Friends and followers of Sadaputa Prabhu, many in Alachua County, Florida, started a branch of the Bhaktivedanta Institute in Gainesville. They decided to do a practice conference on November 13, inviting devotee scholars to speak and present papers. What follows is some notes I took on the presentations of things that were striking to me.
Brahmatirtha Prabhu:
I was at the “Life Comes From Life” conference in Vrindavan in 1977. After each day’s meeting we would report to Srila Prabhupada. He would ask, “What was their argument? What was our argument?”
What did Prabhupada want us to present? Life does not come from matter.
Prabhupada was boot in the face of atheism not boot in the face of science.
Sthita-dhi Muni Prabhu’s thesis adviser, who I knew from another venue, privately told me afterwards that his thesis dissertation was the best she has ever seen defended.
Srila Prabhupada encouraged people to ask questions. I learned from him that the only foolish question is the one not asked.
Dhira Govinda Prabhu:
In the vibration of the sabda brahma itself is the transcendental realization.
In other ways of acquiring knowledge, the four human defects come into play.
There was a triple blind study showing there was a definite effect showing prayer to the Judeo-Christian God improves healing from heart disease, yet the study although published was not promoted. Had it been a new drug with the same effect, it would have become famous.
In research, the gold standard is the double blind study because it supposely eliminates the experimenter’s bias, yet there is a study shows that even in the double blind study the experimenter’s bias still comes through.
One speaker deprecated actually believing in the view you are advocating.
I was not planning to do the Ph.D., which I ultimately did on the maha-mantra study, but my advisers paid me to do it, and they said I could do any topic I desired. One said, “If you are not going to do something you are really into, I will not support it. I have seen you with your cloth bag and your mumbling, why don’t you do something on that?” I took it that Krishna was speaking through him.
Sattva means goodness in the Vedas and tove means goodness in the Bible. Thus I called my organization Satvatove Institute.
By focusing on removing the weeds and just doing a little watering, we find people had major transformations, and they become inspired to inquire “What is this watering process?”
We find from our process, people had realizations. Pratyaksa.
We have published in social science journals that chanting Hare Krishna decreases stress and depression and increases life satisfaction.
I take the responsibility of providing ways of taking those who are attracted to the chanting in order to become from of stress and depression to become involved with Srila Prabhupada’s whole program.
Gopinath Prabhu:
In cases when the physician asked the patients about their spiritual practice, a study showed the physician – patient relationship was better and healing was promoted.
Integrative medicine involves the patient’s lifestyle in addition to just the mind and body, and uses all kinds of therapeutic techniques.
Medicine used to be a drag for me.
I pray even before seeing the patient.
According to Ayurveda, “The secret to sound health of body, mind and spirit is if you can let food be your medicine and work your recreation.”
60% disease is preventable. 70–90% of chronic diseases are preventable.
2.5 trillion dollars spent each year in the USA health care, and 70% is chronic disease.
In Ayurveda, God and the living entities are always separate and Vaishnava sankyha is the philosophy behind it.
Here are the properties of the different material qualities (gunas):
Ayurveda protects and enhances the health of a healthy person and treats diseases.
The five principles in the Gita, namely the Lord, the living entities, material nature, karma, and eternal time, are there in Ayurveda.
Mantra-japa has these good effects:
1. opposes the unseen causes of past diseases
2. directly by invoking divine grace
3. indirectly by increases in sattva [goodness] and preventing excesses of tamas [ignorance] and rajas [passion].
The body is a pharmacy; you just need the key to open it. There are anti-cancer drugs within the body.
The mind is sattva [goodness] by nature.
We show kirtana expands brain blood flow.
Dhira Govinda Prabhu:
Many meditative techniques have been researched showing a real effect, but the maha-mantra had never been researched so I did that. Followers of Prabhupada are behind on doing this research.
The placebo mantra had some effect but much less than the maha-mantra and not statistically significant.
Gopinath Prabhu:
Madhvacarya was a [physical] fitness fanatic.
Amish people have the obesity genes, but have you seen a fat Amish person?
We choose our diseases.
Ayurveda says aging is inevitable, but you can age without pain.
Dairy products decrease diabetics and decrease osteoporosis.
[In an email replying to questions I had about his presentation, Gopinath Prabhu wrote:] “Research that validates that the Hare Krishna mantra (or any japa of the names of Lord Narayana) improves brain health and increases the inclination for right living [an increase of the mode of goodness which Srila Prabhupada always emphasized] is absolutely important. I am currently attempting to do such studies at big academic universities with the aim to make the Hare Krishna mantra a prescription to prevent chronic diseases. Actually I am looking for more collaborators in doing these studies.”
Gopal Hari Prabhu on Science-Based Arguments for God’s Existence and Modern Atheism:
Sometimes science based arguments for God’s existence lead to atheism.
When Prabhupada attacks science he is attacking scientific materialism.
Atheism has existed as long as theism.
There is a movement sometimes called evangelical atheism.
Many of the atheistic books are attacking the Judeo-Christian idea of God.
Comment by Janaki Rama Prabhu: Lots of these atheist books came out after 911 as a reaction to religious violence.
Nowadays atheists use science as the reason for their atheism.
Scientific materialists argue that only things that are measurable are real, and only science can give real knowledge.
Their claim that science is the only legitimate path to knowledge is not scientific.
By science you cannot prove there is God, but you also cannot prove God does not exist.
You can present that scientific materialism is a valid position but in reality it is a faith position that is not actually based on science. Once you establish that both you and the scientific materialist have faith positions, you can talk about which makes most sense.
Natural theology attempts to establish truths about God through human reason and science.
Newton wrote ten times as much on theology as science. Until age 17 he did theology, then for six years science, and then theology for the rest of his life.
Newton wrote, “Nothing can rejoice me more than the fact it [the Principia] should strength belief in God.”
Ramanuja argued:
The argument from design cannot prove that:
1. The world requires a cause
2. The intelligent cause is one and not many.
3. Whether an intelligence cause must be embodied or not.
4. The intelligent cause is good.
These, can, however be established by reason, experience, and scripture.
National theology can strengthen faith in God.
Unfortunately, Newton was not accepted so much by scientists because of his theology nor was he accepted by Christian theologians who did not like his acceptance of Christ as the merely son of God and his interest in alchemy.
Some scientists conceive the Big Bang as beyond space and time and the cause of space and time.
Early scientists saw their work as worship. Some had two tables, a worship table and a science table, and when they had difficulty at their science table they would go to their worship table.
Janaki Rama Prabhu:
I recommend reading Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives.
We should get away from the idea of warfare between science and religion. It is more complicated than that. There are scientists of all sorts of faiths.
One has to have a revisionist idea with openness to science and other knowledge disciplines.
There is a growing openness in discussion of science and religion, and you can bring your theology into the discussion if you do it in the right way.
You have to be very disciplined to be a good scientist. It is almost a yogic process.
There are people who do science for different reasons.
comment by Indian man with white shirt and vest: I come from India and there is no such word as religion. There is dharma and that is more experiential.
It surprising how many scientists believe in God.
Comment by Gopal Hari Prabhu: 70% of physicists believe in God, and 50% of biologists.
In mainstream science journals like Science and Nature if you present anything theistic it will not get published.
Evolution: a theory in crisis is the best critique of evolution.
I got an anti-Darwinism article in Biology and Philosophy.
Darwin considered animals had cognition, feelings, and appreciation of art and music, and this was against centuries of the Judeo-Christian idea that animals were nothing other than sophisticated pieces of machinery. Thus Darwin was progressive in the West in this.
Sthita-dhi Muni Prabhu, “When Boot Meets Face”:
Life Comes from Life may be described as a condensed stylized revision of the original conversations with Srila Prabhupada.
The original conversations should be studied to get a full understanding of Srila Prabhupada.
It was on those walks they began recording Srila Prabhupada’s walks.
Hamsaduta and the German devotees suggested to print the conversations in a book, and Srila Prabhupada agreed, and it was published originally in German, Leben Kommt von Leben.
Srila Prabhupada, although not a scientist, was confident in presenting the Gaudiya idea that consciousness is not a product of matter.
Regarding the scientists, Srila Prabhupada said, “If you talk of God, they immediately become arrogant. That is our protest.”
“We do not deprecate their advancement in knowledge. Their defiance of God is our protest.”
Brahmatirtha Prabhu: Radhanath Swami told me recently he was on a tour at Westminster Abbey at the part where there are tombs of the different saints and scientists. He asked where they were at the moment, and the tour guide said they were in the science section, Radhanath Swami looked down, and saw he was standing on the tomb of Charles Darwin. He joked about it, saying that this is “the boot in the face.”
Dave Butcha:
Pramana: a necessarily accurate source of knowledge.
The Bhagavata is the highest pramana, and thus it must therefore be sruti.
The Supreme Lord is the vaco, and om is the vacaka.
The Veda is another mode of being of that same Lord.
Apparently the Veda has authors but not really, according to Baladeva.
The Vedas are a compilation of the statements of the omniscient Lord.
Vyasa is just revealing the Vedas.
The authority of the sruti cannot be rejected. With smrti, you can choose to follow one and reject another.
Every reading of an infallible text by a fallible person is alway fallible.
That status of the infallibility of text implies an absolute reality.
I cannot attribute the same infallibility to an interpretation of the infallible text or my understanding of that interpretation of it.
Sometimes we say that ‘the scientists used to say this but now they say that’ and therefore we cannot take them seriously, whereas ‘the guru parampara [spiritual lineage] is always saying the same thing,’ but that is not actually true.
A saragrahi is someone who grasps [grahi] the essense [sara]. The existence of a saragrahi implies there is a mixture of essential and not essential things that one can grasp the essence from.
Murali Gopal on astronomical issues:
The problem arises when the description of earth does not match what we see.
I see people now having faith crises like when the Fifth Canto came out because of the flat earth conspiracy theories that are becoming popular.
Sadaputa Prabhu found four possible interpretations of Bhu-mandala, none of which is a flat earth, thank God.
There are actually people who consider that the six seasons listed in the Surya-siddhanta are absolute, even though in the southern hemisphere they are reversed.
[Murali Gopal made a lot more nice points, but I did not write them down as I am familiar with Sadaputa Prabhu’s book Mysteries of the Sacred Universe, and so they were old news to me.]
Krishna-kripa Das on “A Personal Appreciation of the Life and Works
of Richard L. Thompson (Sadaputa Dasa)”:
Abstract:
A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada was known for saying that the material scientists were cheaters. As someone who received a degree in computer science from Brown University, that was hard to hear. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that what Prabhupada was aiming at, was that since there is a God, and that since numerous material scientists were allegedly attempting to explain everything without God, it was in that sense that they were cheating. Later, while I was Sadaputa’s assistant for nearly twenty years, I came to appreciate since scientists were also conditioned souls, even according to everyday definitions of cheating such things were going on in professional science as well.
Sadaputa would point out different limitations inherent to atheistic philosophies, as well as various credible tactics for utilizing empirical evidence favorably in support of Vedic perspectives.
He did not feel disturbed by superficial analyses of Puranic cosmology that suggested a mythological interpretation. Based on his frank confidence in Bhaktivedanta Swami’s faith in the scriptural tradition of Fifth Canto material, Sadaputa used his professional background as a mathematician to illustrate the relevancy of advanced astronomical insight present during ancient times.
Though Sadaputa may not have always felt fully appreciated during his lifetime, and that with additional support likely could have accomplished much more, he kept diligently at work all the same. That, I feel, was one of his greatest qualities.
Presentation:
[I was the last speaker, and we were two hours behind, thus I skipped a few examples I meant to include.]
Scientists are proud of having objective knowledge because they follow their scientific method whereas they see religionists as merely having blind faith in some scripture.
The scientific method involves making a hypothesis based on observation and collecting evidence, modifying the hypothesis as needed in light of the new evidence. Thus ultimately the hypothesis accounts for all the evidence, and becomes an accepted theory.
The first project I worked on with Sadaputa Prabhu was the book Forbidden Archeology and the video derived from it. I learned the first few decades after Darwin came up with his theory, scientists found artifacts and skeletal remains indicating advanced hominids in rock dated 1, 2, 5, 10, 20 and even 50 million years ago. However, in 1894 when Dubois discovered Homo erectus in Java (Java Man) in strata around 700,000 years old, scientists took that as the missing link they had hoped for, and the dozens of artifacts of advanced tool making man in rock 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, and even 50 million years ago were discredited or ignored, and disappeared from view. By not modifying their hypothesis to include all the evidence, the scientists were not only failing to attain objective knowledge but were demonstrating blind faith in a theory with evidence against it. If God does exist and is omniscient and the revealed literature is complied by Him, it is rational to place faith in it, and thus it is a possibility that a religionist could have real knowledge. But when scientists have blind faith in an imperfect theory, so much so that they cast away evidence against it, they have only ignorance. Thus I learned from working with Sadaputa Prabhu on that project that there is real cheating going on in science.
The scientists were so fixed in their conception that humans came from the Old World (Asia) to the New World (the Americas) at most 20,000 or 30,000 years ago, that even Louis Leakey, practically the father of archeology, could not get his many artifacts in 200,000 year old rock in Calico, California, accepted.
There are other examples of problems with atheistic ideas, which I learned from Sadaputa Prabhu.
In his video, “Models of Natural Selection” Sadaputa makes a model of a virus that eats bacteria and analyzes what it would take to mutate it so it could eat bacteria with a thicker cell wall. This part would have to be longer, and if this part were longer, then that other part would have to also be longer, etc. It turned out it would be 1 in 10 to the 54th power chance that it would evolve in that very limited way. At the end of the video, he challenges the scientists: “Without explicit models of biological systems, the theory of evolution becomes simply an exercise in imaginative story telling and not a proper scientific theory.”
Sadaputa Prabhu told how in 1967 mathematicians presented a paper to the biologists showing them how in terms of probabilities that evolution was not possible. The biologists replied, “We know evolution happened, and thus you must have made some mistake in your calculations.” The mathematicians, realizing the nature of the people they were dealing with, did not make further attempts to push the point.
Alfred Russel Wallace also came up with an evolutionary theory the same time as Darwin, but with natural selection alone, he could not account for people having advanced mathematical abilities existing in primitive cultures that did not utilize them. Thus he considered intelligent beings may guide the evolutionary process, an idea that outraged Darwin.
Other problems with atheistic theories Sadaputa Prabhu mentioned in his books:
“Darwinian evolution calls for a self-reproducing system of molecules. Indeed, one of the main tasks of origin-of-life theories is to explain how the first self-reproducing system arose. In living organisms, self-reproduction is a dauntingly complex process involving proteins, deoxyribonucleic-acid (DNA) and ribonucleic acid (RNA). If Darwinian evolution can’t take place until such a complex system is operating, scientists are at a loss to explain how that complex system has come about.” (“Primordial Alphabet Soup” in God and Science)
“Today, of course, scientists explain the succession of life forms in the fossil record by the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution. In this theory, evolutionary developments are attributed to random variation sifted by natural selection. This theory can create plausible explanations of many observed features of the biological world, and it is reasonable to suppose that the Darwinian mechanism of evolution does function in nature. However, it is far from clear that this mechanism is the last word. Organs of high perfection and complexity, such as the eagle’s eye or the human speech center, are notoriously difficult to explain by mutation and natural selection. In addition, many features of the fossil record can be placed in the Darwinian framework only by an act of faith.” (Maya: The World As Virtual Reality)
“To account for one universe with life, this [multiverse] scheme requires us to posit a vast number of universes without life, as well as an underlying process that endlessly spawns universes. One could ask which theory carries more metaphysical baggage, this one, or the traditional idea of a cosmic designer.” (Maya: The World As Virtual Reality)
I also learned from Sadaputa Prabhu that using information theory you can argue that the simple laws of physics do not contain sufficient information to produce the complex biological structures that we see in nature, and thus there must be another source of that information.
While working with Sadaputa Prabhu, I came to learn about empirical evidence supportive of Vedic ideas such as out-of-body experiences and past-life memories. One scientist he mentioned, Kenneth Ring, did studies on people who were blind from birth but who had visual experiences in an out-of-body state. We learn in the Vaishnava sankhya philosophy that the body is composed of earth, water, fire, air, and ether, and the organs of the body responsible for sight would be made of these elements. Yet according to sankhya, the senses, including that of sight, are completely distinct elements from those composing the body, and that out-of-body study gives evidence consistent with that idea.
Murali Gopal Prabhu explained how the planisphere model of Bhu-mandala explains the passage of day and night and the seasons, so I will mention some of Sadaputa Prabhu’s other cosmological and astronomical achievements.
Traditionally the start of Kali-yuga is a time when the planets are all in alignment. Using a modern astronomy program and running it for each day in the last 6,000 years, Sadaputa Prabhu was able to show that one of the three best alignments occurred on the day Kali-yuga started, February 18, 3102 B.C. at midnight.
Sadaputa Prabhu showed that the size of yojana is based on a degree of latitude at the equator and that implies scholars of Vedic times knew the earth was round and how big it was.
Sadaputa Prabhu observed that the Bhagavatam distance from the center of Bhu-mandala to the sun’s orbit is within 10% of the modern earth-sun distance and is much more accurate a value than the Greek astronomers had a similar time in history.
Indupati Prabhu, who did most of the 3-D graphics for Sadaputa Prabhu’s videos, especially those on cosmology, once asked Sadaputa Prabhu, “The Vedas describe so many far out things. How can you accept them?”
Sadaputa Prabhu replied, “Because the Vedic world view can explain so many things.” When he said that I thought about all kinds of human experience throughout the millennia like consciousness, out-of-body experiences, past life memories, mystic powers, levitation, extraterrestrials, UFOs, worship of a personal God, worship of the impersonal absolute, worship of demigods, origin of species, etc., and how the Vedic world view can describe them all in a consistent system, whereas science has to reject so many things it has no explanation for.
[This final quote in which Sadaputa Prabhu explains bhakti, in the language of a scientist, as a way of acquiring additional knowledge of reality, is very powerful, and the devotees appreciated it as just suitable for ending a conference of Bhaktivedanta Institute:]
“The theory of creation by sound vibration involves transcendental levels of reality not accessible to the mundane senses, and thus in one way it is more unverifiable than the purely physical Darwinian theory. However, if a purely physical theory turns out to be empirically unverifiable, then there is nothing further one can do to be sure about it. In contrast, a theory that posits a supreme intelligent being opens up the possibility that further knowledge may be gained by internal and external revelation brought about by the will of that being. Of course, the dynamics of obtaining such knowledge are different from those of empirical, experimental science and mathematical analysis. Instead of forcing nature to disclose its secrets, one surrenders to the Supreme Lord in a humble spirit and pursues a path of spiritual discipline and divine service.
“This approach to knowledge and to life also constitutes one of the great perennial philosophies of mankind, but it has tended to be eclipsed in this age of scientific empiricism. To obtain the fruits of this path to knowledge, one must be willing to follow it, and one will be inclined to do this only if one thinks the worldview on which it is based might possibly be true. Establishing this possibility constitutes the ultimate justification for constructing theories, such as the one considered here, linking physics and metaphysics.” (“High Technology and the Ground of Being” in God and Science)
Tulasi-Priya Dasi of Alachua made a video of the entire conference, in case these notes inspire you to learn more
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