My Science My Religion Read online

  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

  publishing

  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.

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  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 regula
r 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 modern scientists that they are open to including nonprofessionals with a religions orientation in their discourse, as long as such persons justify their ideas with sense evidence and logic rather than just scriptural authority.

  My first presentation at a scientific conference was my paper “Puranic Time and the Archaeological Record.” I read this paper in a section on time and archeology at the World Archaeological Congress 3, held in 1994 in New Delhi, India. The paper was selected for inclusion in a peer-reviewed conference proceedings volume, published by Routledge (Cremo 1999). It was a good beginning for this part of my work. In the following years, I presented many such papers, based on my research into archeological evidence for extreme human antiquity, at conferences on archeology and history of science. Most of the papers in this volume are of this type. There is some repetition of material in them.