03.02.06
Dennett, Nanda vs the Hindus
I put up a post on Meera Nanda in relation to Sam Harris and Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, whose title comes from Nanda’s Breaking the Spell of Dharma: Postmodernism, Hindu nationalism and `Vedic science’;
The mixing up of the mythos of the Vedas with the logos of science must be of great concern not just to the scientific community, but also to the religious people, for it is a distortion of both science and spirituality.
In many ways this initiative has my wholehearted support, but reactionary Hinduism is too easy a target to settle the questions of science and religion.
As with the struggles with monotheistic fundamentalism, conflicts with fundamentalist Hinduism throw everything out of whack. Science ends up with a position that is as weak as what it opposes. Say what you will about Hinduism the reality remains that the Indian tradition, drop the term ‘hinduism’ has a massive amount of knowledge on the subject of consciousness, meditation, ‘evolutionary psychology’, and the rest of it. For modern science to categorically reject all of this point blank and wish to substitute Dennettian analyses of religion is a strategy so pitifully wrongheaded it makes reactionary Hindus almost look smart.
One of the most ludicrous mantras of Hindutva propaganda is that there is “no conflict” between modern science and Hinduism. In reality, everything we know about the workings of nature through the methods of modern science radically disconfirms the presence of any morally significant gunas, or shakti, or any other form of consciousness in nature, as taught by the Vedic cosmology which treats nature as a manifestation of divine consciousness. Far from there being “no conflict” between science and Hinduism, a scientific understanding of nature completely and radically negates the “eternal laws” of Hindu dharma which teach an identity between spirit and matter. That is precisely why the Hindutva apologists are so keen to tame modern science by reducing it to “simply another name for the One Truth” – the “one truth” of Absolute Consciousness contained in Hinduism’s own classical texts.