Is a devotee teacher cheating students by teaching them scientific theories about creation?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

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Thank you So if a devotee or a spiritually minded person is a teacher in a school they know how creation happened from scripture but in school they are reading something different according to school syllabus is that cheating? Cheating is too harsh a word to describe the first thing is we should never position science and scripture as competitors by positioning science and scripture as competitors we devalue scripture devalue scripture scripture yes it does give us some information about creation but the primary purpose of scripture is to give us spiritual knowledge knowledge about how to love Krishna knowledge about how to attain Krishna scripture may give us some information about this world also at the same time this world is extremely complex and there can be different ways in which this world can be perceived what I mean by that is even if you consider medicine simply there is allopathy and there is Ayurveda now both of them treat the body both of these work there are people who get cured using Ayurveda there are people who get cured using allopathy they are two different models of the same body so which is right which is wrong it’s not a matter of right or wrong there is a different perspective of analyzing it so in Ayurveda there is a concept of heat in the body go to allopathy there is no concept of fire in the body like that so there are two different ways of looking at it and what to what to speak of within approaching the body even in science there are two differences approaching the world one is quantum physics the other is relativity and these two I won’t go into technicalities but these two are violently contradictory now quantum physics says that everything is just waves and relativity says that everything is particles and the two are just not reconciled so what do scientists do scientists they find that both theories work in different domains different theories work so what they do is they are simply pragmatic pragmatic means practical so whichever theory works they use that theory there was a scientist there is a famous anecdote in the history of science in the history of quantum physics one student asked a famous quantum physicist sir you say this whole world is made of waves how can I I can see these objects in front of me how can it all be waves so his quantum physicist answered him stop thinking start calculating stop thinking start calculating that means try to think quantum physics doesn’t make any sense but the mathematical equations work so what scientists do is even they don’t know what is reality they simply what science actually offers us is models of reality it doesn’t tell us about reality it gives us models of reality now what is a model, a model is like a map now say I can have a map of Bahrain which is a political map I can have another map of Bahrain which is a topographical map there are some similarities but there are substantial differences so basically within science itself quantum physics offers one map of reality and relativity offers another map and whichever works we use that so same way science offers us one model of reality and scripture offers us another model of reality the two, the world is very complex it can be analysed in different ways so the two don’t have to be seen necessarily as contradictory now definitely there are contradictions but they are not inherently contradictory so science, if there is an honest scientist they will tell us that science cannot answer ultimate questions now the existence of god, the origin of the world these science cannot answer because how the world came about nobody can do an experiment in a laboratory and replicate the creation of the world so there are theories and these theories are highly speculative so what we have to understand is there may be specific theories within science which may be wrong but the methodology of science is just one way of looking at the world and scripture offers another way of looking at the world so there is a we treat science simply as operational knowledge operational knowledge means it offers us a model for working in this world and we use it and as far as ultimate knowledge is concerned we get it from scripture so I won’t go into the technicalities of specific theories here but in principle we see that these are different ways of looking at the world and they are not necessarily inherently contradictory there may be some contradictory features which can be individually addressed but in principle we understand that science offers us an operational model of reality and we use it for operating in this world and for ultimate understanding of reality we need scripture so there is no for functioning in this world if we have to teach science we can teach science, nothing wrong we study science, right now we are using science we are using mic, we are using mobiles so it’s operational the problem comes when the operational is assumed to be the ultimate so if we don’t do that and there is nothing there is no need to see this as contradictory there is a conversation of Shri Prabhupada where he says that we are not against scientists’ spirit of knowing we are against their atheism we are against their atheism so atheism is not inherent to science science is simply a tool for acquiring knowledge and by that tool we can understand how things work in terms of operating here but science itself doesn’t tell how things came about the theories which are claimed to be scientific for explaining the origin of the world, they are actually non-scientific extrapolations of scientific data there is some scientific data but from that there is a non-scientific extrapolation that is done and an honest scientist ultimate question science can’t answer so for operational knowledge in this world we may use science but for ultimate knowledge we study scripture and then we internalize scripture and we share scripture also so basically there is no need to see this as cheating or double dealing it is just we have to understand the difference between the operational and the ultimate and just as for this world there can be different models of the body in medicine of the world in physics similarly science and scripture use different models does this answer your question? thank you very much so I know many of you have questions so we are planning that I am here for two more days so on Sunday Sunday we are planning to have a question answer session entirely, Sunday is it? yes let me complete this so Sunday we are going to have a question answer session there will be practically no class only question answers so those of you who have any questions maybe you can note down those questions and on Sunday we will have a set of chits over here and we will answer those questions thank you