you.
We cannot repeat that. So based on the known factors, what is done? An inference to the best explanation is done. The child could not have killed, the housemaid could not have killed, therefore this butler must have been the murderer.
So now if this is based on the available information, but suppose that same room in which the person was murdered had a secret trap door, which nobody knows about, and the murderer came into the trap door, committed the murder and went out. Because the information available is limited, the inference from that also becomes limited. So therefore, whenever there is this kind of inference to best explanation, that is never as definitive as is induction.
So this means that when science tells us about how the universe came about long ago, how the universe came about, it is not of the same level of scientific credibility as is other principles by which say electromagnetics operates or telecommunications operates. Because these are based on a different method of science, they are based on a different method of science. And so that is why we cannot take the credibility of this method and apply it to that method.
There are two different branches, although they are all called science, but within science there are very different ways of acquiring knowledge. And to give an example for this, so when it comes to origins, science starts from very small samples and makes huge extrapolations, huge extrapolations of finite samples and huge extrapolations. That is why this question about origins is not very reliable.
And I earlier said that science looks only for matter, not for spirit. And that is why the picture of the universe that comes from science remains incomplete. Explanations about origins especially remain incomplete.
Next please. So no experiments are possible when we do abductive reasoning because it is like a who does it mystery novel. Next please.
Yeah. So now if we take out all the verbiage that is there. So what is the non-spiritual or atheistic explanation of the origin of the universe? No, nothing existed and nothing exploded because of nothing and from that everything came.
Originally, nothing existed, nothing exploded because of nothing and from that everything came. Now that is essentially the explanation that we have when we do not start with anything spiritual. Because from the beginning, what existed? There is nothing and how did nothing change and give up everything and give rise to everything? So actually the explanation for origins, if we remove all the verbiage, this is what it boils down to.
And it is not at all an intellectually satisfactory explanation. Now sometimes you say, oh that nothing is very special. It can produce things.
But if it can produce things, now the nothing, there is a scientist who wrote a book, how nothing produced everything. Now if you look at it, what he does, like when we refer to God, we put God as G uppercase. So like that, the scientist, he makes nothing italicised and he says, this is not ordinary nothing.
This is the nothing which can produce everything. Well, if nothing and that nothing requires pages and pages of the most complex quantum physics equations to describe. So it is certainly not nothing.
It is something. So that is why we cannot explain how everything came from nothing. Go ahead, please.
Now, so fundamentally with respect to methodology, science looks for matter, whereas spirituality is beyond matter. But science and spirituality both have some common underlying principles. And that is, there is faith in the quest for knowledge.
So Shraddhava labhate jnanam, Krishna says in 4.39 in the Padma Gita, that jnana, knowledge comes from faith. So one of the most defining movements in scientific history was, Newton saw a fruit falling. Now millions of people had seen the fruit falling before, most of them just picked it up, ate it and went away.
Newton thought, okay, what made this fruit fall? And that was his intelligence, that he asked the question and then he postulated the theory of gravity, which is also intelligence. But this question itself, what made this fruit fall, that indicates a pre-existing faith. The faith that things don't just happen by chance, things don't just happen by random.
There is some order in nature, and I'm trying to figure out what that order is. So without that faith, there would be no reason to ask the question, why did this apple fall? Or what made this apple fall? So the very question indicates that there is some order behind it. So a simple example, suppose say I'm giving a class and somebody sends a message.
Say I'm running over time. Now I know the message is likely to be, please finish the class on time. But then I look at the paper and it just seems all gibberish to me.
And if I know the person who has sent the message is an intelligent person, they won't be writing gibberish. Then my inference would be that this is in some language that I don't understand. And then I ask someone who knows the language, what does this mean? But if I saw something with gibberish, I would not even enquire what it means, if I did not have the faith that there might be something meaningful over here.
So only when I have the faith that there is something meaningful over here will I enquire. So science operates on the faith that there is an order in nature. Next slide please.
So this is not a physicist, Paul Davies. He is himself an atheist, almost like a borderline atheist. But he also admits that even the most atheistic scientists accepts as an act of faith the existence of a law-like order in nature.
So atheists may not accept the existence of God, but they accept the existence of order in nature. And this is an act of faith. Because how do we know in advance there is order in nature? But without that faith that there is order in nature, no scientific progress will be possible.
So in that sense, faith is required not just in spirituality but even in science. And even when sometimes some data comes up which doesn't seem to be orderly. Like Newton's physics worked for 200-300 years.
But at the start of the 20th century, when science went into subatomic particles, it didn't seem to work over there. So at that time scientists still had faith that there is something working over here, some other order over there. And that's how quantum physics came up.
So even when there is disorder, rather than assuming that things are disorderly, scientists have faith that there is an order which we have not yet figured out. And they probe deeper to find that order. Next slide please.
So the famous Indian mathematician Srinivasan Amarajan says that an equation for me has no meaning unless it represents a thought of God. So what he is saying is, this is a next step in the reasoning. So even atheists agree that there is order in nature.
And that order is something which can be expressed in the language of mathematics. E is equal to mc squared. Now, Einstein's brilliance was that he came up with this equation and the theory behind it.
But who made matter and energy to be interchangeable according to a precise mathematical intuition? So that, he says, is the thought of God. So the faith in the order of nature is something which is the foundational operating principle for science. But where does the order in nature come from? That order comes from God.
Next slide please. Next slide please. So here there is an important point which can resolve sometimes some conflict between science and spirituality.
God is not the explanation for the unexplainable. God is the explanation for explainability. That means, sometimes we say, Oh, we can't explain this in the universe, therefore God is required.
We can't explain this in the universe, therefore God is required. That is not the exact understanding. Now whatever we are able to explain in the universe, why are we able to explain that? That we are able to explain because that order comes from God.
In the Bhagavad Gita 9.10, Krishna says, I mean, Krishna is talking about two steps over here. He is the overseer of material nature. And material nature has its own order.
So what science does is, So science goes backward and looks at the order in material nature. And that order is fine. That order is working under the supervision of God.
So why is it that nature is having some order? Or to take this question a little more deeper, a little more complex. If you look from the atheistic perspective, there was just some lump of matter, somehow nothing exploded because of nothing. And then everything came about.
But if nothing exploded and everything came about, then the matter all around should just be disorganised. But the matter around is organised. And not only it is organised, everything came from an explosion.
Then my own brain also came from an explosion. And my brain thinks up of mathematics. So why is it that there is such a big correlation between the way my mind thinks and the way nature is? So if everything had just come by chance, why would there be a correlation of mathematical precision between the world out there which has come out of an explosion and the brain in here which has come out of an explosion? So the very explainability of nature requires an explanation.
Why are things explainable at all? That is because of God's arrangement. Go ahead please. So Albert Einstein talks about this.
If you are right in speaking about the moral foundations of science but you cannot turn around and speak of the scientific foundations of morality, every attempt to reduce ethics to scientific formulae must fail. So you may wonder, I am not worried about origins. I don't bother whether how things originated.
I just want to live here in this world. Fine, we want to live here. But while living we all have to take decisions.
What is right and what is wrong? Now science can empower us to do whatever we decide to do. But science cannot give us a framework for deciding what is right and what is wrong. That means if there is a young man who wants the inheritance from his grandmother, science can tell him, if you put arsenic in her breakfast you will get the inheritance fast.
But science cannot tell whether such a thing is right or wrong. I am not saying science will tell you, do this. I am simply saying, science is amoral.
It is not immoral, it is not moral. It is amoral. Science does not give us any knowledge of what is right or what is wrong.
When Hitler developed Germany at that time Nazi Germany was among the most scientifically developed countries. It developed on the principle of social Darwinism. It is a theory that has been later discarded even by mainstream science.
He thought we Nazis are the most developed race. And these Jews, these gipsies, they are all primitive races. This is by the order of nature the unfit will be killed out.
So these unfit Jews are anyway going to die. But we will help nature along the way. So we will help nature along the way.
That is why if you see his theory, his book, his autobiography is called Mean Cap. My Struggle. That is a direct derivative from the struggle for existence which evolution talks about.
I am not saying evolution necessarily leads to Nazism. All that I am saying is that science is amoral. Science does not tell us what is right and what is wrong.
We need some other source of knowledge to decide what is right and what is wrong. Please go ahead. So spirituality is also a different kind of science.
So in science normally we are doing these two aspects, theory and experiment. Similarly in spirituality there is philosophy and there is religion. So philosophy gives us certain postulates about what is the nature of reality.
And religion is often thought as a set of rituals. But religion actually is meant to be a set of procedures for testing and verifying the truths given in the philosophy. So Shri Prabhupada would say that philosophy without religion is mental speculation.
You just add the armchair. Maybe God exists, maybe God does not exist. But anyway I have got this wine.
Pleasure in this wine exists. So what happens? We can just go on speculating. There is no practise, there is no realisation.
So philosophy without religion is just mental speculation. If you have just one wing of spirituality. Religion without philosophy that is simply sentimentalism or fanaticism.
Just practise religion and sentiment that everything is right or fanaticism. My way is the only way. Once three people went to God and they prayed.
So A, B, C. So A prayed to God. Oh God, please destroy me. B went to God and prayed.
Oh God, please destroy A. C went and prayed to God. Oh God, I don't want anything for myself. Please fulfil the prayers of A and B. So what happens? When there is no philosophical understanding, then religion becomes just another expression of the human ego.
The human ego wants to feel superior. I am better than others. And we may do this based on nation, we may do it based on race, we may do it based on caste, we may do this based on colour.
And religion becomes another way to prop up one's false ego. And when religion becomes a tool for the false ego, then it can become a cause of great destruction. And unfortunately, that is what we are seeing in the world today.
But when both of them are brought together, philosophy and religion, then they can become a tool for raising human consciousness. Philosophy tells us that there is some higher reality. So for example, the philosophy tells us that within us, our core is non-material.
It is spiritual. And religion gives us practical methods. For example, we practise mantra meditation.
This is a method by which we experience non-material pleasure. We experience spiritual fulfilment. So philosophy directs our vision towards spirit and religion raises our consciousness and grants us experience of spirit.
Bhakti is a process. And what does the process do? It's like in science, we mix an acid and alkali and we'll get certain results. So bhakti is a process which gives us results.
Para-eesha-anubhav Experience of the transcendental Lord. And the result of that para-eesha-anubhav experience of God is that viraktir-anyatra-char One becomes detached from worldly experience. One doesn't crave for the worldly pleasures.
In this way, this is a time-tested and repeatable process. Go ahead. So this is a different method.
So to understand Krishna, stand under Krishna. What that means is stand under Krishna means that actually science operates by doing controlled experiments. We want to find out something about this.
So we put that particular object in a controlled experimental scenario and subject it to various forces and try to find out how it works. But God is not controllable by us. So there is matter, there is consciousness and there is God.
Matter is below us in the hierarchy. So we can control it to some extent. But God we can't control.
And that's why we can't apply literally the method of science to study God. So we can't subject God to a controlled experiment. What we need to do is actually to stand under Krishna.
That means submit ourselves to Krishna. He is given as a process by which we can experience higher reality. So whereas modern science is experimental where object is outside us and we subject it to an experiment.
Whereas spirituality is experiential. Experiential means that we experience it. And to experience it we can't control the things outside us.
Rather we need to control our own consciousness. So not controlled experiments but experience through self-control. So when we follow the process of Bhakti Yoga that is given in the Bhagavad Gita then our consciousness becomes elevated.
And as the consciousness becomes elevated we start experiencing higher reality. So I will conclude with one metaphor. You know when a baby is newborn.
At that time the baby doesn't understand anything. So baby starts crying and then the mother picks up the baby and puts her on her breast and the baby starts suckling. At that time the baby may not even understand that actually there is a person over here.
She is my mother and she loves me. Now all that the baby says is I just get some good thing to drink. Now as the baby starts growing up then she starts understanding.
Oh! This is a person. She loves me. And then as she keeps growing up her awareness of the mother's presence and love increases.
Say it's a cold night and the mother sees her baby is trembling. And the baby's eyes are closed. She is sleeping.
And when the mother sees the baby is trembling, mother comes and puts a blanket. And the baby's trembling stops. The baby's eyes are closed so she can't she has not seen what is happening.
But if she is grown up just when she feels the warmth of the blanket she feels the relief from the cold she will understand that Oh! This must be my mother. My mother has put the blanket on me. This is my mother's love for me because of which she has put the blanket on me and that's how I am feeling relief.
So all of us are in a state of spiritual sleep. We are in a state of spiritual infancy and we can't perceive the presence or the existence of God right now. But when the problems of life agitate us at that time if we strive to remember Krishna if we strive to take his shelter if we call out to him, if we sing his names then we experience relief.
We experience relief. When we take shelter of God, direct our thoughts towards God we experience some relief, we experience some unburdening of the heart. And that relief is like the baby trembling and somebody putting a blanket.
So many people can come into a temple and they see a nice kirtan going on. Nice, temple is a nice place. They may come and dance in kirtans also.
I had a nice experience and they go away. That is like a baby who gets the comfort of the blanket but then he just forgets it. But if you are philosophical, we ask the question Okay, when I chant, when I come to the temple when I pray, when I connect my consciousness towards spirituality what is it that gives me relief? What is it that gives me comfort? What is it that gives me solace? And just as the baby, as she grows she starts connecting the warmth of the blanket with the love of the mother.
Similarly, as we keep growing philosophically we start connecting the relief that we get through bhakti with God's love for us. And as we do this more and more then we start perceiving Krishna. As the baby will grow up, she will start understanding her mother more and more we start perceiving the mother's love more and more.
Like that, as we keep growing spiritually our spiritual vision will awaken and we will be able to see God. And that time God will become not just a reality but He will become the defining reality of life. Everything else centres around Him.
He is the reality that gives reality to everything else. Without Him, nothing can exist. Krishna says that nothing can exist without Him.
He is the source of everything. He is the existence that makes all existence possible. That realisation we get when we become spiritually awakened.
Bhakti Yoga is the process for spiritual awakening. I started by talking about how science looks for matter, not spirit. I discussed three examples of a fishing net with a black and white camera and X-ray can't revealing personality.
And because science doesn't look for spirit when it looks for matter, if it is looking at the world around us it can conduct repeatable experiments and come at some level of reliable truths. That is by inductive method. But when it goes to origins, it has to use abductive reasoning.
And it is highly speculative. It is an inference to best explanation like trying to find out who committed a crime. And that is not reliable because from a small sample there is a huge extrapolation.
So all science is not born equally. And if we look at origins, the scientific story becomes that there was nothing and nothing exploded because of nothing and from that nothing everything came about. It's not at all rational.
So then we discussed with respect to induction when science works, then science operates in the faith that there is an order existing in nature. Now where does this order come from? Science genius is that it has found mathematical expression for the order. But where does the order come from? That comes from God.
God is not the explanation for the unexplainable. Philosophy is the explanation for explainability. And then we discussed based on this that if God exists, how can we perceive him? Just as there is material science which is based on theory and experiment.
There is spiritual science based on philosophy and religion. So philosophy without religion is mental speculation. Religion without philosophy is sentimentalism or anarchism.
And when we have both together, then our spiritual awareness develops. And this is experiential. So to understand Krishna, we have to stand under Krishna.
And when we experience and use our intelligence to connect the dots in the experience. Just as a mother maybe translates the warmth of the blanket into her mother's love. Similarly, the relief that we get in bhakti, we can translate it into an expression of Krishna's love.
And as we awaken spiritually, God will not only be seen as the reality, but he will be seen as life's defining reality. The reality that makes all other realities possible. Thank you very much.
So basically, there is a difference. Science can make things better. See the gadgets are improving.
But science cannot bring about moral improvement in people. Science cannot ethically elevate people. That is what spirituality can do.
That is a distinct contribution that we can and look for when we approach spirituality. Thank you for reminding me. Thank you so much Chetan and Jamal.
We are running a little late. So if anybody has any questions, it is going to be right here. So you can ask them individually.
We will just give the announcements now.