Isn’t saying that everything came from a four-headed being’s navel’s lotus more absurd than saying it came from a bang?
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Transcript
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Thank you. It is said that something coming out of a flash, Big Bang is absurd and ridiculous. But isn’t it more ridiculous that the world is created by Brahma, who came out of the navel of someone on some lotus flower.
There are different points which should not be conflated. When you talk about the absurdity of certain things, that has to be seen from what perspective are we talking about. So we see the universe as it exists now is largely governed by laws.
And even those things which we see are chaos theory and something which don’t seem to be law bound. But even within that there are some statistical patterns which indicate some level of governance by laws. So now the question comes up, where did these laws come? Where does this law bound nature of the universe come from? And if we go from the universe as we observe now, to the origin of the universe as postulated by atheistic science.
All science is not atheistic. But I am talking specifically about atheistic science over here. Then we have the explanation that it came from a Big Bang.
This is absurd because from that point to come here, it has no logicality to it. From utter disorder to have to come to order. From no consciousness to have the emergence of consciousness.
From complete chaos to have laws of mathematical precision. So all this we don’t see such things happening in nature. We see consciousness produces consciousness.
We see order produces order. If I go into a room and see everything is spick and span. First thing I will ask, who is maintaining the room? If everything is spick and span, I will say, actually we have no caretaker for this room.
No, order means that we always assume there is an order keeper. So from that perspective of the orderliness that we see in the universe, the explanatory value of the Big Bang theory is extremely low. That’s why it’s considered absurd.
Now, see, there is the philosophical analysis and there is the personal perspective. These two should not be mixed together. If we mix the two together and we say, oh, there was some four-headed creature on a lotus and from him everything came about.
This all sounds supernatural. This all sounds mythological. But we have to, when we are looking from a particular perspective, we have to focus on that perspective.
Say for example, if I go to do a surgery, if I have to do a surgery, if I was to get a surgery done on myself and I go to a doctor. Now, if I start looking, hey, this doctor, you know, his hair is so disorganized. You know, he is not even shaven properly.
This doctor cannot take care of his hair, what will he take care of my intestine? No, a doctor may be doing surgery, emergency surgery for so many hours and he may not have anything to take care of. If I have to focus on the surgery, at that time I should focus on whether the surgical competence of the doctor. The appearance might add credibility to doctors in my eyes, but that is not the primary qualification of the doctor.
A well-born person is not a surgeon. So, when we are looking at things from a particular perspective, we have to focus on that perspective. So, when we are looking here from the metaphysical perspective, let us focus on metaphysical principles.
Now, do not get into the personal aspect at this stage. So, what is the metaphysical principle? That right now we see order. And in our experience, order always comes from some person who brings about order.
Right now, we have consciousness. And we see, we do not see anywhere consciousness emerging from matter. So, what we do see is consciousness comes from someone who is conscious.
There is a mother and a father, they are conscious, they desire a child and eventually they have a child who is conscious. So, consciousness comes from consciousness, order comes from some source of order. These are things which you can perceive.
So, if we see consciousness right now, we see orderliness in nature around us. So, what we can infer from this is that the starting point, whatever it is, that needs to have consciousness. And there needs to be orderliness.
That starting point is the source of consciousness and the source of order over here. So, this is the philosophical analysis. And this is what we can infer from logic and philosophy.
Now, beyond logic and philosophy, there is specific scriptural revelation. Specific scriptural revelation means, now when I come to the process by which creation takes place. When we talk about that process, yes, there are personal agents involved.
There is a supreme being and from that supreme being, there is another demiurge who is Brahma. And from that demiurge, there is a process by which creation takes place. This process is specific.
We can, if we want to make a caricature, anything we can take and make a caricature of that process. For example, if somebody doesn’t know anything about surgery. Say, a person is, primitive person living in a tribe and that person doesn’t know anything about surgery.
And he comes and has some relative in the doctor’s, surgeon’s clinic and he says, Hey, this person is killing you, he is opening your stomach, he is putting a knife in your stomach. And he tells all the ladies, stop him, stop him and nobody stops him. And at the end of it, this person cuts off the stomach and the relatives go and thank him and pay him for that.
What stupidity is this? If you don’t understand the frame of reference, what is going on over there, that surgery can seem like little literacy. But to understand what a surgeon is doing, one has to open one’s mind and see it from within that frame of reference. So from that frame of reference, what we are, if we, so to understand the Vedic version of creation, if we simply say, oh, the creation did not come by Big Bang, it came from the locus of a four-headed being.
We are actually misrepresenting the Vedic understanding of creation. If we are looking at logic and philosophy, focus on logic and philosophy. Logic and philosophy is that the source of consciousness needs to have, that the source of everything needs to have consciousness and needs to bring about world.
That is the, now when we go into the specifics of the process, we will have to look at who Brahma is. Who Vishnu is. What that locus is.
So Brahma is not just some mythical four-headed being. He is described as having powers. Phenomenal powers.
And Brahma is, some people might just fantasize something, some being was there and everything came like that. But if you look at the teachings of Brahma, if you look at the incidents in which Brahma is described, the profound philosophy that he talks, if you read Brahma Samhita, if you read Brahma’s prayers in the third canto, there is all profound philosophy going on over there. So we can’t just caricature Brahma as a four-headed creature.
We have to understand his position. We have to look at his actions. And then from the frame of reference of the Vedic scriptures we understand, this is a being who by the absolute truth is empowered to do all these things.
And then we go into the specifics and there is a whole process of creation described in the Bhagavatam. How things start from the subtle matter and in the sense objects manifest and then the various elements manifest and how the creation unfolds. It’s quite a subtle and complex process that is described.
And every, any branch of knowledge, we can make a caricature of it by looking at it from outside that branch. But if you honestly want to understand it and evaluate it, we have to enter into the frame of reference and then understand it from that frame of reference.