Saturday, September 15, 2012

Creation doesn't necessarily have to conflict with evolution

Image courtesy: smithsonianmag.com
I see endless debates between creationists and evolutionists, and have always felt that there doesn't necessarily have to be a debate.

Usually it's a Christian church vs atheist debate, where the atheist pooh-poos the Christian theory of God creating the world over a few days, due in part to the existence of fossils that suggest evolution over millions of years.

Hindu traditions have theistic theories of creation that do not necessarily go headlong against evolution. The 4 yugas, starting with the pristine Satya yuga, play out endlessly in a cycle of creation and destruction over a period of millions of years.

Vishnu, on Lakshmi's urging, creates the universe, and in it the planets and stars, from primordial matter (jada) and puts some of the endless numbers of souls (jeevas) into a cycle of birth and death, starting with Brahma, who is delegated this task. Several puranas describe different aspects of how the universe ('bhoogola', 'brahmaanda') and the elements, and so on, are created. The souls themselves are said to progress from lower forms of life, such as microbes, and on to higher forms of life, such as mammals and ultimately human. The souls, of course, all are said to be given 'equal opportunity', a fixed number of (something in the lakhs) births through which they do 'saadhana' (a process of self-realization) and progress on to their rightful destination.

The puranas and the Ramayana and Mahabharata describe men of different heights and gaits that we see today, ape-men ('vaanaras in the Ramayana'), fruits and vegetables, and other food items such as rice and mustard of different sizes, indicating that there has been evolution through the yugas.

None of what the puranas and other epics in the Hindu tradition describe need fit exactly well with our current geological evidence and scientific understanding, for we learn something new every day. Our interpretations of the puranas and epics may also not be accurate, due to missing portions or the lack of tools necessary to unambiguously interpret ancient (even somewhat recent) works. And, of course, the 18 puranas have conflicting accounts of the same events, making reconciliation difficult.

Still, that an omnipotent God could not 'create' by setting off an evolutionary process, is a major weakness in the Christian theory of evolution, which has allowed the prolonging of the creation vs evolution debate, and made the atheist position stronger by default.