My Science, My Religion: Academic Papers (1994-2009)

494 Pages·2012·2.508 MB·English

by  Michael A. Cremo

MY SCIENCE, MY RELIGION

Academic Papers (1994-2009)
MICHAEL A. CREMO
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
1. Puranic Time and the Archeological Record
2. The Reception of Forbidden Archeology
3. The City of Nine Gates
4. Alfred Russel Wallace and the Supernatural
5. Divine Nature
6. The Later Discoveries of Boucher de Perthes
7. Famous Scientists and the Paranormal
8. Forbidden Archeology of the Early and Middle Pleistocene
9. Forbidden Archeology of the Paleolithic
10. Forbidden Archeology: The Royal Institution Lecture
11. Forbidden Archeology: A Three-Body Interaction Among
Science, Hinduism, and Christianity
12. The Discoveries of Carlos Ribeiro
13. Paleobotanical Anomalies Bearing on the Age of the Salt Range
Formation of Pakistan
14. The Discoveries of Aime Louis Rutot at Boncelles, Belgium
15. The Nineteenth Century California Gold Mine Discoveries
16. The Mayapur Pilgrimage Place, West Bengal, India
17. Human Devolution: A Consciousness-Based Vedic Alternative
to Materialistic Evolution
18. Excavating the Eternal
19. Beijing Man and the Rockefeller Foundation: An Episode in
the Globalization of Science in the Early 20th Century
20. Forbidden Archeology: Archeological Evidence for Extreme
Human Antiquity and Implications for Education Policy
21. Finding Krishna
22. The Forbidden Zone
23. An Insider’s View of a Fringe Archeology
24. Temple as Body, Body as Temple
torchlight
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Readers interested in the subject matter of this book are invited to
correspond with the author at:
Bhaktivedanta Book Publishing Inc.
9701 Venice Blvd. Apt. 3 Los Angeles, CA 90034, USA or
[email protected]
Copyright © 2012 Michael A. Cremo
All rights reseved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including
mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the
prior written consent of the publisher.
Published by Bhaktivedanta Book Publishing, Inc. Science Books Division
Exclusively distributed by Torchlight Publishing, Inc.
P. O. Box 52, Badger, CA 93603, USA www.torchlight.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cremo, Michael A.,
1948-
My science, my religion : academic papers (1994-2009) / Michael A.
Cremo. p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-89213-395-6 1. Religion and science--Congresses. I. Title.
BL240.3.C747 2012 201’.65--dc23
2012010498
I dedicate this book to the scientists and scholars who have accepted
my papers for presentation at major international conferences on
archeology, anthropology, history of science, and religious studies, who
have listened to me at those conferences, who have reviewed my books in
their professional journals, and who have invited me to speak at their
universities and institutes.
Front Matter_CS55_06-26-2012.indd 6
6/26/12 7:48 PM
INTRODUCTION

This book is a collection of papers that I have presented at major
international conferences on archeology, anthropology, consciousness
studies, history of science, and history of religion. Presenting the papers has
been an interesting experience for me, as well as for many of the scientists
and scholars who have heard me. It is not every day that one sees someone
like me making presentations at science conferences. I don’t have a PhD,
and I openly position myself as someone who looks at the world of science
from a religious perspective.
There are many people who believe that science and religion are two
entirely separate domains. This is especially true of those influenced by
positivism, which holds that real knowledge can only be obtained through
positive verification of ideas by material sense evidence. According to
positivists, and similar schools of thought, science and religion should not
mix. I disagree with that point of view. Science and religion have often
mixed, as many historians of science are now recognizing. In their preface
to Science in Theistic Contexts: Cognitive Dimensions, historians of science
John Hedley Brooke, Margaret J. Osler, and J. M. van der Meer say (2001,
p. vii): “As recently as twenty years ago, when scholars were in the thrall of
positivism in its various forms, they emphasized the separateness of science
and religion. . . . Today the history of science is no longer dominated by
positivist assumptions. Social, cultural, economic, political, philosophical,
and religious factors have all been shown to be intimately connected with
the growth, support, and even conceptual development of science" It is a
modern myth that religion and science have nothing to do with each other.
Einstein (1954, p. 46) famously said, “Science without religion is lame,
religion without science is blind"
To speak generically of “science" and “religion" as things that really
exist on their own, and in some general opposing relationship, is not really
justified. If we look at the history of science and religion, we see that there
have been many scientific views of the world, and similarly we find that
there is a great variety of expressions of religion. We also find that many
times the two overlap, but not always in the same way. Historians of science
John Hedley Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor (1998, p. 45), in their book
Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion, propose
that “the perceived relation between science and religion depends on how
both of these terms are defined, when, and by whom" They remind us that
in discussions of science and religion we must always ask “whose science?"
and “whose religion?" And that is why I have titled this book My Science,
My Religion. Scientists and historians of science can take this book as a
case study of how a particular individual with a particular religious
perspective has integrated that perspective into his presentations to
members of scientific disciplines concerned with human origins, history,
and culture, at professional gatherings of those disciplines. This collection
of papers certainly demonstrates that religious perspectives on scientific
questions do have a presence in contemporary scientific discourse.
So what exactly are my science and my religion, and what is their
relationship? As a start to providing some necessarily incomplete answers
to those questions, let me offer a few brief and selective autobiographical
reflections. In terms of religion, I was born in the United States of America,
in an Italian-American family, and I was raised as a Roman Catholic. I was
baptized and confirmed in the Church. Most of my education, however, was
in secular schools. My father was an officer in the United States Air Force,
and our family moved from base to base in the continental United States
and abroad. In the early 1950s, I lived in Hawaii. In my elementary school
classrooms there, I was exposed to children from a wide variety of racial,
cultural, and religious backgrounds. I see that as a key formative
experience.
From 1962 to 1965, I lived in Wiesbaden, Germany, and attended the
American military high school there. I was not much interested in science.
Although I took the required science and math courses, I was more
interested in foreign languages, literature, and history. My father was at the
time an intelligence officer. The parents of some of my friends were also
employed in civilian or military intelligence services or in the diplomatic
service. When thinking about a future career and the education necessary
for it, I naturally thought of the diplomatic service or one of the intelligence
services. I also had ambitions to be a writer, a novelist or poet. I did not
think deeply about or question the main features of the modern scientific
worldview, such as the theory of evolution by natural selection.
In 1966, I entered the George Washington University in Washington,
D. C., in the program for international relations. In addition to taking
courses in foreign languages and political science, I took courses in
philosophy and literature. My faith, career ambitions, and educational plan
did not survive my exposure to the growing antiwar and counterculture
movements of the time. Although I never renounced my Catholicism, my
spiritual interests turned to Eastern religions and the more esoteric
manifestations of Western religion. I could no longer imagine myself
entering government service. I also became dissatisfied with the knowledge
factory aspects of the formal university education system, which I left after
a couple of years. I wanted to discover truth within myself by some
meditative process, and then find some way to exist in the world, with the
help of a personal guide. I was not questioning any particular scientific
theories, but I felt a general aversion to an exclusive materialism.
After some time, in 1973, I took up a process of meditation (Hare
Krishna mantra meditation) from one of the religious traditions in India. As
recommended by this tradition, I also began studying one of the main texts
of Indian spirituality, the Bhagavad-gita, which propounds a theistic
worldview, encompassing not just spiritual realities but also the relationship
of such realities to the world of matter. I became a disciple of a guru in this
tradition, His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta
Swami Prabhupada (1896-1977). Bhaktivedanta Swami had founded a
society (the International Society for Krishna Consciousness), which
included temple and ashrama communities for students of the tradition. I
began living in these communities. Part of life in the Society is devotional
service, according to one’s talents. Because I had some talent as a writer, I
was invited to participate in the publishing activities of the Society. I wrote
articles (for Back to Godhead, the Society’s magazine) and helped write
some jointly authored small books on topics such as meditation (Chant and
Be Happy), spiritual vegetarianism (The Higher Taste), reincarnation
(ComingBack), and spiritual ecology (Divine Nature) for the Bhaktivedanta
Book Trust (BBT).
In 1984, the BBT managers asked me to assist Richard L. Thompson,
another disciple of Bhaktivedanta Swami, in producing publications giving
the tradition’s spiritual perspective on scientific questions. Thompson had a
PhD in mathematics from Cornell University. He was a founding member
of the Bhaktivedanta Institute, which Bhaktivedanta Swami had set up in
1974 to examine scientific questions from the perspective of the tradition.
This perspective is rooted in India’s Vedic literature, which includes not
only the original four Vedas but also related works such as the Vedanta
Sutra, the Upanishads, the Puranas, and epic works such as the
Mahabharata. I worked with Richard to produce a publication called
Origins: Higher Dimensions in Science.
Prior to this, I had been aware that Bhaktivedanta Swami opposed
many features of the modern scientific worldview, especially the idea that
life comes from chemicals, the Darwinian theory of evolution, the Big Bang
theory of the origin of the universe, and the idea that consciousness is
produced by the brain. But I had not been very interested in these things,
preferring to focus on what seemed to me to be the more purely spiritual
aspects of the tradition. However, my involvement in this new project
caused me to give more attention to the relationship of the tradition to
modern science.
Thompson had for years thought deeply about this, and had produced
some scientific writings expressing his ideas, such as his book Mechanistic
and Nonmechanistic Science. The BBT managers wanted me to put these
ideas into language more suitable for general readers. My method was to sit
with Thompson and question him deeply about his ideas on various science
topics. From Thompson I learned—in considerable detail—about the latest
scientific ideas on the origin of the universe, life, and consciouness. I also
absorbed from him his views of the shortcomings of these ideas. Beyond
that he proposed alternative ideas consistent with the teachings of the
tradition, as it was represented by Bhaktivedanta Swami. We had lengthy
discussions about the importance of these scientific topics within the
intellectual framework of our spiritual tradition. And then I wrote articles,
which he reviewed, for inclusion in Origins. The process of producing
Origins took about a year from beginning to end. For me, it amounted to an
intensive course in science and religion supervised by a scientist who was
also a religionist.
Thompson wanted to expand each of the articles I wrote for Origins
into a book. I was given the topic of the fossil evidence for human origins
to work on first. According to modern science, humans like us first came
into existence less than 200,000 years ago. However, the Puranas, the
historical writings of the Vedic tradition, present a picture of extreme
human antiquity, with a human presence going back many millions of years
to the very beginnings of life on earth. According to traditional sources, as
given and represented by Bhaktivedanta Swami, the statements of the Vedic
literature, including the Puranas, are to be accepted literally, except when
the statements are presented in the texts themselves as allegorical. The
statements about extreme human antiquity are not presented in the texts as
allegorical.
So, accepting that there are statements in the Puranas about extreme
human antiquity, and accepting that these statements should be taken
literally, there arises a question: Is there any physical evidence for such
extreme human antiquity? This question arises primarily in the context of
the modern scientific account of human origins. If I were discussing human
antiquity in a gathering of coreligionists, who accepted the authority of the
statements of the Puranas, I could, as evidence for extreme human
antiquity, simply give statements from the Puranas.
According to the Vedic tradition, there are three main kinds of
evidence: pratyaksha (sense evidence), anumana (logical inference), and
shabda (authoritative testimony, i.e. scriptural statements). Shabda literally
means “sound" Vedic knowledge, according to the traditional sources that
inform my work, originally exists in the form of eternal sound, which enters
the material world, where it may be expressed in written form, texts. Some
of the Vedic statements are about the spiritual domain of reality, beyond
sense evidence and logic. But some of the Vedic statements are about
material reality, the domain of sense evidence and inference. Sense
evidence is uncertain because of the imperfect nature of the senses.
Inference is also uncertain, because of the tendency of the human mind to
commit mistakes, become illusioned, and cheat or become the victim of
cheating. Because shabda emanates, according to the tradition, from an
omniscient source, it is considered trustworthy. Therefore the statements in
the Vedic texts about material reality are ultimately more reliable than sense
evidence and logical inference, according to Bhaktivedanta Swami and
teachers in the line of the tradition to which he belonged (Gaudiya
Vaishnavism). There are other opinions, within the broader Vedic tradition
and within the academic world, about the authority of texts like the Puranas
with reference to material reality. But here I am representing the voices
within the tradition that have informed “my science, my religion."
In the realm of modern science, scriptural statements are not accepted
as evidence. Modern science relies primarily on pratyaksha and anumana,
sense evidence and logical inference. A scriptural statement can, however,
be presented in scientific circles, not as evidence itself but as an idea that
can be tested by sense evidence and logical inference. In science, it should
make no difference what the source of the idea is, just as long as it is
justified on the basis of sense evidence and appropriate logical inferences
from this evidence.
The idea that I was trying to justify in terms of physical evidence and
inference was the idea of extreme human antiquity, as found in the Puranas.
I spent eight years researching the primary scientific literature dealing with
human origins. I found in the primary scientific literature, from the time of
Darwin up to the present, many credible cases of archeological evidence for
extreme human antiquity, which I collected and compiled. The result was
the book Forbidden Archeology. During those eight years of study, I
discussed the results of my research on a regular basis with Thompson. And
gradually I produced a manuscript. On completing it, I showed it to
Thompson, and he reviewed it, after which I made some modifications.
Thompson’s contribution was such that I thought he should be coauthor,
although he had originally suggested to me that I should be the sole author.
Thompson told me that my work in producing the book was in some ways
similar to writing a doctoral dissertation, with him as advisor.
The book was intended for a scientific audience. It was reviewed in
many of the professional journals of archeology, anthropology, and history
of science. Although some reviewers were harshly critical, some were
appreciative. The book was intended to open a dialog between modern
scientists and representatives of the religious tradition to which I belong.
And to some limited extent it succeeded in doing that.
I also decided to personally enter into the scientific arena, to present
the ideas in the book. One may wonder why I thought I should enter the
world of science at all, attempting to justify scriptural statements in terms of
material evidence and inference. The simple answer is that my guru,
Bhaktivedanta Swami, said it should be done. I am not a professional
scientist or academic, but I seem to know just enough about their discourse
to be able to communicate with them, just as one might know a foreign
language just well enough to get along. It is a credit to the community of