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Evolution?
>From: japillai@aol.com (JaPillai)
Newsgroups: alt.hindu
Subject: Evolution?
-What is a Hindu's stand on Darwin's theory of evolution? Please e-mail me
-if you can help me with this question.
As you know, the age of the great Acharyas who interpreted
the Veda for the commoners preceded Darwin and his theory;
therefore there is no authoritative pronouncement in
Hinduism for or against the theory.
That said, we can infer a lot from the scriptures and
the epics.
In the Ramayana, one incident lays out the general principle
in answer to the question - what is the interaction
between God and natural law ? When Sri Rama attempts to
cross the ocean, the waters do NOT give way; whereupon
he gets angry and gets ready to burn away the oceans with
the astras. Then Samudra Rajan, the ruler of the oceans,
comes out and tells Sri Rama, " why are you irate at
us for following our law, our dharma ? It would be unnatural
for the oceans to part; you set up the original principles
of the universe, didn't you ? How then can you be upset
at us for sticking to it ? " Of course, in the Ramayana,
Sri Rama was a mere human, and therefore not expected to
remember this.
Anyway, the idea is that once having set the Law in motion,
God no longer interferes with the laws of physics and
other scientific principles. Thus Darwin's theory should
be perfectly acceptable to the Hindus.
There is another curious parallelism that intrigues
a lot of people, including myself. If you look up the
10 avatars of Vishnu, they go from the fish to the
fully human by way of amphibians, reptiles, mammals,
semi-man, dwarf etc and finlly end up in Superman.
People who believe this should have no problem in
grasping or agreeing with Darwin.
Finally, in Hinduism, since the earliest times, there
has been a full recognition of the fact that the
"lower" creatures are not fundamentally different
from the humans; their kinship with the humans was
a given; thus this great artificial divide between
humans and animals which is a fundamental axiom of
the Semitic religions, which deny that animals have
souls, and which encourage men to lord it over the
animals, and therefore find it unacceptable that
humans could have evolved from them, this whole
syndrome does not exist in Hinduism. Hindus find it
quite reasonable and natural that science has
discovered what they had always believed - there is
no such absurd divide; all life is a continuum.
Thus Darwin would have found a welcoming audience
among the Hindus.
RS
