science and spirituality

What Constitutes Science? As aforementioned, science refers to a system of acquiring knowledge. This system uses observation and experimentation to describe and explain natural phenomena. The term science also refers to the organized body of knowledge people have gained using that system. Less formally, the word science often describes any systematic field of study or the knowledge gained from it. The requisite condition would be that the field of study under discussion should follow the underlying principles of science such as universality, generality and repeatability. For instance, we have learnt in school that a combination of Hydrogen and Oxygen molecules produces water molecules. This is theory unless we perform an experiment in a laboratory to prove this theory. This is called the experimentation phase. This experiment will work in India, in America, or on the moon, Venus or Pluto, provided the governing environmental conditions are favorable. Thus we can say that this phenomenon—of Hydrogen and Oxygen producing water—follows the principle of universality. The same experiment may be performed by anyone—a man, woman, Negro, American, Greek, Russian, a Viking or a Neanderthal. The result would always be the same. Two molecules of Hydrogen and one molecule of Oxygen would not yield anything other than two molecules of water. Thus this observable fact follows the principle of generality too. You may repeat this experiment once, twice, a ten times, thousand times, a million times, or a two billion thirteen thousand six hundred and seventy five times. The result would always be the same: Oxygen and Hydrogen combine to produce water. Thus we can say this phenomenon passes the test of repeatability too. Any field of study or system of knowledge is to be accepted as science or to be scientific if these three governing conditions are satisfied by the postulates, laws or rules governing that field or system. 
Read more to understand about consistency of modern science and Spirituality as a science.

Is Modern Science consistent? We all know modern science has evolved over the last few centuries. Many an ideology and theory that were hailed as scientific realities and were extremely close to the hearts of the scientists of the yester years have been dumped today as irrelevant and unscientific. Contradictions regarding the universal structure and the insufficiency of Newtonian Physics are just a couple of examples. ConsistentThere are also instances where a discovery or an invention of great scientific significance had initially been pooh-poohed. In 1872, Pierre Pachet, a professor of Physiology at Toulouse said, “Louis Pasteur’s theory of germs is ridiculous fiction.” David Sarnoff’s associates, in response to his urging for investment in the radio in the 1920s said, “The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?” Read More... “Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers in the preceding generation…. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” These are the words of Richard Feynman, the famous Nobel-prize-winning physicist, in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out as quoted in the American Scientist. Max Born, another popular Nobel Prize-winning physicist, is quoted in Gerald Holton’s Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought thus: “There is no philosophical high-road in science, with epistemological signposts. No, we are in a jungle and find our way by trial-and-error, building our roads behind us as we proceed. We do not find sign-posts at cross-roads, but our own scouts erect them, to help the rest.” James Bryant Conant wrote in his Science and Common Sense: “The stumbling way in which even the ablest of the scientists in every generation have had to fight through thickets of erroneous observations, misleading generalizations, inadequate formulations, and unconscious prejudice is rarely appreciated by those who obtain their scientific knowledge from textbooks.” In The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl R. Popper wrote, “I think that we shall have to get accustomed to the idea that we must not look upon science as a ‘body of knowledge’, but rather as a system of hypotheses, or as a system of guesses or anticipations that in principle cannot be justified, but with which we work as long as they stand up to tests, and of which we are never justified in saying that we know they are ‘true’.” In the words of scientists themselves, empirical modern science is “belief”, involves “trial-and-error”, consists of data that are “erroneous, misleading and inadequate” and is to be looked upon as “a system of guesses”. It doesn’t augur well for science, does it? Thus we can safely conclude that modern empirical science, in the words of its own practitioners is not a systematic and consistent body of knowledge. And for any body of knowledge to qualify to be termed scientific, requires it to be consistent.

Is Spirituality Science? Students of the Vedic scriptures would be able to appreciate and revel in the highly organized and structured wealth of knowledge available in them. The Vedic scriptures describe different ways of acquiring knowledge. Detailed explanations of these are covered under the section “Acquiring Knowledge”. Spirituality-scienceThese literatures not only talk of phenomena like consciousness and the soul that are still unknown to the modern empirical scientists but also describe in incredible detail many of the scientifically observed phenomena. These literatures are historically known to be at least five thousand years old and those, according to modern empiricists, were days way ahead of rational thinking and scientific reasoning. Some such phenomena are covered in great detail under the section “Vedas on Science”. Read More... Let us put one of the many fundamental postulates mentioned in the Vedic scriptures to test. It is mentioned in these literatures that any living entity in this world goes through six transformations—birth, growth, sustenance or existence, reproduction or transformation, dwindling and extinction or death. We can very well see that this postulate will easily pass the triple test of universality, generality and repeatability. This law applies to every single living entity on this planet (universality), irrespective of the form of life (generality) and we are yet to see someone who has not transformed, dwindled and died (repeatability) in the millions and billions of years of this planet’s existence. In the Fourth Chapter of the Bhagavad-gita, Lord Shri Krishna, says something that is startling yet revealing. He had been describing some of the laws mentioned in the Vedic scriptures to Arjuna, who was his friend and disciple. During the discourse, the Lord mentions that He had instructed the same knowledge to Vivasvan, the sun god, some millions of years ago. This is more than a certification for the system of knowledge represented by the Vedic literatures being consistent over innumerable ages. This is what can be truly termed as science.

Can Science explain God? If there is God or a supreme intelligent designer of the universe, He must exist in a dimension beyond the material time and space that He generates and controls. Just as the engineer working at a television station operates in a more sophisticated environment than the person watching the television at home; there may exist in the universe higher and lower dimensions of material reality corresponding to different levels of material perception. Can-scienceEssentially modern empirical science deals only with observable physical phenomena that are perceivable to our gross senses. Anything that doesn’t fit within this window is discarded and rejected as untruth. How illogical? This unscientific proposition has been reasonably handled under the topic “Four Limitations of the Conditioned Soul”. Read More... Scientists have been engaged for centuries in a philosophical quest for an ultimate unity underlying the variegated universe. Today this takes the shape of the physicists’ search for a grand unified field theory to explain everything from subatomic particles to galactic clusters. Such endeavors to find a unifying material principle have, however, not been successful. Trying to explain a phenomenon of a higher dimension using experiences in a lower dimension will only lead to frustrating results. But we can understand the existence of such an ultimate unified phenomenon or God using reason and logic, which has been presented under the section “Does God Exist”. Finally a call is submitted under the section “An Open Challenge” to all men and women possessing intelligent rationality to seek out the answers to the basic questions in life by pursuing the path of truth and knowledge. Only an enlightened human society can help save us from the dangers that are looming large over our heads.