Are Academic Scholars like Snakes?

by Suhotra Maharaja


Part Two: The Poison of Relativism

Science and all secular scholarship is pervaded by other atheistic assumptions. It's hard to find a "serious" book about any intellectual topic today that does not unquestioningly submit its readers to the doctrine of evolution. Evolutionism spawns an extremely warped, materialistic account of what religion is and how it came to be. Here's a quotation from a 1995 book entitled Soul Searching by Nicholas Humphrey:

No doubt our ancestors needed some rational skills to survive, but. . . the human brain evolved more as a religious than a rational organ. . . Rational science is a minority interest. . . It is likely therefore that the first human brains evolved to impose symbolic meaning on the external world, and the scientific virus later infected a minority of their descendents, where it now flourishes in nerve circuits that originally evolved to carry other ideas.

At first blush we might take what Nicholas Humphrey says as validation for a religious mindset. The human brain is really meant for generating religious thoughts! Scientific thinking is just an aberration of the brain function! Wow! Go get 'em, Bhakta Nick! But without the slightest pause for doubt he asserts that the brain evolved. Hence religion is merely a product of evolutionary biology. Awww. . . Bhakta Nick, you blooped.

Of course there are those--even in and around ISKCON--who will argue that what Nicholas Humphrey states above is not necessarily atheistic. Lately even the Catholic Church agrees with evolution. "What if," the argument goes, "the actual state of affairs in this universe of ours is more Deistic than Theistic? In other words, suppose we put the theological accent on God (Krsna) as being disconnected and aloof from the material world. He's so transcendental that He doesn't involve himself in creation at all, except to lay down the ground rules of nature and to give an initial push to get things going. Thereafter, automatically, mechanistically, the universe comes into being and runs onward according to the impersonal laws that modern science has discovered. Ergo, man was not created, he evolved. Why can't this be the will of God (Krsna)? I mean, He can do anything He wants, right? And if man's brain is hard-wired by evolution for religion, that much the better!" So concludes the argument: "You can believe in evolution and believe in God. "

I'd want to know what is the exact advantage of this is. I predict, based upon a bit of personal experience, that answer will be something like this:
"Well, it saves you from having to be a fundamentalist. "
And what, pray tell, is a fundamentalist?

"Oh, anyone who literally believes without reservation any of the creation scenarios of the different scriptures of the world, which are all in contradiction with one another. The fundamentalist rejects science altogether and just accepts everything scripture says! He's out of step with today's world. And that, that's not a Good Thing. "

So what do you propose to do with the Bhagavatam descriptions of creation?
"Well, we'll just consider that allegorical, like the story of Maharaja Puranjana told to King Pracinabarhisat by Narada Muni. "

I see. The creation account becomes a pious myth, then.

"Yes, exactly. "

This brings us to the point made by my sannyasi Godbrother that mundane scholars are snakes who are so dangerous they can infect devotees with a poison that slackens their grasp of the absolute truth: "Their apparent reasonableness and open mindedness is a sham masking their dogmatic and unreasonable refusal to accept any position as absolute. "

It's a no-brainer that as soon as scripture is re-evaluated from the inherently uncertain standpoint of science--"this chapter I accept, but that chapter can't be correct because it is 'disproven'"--then the line drawn between what is "really true" and what is only "pious myth" will just waver ever more dizzily. It won't take long before nobody knows what scripture is really meant to teach us.

Therefore this itch that agitates certain minds to bend scripture to fit scientific theories is no itch for real knowledge. It's an itch to keep up with the times. Scientists themselves are busy scratching the same itch. "Science, like democratic politics, is a social activity," argues physicist Alan Cromer in Uncommon Sense. He calls science "an extension of rhetoric. " The hope is that by the democratic exchange of viewpoints through the medium of language we can arrive at unified knowledge. The trouble is that scientific knowledge is not unified; in fact, as we saw in Part One of this essay, scientists very often resent being classed as a group with a unified point of view. If science is a social activity, then like all things in mundane society, the information that is generated by that activity--information that is taught in schools as proven knowledge--is constantly being debated and altered. "Facts" fifty years old and less are at this moment being modified or replaced by "new discoveries. " Fifty years from now, many of these new discoveries will be similarly modified or discarded. The factors behind this constant updating of knowledge include lust for profit, fame, and adoration, a polluted desire to be right, ignorance, blind following, vanity, error, cultural bias, dogmatism, jealousy, corner-cutting and cheating as well as the more typical list of noble qualities ascribed to the scientific community. Scientists are only human, after all.

When theologians trade spiritual conviction for changing social fashions, the same sort of rapid-fire revolutions of "knowledge" take place in scriptural understanding. A while back a panel of up-to-date Christian theologians published a special edition of the New Testament. The passages spoken by Jesus Christ were printed in either red, gray, or black typeface as per a vote the panel had taken: red if the majority was of the opinion Christ did not speak those words, gray if the vote was tied, and black if the majority was of the opinion that he did speak those words.

For mundane scholars, though, that's a Good Thing. Why? Because then they have something to "discuss. " Note it well that such discussion is supposed to be conducted with as little conviction as possible. Oh, sure, you can be convinced that here and there in the scripture are glimmers of truth--perceived by you as an individual--but it's a total faux pas to have an a priori conviction that every word of scripture tells the same non-negotiable truth to everybody. Oh no! That's absolutism. That's dangerous! Why, it's. . . it's police state mentality!
In chapter 5 of Truth--A History, historian Fernandez-Armesto has some interesting things to say about how and what "truth" has came to mean today. The chapter is entitled "The Death of Conviction. "

In recent years, historians of late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe have been fascinated by the deceits to which evasive minds were driven by religious persecution. Crypto-Jews had to conceal their beliefs under inquisitorial interrogation, confessional minorities had to equivocate under torture during the conflicts of Catholics and Protestants.

. . . Today, equivocation has disappeared from the witness-stand. . . Equivocation was a necessary resource against interrogation in a world of strong convictions, when deponents were not in any serious doubt about the truth or falsehood of what they said. It is no longer necessary because today, when you swear to tell the truth, I do not know what you mean by it, though if the scene is laid in court we all know what the court understands by truth and what evasions will be punished as perjury or contempt. I do not even know whether you recognize truth as a meaningful concept. Instead of equivocating, you can dodge the interrogator's probes by the relativist's evasion: "what is true for you is not true for me. " Or you can give him an answer true, you think, in a different sense from that of the truth he wants to hear; or you can offer truth of a different type, which you may choose to call a higher type; or you can console yourself that you are not lying to the judge--merely using a different language from him, or interpreting differently the words you have in common, or "deferring" or denying their meaning; or you can reject the distinction he assumes between truth and falsehood as invalid, or tendentious, or oppressive. You can say, as most interlocutors have said to me while I have been writing this book, "Truth? There is no such thing. " A character in a strip in Radical American Comic asks, "Hey God, what is Truth? Eh? "No idea," replies God. "Get lost. "

Truth-evaders of our time are really doing nothing new. Fernandez-Armesto says: ". . . all the ingredients of this modern substitute for equivocation were available in western tradition from the time of Plato. " In The Tragedy of Reason (1990, pgs. 94-95), David Roochnik tells us more about the philosophical conflict over truth that can be traced in the West back to the days of Plato:

The reason that this dispute is so old, so fundamental, is that it is between two of the most basically different and extreme views of the human world that can be held. Is the world made by human productive energy, or is it somehow structured by entities that exist independently of human choice? Is man the measure? If so, then the human world is subject to endless shifts and changes. Human freedom and the power to create become the most cherished of gifts. Or is the world constituted by a stable set of objective standards that somehow reside in the world outside of human agency and thus function as natural goals by which we can measure our activity?
It's a dispute, Roochnik says, between advocates of logos, an ultimate, non-negotiable reality behind the changing appearance of things, and the advocates of misology, the view that there is no definite purpose behind the world as we see it, because this world is an ongoing creative process in which we all take part.
It is instructive to take a closer look at Roochnik's terms--logos and misology--which come from ancient Greek philosophy. The primary definition of the Greek word logos is "word. " Thus logos occupies the same conceptual space as the Sanskrit word sabda, which likewise means "word" but is also the eternal Vedic vibration from which the world we perceive arose. Sabda, like logos, is transcendental sound vibration that gives the world its meaning. A misologist, in Vedic terms, is a nastika, a person who does not believe the world came to be by a divine order spoken in eternity.

Misology appears today in the philosophical evasion of the truth known as relativism, the theory that conceptions of truth and moral values are not absolute but are relative to the persons or groups holding them. In ancient Greece, a kind of relativism was propagated by the sophists, of whom Protagoras was the leading teacher. Against the sophists Socrates was the exponent of logos. Socrates summed up relativism thus: "things are for me such as they appear to me, and things are for you such as they appear to you. "

Plato records Socrates challenging Protagoras, "Do you really mean that? That my opinion is true by virtue of its being my opinion?"

"Indeed I do," Protagoras answered.

"My opinion," Socrates then asserted, "is that truth is absolute, not opinion, and that you, Protagoras, are absolutely in error. Since this is my opinion, then you must grant that it is true according to your philosophy. "

And Protagoras did agree with Socrates here. It's a little naive, though, to conclude that Protagoras accepted defeat by Socrates. Socrates certainly showed that relativism is self-contradictory; but, you see, self-contradiction may be the very reason why Protagoras agreed. The more contradictions the better for the relativist. Contradictions demonstrate, in the mind of the relativist, that truth is not universal. It is individual. Each individual swims like a goldfish in his own glass bowl of personal truth. Though Socrates intended to trounce Protagoras, he allowed space for relativism to continue to play when he told him, "Since this is my opinion, then you must grant that it is true according to your philosophy. " We can imagine a cynical smile breaking out on Protagoras' face. Behind the smile, perhaps, he was thinking, "By our agreement now, Socrates, we are confirming that truth is just an opinion that some men consider correct. "

It is doubtful that Socrates took much comfort in his opponent's agreement, for he confessed to experiencing "vexation and actual fear" during his dialogues with Protagoras. He said Protagoras "drags his arguments up and down because he is so stupid that he cannot be convinced and is hardly to be induced to give up any one of them".

That a proponent of logos finds relativism difficult to refute does not mean that the latter has real strength as a philosophical position. In fact it is a position of non-position that normal people can't live by. David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason, pg. 41) explains.

. . . relativism is untenable; it is a position that cannot be coherently held. It is a position whose consequences few, if any, can actually live. For the relativist, all value judgments are ultimately equal in the sense that none can muster a final defense of itself. This implies that if person A makes judgment P, and person B makes judgment R, and P is directly opposed to R, A (according to the relativist) must accord to B full equality with himself. . . . Such a view is at odds with the way people live.

Suppose A himself is an intellectual relativist. He is of the "opinion" that the automobile he purchased with his own money and legally registered in his name is his private property. Suppose B, whose mind usually dwells on matters less exalted than philosophy, is of the "opinion" that A's car is simply too cool for A to own; better B takes it from him. Do you think A, as he looked out the window of his house to see B forcing open the door of his car, would give much thought to the problem? "How can I claim absolute ownership of that car? How can I absolutely deny that B has a right to that car? Hmmm. . . maybe B and I ought to share it. " In a real-world situation, A wouldn't miss a beat before telephoning the police to report grand theft auto.
While it's very hard to picture A adhering to relativistic morality when faced with the practical situation of B stealing his car, it isn't hard to envision B resorting to relativism to defend himself when being interrogated by the police.

"Why did you steal A's car?"
"It's not his car!"
"Of course it is his car. He paid for it and he's the registered owner. "
"That has validity only under the laws of this police state!"
"Are you telling us you didn't steal his car?"
"I'm telling you that what you call stealing is a social construct that I do not accept!"

Suppose B belongs to a minority community that is acknowledged in society as having been historically oppressed. His relativistic arguments might generate political sympathy for his cause. A "Free B" movement might swell; defense funds might be raised; a high-priced Dream Team phalanx of lawyers might be assembled; and who knows? In today's relativistic climate, B might very well be found innocent.
Relativism is a theme of Mayavadi philosophy. Srila Prabhupada (Mauritius 3 October 1975):

Yatha mat tatha path ["Each man's opinion is his own path to the truth. "] This is going on. Everyone will say something, and it is all right. However nonsense it may be, it is all right. Even Gandhi followed that philosophy. Therefore he invented one, another philosophy, nonviolence, which is impossible. When Hindus approached him, that "You have got so much influence over the Mohammedans, so why not stop cow killing?" he said, "It is their religious principle. How can I interfere?" Just see.
Just see. Relativism is successful in the modern world not because it is convincing in its own right (in fact, it is a philosophy of lack of conviction). It is successful because people in general have lost sight of the Absolute Truth. It is successful because due to accepting bodily upadhis, people in general are divided into groups of conflicting interests. It is successful because people in general are trying to possess this world as their own. The absolute truth is that this world, at every level and nuance, is completely under the control of Krsna. And that, that is what people in general do not want to see.