Question from :
What would be your best argument against someone using the Unpanishads and Quantum Physics as a justification for their belief in God?
Answer by SmartLX:
For those like me who may never have seen the word before, The Unpanishads are the source of a lot of central Hindu concepts. The doctrines behind this particular justification concern the importance of consciousness and awareness to the universe, and the timelessness of certain entities. The argument is that these correspond to the observer effect in quantum mechanics and the general unchanging nature of the fundamental physics of the universe. Here’s an example of an article making this point.
This fits into the general category of a claim of divine foreknowledge. The appropriate category in my article on prophecies and predictions is #4: Shoehorned, because people are taking established science and fitting it to the most relevant parts of a religious text after the fact. No one read the Upanishads and realised as a result that observing individual particles of light would affect how they appeared. Nor does anyone expect to be able to scrutinise the Upanishads now and find new practical details that will advance science any further.
The major complication for someone actually using this as an argument for their particular god is the existence of a huge number of arguments along the same lines using both Christian and Muslim scripture. I’ve covered many of these separately and as a group. A Hindu (or Buddhist or Jainist, since they also use the Unpanishads to a degree) would have to explain why there’s so much similarly accurate-looking material in mutually exclusive texts, or make the effort to debunk everyone else’s claims. Christians in particular have worked to do just that.
3 thoughts on “Scripture Outpaces Science Again (Hindu this time)”
Comments are closed.
No other document has the preeminence of the Bible. Men who doubted the Bible have either been laid to rest having predicted the Bible’s demise, or they have been enfolded within it’s history as having accepted it’s Author as God and they became His children. The Bible needs no one to defend the writings within it, for they have sustained the march of the truth of God since it began and emboldened the Church of Christ to win souls straight from the jaws of Hell itself. One needs only to read the truth of love written therein and his life becomes for the better. That is the testimony of the living Word of God in itself. It leaves no one the same once it is read. But the voice of God has been heard in the past telling .of what was to come and although unbelievers have thrown their time and money to disprove that what it predicted had been written years later, they have had to hang their heads in shame because they had only given more reason to believe that the Bible is God’s voice and that we should heed it’s teachings and embrace the call the Christ gives to all, to come unto Him and believe. Here is something that one site put together to help us know truth.”http://peace-of-mind.net/prediction.htm”
Bible prophecies have correctly predicted events in secular history.
Predictions about political events borne out in history.
Political events Bible reference ©Year Prophesied Fulfillment.
This is the beginning of this site. Please check into it. Many previous Atheists have considered that the necessity to disprove these prophecies dire so to disprove the uncanny accuracy of the Bible. The Atheists of today pale in comparison to those of yesteryear. Many of the Atheists simply scoff and deny their is a God, but fail to dig deep into the Bible to become astounded at what the Bible has written so many years before it actually happened. The Atheist of today, haven’t even bothered to check into these prophecies. Yet there have even been Atheists who when the Bible said it would not happen again, they devoted their lives to disprove what the Bible said and they died never have fulfilled that attempt. The Bible has a text where God challenges to come and reason with Him. As I said before, God puts Himself on the line to any and all who would to come and allow Him to reveal Himself to them. That He is not a fairytale God, But the God who would be your God. So, what are you waiting for. Do you want to disprove Him. Go to this site I mentioned and check out the prophecies. Then go to this next site and peruse those who tried to disprove the Bible and God and who have sunk unto unto the unknowness of history or who have declared that there is God who reveals the future through His book the Bible.
“http://askawiseman.com/skeptics/”
“5 Skeptics Who Tried to Disprove Christianity (and got saved)!
by Jim Graham on April 11, 2013
Here are 5 examples of respected skeptics who set out to disprove Christianity, yet through their research actually became Christians.
1. Sir William Mitchell Ramsay was a highly respected archaeologist (so much so that he was knighted) from Scotland. He set out to prove the historical inaccuracies of the book of Acts. Ramsay thought this book was the most ridiculous of all the New Testament. 15 years he spent researching and digging, only to end up being convinced of the incredible accuracy of the book, converted to Christianity, and called Luke (who wrote Acts) one of the greatest historians to ever live. His has written several books on the subject, which have yet to be refuted. His work caused an outcry from atheists because they had been eagerly awaiting his results in disproving the validity of the book.
2. Frank Morrison was an English journalist and author who set out to disprove the myth of Christianity over over 80 years ago. His book “Who moved the stone?” is a classic and has led many people to Christ.
3. Lee Strobel was a journalist for the Chicago Tribune who set out to disprove Christianity, but ended up becoming a Christian and created the famous “Case for…” series.
4. Josh McDowell set out to write a paper in college to expose Christianity as a myth, but ended up being so convinced that he became a Christian himself and wrote the influential book “Evidence that Demands a Verdict”.
5. Andre Kole was a giant in the world of magic, creating tricks for the greatest magicians in the world including making the statue of liberty disappear for David Copperfield. He was commissioned to study the miracles of the bible to expose them as magic tricks and thus disprove its legitimacy. Through this investigation, Andre Kole became a Christian and has since dedicated himself to spreading the Gospel via the art of magic, performing in more countries than any other magician in history.”
“http://www.wayoflife.org/reports/men_who_were_converted_trying_to_disprove_2.html”
Here is another site. Atheist friend. I wouldn’t go to these sites unless you really want to be a believer. Because you will be wowed. And start asking how can this world our great country, could allow so many lies be told about the Bible and cause so many to go without God’s councel when is it is free and so life changing.
“http://blog.godreports.com/2015/03/nih-director-turned-from-atheism-to-god-as-he-contemplated-science/”
“http://bnugent.org/rich-men-seek-to-disprove-bible-but-prove-it-true/#comment-65
Whether or not the Bible needs defending, it’s got an army of defenders and it has for centuries. You should know, you’re part of the army. The Bible survives because billions of people read it; any book would. It would survive even if every part of it were proven untrue, because it would be an important piece of literature that shaped about two thousand years of history. Therefore its survival says nothing about its accuracy.
There’s never enough time to go through everything on a list that extensive, but why not pick out one or two of your favourites and examine them with regard to my piece on prophecies, linked above? Confirm that none of the categories there apply to them (pay special attention to “Shoehorned”), then lay them out here and we’ll take a look.
Of the five converts named in your excerpt, I’m most familiar with McDowell and Strobel, but from covering their arguments pretty thoroughly and regularly I’ve learned that people can change their minds from right to wrong, and for bad reasons. A similar list of converts from theism to atheism would include many well-known atheists (including Richard Dawkins and former preacher Dan Barker), simply because the majority in Western nations is theistic. What’s important is the reasons they give, and if those don’t stand up by themselves the people giving them are irrelevant. Frank Morrison’s rationale, for instance, presumes that most every non-supernatural part of the Gospels is true before asking the question about the central miracle, and few non-believers will follow him that far.
Hindu religious literature is astoundingly complicated. There are 4 core texts – the 4 vedas. There are around 200 or so Upanishads embedded within the core vedas. And then there are the Puranas (legends, folklore regarding the various deities) as well as epics written allegedly by sages (Ramayana, Mahabharata etc.).
The Upanishads contain philosophico-spiritual doctrines based on the core 4 vedic texts. They can be viewed as interpretations or expansions of the vedic texts.
The six main schools of Hinduism (two of which are distinctly atheistic i.e. they do not believe in a personal god or deity or creator but they do believe in following the practices prescribed in the vedas/ derived from the vedas) plus the 3 additional schools of Carvaka, Jainism, Buddhism are all inspired by the Upanishads to some degree (non-violence, Karma, ideas on ethics & morality etc. are all ideas expounded in the Upanishads).
Reading some Upanishads and Vedic literature, one does see a certain depth in philosophical inquiry and thought in these texts.
But these texts – though sublime in parts – do not touch or talk at all about modern science. They are intuitive and speculative, philosophical texts.
Some of the philosophical ideas in Upanishads may match modern views here and there. But like any other speculative philosophy, there are ideas in them that are a bit fantastic and not in sync with modern science at all.
Anyone using the Upanishads to justify god belief is on tenuous ground. He/ She is using speculative metaphysics to justify views held by them about the nature of reality.
I’d stick to concrete scientific fact for that.