This letter focuses on some foundational issues that should be understood, if at all we wish to demonstrate the scientific nature of Bhaghavata descriptions of cosmology.
In everyday thinking we assume that the objects we are accustomed to see around us are real, i.e. exist in the world apart from our experience. It is impossible for people in general to give up this belief. We believe that fire will burn when we touch it, or the bus will run us over if we don't move out of its way. How could we practically survive even for a moment in the world, if we were to take “fire” to exist only as a function of our perception?
Quite in opposition to this common sense pragmatism, Lord Krishna says, “the non-permanent appearance of happiness and distress, and their disappearance in due course, are like the appearance and disappearance of winter and summer seasons. They arise from sense perception, 0 scion of Bharata, and one must learn to tolerate them without being disturbed.” (Bhaghavad Gita As It Is 2:14)
The word “sitosna” in the above verse refers to heat and cold. Lord Krishna says that these arise only as a result of “sense perception”', which is a difficult technical concept, since "senses" are different from the organs of perception that our bodies have. But what is definitely meant is that heat and cold, and indeed all sense phenomena, are not objectively real in the usual everyday sense in which we regard the word ''real". Krishna says we must learn to tolerate them, i.e. ignore them. In other words, the Bhaghavata viewpoint rejects commonsense pragmatism from the very outset!
Science too is based on accepting the reality of everyday sense experiences at the level of observations. This makes present scientific conceptions of reality as suspect as our present everyday notions of reality. People in general embrace scientific truth too, only pragmatic usefulness, i.e. technology.
A consequent feature of science is that nothing in current science is proven. Indeed, the “round earth” hypothesis in science is just that, a hypothesis, which has proved most adequate for predicting a wide range of observed phenomena. Neither that predictive success, nor even seeing a round earth from a space ship have any relevance to how earth is structured in reality. In science, any idea or model is judged solely by its empirical content, i.e. its power to predict some chosen observations accurately, not how far it is in accord with our sense experiences, or even reality. At the time of Copernicus and today, we see only the sun going around the earth. Yet, scientists have embraced the idea that the earth is going around the sun, and it has enabled them to make certain predictions about celestial motion. If tomorrow we were to fly outside the solar system and observe that sun is indeed going around the earth, still on earth the use of the heliocentric model would be justified on pragmatic grounds. It is the current, working model. That is the meaning of saying that science first and foremost predicts phenomena.
Srila Prabhupada himself accurately pointed this out: “Science means observation and experiment. You observe the rules are working, and when you practically bring them into experiment, then it is science.” (Room Conversation, 9 May 1975, Perth)
Most physicists, including the likes of Einstein, Bohr, Newton, also accept this view of science. Hawking too said: “Physical theory is just a mathematical model. It is meaningless to ask whether it corresponds to reality. All that one can ask for is that its predictions should be in agreement with observation.” [place an order to read the full article]
