What does spirituality have to say about modern cosmological knowledge?

Anwser Podcast

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Thank you very much.
Sorry, I can’t hear you. Sure, I have a couple of questions here. I will take them online.
If you want, you can be there. Otherwise, I will take these couple of questions. Sure.
You can decide. So, the question is, science has discovered a lot of things through its research into the galaxies. So, what does what does spirituality have to say about what we have found through our space research? Answer? Firstly, the universe itself is a very complex thing.
And when we talk about spiritual texts like the Bhagavad Gita or the Bhagavatam, they approach the universe from a very different perspective. So, that’s why when we talk about particular things being found, knowledge often in science is actually theory specific. So, science has a particular way of looking at the world and based on looking through that way, it can find many things.
So, for example, I’ll give three examples to illustrate this one by one fast. If we have white chalk and we have black coal and we reduce both of it to powder and we mix it together, we will have grey powder. But if we look at that under a microscope, we will not see any grey powder.
We will see black granules and we will see white granules. Now, what is it really? Is it grey particles or is it white and black granules? It is actually both. It depends on the scale of observation.
So, based on the scale of observation, different people, the same thing may be perceived differently. Similarly, the yoga texts such as the Bhagavad Gita, Bhagavatam, they perceive the world from a different scale of observation and modern science perceives the world from a different scale of observation. So, therefore, naturally what is perceived is going to be different.
And things can be perceived differently based on different scales of observation that is actually true even within science. Today, there are two main theories in science that is physics. Within physics there is quantum physics and there is relativity.
Now, both of them perceive the same world in very different ways. According to quantum physics, all that exists is waves. According to relativity, there are particles that exist.
Now, relativity and quantum physics are not reconcilable. Researchers have been trying for several decades to bring them together but since the time of Einstein the reconciliation has not happened. These are two different models of reality and they are not reconcilable.
Steven Weinberg said that we have made great progress in the last few decades but the more we have progressed the further we are away from the solution. So, basically science also has two models of reality and both these models they work in different situations. So, which model is real? It is not that one is real and the other is false.
Both are models. Both are functional. So, scientists use whichever model works for their particular theoretical or practical purposes.
So, reality what it is is very complex. Science offers us models of reality and those models are very useful as functional tools but they don’t tell us actually what the reality is. So, just as within science there can be multiple models based on a particular theoretical perspective spirituality also offers us a different perspective.
So, one last example to conclude this point. Suppose a person is playing and he had a camera just above the billiards board all that we would see is a stick hitting a ball and a stick hits a ball that causes another ball to move another ball to move and one ball goes into the hole. The movement of the ball of all the balls and the eventual going of a ball into a hole that can be explained in terms of the laws of physics.
It’s a correct explanation. Why did the ball fall into the hole? Oh, it was because this stick hit this ball at this angle with this velocity, this momentum that’s why the ball went into the hole. That’s a correct explanation but is it a complete explanation? No.
If we expanded the frame of the camera we would see that that stick was held by an expert billiards player and because that billiards player hit the ball that’s why the ball went into the hole. So similarly science has a particular frame of reference where it looks at reality from the perspective of the interaction of forces interaction of forces acting on matter and it is a correct explanation but is it a complete explanation? No. From another expanded perspective we may see that there are conscious beings who are operating the laws of physics.
So both these explanations the ball went into the hole by the laws of physics the ball went into the hole because of an expert billiards player. These two explanations are complementary they are not contradictory. So therefore the vision of the galaxies and the space that we get from science from a functional perspective it is fine.
The scriptures offer us a different vision of the cosmos that is from a different scale of perception and these two don’t have to be contradictory they can be complementary. So therefore science within its particular model it can advance and it can come up with significant insights into knowledge and they are all perfectly fine. They are in their domain from a particular perspective and scripture offers a knowledge from another perspective.
So let me finish. So when we are practicing if you want to leave you can carry on. Yeah, if you want to carry on.
Sure, fine. Sure. Thank you very much.