Gravity doesn’t make people fall in love

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna.
The law of gravity is not responsible for people falling in love with each other. So said Albert Einstein. Einstein is one of the greatest scientists because he is widely considered to be the greatest brain of the 20th century and he showed how many of the things which were not explainable by classical physics by Newtonian physics could be explained by the theory of relativity which he proposed.
So now while Einstein expanded the scope of science beyond what was earlier understood but he also recognizes the limitation of science and in this particular numerous quote he is pointing that out that the law of gravity is responsible for the falling of objects. So if we hold an object and let it go it will fall down because of the law of gravity but he is saying that the law of gravity which is normally responsible for the falling of objects is not responsible for people falling in love with each other. So now of course we could say the falling here is metaphorical.
People don’t literally fall in love with each other but the point is that the laws of nature have limitations. They are not all-encompassing. Everything in the universe does not operate just according to laws.
Human behavior and human emotions are not reducible to merely functions of physical laws and what Einstein’s statement indicates is that scientism is invalid. Scientism is the belief system that holds that science has a monopoly on knowledge. That science is omniscient or will become omniscient and that all knowledge can be acquired through science and more or less and science because science operates according to laws.
So therefore everything can be explained by scientific laws but human emotions are coming from something which is independent of the laws of science as are revealed by physics. We all have free will and by our free will we can choose to act in various ways and that is why because we have free will we also can go beyond the determinism of nature. Because we know the laws of nature so we can predict say a particular comet has come here at a particular time and how much later the comet will come back again if we know the speed at which the comet is moving, the trajectory of the comet then we can more or less predict that the comet will come back up to 60 years or 80 years or 150 years so like that the paths of comets can be predicted with substantial accuracy because those paths are governed largely by laws.
However we can’t predict human behavior in the same way and yes human beings are consistent especially those who are responsible, those who are principled. At the same time the point is that there are factors which come into the picture and those factors can shape people to make decisions in different ways. So there is a stimulus and there is a response and as per the mechanistic laws the same stimulus will provide the same response and the comet as is understood by mechanistic science is an unconscious object which simply responds to the laws of physics, to external stimuli called laws of physics but human beings are not like that.
Now this can work both ways. Human beings can behave as an irrational. Sometimes people under the rashness of the spell of love or what they consider as love which is often just a gust of lust, storm of lust that is swept into their consciousness under the influence of that people can get carried away, swept away.
But similarly people can also on a positive note rise towards a higher reality and gain positive realization, can act positively in ways that cannot be predicted merely by the laws of nature or what we consider the laws of nature. So if everything was just a product of laws of nature then we would have no geniuses, we would have no extraordinary human achievements because say a child who is a mediocre performer in school, who is not interested in studies in school would not become a great scientist and we would not have Albert Einstein. He was notorious for not being very interested in academic study although he was proficient in his own way but he was not very inclined towards that study and similarly there are many great people who arose from factors which is not at all conducive for producing them if you just look at mechanistic causes.
So the point is we have free will and that free will is what differentiates us from just being governed by the determinism that characterizes the rest of the universe. If everything would be governed by the laws of physics or the laws of science then everything could be predicted but we cannot predict everything and that unpredictability is because we have free will. So that free will is what makes us, what characterizes our consciousness, what makes us human and what enables us to do science.
Ultimately even in science the great breakthroughs occur when people don’t think according to the predictable patterns of thought and ultimately when people think in ways which are, which transcend the normal then they attain transcendence. Then they attain transcendence in the material sense in the sense that they develop a new theory, a new explanation. They go beyond the conventional explanation that will be doubted in the world of science.
So the scientific laws have their scope but they also have their limitations and acknowledging human will and tapping the power of human will requires not scientific understanding but spiritual understanding. The more we become enriched with spiritual understanding the more we will be able to tap the human potential and direct the human free will in constructive directions and thereby lead, there will be great achievements. So we shouldn’t reduce all of human behavior to merely the predictable function of laws but to recognize the glory of human beings is in the free will by which they can go beyond predictable patterns of behavior and