Summary (of "Question", "braHmavid=Krishna?" series of mails)

[Roger Floyd]

Dear Jagannath and group

Namaskar

Please forgive the uncompleted state of my last email. I had to attend to
other business half way through writing it and inadvertantly posted it,
unfinished, when I returned to the computer.

You are of course right about the relevance of practice to resolving these
issues - the more practice, the deeper the insights.

The conflict of world-views that I referred to in respect of Kiran's
questions arises out of  the refusal of  Science a priori to countenance
miracles. Its explanations must, as a matter of principle, exclude the
miraculous. By a miracle I mean the intervention  of a divine hand (or indeed
any kind of supernatural hand) in ordering the world. Let us suppose, for the
sake of example, that Kiran did one day run 100m in 2s. What would be the
attitude of Science to this? By "Science" I mean the scientific community. It
would say,"OK Kiran let us see you do it again". If he could not, Science
would respond with a "Sorry Kiran, I only deal in repeatable phenomena". It
would resort to fraud or hoax as an explanation of his performance and
rapidly lose interest in the affair. On the other hand suppose that Kiran
could repeat his run to order. Science would now take a serious interest in
the matter but would it admit that a miracle had occured? Not a bit of it.
Instead it would try to encompass the 100m-in-2s run in a new broader
world-view consistent with known phenomena. To put it another way, according
to Science the laws of nature are never suspended or broken. On occasion
however they may prove to be inadequate in which case they are replaced with
new more encompassing laws. Under no circumstances does it allow of miracles
(if it did, it would cease to be Science). In this sense there is a conflict
between Science and Religion (or at least religion which admits of the
miraculous).

Hari Om

Roger
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