Don't ridicule science

I'm angry; I'm furious! Why? Because of the shabby way in which some ISKCON propagandists treated certain scientific theories.

I attended a session at my office which promised to offer relief from work-induced stress, among other things. More out of curiosity than anything else, I had decided to attend these sessions, which were going to be conducted once a week for six weeks. The first of these sessions was good in that it raised a few points about how we busy ourselves with one major purpose - being happy - with its auxiliary , money-making. It was somewhat predictable, but it had its good points too. All in all, I was content, with the expectation that things would start moving further along in the coming weeks. I was in for a surprise.

Yesterday happened to be the second of these sessions. And it was conducted by a different person who, it seemed to me, not only seemed to have a poor command over English (the language in which he was speaking), but also had a distinct bias to listen only to those members in the audience who gave answers that supported his views. To be fair, he did let a few debates among the audience happen, but the overall impression was one of inadequate preparation, or more accurately, inadequate information on the topic that he was expounding.

One of the main things that were being discussed was how God's creation is so perfect: how the planets are so perfectly arranged in our solar system; how very precisely positioned the earth was to support life as we know it; how beautifully the human body was created; yada, yada, yada. And then he went on to talk about why we shouldn't always trust our senses (our senses are not perfect), or our own intelligence and / or theories put forth by other people. Therefore, he argued, we should resort to accepting truth from trustworthy sources, namely the religious scriptures. Of course, it left unanswered the very important question "But how do we know the scriptures are trustworthy?"

Ignoring, for the moment, the very obvious contradiction in his statements (perfect creation, but imperfect senses, etc.), let's come to the heart of the matter that I want to highlight. Illustrating how human intelligence has "a tendency to be inaccurate" [his assertion, not mine], he pointed out certain contradictions in the theory of evolution as put forth by Darwin. He quoted a few sentences from his famous work, and also a few other statements allegedly made by him, and asked us to judge for ourselves whether such a weak theory was even plausible. A classic sign of weak logic is an appeal to one's emotions, and he exhibited it in abundance. But more than what he said, it was the way he said it, and the irony of it all, that got me.

There he was, pointing out the flaws and contradictions in Darwin's theory, when his own presentation was riddled with holes. He said that trustworthiness of a source (like some of the Indian holy books) could be determined by the number of citations that the source gets - a technique that Google's founders would be well versed with - but refused to acknowledge that Darwin's theory is widely cited. A very, very poor presentation, and one that doesn't do any good to the image of ISKCON at all.

And now, it leaves me wondering whether I should be attending these sessions any more....