We've glanced at the history of the Western model of the moral universe from its Zoroastrian beginnings to its reductionist “all-is-one” version. The previous chapter noted that the advancement of science contributed much to this so-called progress. The present chapter looks at the scientific search for “facts.” This search can do nothing else than reduce the object of its study—the observable universe—to absurdity.
The dictionary defines reductionism as a “procedure or theory that reduces complex data or phenomena to simple terms.” A critic of this method of understanding the world demands to know:
"Why should the world be simple? Who made that decision? Who imposed it? There is no answer, for nowhere can we find such a guarantee."
To presuppose that all reality is uniformly simple has less to do with proven knowledge and more to do with a belief that whatever was real must be subject to the laws which were observed to operate in the physical world—that it must work, in short, like a machine. As Sir Arthur Eddington has put it,
“...science was disposed, as soon as it scented a piece of mechanism, to exclaim 'here we are getting to bedrock. This is what things should resolve themselves into. This is ultimate reality.'“
"...inquiry into purposes is useless for what science aims at: namely, the prediction and control of events. To predict an eclipse, what you have to know is not its purpose but its causes. Hence science from the seventeenth century onward became an exclusively an inquiry into [mechanistic] causes...It is this which has killed...the essence of the religious vision itself, which is the faith that there is a plan and purpose in the world, that the world is a moral order, that in the end all things are for the best."
The past three hundred years were very good for the reductionists. By their “factual” model of the universe, they managed to capture the popular imagination. That model breaks down to three principles: 1) matter is the only form of reality; 2) the conception of the mechanical is the only kind of law; and 3) evolution is an automatically determined process that, at a certain stage of development, threw up consciousness as an effect of material combination. The old, “merely religious” model of the universe is widely frowned upon. To hold the fundamental cosmic law to be moral and not mechanical is, the reductionists argue, intolerant. This argument gets color and drama by the invocation of The Horrors of the Past: the Inquisition, for example, or the witch trials of Salem. The supposedly “factual” worldview claims to be value-neutral. It consigns moral judgements to the non-scientific sphere of imperfect human opinion. That is a Good Thing because while it leaves people the individual freedom to choose their own moral menus in life, it does not permit them to impose their beliefs on others. Society as a whole is to be governed by principles of factual knowledge. The more society moves away from the religious model of the world to the factual model, the safer we will all be from theocratic fundamentalism imposed by a narrow-minded priesthood.
The word “factual” comes from the Latin facio, “to make or do.” Thus a fact is what has been made or done. It is a product of the work of our senses—our seeing, hearing, touching, smelling and tasting. Facts are therefore “practical.” Reductionism reduces the whole world to man-made facts: observations made by human senses and calculations made by human minds. In contrast, scriptural revelation about the purpose of the world is God-made.
From the standpoint of facts, religious values seem less practical and thus less real. Why should a certain kind of food—beef, for example—be judged as sinful? Factually beef, like food of any kind, nourishes the body. And so in the modern world the value of practicality (something that works) takes the lead over the values of faith and morality. “Can” supersedes “should.” So many cows run loose in India, and beef can be eaten—why should poor Hindus go hungry when the rice crop fails? Contraceptives can prevent pregnancy—why should we fear the consequences of sex? Abortions can be performed, women can do the work of men, aerial bombs can be dropped. Whether these things should happen or not are worries outside factual knowledge. Anyway, goes the argument, whether we like them or not, these things are happening now. That, we are told, is progress.
“Progress” translates into the language of facts as a more effective way of doing things. Almost daily more effective solutions arrive for how things can be done, incarnated as man-made machinery. The more effective way to cook incarnated as the microwave oven; the more effective way to reckon incarnated as the computer; the more effective way to travel incarnated as the airplane. The appearance of these mechanical deities is jubilantly hailed by millions of people. But it is as if these deities emanate an opiate fog that deadens inquiry into the purpose of increased effectivity—why is such machinery good. For modern people, “The supreme question,” as Karl Jaspers wrote, “is what 'the time demands'.”** What's the point of asking any other question? Whatever is “factually” needful, time is revealing right now.
"Time...takes on a specific moral dimension. Future time is good, past time bad. We move from this inadequate past into this bright future. Since progress is seen to be happening and is regarded as a virtue, the past comes to be understood as an underdeveloped realm, an impoverished Africa of memory and the imagination, useful only as a staging post for the future."
Most people who believe in an evolving technological future miss the irony that “factual knowledge” can only be knowledge of the past. When we look up at the night sky, we do not see the stars as they are but as they were. It takes time for their light to reach our eyes. According to modern cosmology, the light of many of the stars we see now may be several thousand years old. Some of them may have exploded centuries ago.
Though their light continues to stream to earth, they are no longer really there. The “factual” sun that brightens our eyes is always eight minutes in the past. No one on earth has ever seen the “real” sun. A slight time lag divides us from even the nearest objects of our perception. This “factual” world of human sensory experience is the phenomenal world—a world that has already changed by the time we know it.
Thus the phenomenal world, the world of facts, is a world of secondary, dead information. The world that is, the primary living reality, we never know. Facts, far from being “the whole truth,” are just signals conveyed by the network of our senses.
Compare a human being to a spider. A spider has rather limited powers of sight, hearing and smell. But it is blessed with an acute sense of touch. Thus its knowledge of the world comes largely by way of the network of its web. Just by feeling the movement of something in the network, the spider can judge with great accuracy how far off and how big it is. The web cannot, however, inform the spider about the world beyond the network. Even about things caught within the network, the spider receives only information useful for practical ends. For example, the web does not convey the color of a thing. Similarly, there are limits to the quantity and quality of information the network of human sense perception can convey. The edge of the universe remains totally outside our informational reach, despite sophisticated modern instrumentation. Even about things near at hand, our senses permit only restricted information. For example, a dog whistle is knowable to human senses only in a limited way. Though we can see it and touch it, it emits a sound outside the perceptual dimension of our ears. According to the Vedic scriptures, there is a higher reality, beyond our human awareness, to every object of our perception.
Vaisnava philosophy finds the network of sensory knowledge to be riddled by four defects: imperfection, error, illusion and cheating. Likewise, scientists are forced to admit that our senses are incapable of grasping the reality of the world around us, since the closer we try to get to the objects we perceive, the more unreal our sense data about these objects becomes. I am typing these words on a laptop computer. This computer appears to my senses to be a solid object of definite characteristics. But as I come closer to this computer via the method physicists employ to examine atomic and subatomic structures, I find it to be “an indefinite quantum field” or “a cloud of potentia” or “a random flux of energy.” It remains a scientific mystery why the nebulous state of the computer's micro-elemental existence presents itself moment after moment to my senses as an object of certain shape, size, color and texture. If I take quantum physics as my guide, then the “fact” of this computer I am using right now is just a creation of my senses. It does not really exist.
Now, this does not mean the computer is really a random flux of energy. That notion, like the form of the computer my senses perceive, is “factual” in the sense that it is man-made. The world as a chaos of zips and blips is an idea manufactured in the minds of scientists. Actually, quantum theory says that the only thing we can know about material objects is our attempt to know them. That attempt results in the “facts” of quantum physics, which we cannot determine as having reality.
To summarize this critique of reductionism so far: from the seventeenth century onward, science aimed to reduce the universe to matter, mechanical law and evolution at the expense of the moral and religious sense of life; the reductionist universe is a construct of man-made facts; facts, being practical, are supposedly more real than moral and religious values; the improvement of facts (things made by men) is supposedly progress; because progress comes with time, future time is supposedly good, past time bad; ironically, all facts (facta = that which is made) belong to the past as soon as they are perceived, since with the senses we never perceive things as they are right now; thus facts are not reality but only information that turns out to be far from complete; even science admits that what is known to the human senses and mind is different—perhaps totally different—from reality. The logical conclusion of all this? Since facts cannot bring us in touch with reality, progress in facts is progress in illusion.
In charity to the hard-working men and women of science, we might agree that that they offer a useful account of how some, but certainly not all, phenomena take place. For instance, they reduced a bird's flight down to the laws of physics. Mechanically applying those laws, they invented the airplane. The swift transportation of people and goods over great distances by high-powered winged machines does indeed represent a kind of progress over earlier modes of transport. But that doesn't change the fact that mechanistic reductionism cannot help us progress in knowing why the world exists. However, many modern scientists believe that the purpose of the world taught by religion is obsolete, and that it is left to them to fill the gap. More than fifty years ago, British philosopher C. E. M. Joad observed:
…today scientists trespass into the territory of religion and proceed to make statements about the “why” of things for which their science gives them no authority. For the concern of science is with “hows” not with “whys”.
Now, at the turn of the twenty-first century, many scientists are straggling back out of the desert of mechanistic “whys” to the oasis of spiritual “whys”. By bitter experience, these men and women know that it is no less absurd to seek a convincing purpose for the world in reductionism than it is to seek water in a mirage. But on the whole, science remains doggedly atheistic, though lately less cocksure of itself. Writes physics professor Lee Smolin in a recent issue of Time magazine:
"Reflecting on this [the problem of reducing the “why” of the universe down to a mechanistic cause] has made many scientists turn to mysticism or religion. But I prefer to search for a rational, scientific understanding of this puzzle. The revolution we are engaged in involves throwing out the view that the universe was made by a god—some grand puppeteer or master weaver. Instead, the universe can be understood as having constructed itself according to physical laws..."
Smolin's defense of atheistic science ushers us into the darkness at the heart of the reductionist conception of progress. The goal of life is figured to be the continual invention of more effective ways of doing things because everything started with the invention of the universe by the universe itself. Mankind is but a cog in the great machinery of cosmic invention.
Smolin believes that the physical law compelling this progress of invention is evolution. It is via the “law” (actually just the theory) of evolution that scientists propose to define the why, the moral purpose of existence. What is evolutionary good? The impulse to actions that aid physical survival and social order. What is evolutionary evil? The impulse to actions that end in physical destruction and social disorder. This is termed the naturalistic reduction of value, that there is ultimately nothing more to human morality than a group of compulsions which are basically akin to those of an ant-hill”. Smolin again:
"If this theory [of the self-invented universe] is true, it means that we live in a benign universe, one that is hospitable to life because it shares some characteristics with living things. It also means that we live with each other in a world all of us create. The principles of justice, law and equal rights are not imposed from outside; they are made by us as an evolving system called human society."
Here Smolin tips his hat to the supposed moral dimension of time when he tells us that morality—justice, law and equal rights—evolved out of the works of mankind. To scientists like Smolin, evolution is the cornucopia of all good things, even human virtue. As long as things continue to evolve, they are bound to get better. Thus evolution—time's flow as a blessing—turns out to be the closest thing the reductionists have to a God. For scientists like Smolin, evolution is not only the how of creation, but the why also.
In order to give credence to Smolin's case for evolutionary morality, one must buy into his covert redefinition of science as an atheistic religion. Science, as defined in the seventeenth century, has typically been concerned with showing how events occur in nature by modeling those events mechanically. Take the example of eclipses, mentioned in a previous quotation. We can credit scientists for having constructed models that demonstrate their theory of how the earth orbits the sun and the moon orbits the earth. Such models can, on a small scale, mechanically reproduce eclipses. Thus scientists can claim that model to be a fact, because it “makes” eclipses. But there is no model that demonstrates how the universe invented itself. There is no model that demonstrates how life arose from the laws of physics. There is no model that demonstrates how life in the “benign universe” will get better and better in the future. These notions are articles of a quasi-religious faith. They are certainly not articles of facta—“that which is made.” Writing in the same issue of Time as Smolin, Sir John Maddox has this to say about the “facts” at the back of evolutionary theory.
"How did life begin? The natural answer is that living things emerged spontaneously from the chemicals present in warm, shallow waters on the early Earth. But what chemicals? And what more complicated chemicals emerged from that primordial soup with the ability to reproduce themselves and evolve by some kind of Darwinian process? No one yet knows."
No one knows how life appeared from chemicals, nor what these living chemicals were, nor how they evolved as Darwin theorized. To “talk” of how such events happened, science must “walk” the physics that made them happen. As Ernest Rutherford, who discovered the nucleus of the atom, said: “All science is either physics or stamp collecting.” Darwin's theory of evolution is supposed to walk with the physics of three hundred years ago—the “classical physics” of Sir Isaac Newton. Newton, as we learn from physics professor Michio Kaku, modeled the universe after the image of a clock.
The Newtonian vision held that the universe was a gigantic clock, wound at the beginning of time and ticking ever since because it obeyed Newton's three laws of motion.
The point I wish to make here is very basic. I feel no need to devise complex arguments against evolutionary theory because that theory cannot walk alone. Either it walks with physics or it doesn't walk as serious science at all. If the physics behind Darwin's theory won't demonstrate evolution “in fact,” then the theory goes nowhere. The Darwinists have not provided us with a small-scale clockwork model of the cosmos out of which species of artificial intelligent life automatically evolve. Furthermore, the Newtonian concept of the universe as a clock has lost its scientific validity. The following quotations sum it up:
"In 1905 Albert Einstein published four papers. All four were revolutionary...Newton was overthrown.
Without question, the new experiments on radiation showed that the foundations of Newtonian physics was crumbling.
Quantum theory demolished, once and for all, the Newtonian dream.
Quantum theory, in fact, turned Einstein on his head. In almost every sense of the word, quantum theory is the opposite of Einstein's theory.... Thus the two theories are hostile opposites."
Newton developed his classical physics in the seventeenth century. Two centuries later, Charles Darwin devised his theory of evolution upon Newtonian foundations. In the early twentieth century, those foundations were overthrown by Einstein's theory of relativity. Relativity was soon followed by quantum physics, which developed out of experiments with radiation. This theory relegated the Newtonian picture of the universe to the status of “a dream.” Leading quantum theoreticians like Werner Heisenberg were openly doubtful of Darwin's ploy of appealing to Newtonian physics to explain life. They were also doubtful of Einstein's theory. And even within the quantum school, rival GUTs (Grand Unified Theories) and TOEs (Theories of Everything) clash.
More and more thinkers now conclude that this “evolution” of physical theory—from classical to relativity to quantum—represents not the progress, but rather the decline, of science.
"Some observers contend that these unconfirmable, far-fetched theories are signs of science's vitality and boundless possibilities. I see them as signs of science's desperation and terminal illness.
The key problem is that, if hugely successful theories can be found to be wrong and “truths” can be found to be false, what can possibly be the real nature of the form of knowledge we call science? Why is it successful and why should we believe it?"
Yet quantum mechanics, relativity and classical physics remain equally important to modern scientists—less because they bring us nearer to how life arose in the universe, more because they work very well within the realm of human affairs. If not for quantum physics, we could not produce television sets, radios, stereo sound systems, computers, nor any modern electronic equipment. Without Einsteinian relativity, we could not harness atomic energy. Without classical physics, we could have no automobiles, trains, airplanes, rockets nor the rest of the machines that hasten our movement through time and space. And that is why the switch from the Western religious model of the universe to the reductionist model is supposed to be good. The reductionist model works. It yields human progress. But again, this is “progress” in nothing other than facta, “that which is made.” The bright shining hope is that what science makes for us 1) expands human powers, 2) brings the materials and laws of nature more under human control, 3) extends the duration of human life and 4) makes that life happier.
These four exceedingly optimistic claims, formulated by a scientist in the eighteenth century, make up the standard definition of progress even today. Fired by these promises of a better future, great minds labored hard to bring nature under human control. Yet, in the final analysis, they were forced by the same nature to admit that the whole enterprise of progress is useless. Charles Darwin wrote in his Autobiography:
"Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued progress."
When Darwin wrote these words in the nineteenth century, people were at least confident that, with the aid of science, the human race would continue to progress as long as the universe could support life. The twentieth century dashed these hopes, showing science to be a clear and present danger to human survival. In the two world wars and the cold war that followed, technology vastly multiplied the killing efficiency of modern weaponry, pushing civilization and, it was feared, all life on Earth to the verge of destruction.
How could a doctrine like reductionism, which leads to such absurd contradictions, be so influential as to shake the religious faith of the West? Well, reductionism did not simply appear out of nowhere. It had three thousand years of momentum behind it. Scholars of our time trace the roots of reductionism back to a change in human consciousness that resulted from social upheaval in the ancient kingdoms of Egypt and the Mesopotamian Near East. These civilizations, like Vedic India, had long been ritual societies. “Ritual” is a word that comes to us from the Vedic term åta (the real), which points to the higher cosmic and moral order, beyond human comprehension. Through ritual, societies of antiquity participated in the great universal sacrifice the demigods offer to the Supreme. With the start of Kali-yuga, five thousand years ago, ritual society gradually stagnated. Around one thousand years BC, a new order emerged in Egypt and Mesopotamia. At that time the stronger independent interests of artisans, craftsmen, farmers and traders wore down the older social norms that had been held together by the knowledge and power of priests and kings, who derived their authority from the divine past.
"Egypt and the Near East...gave rise to a new society which sprang into existence out of the ruined shell of the old. The new society brought with it new technology related to new perceptions of the cosmos. It required new ideas, because it was based on trade and, in part, on free labor. While reliance on authority may suit a priesthood, it is a poor guide for an enterprising trader or craftsman. Instead, the merchant had to learn by observing the world around him—the winds and tides. And the free craftsmen learned by changing nature, by experimenting with new materials and methods."
Why did the priests and kings of these societies lose their power? In the age of Kali, the two varnas of leadership—the brahmaas and the ksatriyas—fall down due to the growth of materialism in the hearts of all men. The same increase of materialism raised the two lower orders—the vaisyas (farmers and merchants) and sudras (craftsmen, artisans and workers) to exaggerated prominence. Sattvic culture declined, opening the way for the ascendance of sinful mleccha culture. This destabilized society and promoted quarrel.
It is thus evident that the trend toward mechanistic reductionism was historically nourished by the social preponderance of the vaiçya and sudra mentality and the social instability of post-varnasrama society. The first Western attempt to philosophically reduce the world to simplicity began in Ionia. In this area of the eastern shore of the Aegean sea, Greeks established cities that embodied Kali-yuga philosophy and social values.
"By 700 BC the Ionian trading cities...had thrown off the earlier subordination to the great landowners of mainland Greece. They established new societies of traders, craftsmen, and freeholding peasants—the first limited attempts at democracies and republics. They needed new ideas to run such new societies—the old gods were outmoded...Around 580 BC Thales, a native of the trading and textile center Miletus, first asserted that the world was formed by natural processes which could be observed in the world... While Bronze Age priests had seen an unchanging society ruled by the unchanging cycles of the seasons, the Ionians saw a society in the midst of convulsive changes as aristocratic landholders, merchants, artisans, and peasants battled for power. Heraclitus concluded that the universe was in constant flux, like a fire, ever changing...Anaxagoras, a native of Ionia and later a friend of the Athenian leader Pericles, derived his theory of origins from close observation of nature...whirlpools, the glowing hot metal of the blacksmith's forge, the distant light of merchants' signal fires."
Ritual society was a sacred tradition revealed to man by demigods and sages. Ritual progress was the fourfold reward of dharma (religiosity), artha (material prosperity), kama (sensual enjoyment) and moksa (liberation from material existence). The early Ionian reductionist society was based not on godly revelation but on human sensory observation of the physical world. Progress was calculated in terms of artha and kama. What became of dharma and moksa, which extend the human mind toward goals beyond sense perception? The vaisya system of values reduced that subject matter to numbers.
"Anything could be reduced to abstract numbers: the value of a pot, a jar of oil, a plot of land, a slave, could all be expressed by exact numbers of coins, as could the wealth and worth of any citizen. Numbers seemed to have magical powers.... To Pythagoras the pure relationship of numbers in arithmetic and geometry are the changeless reality behind the shifting appearances of the sensible world. In contrast to the Ionians, Pythagoras taught that reality can be known not through sensory observation, but only through pure reason, which can investigate the abstract mathematical forms that rule the world."
Early Greek philosophy, a sort of protophysics, was born in Ionia around 580 BC from observation of phenomena. Soon afterward, Pythagoras of Croton added the abstract dimension of numbers. Then Plato of Athens elaborated upon the moral dimension of Pythagorean idealism. While there is much in Platonic morality a student of Vedic knowledge can agree with, moral values taught by God had no place in Plato's system. His values were discoveries, made (facta again) by the intelligence. They depended upon reason, not revelation.
"Moral truths, thinks Plato, are timeless and beyond the happenstance of human opinion or social structure. They are likeqwise objectively real and like other such truths, such as those of mathematics, are discoverable by the intelligence.... [Moral truths are] not a god, nor [are they] the creation or commandment of a god."
Plato was sure about the eternality of the individual soul, less sure about spiritual personality. At least he believed every soul to be the very form of life itself. As such, the soul belongs to the transcendent realm of eternal pure forms. Souls down in the phenomenal world can sustain purity by reason, the link to the realm of true forms. The reasoning soul exhibits three virtues: wisdom, courage and temperance. An impure, unreasoning soul is deficient in the three virtues. That deficiency is evident in the vices of ignorance, cowardice and intemperance. So although on one hand Plato was reluctant to affix morality to a personal God, on the other he insisted it is fixed in an eternal Good beyond the world of matter.
Aristotle, Plato's most prominent disciple, brought goodness down to earth by dispensing with his teacher's idea of a transcendent realm of forms that projects ideal virtue into the phenomenal world. While more or less agreeing with his teacher that the soul is pure form and excellence of character, Aristotle argued that the soul is inseparable from its body. Goodness, likewise, is inseparable from particular good things. When the body vanishes, so does the soul. When a good thing vanishes, so does its goodness. On one key point Plato and Aristotle agreed: that matter is moved by the soul.
The Christian doctrine that said a soul without a material body cannot act was much closer to Aristotle's soul-concept than Plato's. But unlike Aristotle, the Judaeo-Christian scriptures had almost nothing to say about cosmology and physics. Aristotle's writings elaborately described the universe as a system of fifty-five concentric spheres whose rotation accounted for the movements of the sun, moon, stars and planets.
Translated into Latin in the Middle Ages, his model of the cosmos had a deep impact upon Church scholars, starved as they were for this kind of information. In AD 1266, the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas officially wed Aristotelian philosophy with Catholic theology. The Theory of Everything of its time, this work was an awesome intellectual monument to both the protoscience of the ancient Greeks and the moral authority of Jesus Christ, just as the soaring cathedral of Chartres—completed while Aquinas was alive—was a synthesis of the two in architecture (figures of Pythagoras and Aristotle were carved into the stonework).
But the Thomist model of reality—“Thomist” was the label given to Aquinas's thought—was pregnant with the seeds of its own destruction. One seed was Aquinas's admission that some portions of the Bible are not the literal truth. Another seed was the high degree to which the model depended upon the power of human reason. A third seed was the physicality of the model: Aristotle proposed that the upper spheres of the universe were made of “pure matter”—an immaculate, unchanging crystalline solid. But he rejected the Platonic position that the real form of the world exists in a higher dimension of consciousness. It followed from Aristotle's physics that the higher spheres—for example, “the eternal pearl” of the moon—could be rendered humanly visible just by discovering a way to get close enough to see them. A fourth seed was the humanism of the model: within creation, the earth was positioned at the privileged center, and among earthly creatures, the human race had the only role in God's plan. A fifth seed was the conceit that the model explained all there is to know. Each was a seed of facta—a “truth” made by man, not God.
Even though there were significant features of the Thomist model that echoed Vedic knowledge—for example, that the universe is morally constituted, and that of the many heavenly planets, the moon is the nearest—the seeds of its self-destruction began fructifying in 1604. That was the year Galileo Galilei established the “fact” that a nova (new star) flared into being in the constellation Serpentarius. This contradicted the Thomist model, which said stars are permanent fixtures of an unchanging heaven where nothing new could happen. In 1609 Galileo looked at the moon through a telescope. He found that the Thomist lunar heaven was not a fact: he could not “make it out” in his eyepiece. Fact was, the moon looked very much like earth. Fact was, the surface of the moon reflected earthlight. To Galileo, that meant that the earth, shining like the other planets, is not special.
Looking elsewhere through his eyepiece, Galileo discovered more facts: Jupiter is encircled by moons; the sun, not the earth, is the center of the solar system; countless stars are invisible to the naked eye. By dropping objects from the Tower of Pisa, Galileo demonstrated mistakes in Thomist physics.
Now, the Aristotelian “facts” of the Thomist model were tied together by Christian logic. The tremendous weight of new facts discovered by Galileo could not be supported by that logic. Thus Galileo set about assembling a new, non-theistic logic for his facts. Suppressed by the Church, Galileo died before he could complete it. Sir Isaac Newton labored through his life to finish the model, which I've termed the mechanistic reductionist model. This model 1) reduced reality to the base concerns of vaisyas and sudras, namely numerical value and physical work, 2) was cool to the belief (shared by Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas) that matter is moved by spirit, 3) was warm to the belief that mechanical forces move matter.
If matter is moved by spirit, it is then fair to say that matter has a moral dimension. Most religions teach that souls are promoted or degraded according to what they do with matter; they also teach that certain kinds of matter are sanctified by God. When they utilize sanctified matter (holy water, for example), souls are blessed. The blessing emanates not from the molecules of the holy water—these being no different from the molecules of sewer water—but from the holy spirit that moves the foundations of the material world: the three modes of creation, maintenance and destruction. God acts through earth, water, fire, air and ether (sound) to deliver people from sinful life, and to inspire their hearts with loving attraction to Him.
On the other hand, if matter is moved only by mechanical forces, it would be fair to say it has no moral quality whatsoever. Newton allowed a role for God only in the beginning, when He set the mechanism of the cosmos into motion. God faded from the scene after that initial divine push, and mechanics just carried on. If this is the case, then water is always just water. The only ethics at play in a mechanistic universe are the ethics of physical survival.
As they worked with Newton's model of the universe, scientists realized it was not really complete. They continued to discover newer and newer facts. To survive, Newton's model had to absorb these facts and grow with them. In the nineteenth century it absorbed the electromagnetic field theory of Faraday and Maxwell. That wasn't easy, as field theory pointed to a level of reality unknown to Newton, beyond mechanical relations. Then, as noted before, the facts of radioactivity, discovered in the early twentieth century, swelled the model to the bursting point. It split, ameba-like, into mutually hostile variants of itself: the classical variant, the Einsteinian variant, and the quantum variant. Because all three work well in terms of vaisya-sudra values, Kali-yuga brains are perplexed as to which variant represents reality as it is.
What the variant models really represent is mäyä, the illusory feature of prakriti. The word prakåti means “abundant activity”—certainly, prakriti works! But it works to hold materialistic living entities fast within the grip of the three modes of nature. Çré Prahläda Mahäräja explains in Srimad-Bhagavatam 7.9.20:
"My dear Lord, everyone in this material world is under the modes of material nature, being influenced by goodness, passion and ignorance. Everyone—from the greatest personality, Lord Brahmä, down to the small ant—works under the influence of these modes. Therefore everyone in this material world is influenced by Your energy. The cause for which they work, the place where they work, the time when they work, the matter due to which they work, the goal of life they have considered final, and the process for obtaining this goal—all are nothing but manifestations of Your energy. Indeed, since the energy and energetic are identical, all of them are but manifestations of You."
His body and mind working puppet-like under the direction of the modes, a living entity is passed from the controlling hand of creation (rajo-guëa) to sustenance (sattva-guëa) to destruction (tamo-guëa). After death he is handed back to creation to receive the next body. This cycle revolves life after life until the whole universe comes to an end. Hopes for progressive evolution to a perfect status of material life are insane. A soul's only real hope is for deliverance from the cycle of the modes, by the Divine Grace emanating through the veil of matter.
Now, there are facts of perception that seem to contradict the Vedic description of the material world. We've seen how the Thomist model of the universe fell by the wayside of history after the telescope “proved” it not factual. Well, truth be told, the Çrémad-Bhägavatam locates the earth, moon and sun in positions very different from the modern astronomical standard. Is this cause to doubt the Bhägavatam? If it is, then it is also cause to doubt the moral dimension of the universe taught by the Bhägavatam. It is cause to neglect the regulative principles and indulge the whims of the senses.
The Vaisnava scriptures tell us the material energy is Lord Krsna's adhara-sakti or all-accommodating energy. She accommodates the lusty desires of the materialistic living entities by presenting herself as exploitable matter. They perceive her as exploitable according to the particular range of their cognitive and motor senses.
Earlier the example of a spider and its web was given. The adhara-sakti accommodates the spider's desires by providing it a “factual world” which the poor creature can perceive and control. If the spider's worldview could be rendered into English, there is little doubt the average person would find it to be bizarre mythology, fiction, or lunacy. Our own world of human facts is no less bizarre to the demigods.
Beyond these worlds of facts populated by creatures lusty for sense gratification, there is the real form of the world. This is the dharmic or moral form, seen by those living entities who know nature's primary purpose. That primary purpose is to accommodate the Lord's plan for the reformation of His wayward parts and parcels. The dharmic form is presented in Srimadd-Bhagavatam, which states:
"Krsna consciousness means constantly associating with the Supreme Personality of Godhead in such a mental state that the devotee can observe the cosmic manifestation exactly as the Supreme Personality of Godhead does. Such observation is not always possible, but it becomes manifest exactly like the dark planet known as Rahu, which is observed in the presence of the full moon."
At Kuruksetra five thousand years ago, Krsna revealed His visvarupa (the form of the entire universe) to His constant companion Arjuna. An opportunity like Arjuna had—to directly observe the universe exactly as Krsna sees it—is very rare. But all of us can take advantage of an indirect method that allies human reason with scriptural revelation. This method is explained by an analogy. During a full lunar eclipse, the halo around the moon allows us an indirect perception of a darkness that blots out the lunar disc. It is indirect because our eyes cannot tell us what is blotting out the moon. At least we can tell from the soft halo that the moon is masked by something passing in front of it. The Vedic scriptures tell us this shadowy mask is Rahu, a demonic planet that otherwise cannot be seen. Similarly, the moonlike light of reason guided by scripture permits us to indirectly perceive the material universe as a mask of the spiritual world.
A mechanistic reductionist will argue that what eclipses the moon is not a mysterious demonic planet but the shadow of the earth. The difference between the mechanistic view and the Vedic is a question of what is known as “the scale of observation.” For example, if we are asked to say with the unaided eye what we see when we look at an even mix of two powders—white flour and finely-ground charcoal—we will say we see a gray powder. But if we are able to observe that gray powder through a microscope, we will suddenly understand it does not exist. The microscopic scale of observation reveals countless white and black particles.
On the mechanist's “factual” (man-made) scale of observation, it is certainly logical to say the darkness eclipsing the moon is just the shadow of the earth. But on the Vedic scale, the scale of God-made observation, mechanistic facts vanish, just as the fact of the gray powder vanishes when it is observed through a microscope. On the Vedic scale, cosmic events are seen to be the interrelation of two potencies (spirit and matter) of the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Sri Krsna all dimension is defined by the three qualities of that interrelation: goodness, passion, and ignorance.
The moral dimension of the cosmos is determinable by purification of consciousness, not by sensory inspection or mental speculation. Purification entails detaching consciousness from the exploitation of matter aimed at physical sense pleasure, and attaching consciousness to the employment of matter in Krsna's service.
