Science versus Religion (cont.)
By Harry Sivertsen & Steve Redman
The questions of today also perplexed the minds of the sages of the ancient times, the most prominent query being from where did all derive? In man’s experience all grew or was made, except the Earth and what was in the skies. Animals mate to produce offspring, trees and bushes, flowers need pollinating insects to reproduce but the stars did not reproduce, except for comets, in the form of meteorites which were flung away from the parent body. Strange. The stones of the Earth were just there. Like the sun and the moon. The moon has its phases, which were reasonably well understood, and the sun moved north and south during the course of a year, knowledge, scientia, gained via simple observation; all except comets and meteorites was regular and steady. One knew what was to happen in the skies, they were predictable and one could prophesise what was going to happen generations into the future. The heavens give accurate counts of time, of days, of months and of years; numbers; maths. All was confirmed via repeated observations, what today would be termed the scientific method and was understood before 12,000 years ago, the end of the last Ice Age which is approximately when our story commences.
But while reproduction and heavenly movements were generally understood in principle, from where was all derived, the stellar movements were as steady as a mark on the rim of a wheel, even if that wheel was a section of log which, when rolled, brought the mark regularly back to its starting point. The whole of the universe must have been created, been fashioned to work so accurately, nothing else observed had such symmetry. So from a sequence of logical deductions it was determined that lacking another satisfactory explanation, the whole of the universe had to have been created, the sun, moon and stars would not have merely grown as neither did the ground upon which these thinkers stood, but neither could they have emerged from nothing.
Hence we have knowledge, scientia, determining that all that is known had to have had a creator. Fine, but from where did the creator’s raw materials derive, from what did this creator fashion not only Earth but the sun, moon and stars? Taking this further, if there was a creator who or what created the creator? This line of investigation was getting into a bit of an eddy so an invention was made, a power greater than the creator, a power that was just that, power, a power that willed a creator into being.
Here we have the Indic Brahman, the overarching power, that which is in everything and is everything, from thought to rock, from bird to fish, timber to water, from flame to ice, is the overarching non-describable, omnipotent ever present abstract entity that is in all and is all. Effectively the only word that adequately describes Brahman is energy. Brahman is simply that, pure energy and as modern science has shown, it is from energy that all in the universe is derived. However, Brahman could not make the visible, physical elements; something had to happen to turn this energy into an observable universe. Brahman required a creator, a builder to turn ideas into reality, a catalyst that turned energy into action. Brahman willed the creator Brahma into being to turn Brahman’s desires into realities; the creative moment, the source of all; from raw energy came the explosion of creation, from raw energy came the universe and all within.
Invention? Yes it was. Satisfactory explanation? For the available information at the time…yes. Comply with modern interpretations? Take away the elements that describe characteristics that would apply to human personality and yes. Creation based upon logic, effectively an early description of what we think of as the Big Bang, an interpretation that suffered only from a lack of the scientific information available today; that made no allowance for the vast time lapses involved simply because there was no comprehension of this, but nevertheless, a definition that in fact pre-empted the modern concept. This was a theory based upon logic that in fact has stood the test of time but has been grossly misunderstood and ignored. Religious? No.