How did Darwin spoil our culture?

From D P Anjne

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna how did Darwin Darwin spoil our culture question from BPA Anjani Prabhu answer again as I have answered in the earlier question about Macaulay our focus is not to blame anyone our focus is to understand the historical process and see how it can be corrected throughout history there have been theists and atheists and it was Darwin’s theory of evolution that brought scientific credibility and authority and intellectual respectability to atheism as one of the world’s most infamous atheist Richard Dawkins said that Darwin made it possible to become an intellectually fulfilled atheist so essentially there was the whole idea that science is the means to progress and initially when science started we see Newton, Galileo Copernicus all these pioneers of the development of science they all believed in God and so did the subsequent scientists also so their idea was that God is the creator but God is not directly involved in the management of the world God has set up laws like the laws of gravity by which the world is managed so this idea is primarily called as deism so theism is God is the creator and the controller atheism is there is no God neither as a creator nor as a controller deism is the idea that God is the creator but not the controller the universe is like a clock the clockwork universe was a favorite metaphor of Newtonian physics so God created the world but I just said the clock has been created by a clockmaker but now that clockmaker does not have any control on the clock right now the clock is working independently as per its laws so that was the idea the world is working as per its laws so after this first step where God was removed as the creator God was removed as the controller of course we understand from the Vedic perspective that God is God has arranged laws but the laws are also under his supervision maya dakshina prakriti as 9.10 Bhagavata says so Krishna can change and intervene within the laws of nature whenever he wants to by his free will as he does when he comes and performs his pastimes and say for example let’s go over the hill but beyond that when Darwin’s theory came along before that there was no intellectually acceptable respectable explanation for God that for the origin of the world which did not bring God into the picture and that’s why atheism was on the lower side of intellectual respectability but after Darwin proposed his theory although Darwin himself was not an atheist he was agnostic but he cleared the way for the frontal assault of atheism on the mainstream culture and the public mind so he came up with an idea that things could have changed by natural adaptation and from simple unicellular particles all the complexity of life has come about now elsewhere I have talked about what are the problems with this theory in terms of its own intrinsic value there is no strong theoretical explanation of how species change nor is there any good evidence for actually species changing so actually the Darwin’s theory is based on survival of the fittest but from that perspective this theory itself is unfit to survive but it has survived because it was immediately picked up by atheists as a bulwark as a framework for defense against theism and in fact as a maze for founding theism so that’s how it has survived and flourished not because it has an intrinsic value but because of its ideological implications now after Darwin’s theory became accepted as scientific truth, truth in double quotes then people started feeling that if I believe in God then I am the unscientific and because science had so much glamour in society because of its technological achievements and because of its perceived intellectual depth that people just didn’t want to be unscientific and then for many people to believe in God became unscientific and to believe and therefore to disbelieve in God atheism became scientific and science was intellectually respectable so actually in one sense atheism got a double boost, one was that Darwin’s theory not only rejected the role of God as a designer, God as a creator but in many ways it removed the spiritual element from human beings also if we are just particles of protoplasm which have evolved then there is nothing spiritual in our people’s lives so there is no soul and when there is no soul then there is no real value or meaning to spirituality so religion at best became relegated to a subjective corner if that’s what you want to believe you can believe that you are a weak person, you need a crutch in life so believe that there is a protector God so that sort of idea came up and after Darwin soon along Freud came up and Freud had the idea that we all are like children and we need a parent figure and that’s why we have imagined God and that’s how the whole atheism got a lot of respectability and theism became very intellectually disrespectful for some time however Freud as well as thinkers before and after him had predicted that theism was on the verge of dying and as people would become progressive then people will reject God but to the great surprise of many observers of the history of ideas, theism has not only survived but has had tremendous resurgence in the last 50-60 years so especially the western the influx into the west of eastern spirituality Vedic ideas along with of course Buddhist ideas Vedic ideas coming in they have offered people an alternative so you know Christianity had a very simplistic idea of creation and that seemed utterly unscientific that you know God just said let there be earth and there was earth, let there be sun and there was sun, so now in principle by God by his willing can do anything and everything but science wants to know the processes by which things happen and this idea seemed to be just like a magician God just waving a magic wand and making things happen it didn’t seem to have much scientific substance but if you look at the Vedic understanding of the universe there is a lot of profundity Sankhya is such a systematically and deeply developed branch of knowledge it is almost in parallel to physics it is like the Vedic version of physics where matter is analysed into such profound depth, in the third canto there are several chapters which describe the properties of various material elements and Srila Prabhupada said in the purport that there is a huge opportunity for potential research over here so now people have a third alternative that rather than choosing between scientific atheism and primitive magic wand blowing theism, people now have a respectable intellectually respectable and analytically substantial theism, so as devotees and especially devotee scientists present the Vedic alternative to Darwinian evolution in a intellectually coherent and a scientifically respectable way then there is a great opportunity for the, for at a scientific level the glaring loopholes in Darwin’s theory to be countered and for in the public mind the emptiness that has been created because of the rejection of spirituality and God to be filled also, so in this way Darwinism or evolution and atheism have scarred people’s mind severely but the Vedic alternative can heal those scars and that’s why Srila Prabhupada wanted devotees to present Krishna consciousness in a respectable way now there may be devotees who are working in biology, working in fields of science and they especially if they have the interest the inclination, there are devotee scientists who are also working in these fields and they can network with them and help in furthering the spreading of Krishna consciousness in a way that provides intellectually respectable and emotionally satisfying alternatives to this simplistic theism of Christianity and the reductionistic God rejecting materialism of atheism that is masquerading as modern science due to the theory of evolution. Thank you.