Evolution and Science

Srila Prabhupada was a spiritual teacher, not a scientist, and he never claimed to be one. When he spoke about science he was making a philosophical point, and it is worth being clear about what that point was, because devotees sometimes overstate it. This chapter tries to present his position realistically, and to show where the Vedic literature anticipated modern findings, which it does more often than its critics expect.

Two different questions

Science asks how the material world works: how bodies are built, how species change, how planets move. Its methods are excellent for those questions, and a devotee has no reason to deny what careful observation shows. The Vedic literature asks a different set of questions: Who am I? Why do I suffer birth, old age, disease, and death? What is the purpose of life, and what is my relationship with God? Bhagavad-gita and Srimad-Bhagavatam were spoken to answer these, and no laboratory can settle them.

Trouble begins when either side answers questions that belong to the other. A scientist who declares that consciousness is nothing but chemistry has stepped outside what experiment can show. A devotee who argues against well-established biology on the strength of a purport has done the same thing in the other direction.

What Srila Prabhupada actually challenged

Prabhupada's central objection was to the assumption that life comes from matter. He insisted that consciousness is the symptom of the soul, not a by-product of chemicals, and that "life comes from life." This is not a claim about fossils or genetics. It is a claim about the nature of the self, and it is exactly what Krishna teaches in the second chapter of Bhagavad-gita: the soul is eternal, and the body is a temporary covering that the soul changes like clothing.

He also challenged scientism, the attitude that the scientific method is the only path to knowledge and that whatever it has not yet explained must be an illusion. He pointed out that scientists cannot manufacture even a single living cell from raw chemicals, that theories are revised constantly while being presented as final, and that technological progress has not reduced the four problems of birth, death, old age, and disease. These are fair observations, and one can make them respectfully.

na jayate mriyate va kadacin
nayam bhutva bhavita va na bhuyah
ajo nityah sasvato 'yam purano
na hanyate hanyamane sarire

"For the soul there is neither birth nor death at any time. He has not come into being, does not come into being, and will not come into being. He is unborn, eternal, ever-existing and primeval. He is not slain when the body is slain." (Bhagavad-gita 2.20)

Evolution of the body and evolution of the soul

The Vedas describe 8,400,000 species of life and say that the soul transmigrates through them according to karma and desire. This is an evolution of consciousness: the same eternal soul moves from body to body, gradually reaching the human form, where it can inquire about God. Darwin's theory is about something else, the way bodily forms change over generations. The two ideas are not really in competition, because one is about the traveler and the other is about the vehicles.

A devotee can therefore accept what biology has established about how bodies change while holding firmly that the body is not the self and that consciousness is not produced by matter. Srila Prabhupada's frequent jokes about "the monkey theory" were meant to puncture the pride of people who think that explaining the body explains the person. They were not a research program, and we should not pretend they were.

Where the Vedas got it right, or close

Being honest about the limits cuts both ways. The Vedic literature, written down thousands of years before the telescope and the microscope, contains a surprising number of statements that modern science has since caught up with. None of these prove the scripture; a devotee's faith does not rest on them. But they are worth knowing, because the people who dismiss the Vedas as primitive mythology have usually never read them.

• The age of the universe is counted in billions of years. One day of Brahma, the span of a single creation, is a thousand cycles of the four yugas, or 4,320,000,000 years (Bhagavad-gita 8.17, and the time calculations of Srimad-Bhagavatam, Third Canto, chapter 11). Brahma's whole life is 311 trillion years. Modern cosmology puts the universe at about 13.8 billion years and the earth at 4.5 billion. The Vedic figures are of the right order of magnitude, and a day of Brahma is remarkably close to the age of the earth, while other traditions were insisting on six thousand years.
• Matter is made of atoms, and time is measured by their motion. The Bhagavatam defines the paramanu as the ultimate, indivisible particle of matter, describes how atoms combine into larger units (two make a double atom, three of those make a trasarenu, the "hexatom," the smallest particle visible floating in a sunbeam), and defines the smallest units of time by the movement of these particles (Srimad-Bhagavatam 3.11.4 and Srimad-Bhagavatam 3.11.5). This is an atomic theory of matter two thousand years before Dalton, and the modern second is likewise defined by the vibration of a caesium atom. The dust mote the text calls a hexatom contains vastly more atoms than six by today's count; it is the principle, that matter and time are both built from discrete atomic units, that the Bhagavatam had right.
• Development of the embryo. The thirty-first chapter of the Third Canto describes the growth of the child in the womb month by month: the mixing of the parents' seed on the first night, the forming of a lump, the head within the first month, hands and feet and limbs by the second, nails, hair, skin, and bone by the third, the beginnings of hunger and movement by the fifth month, and the child turned and enclosed in the amnion by the sixth (Srimad-Bhagavatam 3.31). The sequence is close to what modern embryology describes, and the text adds what embryology cannot: that a living soul enters at conception.
• Time runs at different rates in different places. The story of King Kakudmi, who took his daughter to Brahma's planet for a short audience and returned to find that twenty-seven cycles of the four ages had passed on earth and everyone he knew was gone (Srimad-Bhagavatam 9.3.32), was told as plain fact long before anyone proposed that time could pass differently for different observers. Relativity does not describe Brahmaloka, and a devotee need not claim it does. But the Vedic insistence that time is not absolute, and that a day on a higher planet is many years on earth, was a strange idea until the twentieth century.
• Cow dung is antiseptic. Srila Prabhupada often gave this example of a Vedic statement that seems absurd until it is tested: the scripture says that the stool of an animal is impure but the stool of the cow is pure, and that cow dung may be used to clean a kitchen floor or a temple. He would tell of a chemist in Calcutta who analyzed cow dung and found it full of antiseptic properties. Village India has used it that way for thousands of years, and laboratory studies have since reported antibacterial activity in cow dung against a range of common pathogens. The Vedic instruction was right, and the explanation came later.
• Plants are alive and feel. The Vedas count plants among the living entities, each with a soul, and a devotee is careful not to harm them unnecessarily. The scientific world treated plants as insensible until Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose showed in the early twentieth century that they respond to stimuli, and the study of plant signaling has grown ever since. Srila Prabhupada mentions Bose's work in his conversation with Cardinal Danielou.
• The sciences of Vedic civilization. Beyond the scriptures themselves, the culture that preserved them produced the decimal number system and the zero that the whole world now uses, names for numbers up to a trillion and beyond, the grammar of Panini, which describes Sanskrit with a rigor that modern linguistics and computer science did not match until the twentieth century, surgery and medicine in the Ayurveda, and astronomy accurate enough to predict eclipses and measure the precession of the equinoxes. A civilization that could do all this is not one whose cosmology can be dismissed unread.

The point of listing these is not to win an argument. It is to show that the Vedic literature deserves the same careful reading we give to any serious source, and that a devotee can speak about it to an educated person without embarrassment.

Cosmology and the Fifth Canto

The Fifth Canto of Srimad-Bhagavatam describes the universe as Bhu-mandala, a vast disc of islands and oceans with Mount Meru at the center, and gives distances and dimensions for the sun, moon, and planets that do not match what telescopes and spacecraft measure. Srila Prabhupada himself said these descriptions were very difficult to understand, and he encouraged his disciples to study them rather than dismiss them. But he did not ask anyone to reject observation.

The Bhagavatam presents the cosmos from the viewpoint of the demigods and sages, as a place ordered around the Lord, with measurements that are as much about hierarchy and meaning as about kilometers. One does not need to take every figure literally to receive the Fifth Canto's actual instruction: that the material universe is a temporary place, that its enjoyment ends in suffering, and that the soul's real home is with Krishna. That teaching is not threatened by any measurement.

How a devotee can talk about science

• Keep the argument where it belongs. The strong Vedic claim is about consciousness and the self. Make that argument, and leave arguments about the age of rocks to geologists.
• Be honest about what is symbolic. When the scripture gives a cosmic measurement, it is reasonable to say that the purpose is spiritual and the details are beyond our present understanding. Krishna does not need us to defend every number.
• Give credit where it is due. Medicine, agriculture, and communication have relieved much suffering. Srila Prabhupada used airplanes, dictaphones, and printing presses to spread Krishna consciousness, and he thanked the scientists who built them.
• Remember the real point. The question is not whether the universe is old or young but whether we will use this human life to understand who we are. Real science, in Prabhupada's sense, means knowing the self, its source, and its purpose.

Srila Prabhupada's books remain the guide. Read them with the same intelligence he asked us to apply to everything else, and the perceived conflict between devotion and science largely disappears.