Is Religion Still Ruining Science? Lecturer at UCSC Thinks So

Christians believe that human beings are the only creatures with a soul capable of entering heaven. Sripad Bhakti Madhava Puri Maharaj and his associate, Srila Bhakti Pavan Janardan Maharaj, believe that this concept has infected the scientific community and leads it to hold a false, materialistic conception of reality.

In a forum called "The Evolution of Consciousness" last week at UC Santa Cruz, Sripad and Srila attacked the Darwinian theory of evolution on the grounds that its belief that consciousness is a phenomenon that arises from the material body is exactly backward.

Around two-dozen people attended the talk, held at the Natural Sciences building. Sripad and Srila said they hope to make the meeting part of an ongoing series.

Sripad has a doctorate in computational quantum chemistry from Georgetown University in 1971 and is president of Bhakti Vedanta Institute, a collection of scientists, philosophers and spiritual seekers interested in questions about consciousness. Sripad has written articles on topics such as matter and life, the difference between animal and human laws of karma and the search for another paradigm of life.

“Darwin is saying that the body is evolving, from the bacterium to the man," Sripad said. "That's the objective plane of evolution." Viewing evolution in this way is a mistake, he added, which leads scientists to believe that physical matter is what comprises and gives rise to consciousness.

He proposed an alternative view of evolution.

“The Vedas are telling us of the subjective plane of evolution, that the plane of consciousness is evolving through different stages of enlightenment, and these different stages of enlightenment are reflected in the different forms of life that we find on this planet. Now, this means that consciousness is present in every form of life, and without consciousness, there would not be any life, even the simplest microbes.”

Sripad said Darwinian evolution, which accounts for the increasing complexity and intelligence of life-forms over time through a system of accidental mutation and natural selection in the body, is misguided, that it puts the cart before the horse, so to speak. The consciousness of a creature precedes the physical form it takes, he concluded.

Reality as it appears to us, as living beings on the planet Earth, with space and time and the physical matter such as dirt and air and flesh that surrounds us, is a kind of illusion, a trick God plays on itself, fooling itself into forgetting its own ultimately singular oneness.

The more complex and intelligent a life-form is, the degree to which they are able to realize the fact that they exist within and are comprised of a divine and singular consciousness, the more advanced their physical form manifests itself.

“In the forms of life, consciousness is so absorbed in the material form that it cannot understand this. Only in the human form can this begin to understand that there is something else besides the body.”

The expressed purpose of the talk was to attack the Darwinian theory of evolution, but the arguments presented are in opposition to the foundations of the Western scientific realism and empiricist philosophy.

“The activities that we find in the material world are actually the activities that are going on within our consciousness," said Sripad. "What we see in the world is an imprint made by our conceptions, our thoughts. The objective world before us: What is that? How can we say what that is, except by what we think it is? Is it possible to talk of a world, to refer to a world that has nothing to do with our ideas of it? What we see in the world is actually within us.”

Although this idea is very ancient, it has gained modern traction, particularly in the field of quantum mechanics.

Sripad quoted famous scientist Sir Arthur Eddington, who said, “We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origins. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And lo! It is our own.”

Sripad admits that viewing life in this way does not have much to offer to science, nor does he see the Darwinian theory of evolution being bolstered or co-opted in any way by this understanding of reality.

“I see Darwinist theory as a false theory ... like Phlogiston,” he said. Phlogiston was an element theorized in the 1700s to be responsible for combustion.

The goal of science is to understand the universe as best it can, but that it limits its search by focusing on objective, external reality, he added.

“The highest attainment for a living entity is to establish a loving relationship with The Supreme, without any material interruption,” Srila said, and this goal is not a scientific one.

A subjective, spiritual approach is better suited in the search for knowledge of the universe, he said.

“The scientists who originally brought science to the world were diests, were creationists," Srila said. "There is no conflict between science and theology. One can be a scientist and study the mechanics of things, without having to say that life is explainable in those terms. What we must avoid is allowing those thoughts from barring our understanding of reality.

“Modern society, and its whole scientific conception of reality is a very recent thing, and we got along quite well without it for thousands of years before it came on the scene, and perhaps even better, in the sense that things like pollution and atomic bombs were not around. And there was science in the past that was not based on atomic and molecular physics.

"Modern science cant explain mind or consciousness or ego, it cant explain life. We can analyze a book in terms of its letter, but how much does this give us an understanding of what it is about, about what the story is?”