15AR20-18

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AR 20:18 - Why Scientism's Cherished Progress Narrative Fails

Apologia Report 20:18 (1,247)

May 28, 2015

In this issue:

HINDUISM - "the most important and popular Hindu views of God" clarified for temple administrators

NEW AGE MOVEMENT - how to know if you belong

SCIENCE - rejecting dogma from "the flatland of materialism"

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HINDUISM

"How We Describe Our Deities" by Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami (publisher of Hinduism Today magazine) -- an exceedingly valuable summary, both because of its in-house context and because we've rarely seen such a condensed presentation. Hindu temples feature "enshrined Deities, known as murtis." In describing these murtis, Hindu publications provide "a variety of approaches conveying distinctly different perspectives. ... These differing views can be perplexing to Hindus and non-Hindus alike, especially when a temple, ashram or swami speaks of one of the views as though it were the official, or singular, Hindu understanding. To give clarity, we explore here four distinct ways of describing God and His/Her representations, or murtis. ...

"The first type of presentation, [God as a divine trinity] is based on the popular idea, thought to originate in the Puranas, that a trinity of separate Gods - Brahma, Vishnu and Siva - perform the basic functions of creation, preservation and destruction, respectively. ... Temples that have prominent shrines to both Siva and Vishnu often adopt the trinity perspective to explain what otherwise might appear to be two supreme Gods under one roof. ...

"A serious problem arises from this description, for it wrongly depicts Hinduism as polytheistic - believing in multiple Gods without any of them being supreme. ...

"[A] second type of presentation, which arises from the Smarta tradition, one of Hinduism’s four primary denominations (along with Saivism, Vaishnavism and Shaktism). Generally, Smartas do not regard the Deities as real, conscious spiritual beings, but as symbols of one spiritual reality. ... This perspective emphasizes the belief of the Advaita Vedanta philosophy of the Smarta denomination that the One Reality, Paramatma, manifests through the various Deities; when we worship any of the murtis - Siva, Vishnu, etc. - it is actually Paramatma that we are worshiping. ...

"For some, the murti is a symbol, for others it is a channel for God’s grace. ...

"An important counter-perspective declares that God, the Supreme Being, and the Gods (His/Her helpers) are real and conscious beings, not symbols of cosmic powers, not human constructs. The murti is the earthly representative of a real Divinity in the highest plane of reality, serving as a channel for His/Her blessings. ...

"Another interpretation emphasizes the theological perceptions appearing in a body of Hindu scripture called the Agamas. The Agamas are revelations on sacred living, worship, yoga and philosophy. Saivas, Shaktas and Vaishnavas regard these sacred texts as divinely revealed, shruti-on par with the Vedas-and each denomination has its distinct collection. ... All the Agamas look at creation, preservation and destruction as three powers wielded by the one Supreme Being and not by a trinity of separate Gods. Most priests serving in North American temples have been trained in either the Vaishnava or Saiva Agamas, and some in both. ...

"A fifth style of presentation [and that of the publisher] depicts a Supreme God and other Gods (Mahadevas or Divinities) who are subordinate to the Deity. [It] 'follows the Saivite tradition, the oldest of the four main denominations of Hinduism ... worship [of] the one Supreme Being as God Siva, and Lords Ganesha and Murugan, whom God Siva created to assist Him in the care of His great creation. In Saivism, Shakti is God Siva’s manifest power and is not separate from Him. This is depicted most clearly in the image of God Siva as Ardhanarishvara, whose left side is female and right side is male. [T]here is no separate Deity representing Shakti, for in our tradition the Supreme Being is neither male nor female, but encompasses both.'" according to the publisher's Kadavul Hindu Temple website <www.goo.gl/sFmy2F>.

The author concludes: "This article is not suggesting that all temples adopt the same view of God and the murtis. Rather, it is meant as a catalyst for temple administrators to give full attention to how they describe the Deities, to clearly and deliberately reflect, especially for visitors, the temple’s tradition and philosophy." Hinduism Today, Apr/May '15, <www.goo.gl/0Df8aB>

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NEW AGE MOVEMENT

"Are You a New Ager?" by Carl Llewellyn Weschcke, owner of North America's leading occult publisher, Llewellyn Books -- written in the hope his readers will answer the question in the affirmative, this editorial on the inside front cover of New Worlds (Mar/Apr '15), the company's product catalog, suggests the New Age movement remains far from dead. Weschcke bets the farm on this motivational stump for his worldview, championing this "non-religious kind of Spirituality ... commonly used by Esotericists for several hundred years to mean a radical alternative to 'Witchcraft' and 'the Occult'...."

Weschcke further explains the designation "New Age," noting that "the term has become mostly familiar since the 1970s" and gives a brief historical survey. "Its first political appearance may have been in the 1782 reference to 'A New Order of the Ages' in the Great Seal of the United States. The spiritual ideas are found in the practices of early Gnosticism and European Paganism; and sources as diverse as the emergence of Alchemy and Kabbalah; and the futurist writings of Sir Francis Bacon in the 1600s, the mystic writings of Emanuel Swedenborg in the 1700s and William Blake in the 1800s; the symbolism of Free Masonry, and in Freedom from the rule of Monarchy, Landed Gentry, the alliance of Church and State, and with the Empowering of the Individual through the spread of Free Thinking, Free Education, Free Enterprise, and the Rule of Law in American Democracy."

He follows this with an equally brief inspirational worldview affirmation and concludes that "we are Gods and Goddesses in the Making." <www.goo.gl/A5SwwD>

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SCIENCE

"The Icon of Materialism: Why Scientism's Cherished Progress Narrative Fails" by Jonathan Witt, senior fellow and writer in residence at Seattle's Discovery Institute <discovery.org> -- argues that the dogma of scientism is "actually quite vulnerable, since it rests on a story of progress that collapses under scrutiny. ... [Evolutionary biologist] Steve Matheson employs the story in the heat of battle, in a clash with intelligent design proponent Stephen Meyer. ...

"This mode of reasoning, common to the historical sciences, has been described by philosophers of science as inference to the best explanation (IBE), and Meyer argues that IBE points decisively to the work of a creative intelligence in the biological realm.

"Here's the argument in a nutshell: one clue we find in the present is information in living things, such as the sophisticated digital information encoded in DNA. How did this information first arise? A long, broad, and intensive exploration has uncovered only one type of cause with the demonstrated power to generate information: creative intelligence. Therefore, the IBE mode of reasoning, common across a host of historical sciences, points to intelligent design as the best explanation for the origin of biological information. ...

"Matheson actually agreed with Meyer's argument up to a point. 'You said that we reason backwards from what we know works, which is that intelligence makes codes,' he said. 'I'll agree with that. . . . We reason back and say, therefore, this is the one explanation we know that can do this. I buy that. I get it. It's obvious.' ...

"Matheson took the lower-level historical pattern of information always leading back to mind, and trumped it with what he sees as a higher-level historical pattern-materialism's manifest destiny, if you will.

"That alleged pattern is scientism's grand progress narrative....

"Scientism's grand progress narrative holds that as we learn more and more about the world, purely natural or material explanations will inevitably arise and grow stronger, while design arguments will inevitably collapse under the weight of new discoveries. But the opposite has happened in cosmology and origin-of-life studies. Despite this, the disciples of scientism go right on recycling their grand narrative as if it were the whole truth and nothing but the truth. ...

"[S]cientists abandoned science's fertile theological heritage, opting to restrict themselves to purely material explanations and insisting that science should trade only in hypotheses consistent with materialism. They sought 'to create,' in the approving words of Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin, 'an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive,' even to the point of tolerating 'unsubstantiated just-so stories' if necessary. (Yes-those are Lewontin's own words.)

"The cosmic-sized case in point is their invoking untold billions of unseen, undetectable universes to argue that ours is just a rare lucky one among all these untold universes, one with a life-sustaining combination of physical laws and constants. Never mind that the idea is un-falsifiable, and never mind that such a multiverse would itself require exquisite fine-tuning in order to generate even one life-sustaining universe.

"Thus, this mother of all just-so stories is not only unsubstantiated and unsubstantiatable, it merely moves the fine tuning problem back a step, out of sight and out of mind. And yet it's tolerated and even embraced because, as Lewontin further explains, 'we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.'"

Witt concludes by reviewing "some nakedly misleading arguments against intelligent design" which continually spout forth "out of the flatland of materialism." Touchstone, Mar/Apr '15, pp40-43. <www.goo.gl/Ylp1V5>

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