[Advaita-l] Apoureshyatva - Faith or Logic?

[Shyam]

Pranams Rameshji
"my approach has always been that one must steer clear of exceedingly
short-sighted and simplistic interpretations which unnecessarily lead
to a false pitting of science against the mImAMsaka and other such
traditions."

What is short sighted and simplistic is to try to accomodate what is clearly laid out in the Vedas into a framework of Science - which latter, has been and is always going to be a moving target, as it uncovers more layers of ignorance through every layer of acquired knowledge. Such an enforced conjugality is as disingenious as it is unwarranted. It is what leads to the kind of hilarity-strewn jargon that you outline such as "There is no need to presume that in the entire cosmos, homo sapiens is the only jIva with the ability to do so. Likewise, prithivi could be any loka where such manuShya-s live." So are there mantradrshtas amongst those non-homo-sapiens that are inhabiting a planet XYZ in a far far way galaxy ABC? Do you really want to take a "scientific" excursion down this path with the idea of Vedic validity??


"We could take Vidyasankar's approach and say that the generic Veda manifested itself in the particular form we know (pre-classical Sanskrit etc) when the concerned R^iShI-s were born. For humans who lived before, they either had access to the Veda in some other form, or were born purely for bhoga in accordance with their past karma."

I am amazed that the illogicality of such a preposterous presumption are seemingly lost on you.  Can there be a human form which is purely for bhoga - meaning this particular human in your fertile imagination has no free will? And all his karmas are akarma? And one fine day unto one mantradrshta will be revelaed a section of the infinite Veda? And from that time on, selectively, over a certain period of time, various other mantradrshtas will keep adding to this corpus so that gradually humans will gradually in bits and pieces be given codes of conduct and access and information to rituals and the like? And during this interim phase also humans will only have partial responsibility for the precepts selectively laid out by the section of the Veda that has been revealed thus far. And so you accept that human brain needed to "evolve" with time and get progressively more refined in order to account for the emergence of exalted mantradrshtas from more
 primitive humanoids? Which means that the brain of todays man- says an Einsteins'  - would surely be far more evolved than those of Vishwamitra and Vashishta? And what about a ten thousand years later? Our intellects by then presumably would have scaled even greater degrees of cortical refinement with enlarged amygdalas capable of intuiting much more vedic datum? Use of scientific method and reasoning could tear to shreds any attempt at a universal theory that harmonizes the Vedic ideas with the current state of knowledge of Science as far as this particular issue of evolution and abiogenesis is concerned, no matter how ingeniously and indulgently one may stretch the interpretation of the Vedas. 

"I honestly don't see any problem unless one insists on straitjacketing
the Veda, strips it of its cosmic grandeur and restricts its essential
insights to one particular form of life on one particular piddly
little planet."

The very Veda has relevance in the plane of existence of this piddly little planet alone. Giving free reign to ones imagination and coming up with bizarre ideas of a nonhuman life in planets as yet unseen certainly strips a Vaidika off any degree of fidelity.


"The point is simply that by straitjacketing our intellectual
traditions and presenting them (falsely) as being pitted against this
or that scientific or other laukika pramANa based theory, we are only
a doing a great disservice to our dharma and our intellectual
traditions."

To the complete contrary, without first examining the current state of knowledge of the scientific method and harboring a healthy degree of skepticism which that very scientific method demands in terms of rigor, and identifying the limitations of those very concepts and theories, (instead of blindly accepting them as fact), while in the meantime, hastening to reinterpret Vedic dictums in a wantonly liberal manner, in a misguided attempt at avant-garde sensibility, is what will rob our tradition of any sense of credibility and coherence. And to undertake such an exercise to accomodate a halfbaked theory of evolution that cannot stand scrutiny in its own light will certainly be tragic.


Hari OM
Shri Gurubhyo namah
Shyam

----- Original Message -----
From: Ramesh Krishnamurthy <rkmurthy at gmail.com>
To: A discussion group for Advaita Vedanta <advaita-l at lists.advaita-vedanta.org>
Cc: 
Sent: Monday, June 25, 2012 8:50 AM
Subject: Re: [Advaita-l] Apoureshyatva - Faith or Logic?

On 22 June 2012 23:40, Vidyasankar Sundaresan <svidyasankar at hotmail.com> wrote:
>

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