Page 14 - RD (English) - Sample

6 IntroductIon

discussion – in particular, studies of consciousness, parapsychological
phenomena, inspiration, and evidence pointing to a conscious self that
can exist apart from matter. Some may consider this a risky step, but
upon examination one finds much high-quality scientific evidence in
this field that opens a window on a nonphysical yet still observable real-
ity. This, of course, can have great implications for how we understand
the nature of life.
Finally, in the book’s last chapter, I try to weave all these disparate
strands of evidence together into a whole. Evidence never stands alone
in science; it must be interpreted into a broader theoretical framework,
often called a paradigm. For most modern biologists, the guiding par-
adigm is Darwin’s theory of evolution. In the words of evolutionary
biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900–1975), “Nothing in biology
makes sense except in the light of evolution” and “There are no alterna-
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tives to evolution as history that can withstand critical examination.”
In this book’s last chapter, I take up Dobzhansky’s challenge and pro-
pose such an alternative.
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As I have said, I have drawn my paradigm from the Vedas, the
ancient Sanskrit writings of Hindu India. From the viewpoint of mod-
ern science, the Vedic literature, apart from its philosophical con-
tent, records some astonishingly accurate details about the universe.
Astrophysicist Carl Sagan (1934–1996) noted in his book Cosmos:

The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths
dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an
immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths.
It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond to
those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our
ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 bil-
lion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and
about half the time since the Big Bang. 7

Of course, that the ages of the earth and the universe given in the Vedic
literature roughly coincide with the figures discovered by modern