What is the best way to present scriptural wisdom to scientists?
Answer Podcast
Transcript
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What is the best way to approach scientists to share Krishna consciousness with them? First thing is that we should not position science and scripture as competitors science is just one body of acquiring knowledge English as a language is one body of acquiring knowledge arts is one body of acquiring knowledge like that science is one body of acquiring knowledge now science is very strong in terms of looking for natural explanations for natural phenomena for giving us explanations of how things work within this world now with all its measuring and predictive power science you know whenever there is focus there is clarity on the object that is focused but there is also things that are not seen so that is why science can’t answer questions for three things fundamentally that is origin value and purpose origin means where we originally came from where did the world come from where does consciousness come from now science there are some science theories which do claim to answer these questions but if you look at serious scientists they don’t take these theories so seriously no but the laws of physics nobody changes see f is equal to g m 1 m 2 upon r square nobody says today what is going to be r cube or r raised to the power of 4 but when scientists talk about the age of the universe you know routinely after every few years the age of the universe sometimes doubles and sometimes halves sometimes become four times so these are not the when science goes into prediction about origins it is an unstable ground because there are no repeated experiments possible we cannot tell the universe please originate once again so that we can observe so with origins science resembles more guesswork than science it is actually going beyond its jurisdiction it is very powerful and it is doing the repeat experiments about repeatability about which can be repeated again and again so origins second is values what is right and what is wrong this is something which we decide from our own moral sense which we have acquired from various sources science inherently is neither moral nor immoral it is amoral. Amoral means it does not make any moral statements about what should be done or what should not be done and morality is very important Einstein said that we can have we can talk about the ethical foundation of science but if you can’t talk about the scientific foundation of ethics so ethics knowing what to do what not to do the basis is very important now science can tell us that if I use this machine gun I can kill someone science can tell a young man who has a aging grandmother who has left her inheritance to him if I put arsenic in her breakfast I can get to the inheritance but should I do that or should I not do that science cannot tell us so values ethics are important but science is silent about that and ultimately is purpose what is it that we are living for oh Einstein and Newton saw the fruit falling at that time he asked the question what makes this fruit fall and that is the answer that he came up with his brilliance at the same time the very point that he asked this question that means he assumed that things don’t happen by chance that there is some causal connection some causal pattern by which things happen so science helps us to discover to some extent okay now why do the why do the planets move in their orbits why do things fall on the ground why do things light up when electricity flows through them science gives us explanations for things now unfortunately if we extend it further if we ask science the question okay what is the ultimate meaning of life what is the ultimate purpose of life you know a famous scientist Stephen Weinberg said the more we study the universe the more it seems pointless so what if we extrapolate science beyond a jurisdiction to answer questions about the ultimate purpose of life what we end up with is small islets of meaning in an ocean of meaninglessness why do planets fall down oh it’s law of gravity why do planets move around it’s law of gravity laws of motion why do we live oh there’s no purpose so we end up with small islands of meaninglessness islands of meaning in a vast ocean of meaninglessness these fundamental questions about origin value and purpose these are answered by sources of knowledge other than scientific so it’s not that we are criticizing science when we are saying that science can’t answer these questions it is simply objective that is to say that the president of America is not the king of the whole world it’s not a criticism of the president of America to acknowledge his power at the same time we recognize that there is things beyond the jurisdiction so similarly we that the greatest scientists were recognized the strength of science and the limits of science Einstein himself was probably the greatest scientist of the last century and he said that the sciences the arts and the religions they have all come from the same tree of human knowledge so science gives us powerful knowledge about certain things and we value that and we use that but there is much more that we need to know to live meaningfully to live hopefully in life and when we present the principles of bhakti yoga we present them not as competitors to science it’s not a competitor to science it’s a complement to science science offers us no functional knowledge about how to live in this world spirituality offers us ultimate knowledge of why to live in this world how to live okay how to fly a plane how to manage a computer all this science will tell us but what to do with our life what is the ultimate purpose of life that scripture tells us so we are ourselves not scientists nor are we spirituals we are human beings in a search for understanding and we can be open to understanding from whichever source it comes so if science helps us to function better in the world in your scientific knowledge if spirituality helps us to understand the ultimate purpose of life the origin of life the values of our living then we should we should be open to accept that also sounds good