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Re: questions
Pradip Gangopadhyay (pradip@lism.usc.edu) wrote:
: Thank you for your interesting reponse.
: You are right that only a fraction of God has become this universe.
: This is mentioned not only in the Gita but also in the Upanishads. The
: I agree that God periodically projects the universe and takes it back or as
: you said that God creates and dissolves the universe. This idea of creation
: is, however, different from the modern scientific idea of creation from
: nothing.
Dear Pradipbabu:
Thank you for the kind words. I tend to think that we should not try to
tailor our answers to suit the assumed levels of familiarity of the
questioner with Hindu Scriptures, but always try to give the best
answers we can think of. I have two reasons for that. Firstly,
there are many more readers than questioners, and many of them are highly
informed. Secondly, I am often unable to judge the intent or knowledge
of the questioner.
I should give you an example of the second. Remember there was somebody
with an western name who asked whether Hindus think of God as fearsome?
Several of us , including myself wrote that God is the embodiment of love
to Hindus and not the embodiment of fear. That is the message Sri Krishna
gave to Arjuna in the SBG, in Chapter 11, as Arjuna was scared by His
"dangstrAkarAlAni bhayAnakAni" image, but God asked him not to be afraid
of that before he changed into His Krishna form again.
The other day, I was going through the homepages, and found that
questioner's homepage (I believe). He had already made up his mind about
what he wanted to write, and ignored what we think about it. He has
included a description of the fearsome Rudra as the example of how Hindus
fear God.
You indicated that science thinks that creation came out of nothingness.
I do not believe it to be so. Scientists hypothesize that the subatomic
particles pre-existed either as quanitized energy or as particles. The
assembly and arrangement of these generated elements and bodies of
objects. Some of the elements combined to form amino acids and small,
perhaps catalytic ribonucleic acids, that created the macromolecules found
in living organisms. However, scientists stop shy of talking about how
life was created and as Fernandez Moran put it, you can put together all
components of a bacterial cell to make it look like a bacterium, but it
will not live.
In a gross physical way, the famous big bang theory suggests that the
world was a compact mass at one time long ago, that has disintegrated
with a big bang, and since then has been expanding, that is, the
components are spreading in all directions.
With best regards,
Dhruba.
