Go here to see it on Youtube.

Having presented points of agreement with Professor Richard Dawkins, I am now going to present points of difference.

These are not in the area of evolutionary biology, which is Professor Dawkin's area of authority, and not mine, but rather in the area of metaphysical conclusions that Professor Dawkins presents, extending his research into other areas of human concern. In this area and these conclusions he is joined by other notable contemporary philosophers and rhetoricians such as Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens.

I will not quote their arguments verbatim, as I do not have access to all the literature to do so "chapter and verse". I will present the broad structure of their arguments, basing it mainly on the "Atheist Pocket Debater" app for iPhone - a preaching resource for secular humanists that is inspired by the thinking and argument of these modern exponents of scientific atheism.

The first argument that I will examine is the Argument of First Cause.

This argument states that the universe must have a cause, because something does not come from nothing, and therefore God must exist to have created it.

Dawkins rightly points out that arguing that something must have a cause, because nothing comes from nothing, actually argues against the existence of God.

If the universe must have come from somewhere, because nothing can come from nothing, then where does God come from? Nowhere?

Dawkins would say that positing the existence of God is simply removing the problem of origin of existence to the next level.

The response to this is to say that God is eternally existing, and has no beginning or end.

The extension of Dawkins' argument would be to say: "If you say that something cannot come from nothing, and you're going to say that something exists eternally, why not just say that the universe, which we can see does exist, is eternally existing, and has no need of a transcendent creator, who is a speculation from the empirical point of view?"

This is the application of Occam's razor, the scientific principle of choosing the simplest explanation when in doubt, to the First Cause Argument. This argument for the existence of God has the fatal weakness that Dawkins has pointed out and that I have expanded by applying Occam's razor. Dawkins and company like to use this refutation of the argument from First Cause as an argument against the existence of God, but it is a refutation of the First Cause argument, not a refutation of God's existence.

You cannot establish reality on the basis of argumentation, but you can influence what people think, and as a result what they do with their lives.

Now for where the Vedic school differs from this.

The First Cause Argument is not Vedic, and you will never hear me use it. According to the Vedic worldview, the manifested universe is eternal and beginningless (anadi). Whatever exists has always existed and will always exist. Whatever does not exist will never come into existence. Existence is eternal.

Those who are seers of the truth have concluded that of the nonexistent there is no endurance and of the eternal there is no change. This they have concluded by studying the nature of both.

- Bhagavad-gita 2/16

Sat means eternal. Bhavah means coming into being. That which is eternal does not come into being. That which comes into being does not exist.

So both the material universe and the Supreme Lord are eternally existing. There is no argument from First Cause for the existence of God in the Vedic worldview, because the Vedic worldview does not agree with the scientific perspective that this world came into existence from a previous state of non-existence. It's that point of agreement between Christian philosophy and modern science that gives rise to both the First Cause argument and its fatal flaw.

Just to elaborate on this Vedic idea of eternal existence and coming into being.

Just remaining within our immediate experience here - we can see that the material elements have persistence but manifestations of categories do not.

As an example, the elements of the material body have persistence - from dirt to plants, to bodies, to reproduction, to death, to dirt - the cycle of life uses and reuses the same elements, recycling them over and over again. Apparently at this point we all have some atoms in us that were in Shakespeare's body.

However, the material body itself is not persistent. The elements of your body do not have a beginning, but your body does. In the Vedic worldview this means that your body does not exist. It is like a shadow or the flicker of a candle. Does the "flicker of a candle" really exist, or is it merely the transient side effect of some other more substantial underlying manifestation - the flame?

The Vedic idea is that the body and the life we are now experiencing is like the "flicker of the candle", and that underlying it is a more substantial reality. Each of the material bodies is transient, however the underlying elements are persistent, and the "archetype", if you like, of the human body is also persistent, though not always manifested.

Just like I may have a cookie cutter and some cookie dough. With the cookie cutter I stamp out a gingerbread man. The gingerbread man is then eaten. He's gone. Temporary. However, with an unlimited supply of cookie dough (the persistent material elements), and the cookie cutter (the archetype of the form), the substance and the form are both be persistent while each manifestation is only the temporary coming together of the two.

In the same way, eternal elements combine together to give rise to a temporary manifestation - our body and our life in it. According to the Vedic world view this is as substantial as the temporary transient effect of the flickering of a candle.

If we focus on the temporary combination of the form and substance into the human body, and engross our consciousness in that, we find the sands of time slipping through our fingers, and the illusion is dispelled - the fog lifts, the clouds disperse, the candle flickers again, and it is all over.

The real use of this human form of life - the temporary coming together of the material elements, the archetypical form of the human body and mind, and our consciousness of that wave on the eternal ocean of becoming and unbecoming (bhava-sindhu), is to understand this and strive to understand our real nature:

What is it that is conscious of and experiencing this eternal ocean of becoming and unbecoming, of eternally temporary transformations of eternal matter?

Having attained this very rare form of human birth, we should make sure to realise its true worth by seeking after our eternal nature. Even if it turns out that there is nothing beyond an eternally existing universe and a temporary life as some chemicals thinking they are a person, as a materialist would argue, we have nothing to lose....

And the atheist's take on that argument, Pascal's wager, I will look at next.

In the meantime, you can read more about the First Cause Argument here.

Just started.

Listen to it live here: Kirtan Australia Internet Radio

We need a "no mercy" harinam program. ;-)

Note: My "Devotional Dawkins" series of posts is not designed to prove or even assert the factual correctness of either Dawkins' Darwinian narrative or the Vedic worldview narrative. Its purpose is to demonstrate that there are significant points of congruence between the two. Caveat Lector. And on with today's post...

It is often thought clever to say that science is no more than our modern origin myth. The Jews had their Adam and Eve, the Sumerians their Marduk and Gilgamesh, the Greeks Zeus and the Olympians, the Norsemen their Valhalla. What is evolution, some smart people say, but our modern equivalent of gods and epic heroes, neither better nor worse, neither truer nor falser? There is a fashionable salon philosophy called cultural relativism which holds, in its extreme form, that science has no more claim to truth than tribal myth: science is just the mythology favored by our modern Western tribe. I once was provoked by an anthropologist colleague into putting the point starkly, as follows: Suppose there is a tribe, I said, who believe that the moon is an old calabash tossed into the sky, hanging only just out of reach above the treetops. Do you really claim that our scientific truth — that the moon is about a quarter of a million miles away and a quarter the diameter of the Earth — is no more true than the tribe's calabash? “Yes,” the anthropologist said. “We are just brought up in a culture that sees the world in a scientific way. They are brought up to see the world in another way. Neither way is more true than the other.”

Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I'll show you a hypocrite. Airplanes built according to scientific principles work. They stay aloft, and they get you to a chosen destination. Airplanes built to tribal or mythological specifications, such as the dummy planes of the cargo cults in jungle clearings or the beeswaxed wings of Icarus, don't. If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists or literary critics, the reason you will probably get there — the reason you don't plummet into a ploughed field — is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their sums right.

- River out of Eden, Richard Dawkins, p. 31-32

A nice example of Richard Dawkins doing what he does best - arguing in a cogent, entertaining, memorable and widely-accessible way.

In my copy of the audio book, which Richard Dawkins personally narrates, he goes on to say:

This is not the first time I have used this knock-down argument, and I must stress that it is aimed strictly at people who think like my colleague of the calabash. There are others who, confusingly, also call themselves cultural relativists, although their views are completely different, and perfectly sensible. To them, cultural relativism just means that you cannot understand a culture if you try to interpret its beliefs in terms of your own culture. You have to see each of the culture's beliefs in the context of the culture's other beliefs. I suspect this sensible form of cultural relativism is the original one, and that the one I've criticised is an extremist, though alarmingly common perversion of it. Sensible relativists should work harder to distance themselves from the fatuous kind.

I don't agree with all of Richard Dawkins' conclusions, but I do admire his intellectual rigour, his clarity, and his intellectual honesty.

Dawkins will lay the "cultural relativist smack" down hard when he feels he needs to - for example in the video below. This use of the argument is public debate, so it's more populist than the carefully measured argument he makes above.

What he is doing here, pre-emptively I must add, is defusing what he perceives as an attempt to inject another cultural context into the conversation he is having within the cultural context of modern science. You hear the murmuring of the crowd when the question is asked? That's Dawkin's signal to go on the offensive to keep the crowd (and note the rock star applause he gets at the end - classic). However, we can see from the above statement that he is not opposed in principle, and in fact thinks it a good idea, to analyse cultural belief systems as a gestalt - a complete whole.

This sensible approach to understanding an unfamiliar system of thought is echoed in A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada's introduction to his commentary on Bhagavad-gita, called Bhagavad-gita As It Is:

So according to the statements of Bhagavad-gita or the statements of Arjuna, the person who is trying to understand the Bhagavad-gita, we should at least theoretically accept Sri Krishna as the Supreme Personality of Godhead, and with that submissive spirit we can understand the Bhagavad-gita. Unless one reads the Bhagavad-gita in a submissive spirit, it is very difficult to understand Bhagavad-gita, because it is a great mystery.

- Bhagavad-gita As It Is, Bhagavad-gita As It Is

"Submissive" in this sense means suspending critical analysis of the work until all the pieces of the work and their relationship have been grasped, and the work can be considered and critiqued as an integral whole. Readers of Bhagavad-gita who attempt to analyse it piecemeal, without comprehending the gestalt, will be defeated in their attempt to understand it.

I know this, because that is what happened to me. I read through the first three chapters of the book without any problem, but when I hit the fourth chapter, and read a statement that the Bhagavad-gita had been extant in human society for 120 million years, I put the book down, saying: "This is ridiculous". That statement, admittedly, is not in the original text, but is in Prabhupada's comment on a text.

Some time later, by associating with persons who had grokked the metaphysical system expounded in Bhagavad-gita, I was able to again study the work and gain some comprehension of the overall system that it presented.

There is some debate today among students of Bhagavad-gita As It Is as to the effectiveness of Prabhupada's commentary in the contemporary context. Personally I think it is a double-edged sword. Some people find it very beneficial in helping them to understand the Bhagavad-gita, as do I now. In my case, however, the commentary initially ejected me from the book. I find a commentary such as that provided by Swami B.V. Tripurari, Bhagavad-gita, Its Feeling and Philosophy to be more initially accessible, and the one that I would probably recommend for a first read to friends who are intimately familiar with the ins and outs of Dawkins' world view, written as it is with them in mind.

Swami BV Tripurari is a student of Srila Prabhupada, one who has studied Bhagavad-gita As It Is in depth, and produced a commentary in which he wanted to (and I feel he succeeded) preserve the intent of Prabhupada's commentary, while making it more digestible for an audience coming from a modern scientific background, and perhaps lacking the close personal association that made Bhagavad-gita As It Is accessible to me.

My own teacher, Devamrita Swami, frames his presentation of the Bhagavad-gita's metaphysical system, Perfect Escape, in a similar way. I am paraphrasing here from memory, as I do not have the book to hand:

[Update: I located my copy, and it is now verbatim. One thing to note is that the target audience for this argument, and the book itself, are not those influenced by Dawkins, but rather those influenced by 'new age' concepts]

Often contemporary seekers of spirituality look askance at spiritual texts from another era. "Why trouble yourself with the dry bones of previous millennia?" they say. "Those books had value for people then, but not now! All you need for your enlightenment is right there within yourself - here and now. The book is a dead artifact from someone else's distant past, but you are the living truth, at this ever-present moment."

I would like to point out that you can only be aware of something through consciousness - your consciousness. Whether that object seems to be of the past, present, or future, it is, in effect, of your consciousness at the present moment. So there is no need to try to isolate yourself from spiritual classics by artificially exporting them to a lifeless Siberia, a barren terrain "outside of consciousness: commonly known as "the past". Just as you are here, now, so is this transcendental text... why not see if there is some advantage to acknowledging the book's presence - in a reality, of course, that can only be known as you and of you?

- Devamrita Swami, Perfect Escape, p.2

The structure and intent of the argument is the same - the idea is to suspend judgement until the whole picture has been assembled, then treat it as a complete whole.

So in terms of how this information should be approached, as a gestalt - Dawkins and our Vedic spokesman, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada are in agreement.

I don't think that fundamentalist Creationists would be so intellectually liberal as to allow for that. My experience of critiques of both Dawkins and Bhagavad-gita by persons who subscribe to Creationism as a doctrine is that in a majority of cases they have not understood either as a complete whole, but rather try to poke holes in pieces of them, taken out of context. Ted Haggard's statement about the "eye or ear forming accidentally" in Dawkin's video "Root of all Evil" is a classic example of this.

So on this point, I call 100% congruence.

Note: My "Devotional Dawkins" series of posts is not designed to prove or even assert the factual correctness of either Dawkins' Darwinian narrative or the Vedic worldview narrative. Its purpose is to demonstrate that there are significant points of congruence between the two. Caveat Lector. And on with today's post...

One popular strategy of (so-called) "Intelligent Design" advocates is to produce examples that they say prove that biological life forms must be top-down designed, rather than emergent from simple principles.

These examples show the unmistakable intervention of some supernatural power they claim.

Dawkins and other evolutionary biologists do not accept that these examples disprove the evolution of life forms over time in response to environmental pressures and opportunities. Dawkins says that when our ingenuity is unable to divine the evolutionary path taken by a particular adaptation, "so much the worse for our ingenuity" [1].

I put "so-called" in parentheses before the identifier "Intelligent Design" advocates because the Vedic worldview would see occurrences of anomalies in biological design, that which cannot be explained by the normal operation of the universe according to simple fundamental principles (dharma), as evidence of bad (unintelligent) design.

According to the Vedic version:

And yet everything that is created does not rest in Me. Behold My mystic opulence! Although I am the maintainer of all living entities and although I am everywhere, I am not a part of this cosmic manifestation, for My Self is the very source of creation.

- Bhagavad-gita 9.5

In his purport to this verse, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada explains further (my emphasis added in bold):

The Lord says that everything is resting on Him (mat-sthani sarva-bhutani). This should not be misunderstood. The Lord is not directly concerned with the maintenance and sustenance of this material manifestation. Sometimes we see a picture of Atlas holding the globe on his shoulders; he seems to be very tired, holding this great earthly planet. Such an image should not be entertained in connection with Krishna's upholding this created universe. He says that although everything is resting on Him, He is aloof. The planetary systems are floating in space, and this space is the energy of the Supreme Lord. But He is different from space. He is differently situated. Therefore the Lord says, "Although they are situated on My inconceivable energy, as the Supreme Personality of Godhead I am aloof from them." This is the inconceivable opulence of the Lord.

In the Nirukti Vedic dictionary it is said, yujyate 'nena durghateshu karyeshu: "The Supreme Lord is performing inconceivably wonderful pastimes, displaying His energy." His person is full of different potent energies, and His determination is itself actual fact. In this way the Personality of Godhead is to be understood. We may think of doing something, but there are so many impediments, and sometimes it is not possible to do as we like. But when Krishna wants to do something, simply by His willing, everything is performed so perfectly that one cannot imagine how it is being done. The Lord explains this fact: although He is the maintainer and sustainer of the entire material manifestation, He does not touch this material manifestation. Simply by His supreme will, everything is created, everything is sustained, everything is maintained, and everything is annihilated. There is no difference between His mind and Himself (as there is a difference between ourselves and our present material mind) because He is absolute spirit. Simultaneously the Lord is present in everything; yet the common man cannot understand how He is also present personally. He is different from this material manifestation, yet everything is resting on Him. This is explained here as yogam aisvaram, the mystic power of the Supreme Personality of Godhead.

So the universe is not a poorly designed, high maintenance creation, requiring supernatural intervention to keep it running, according to both Dawkins and the Vedic worldview. It is a perfectly integrated autonomous system. You will not find a telling lick of touch-up paint somewhere, no lick-and-stick patchwork, no smoking gun indicating a last minute divine intervention to get a particularly tricky piece of biology to work. In fact, Vedic worldview-subscribers would probably become atheists out of disappointment if such a thing did turn up - what kind of imperfect design would that be?

No, according to the Vedic worldview, and to Dawkins, it's all working perfectly and automatically- and that's real Intelligent Design. Krishna can hit a hole in one from a trillion years away using nothing but a space-time continuum and a handful of cosmic constants.

Congruence on this point with Dawkins: 100%
Congruence on this point with "Intelligent Design" advocates: 0

[1] River out of Eden, Richard Dawkins

Note: My "Devotional Dawkins" series of posts is not designed to prove or even assert the factual correctness of either Dawkins' Darwinian narrative or the Vedic worldview narrative. Its purpose is to demonstrate that there are significant points of congruence between the two. Caveat Lector. And on with today's post...

(W)aged against Dennett, Dawkins and Wilson, are an alliance of creationists, religious fundamentalists, church-goers and rightwing politicians, as well as a rump of scientists who include the US biologist Richard Lewontin, the UK academic Steve Rose, of the Open University, and Stephen Jay Gould, the late palaeontologist and science populariser... Hostilities can be traced to the publication of Wilson's theory of sociobiology 30 years ago. In it, Wilson argues that the make-up of society has a strong genetic component, a controversial notion to say the least.

- "Great minds united in an ungodly trio", Guardian UK

Come on, how can anyone in ISKCON seriously join a crusade against this? This stuff is old school HK smackdown - pure gold!

Hippie: "Surfing is so spiritual, man"
Dawkins: "No it's not - it's an extended phenotype, in other words: sex life."
Classic music appreciator: "Well Bach's music is definitely spiritual"
Dawkins: "Nope, sex life."

According to Dawkins (and Vedic fundamentalists) human society is based on sex life - all material human activities (and most so-called spiritual ones) are genetically (ie: "sex life" in the contemporary Vedic lexicon) based.

The extended phenotype is Dawkins principle contribution to evolutionary science. It is the idea that genes, in their "struggle" for survival, not only influence the biological tissue of the organism, but also its behaviour. It's kind of obvious when you think about it, but the implications are profound.

Non-Vedic-worldview subscribers are very disturbed when the material world, including human society, are reduced to mere genetic ("material" in the Vedic lexicon) status. However, this meshes perfectly with the Vedic worldview's relative assessment of this world. We have a desire to be more than that, because ultimately we are. But I'm sorry, according to both Dawkins and the Vedas, this world is a deterministic one, and we are largely spectators of the interplay of genes as they move through different survival machines.

Once in the body (collection of genes) of a dog, you are forced to live and act as a dog. Humans are another case of this among millions, nay billions of species - not an exception.

The Vedic worldview does offer that humans have the potential to aspire to more than this however, as Dawkins confirms in The Selfish Gene:

So far, I have not talked much about man in particular, though I have not deliberately excluded him either. Part of the reason I have used the term 'survival machine' is that 'animal' would have left out plants and, in some people's minds, humans. The arguments I have put forward should, prima facie, apply to any evolved being. If a species is to be excepted, it must be for good particular reasons. Are there any good reasons for supposing our own species to be unique? I believe the answer is yes.

- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

This brings Richard in short shrift to a discussion of the "God meme":

Consider the idea of God. We do not know how it arose in the meme pool.

- Richard Dawkins, ibid

Richard Dawkins' views on God and religion are another huge motivation for the crusade against him. I would like to point out at this point the very first point that A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, our spokesman for the Vedic worldview, makes in his Srimad Bhagavatam commentary:

The conception of God and the conception of Absolute Truth are not on the same level.

- A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, Srimad Bhagavatam Introduction

Richard Dawkins has not commented extensively, or even at all to my knowledge, on the Vedic worldview, especially its metaphysic. I know how Richard responds to generic religious tradition, or religions with which he is not familiar. He would say something along the lines of: "Well, I could say that you have to believe in the Jabberwocky of the mountain." I know this from studying his public debates, and from debating students of his books.

Dawkins has dealt a significant (some would say fatal) blow to much of Western religion (most of which actually has its roots in the Middle East) and its philosophy. While discussing with students of his thinking I found that they would often cast my presentations of the Vedic world view as another religion in the same vein, and then tilt away with great vigour using the same arguments and lines of reasoning that Dawkins has so effectively used to demolish the rational and empirical underpinnings of Western faith.

However, in doing that they missed the opportunity to discover something unique and valuable in the Vedic worldview. You see, I myself found the Western religious traditions to be lacking in empirical and intellectual rigour, well before Professor Dawkins was on my radar screen. That is not to say that I find them without value, and I know that Professor Dawkins recognises great value within them as well, although we might differ on exactly which aspects of them we find valuable.

In the Vedic world view, however, we find a metaphysic without comparison - one which easily accommodates Dawkins' empirical analysis, agrees with it, and encapsulates it within a wider metaphysical perspective.

Don't get me wrong - the Vedic tradition and its religious aspect are full of "Jabberwockies", and not just one God, but 33 million of them for Dawkins to tilt at if he wishes. But behind that, carried within that cultural covering, is an incredible metaphysical system. It is impossible to know with certainty the precise historical path that lead to its arrival to us today, wonderfully encapsulated in a rich, colourful cultural package - and I totally appreciate the cultural aspects of it, replete as they are with Dungeons and Dragon-type imagery, complete with magic-thread-wearing spell-casters summoning demons from fire. For someone who has a soft spot for the odd Amon Amarth video, and who once considered the Dungeon Masters Guide as essential reading, the Srimad Bhagavatam was really a no-brainer (the web version doesn't hold a candle in this respect to the printed version, with its Devanagari script and amazing pictures).

However, the cultural context and background of the Bhagavatam should not distract us from or blind us to the metaphysical system that it presents. The trappings of Vedic culture, a human culture subject to the same analysis as any human culture, should not eclipse or obscure the unique value that is to be found in the Vedic metaphysical philosophy, laid out in the Upanishads, and summarised in the Vedanta-sutra (and its "natural" - read then-culturally relevant - commentary the Srimad Bhagavatam), and the Bhagavad-gita (also known as the Gitopanisad for its Upanishadic synthesis).

There are plenty of Jabberwockies for Dawkins and his students to invoke and tilt at in the Vedic tradition, but this misses the point.

At its core, empirically the Vedic metaphysical system agrees with Dawkins' observations and conclusions, and provides additional information.

Again, my point is not to prove or even assert the factual nature of either Dawkins' or the Vedic worldview, merely to point out points of congruence.

So to return to the original point: on Wilson's initial barrage that started the war with the religious right - the idea that human society is majorly a product of the deterministic laws of material nature, I call 100% congruence.

"Notions like Selfish Genes, memes, and extended phenotypes are powerful and exciting. They make me think differently. Unfortunately, I spend a lot of time arguing against people who have overinterpreted these ideas. They're too easily misunderstood as explaining more than they do. So you see, this Dawkins is a dangerous guy. Like Marx. Or Darwin."

- Physicist and computer scientist W. Daniel Hillis, quoted in the Edge's The Selfish Gene Thirty Years On special

Note: My "Devotional Dawkins" series of posts is not designed to prove or even assert the factual correctness of either Dawkins' Darwinian narrative or the Vedic worldview narrative. Its purpose is to demonstrate that there are significant points of congruence between the two. Caveat Lector. And on with today's post...

They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines... We are survival machines, robot machines, blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.

- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

According to the Vedic worldview, the body and the mind are material manifestations, and are inextricably linked and interdependent:

The living entity, thus taking another gross body, obtains a certain type of ear, eye, tongue, nose and sense of touch, which are grouped about the mind. He thus enjoys a particular set of sense objects.

- Bhagavad-gita 15.9

The Vedic worldview explains that there is an "observer", who experiences the body and mind and is completely separate from the two. This observer is commonly referred to as "the living entity".

Bodies and their attendant minds are produced by material nature:

Material nature and the living entities should be understood to be beginningless. Their transformations and the modes of matter are products of material nature. Nature is said to be the cause of all material causes and effects, whereas the living entity is the cause of the various sufferings and enjoyments in this world.

- Bhagavad-gita 13.20-21

Commenting on these verses, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, a 20th century commentator on the Bhagavad-gita explains (my emphasis to highlight points of congruence with Dawkins above):

The different manifestations of body and senses among the living entities are due to material nature. There are 8,400,000 different species of life, and these varieties are creations of the material nature. They arise from the different sensual pleasures of the living entity, who thus desires to live in this body or that. When he is put into different bodies, he enjoys different kinds of happiness and distress. His material happiness and distress are due to his body, and not to himself as he is. In his original state there is no doubt of enjoyment; therefore that is his real state. Because of the desire to lord it over material nature, he is in the material world. In the spiritual world there is no such thing. The spiritual world is pure, but in the material world everyone is struggling hard to acquire different kinds of pleasures for the body. It might be more clear to state that this body is the effect of the senses. The senses are instruments for gratifying desire. Now, the sum total — body and instrument senses — are offered by material nature, and as will be clear in the next verse, the living entity is blessed or damned with circumstances according to his past desire and activity. According to one's desires and activities, material nature places one in various residential quarters. The being himself is the cause of his attaining such residential quarters and his attendant enjoyment or suffering. Once placed in some particular kind of body, he comes under the control of nature because the body, being matter, acts according to the laws of nature. At that time, the living entity has no power to change that law. Suppose an entity is put into the body of a dog. As soon as he is put into the body of a dog, he must act like a dog. He cannot act otherwise.

- A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, Bhagavad-gita As It Is 13.21 purport

Congruent with Dawkins' view of the body as a machine which dictates the terms of existence, Prabhupada explains that the body and mind are produced by material nature, and that once within the material body the living entity is on the agenda of the material body.

Dawkins explains that the agenda of the material body arises from genes, which are the mechanism by which the material nature creates various bodies. The agenda of the genes is survival by means of replication. This means reproduction of bodies which contain these genes. The primary agenda for the body therefore becomes gaining access to the resources necessary for the survival of the genes' survival machine, the body - namely food and shelter - and reproduction of the genes' container - the body.

While the living entity in the body may feel that he wishes to preserve his own life, and I'm sure we all do, the genes, inasmuch as we can attribute motive to them as a means of narrating the situation, wish to preserve themselves - which means that they are happy for their survival machine to die, as long as they are able to continue in another body.

As a result of this, we see that monkeys, when offered the opportunity with electrodes implanted into their brain will press a button to experience orgasm in preference to the activities needed for their continued immediate personal survival:

It was found that in male monkeys there were separate systems for erection, for ejaculation, and for orgasm. With an electrode in the separate orgasm system, the monkey would stimulate this region and go through a total orgasm without erection and without ejaculation. Given the apparatus by which he could stimulate himself once every three minutes for twenty-fours hours a day, the monkey stimulated the site and had orgasms every three minutes for sixteen hours and then slept eight hours and started again the next day.

- John C Lilly, The Scientist: A Metaphysical Autobiography, p.90

The monkeys run the risk of dying due to this behaviour. We all want to live, and we usually act in such a way as to preserve our life. However, the genes in our body will continue to exist after the death of our body, if they can get themselves into another body, and this leads us to behaviours that ensure the survival of the genes, while "we" (meaning the particular combination of this body and the consciousness that experiences it) die. By the Vedic standard the living entity never dies, but this body will die.

Prabhupada gives a number of examples of animals which are lured to their death by sex desire, such as an elephant that falls into a prepared trap in a path after being tempted by a female elephant. Sex desire is so powerful that it trumps self-preservation. Dawkins gives the mechanistic explanation of why this is so, based on the concept of the selfish gene, which is an application of Darwin's big idea, the single simple idea of reproduction, variation and natural selection - an idea whose power lies in its ability to explain so much from such a simple principle.

Orgasm is usually associated with ejaculation, which is usually associated with reproduction opportunity. With two or three more vehicles (bodies), genes have increased chances of survival. Therefore, natural selection will over time filter out genes which create bodies with low sexual drive, as bodies with gene sets that produce higher sexual drive reproduce more (all other factors being equal), and thus spread those genes at the expense of the lower sex-drive producing gene combinations.

The result is that reproduction will become and remain an intense driving force for the survival machines - the "sex desire that typifies and perpetuates material existence" in the Vedic worldview (actually, identification with that desire, technically). While in the body, the consciousness of the living entity is subverted by the agenda of the genes, in the Vedic worldview, or merely exists to serve the agenda of the genes in Dawkins' worldview, which does not contain the concept of a separate observer with a distinct agenda that can be subverted.

As such, all human endeavours, such as language, art, science, and commerce, are Dawkins' "extended phenotype", genetic strategies that extend the influence of the genes on their future survival beyond the biological tissue of the survival machine (his self-nominated single greatest contribution to evolutionary biology, which I shall discuss in further depth in another post), or "material activities born of lust (rajo-guna)" in the language of the Vedic worldview.

I call 100% congruence, with gratitude to Dawkins for providing a rational mechanistic explanation to colour in and support the Vedic perspective.

I've added a new category to my blog: "Devotional Dawkins".

In this category I will be posting a series of articles examining the congruence between Richard Dawkins' empirical interpretation of the mundane world with the Vedic worldview that underpins Krishna Consciousness.

I personally think that while we have a number of congruences with Christian philosophers, on the matter of empiricism the Vedic worldview is more congruent with modern science than it is with Creationism as a scientific doctrine.

While it is tempting to join the Christian Crusade against Professor Dawkins, and many within ISKCON obviously think it a good idea, I personally will not be joining.

My observation is that many of the congruent points that we share with Professor Dawkins are points that Creationists would also wage war on us for - for example, the idea that there is a single common ancestor, and a limited set of common ancestors of all living beings, which I discussed in my previous post. This would be grounds for Crusade against our worldview by Creationists, whereas it is a point of agreement with Dawkins.

One of the major reasons why Dawkins' worldview is more congruent with the Vedic worldview than the Creationist one, is that Dawkins' area of authority is the phenomenological world of mundane experience. Just as Buddhist philosophy and psychology is compatible and very similar to Krishna Consciousness up to the point of nirvana, similarly Dawkins' worldview is compatible up to the limits of empiricism. His worldview does not contain the soul, and thus represents a subset of the total Vedic worldview.

Creationism, on the other hand, already has the soul within it. This is a point of congruence with the Vedic worldview. However, Creationism mixes the concept of the soul and the body, making it incompatible with both Dawkins and the Vedic worldviews.

The beginning of knowledge, by the Vedic standard, is understanding the difference between spirit and matter. Whereas Dawkins' biological worldview is devoid of the concept of spirit, and thus offers the potential for a synthesis, the Creationist worldview has the concept, but it is erroneous. Thus their world view offers neither empirical rigour, nor metaphysical rigour by the Vedic standard.

When I say empirical rigour, I am referring to what Dawkins calls "the explanatory power of Darwin's big idea.

Studying books such as Dawkin's watershed work "The Selfish Gene" reveals that Darwin's big idea explains the material world in terms that are congruent with the Vedic world view - the material bodies are machines manufactured by the material energy, and are vehicles for material desires which are a completely separate agenda for the higher-order beings (ourselves) who find themselves manifested within them for a limited span of time.

This is completely at odds with the worldview of Creationism - another powerful example of our affinity for Dawkins over the Crusade against him.

Professor Dawkins' statements about religion are outside the scope of his work on biology and empirical science, and fall more into the category of sociology and psychology. In many of those cases I also happen to agree with him. In the area of metaphysical statements he also exceeds the scope of empirical science, and these are again in another category. In that category I feel he speaks with more certainty than is warranted by the available empirical evidence, and also borrows from his authority in other areas to lend more credence to his ideas there, than they would otherwise merit in isolation.

Readers who made it this far in this article may also be interested in my category "Dawkins", where I posted two years ago a series of posts analysing Dawkins' debates with various religious representatives.