Episode 34 - From cave to Cosmos: the obstacles to Science in Greek and Hindu Traditions

How often do we tread the fine line between shadows and reality? In an exploration of Plato's Allegory of the Cave, we unravel the skepticism that has seeped into Western thought, challenging the perceptions of the physical world's reliability.

Grappling with these ancient doubts, we reveal how the transformative power of Christian teachings brought about a robust pursuit of scientific inquiry, steering us away from the siren call of Greek pagan philosophies.

Our discourse digs into the necessity of Christ's perspective for a truthful engagement with our surroundings and the monumental impact this had on Western civilization.

Venture with us as we contrast this with the Hindu concept of Maya discussed by the philosopher Sankara, where the material world is regarded as an elaborate illusion. Through the analogy of mistaking a rope for a snake and a yogi's parable, we examine the profound implications this view of reality holds for spiritual enlightenment and scientific development. We ponder how this perception of the physical realm may have shaped the trajectory of scientific endeavor within Hindu culture, offering an insight into the complex relationship between spirituality and empirical study.

Concluding our journey, we scrutinize the symbiotic relationship that once existed between Christian theology and the ascension of science and technology.

Reflecting on India's historical contributions to mathematics and astronomy, we discuss the Bible's role in inspiring systematic exploration and dominion over nature. As we navigate the shifting dynamic of theology from the 'queen of the sciences' to a compartmentalized branch of knowledge, we confront the fragmented modern understanding of reality. Join us as we dissect the evolution of science and our duty to relay refined truths to the minds and hearts of those who follow.

The theme music is "Wager with Angels" by Nathan Moore

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:31

Well, welcome to episode 34 of the Christ-centered cosmic civilization. And we're continuing to look at science. And we're really wanting to look more at why pagan views of the heavens and the earth were unable to produce a scientific method. In book 7 of Plato's Republic, he explains his belief that the physical world is made up of nothing but shadows and that a person cannot see clearly until they escape the illusions of this world and go into or send into the pure intellectual world of forms.

Speaker 1: 1:38

In his famous allegory of the cave, plato gives a view of the physical world that haunts even the western world for hundreds of years and in many ways is still a ghost that troubles the western world. I'll just read what he says from there. He says Behold human beings living in an underground den which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den. Here human beings have been from their childhood and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move and can only see before them, in front of them. They are prevented by the chains from turning their heads around Love, and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised pathway, and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the pathway like a screen which puppet players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets. Do you see, then, how men passing along that wall, carrying things, all sorts of vessels, statues, figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, they appear over the wall, some talking, others silent, like ourselves, they see only the shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave.

Speaker 1: 3:43

So that's Plato's understanding of the physical world that human beings are unable to look directly at reality. But what we have are shadow forms that are quite misleading and also, because the fire is a moving thing, the shadows themselves are strangely insubstantial and so on, and all we are looking at is shadows of things that are, almost, incidentally, passing in front of the fire, and we are trying to deduce reality and truth via being forced to only look at shadows projected onto the back of a dark cave and the real world outside the cave that's so far away. So the physical world is like illusion and misleading and really quite disconnected from real truth and reality. And so, with Plato's view that is so deep, and of course, plato forms the Academy, the original Athenian Academy, and we talk about the academic method that's written into the western academic approach and there's that Plato's fingerprints on it in some ways, even still, where there is a sort of suspicion about the physical world. And this deep suspicion that the physical world is unspiritual, unreal and unreliable has cast its corrupt shadow over much of western life and thought. And it's only because of Christ, who shows us how spiritual, how real, how reliable his good creation is, only because of Christ pushing against the Plato's Academy, really only because of Christ, has the western world been set free to take the physical world seriously. Thank you, so that is something that well, we might come back to that in a future episode to think more about some of these legacies of paganism and how, every time the Western world has what, these return to the Greek pagan ancestry, they always feel it's giving them light and strength and helping them. But it always, always harms us to do that, and Christ has to keep delivering cultures from these pagan ways of thinking. So that's the Western world we've thought a little bit about.

Speaker 1: 6:58

But on the other hand, in the more distant East, other ideas emerge that went even further. Perhaps the greatest Indian philosopher, possibly perhaps the most brilliant human thinker in all world history, or certainly right up there, he could see no reality to the physical world. We're thinking of Shankara, who lived between, say, 70750,. And Shankara said that time and space are products of illusion. So similar to Plato. But this is how he has a different analogy and he used the analogy of a rope that looks like a snake under poor lighting. So again, that is similar to the Plato idea, with lighting that is inadequate and creating false perceptions, and the person who sees this snake but it's really a rope they see this snake and then they behave with all the fear of a person who is confronted with a real snake. But there never was a snake there at all. And in the same way, shankara says we behave as if the universe of time and space is real, but time and space is mere illusion. Maya, that's the word used. Maya, it's illusion. So this is an incredibly suspicious view of the physical world and the entire universe, that the whole thing is an illusion.

Speaker 1: 9:03

And one of the classic stories of Hindu philosophy is about a yogi who lived in a simple hut. He used to wash his loincloth each morning and hang it out to dry. One day rats tore it to shreds, so he went to a village to get a new one. When this happened again, they recommended that he keep a cat to deal with the rats. He needed milk for the cat, so he ended up getting a cow. But he needed straw and hay for the cow, so he began to cultivate the land around his hut. And then he had to build barns, buildings to store his produce and keep more cattle to ensure a constant supply. And then one day his master arrived and asked whoa, what's going on? There used to be a fine yogi living here. Do you know what happened to him? And the yogi replied it's me. I did all this for the sake of a loincloth.

Speaker 1: 10:27

It's a powerful story, in a way, about how easily we become snared into the treasures, the possessions, the obsessions of this passing world. But the story means more than that. In Hinduism, it's not just a warning against becoming too ensnared in things we don't need to. Now, in the main philosophical school of Hinduism, the soul is deceived by the physical world, which the entire physical world is seen as an illusion, maya, and in a desire to reach for spiritual reality, the physical world is seen as a dangerous illusion that prevents the soul from grasping spiritual reality. The human soul or mind thinks that the body and the physical world is real and so becomes defined by these temporary illusions. And true enlightenment is to see through the illusions of the material world. So in this then Hindu philosophy, the physical world is not just a poor representation of ultimate reality, it is an enemy of the ultimate reality, it is preventing us. So it's not just it's hard to move from the physical world to ultimate reality, plato would say that it's hard to do that, to link the physical world to ultimate reality. In this you know the really predominant Hindu philosophy the physical world is the enemy of truth. It prevents access to ultimate reality and ultimate truth. So under such a view of the world, science is an enemy.

Speaker 1: 12:44

Science involves a deep concentration on the physical world. It's about tuning your senses into an intense observation, obsession with the physical world, taking it very seriously, knowing it to be real, good, logical. If the foundational philosophy believes that paying attention to the physical world is a delusion, well then the scientist is relegated to the level of a deluded, unspiritual fool who is far too entangled in mere illusion. And this is why science did not arise under Hinduism. I mean, I think we could say, could not arise under Hinduism, even with some of the most brilliant minds in all human history Sankara, surely one of the most brilliant minds in all of human history, but utterly unable to produce something like science. And so many brilliant minds throughout Hindu, all the different Hindu philosophies, schools of philosophy, and so many amazing thinkers, and yet absolutely unable to produce something like the scientific method. As long as humanity was enslaved to ideas that either dismissed the physical world as evil or as an illusion, or thought that the world was governed by sort of demons or indiscernible magical powers. As long as humanity was enslaved to that demons, illusion, all of that, then science could never arise as an intellectual ideal, as a worthy goal for a culture.

Speaker 1: 15:05

Churches knew that the Lord Jesus Christ had risen from the dead and ascended to the highest heaven as the great high priest of all creation. Church knew that he, jesus, the Lord Jesus Christ, ruled over everything in heaven and earth and he is the Logos of the universe, the one who holds everything together with his reliable and rational rule. Church knew that his sovereign authority was what made sure the sun rose every day, the rain fell from the clouds according to reliable, predictable patterns and all the other events of the universe happened according to his unshakable authority. And his unshakable authority, his divine empire, guarantees that his universe is not an enemy of truth but a servant of truth, and because he is the divine emperor whose presence and reign fills the universe. So the universe is not a battleground for different gods fighting to get control, nor is it powered by magical energies that can be controlled by humans or demons or little gods. No, the whole universe, from top to bottom, is controlled and ordered by the same logos that created us too.

Speaker 1: 17:03

Let me give another quotation from Vishal Mangalwadi's book, and it's called the Book that Made your World, and it's a brilliant paragraph from pages 220 to 221. He says this A culture may have capable individuals, but they don't look for laws of nature. If they believe that nature is enchanted and ruled by millions of little deities like a rain god, a river goddess or a rat diva, if the planets themselves are gods, then why should they follow established laws? Cultures that worship nature often use magic to manipulate the unseen powers governing nature. They don't develop science and technology to establish a kind of dominion over nature. Now some quote magic may seem to work, but magicians don't seek a systematic, coherent understanding of nature. Ancient India produced great surgeons like Sashruta, but why didn't his tradition develop into scientific medicine? As early as the 5th century, aryabhata suggested that the earth rotates on its axis and revolves around the sun. Indian astrologers knew of his theory, but it didn't change their practices.

Speaker 1: 19:11

Ancient and medieval India's genius for mathematics is widely recognised, thinking of Brahmagupta, 7th century, mahavira in the 9th century and Bhaskara of the 12th century. They were eons ahead of the west, but the passion for science began when the Bible inspired Christians to devote their lives to recovering God's forgotten mandate for humans to take dominion over nature. The first historian of the Royal Society of Science, thomas Spratt, who lived from 1635 to 1713, explained that the Royal Society's objective was to enable mankind to re-establish dominion over things. That quotation from Mangalwadi's book Brilliant, isn't it? And that way in which it's not enough to have brilliant minds, some of the most brilliant minds there's ever been. India has had them, but India could not develop science because of the wrong philosophy, because they did not have Christ at the centre of the culture. And that the Bible begins by telling us that what human beings are created? To have? This dominion, and that dominion it means to understand, to be able to use, to be able to bring out the potential of the creation. All of that requires something like a scientific method. So over against the human philosophies of both East and West stands the Lord Jesus Christ, who shows us the reality and rationality of His creation.

Speaker 1: 21:26

As we've already noted, the word science comes from the Latin word schientia, meaning to know. Notice that it is not the same as truth. It doesn't mean truth, like veritas, truth. There are many things that we might say that we know in inverted commas and that know, but that might not be the same as the truth. Knowledge is what we believe to be true. Knowledge is our convictions about the truth. Knowledge is based on our deepest beliefs about truth and how to go about finding the truth. But knowledge is not the same as the truth.

Speaker 1: 22:23

There may be many things that we could never know, even though they might be true. There are many things that are true which we could not ever know, realistically speaking. I mean we might say there are truths that pertain to, say, a planet that is many, many galaxies distant from us. There is truth on that planet, I suppose, but we could never know it, at least not in any conceivable time frame that is available to us, the truth of what is on a mountain or a planet millions of light years across the universe. We will never have knowledge of that. We may not have the whole truth. So this is the point we may never have the whole truth, but yet, by the grace of God in Christ, we may truly know. We may know what is given to us to know, and so we have real knowledge about the truth. But the truth may be, you know is vastly more than we can know. But we can know truly, and the wonder is that human beings might actually know real truth. Or, if we wish to be more like, say it perhaps more precisely we can know, we can approximate to the truth and really, really and truly have knowledge that approximates to the truth.

Speaker 1: 24:05

Our minds have been designed with the same basic logic as the entire universe, so that we can really engage, really connect, observe and analyze in order to probe and theorize about the truth. We can come to a knowledge of the world and actually a knowledge of ourselves. We can put ourselves under the scientific method and we can improve on the knowledge of previous generations. As we probe more and test theories, develop new theories, test those. Our knowledge can be revised and deepened as we hand on to the next generation the best of what we know and explain to the next generation how we've tried to get at the truth. In truth, as we hand on our knowledge, we also, of course, are handing on our faults and delusions, our bad assumptions and poor observations. Our knowledge is a mixed bag of success and failure. So we are entrusting our work to future scientists who can improve what we know and they may be able to see what we have been unable to see. So if science means knowledge, then perhaps we might expect it to cover all areas of human knowledge.

Speaker 1: 25:52

In the 19th century, every area of knowledge really did attempt to use the methods and assumptions of the physical sciences, but by and large science has now come to be associated only with the physical sciences. For hundreds of years, theologians wondered whether to classify theology as a science. In Abraham Kuiper's book, his Theological Encyclopedia, he says, and I quote if the subject of science, that is, the subject that wants to know and acquire knowledge, if that lies in the consciousness of humanity, the object of science must be all existing things as far as they have discovered their existence to human consciousness, and so if anything that exists can be an object of science, with such a comprehensive definition of science, then science has to include theology, biblical studies, psychology, pastoral care, everything. But is the scientific method appropriate to all these areas? So in the pre-modern age it perhaps made a lot more sense to think of theology as a science, as knowledge.

Speaker 1: 27:43

When all areas of knowledge were joined together in one harmonious vision of reality, then theology was described as the queen of the sciences.

Speaker 1: 27:59

The queen of the sciences, because theology provided the big overall vision that drew everything else together. Theology was, in a way, what enabled all the areas of knowledge to function, and we've seen that, haven't we? That science requires a theological framework to operate, and in the pre-modern world they knew that. They knew that they were much clearer on what was required for science and technology to flourish, and so they enshrined that by crowning theology as the queen of the sciences. However, when that one single vision of reality fell apart, let's say in the Enlightenment anyway, let's say that's when I mean it actually is unraveling before that. But when that one single vision of reality fell apart, and when the physical sciences began to operate in an Enlightenment context, the idea of one single truth that included both the heavens and the earth, the scene and the unseen, the spiritual and the physical, the divine and the human. The idea of one single truth that included it all, that was much harder to maintain.