Some days ago I was just searching on Facebook suddenly I found a article which is written to Prove that Hinduism doesnt supports Human Evolution. This article is here to prove that Hinduism is the most scientific religion and accepts each and every theory of science Hinduism is the only religion which accepts Human Evolution as whole while other religions believes on 6 days theory of creation around 5000 years ago. Hope you will like it.
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Hinduism does believe in evolution. not only believes in evolution, it takes it a step further and says that even "souls" evolve,
Hindus are the only society in the world, who have no conflict of interest with the theory of Creation and as well as that of Evolution. This is one issue which has been addressed in detail in religious text of Hindus. We are the only ones who believe that the CREATOR or GOD, after having created this universe and set out broad and flexible goals for creation, let the EVOLUTION take care of the rest. As such there is no conflict between science and religion.
That Hindus have faith in the theory of Evolution is abundantly clear from the fact that we believe in the theory of incarnation of God. The incarnation theory can only work, when one believes that God sitting in heavens will not interfere in life of Human. If HE has to interfere, HE has to come on this earth, take birth, and then make the best use of opportunities, and evolve the path of Dharm…in other words create rules for the growth of society.
there is this wonderful Ancient Tamil Hindu-hymn that explains the knowledge of physical amongst beings
"pullaki-poodaki-puluvai-m
palvirukamai-paravayaip-pa
-kalla-manitharai-
thevarai-ellamumahi"
the english translation is
became grass-became little shoots of plants-became huge trees-became little worms-became birds-became snakes-became-illiterate-h
another quote -from the famous Hindu sage swami Vivekananda
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The secret of evolution is in the organism itself. The Vedantic concept of evolution is much deeper. Swami Vivekananda observes:
From the lowest protoplasm to the most perfect human being there is really but one life. Just as in one life we have so many various phases of expression, the protoplasm developing into the baby, the child, the young man, the old man, so, from that protoplasm up to the most perfect man we get one continuous life, one chain. This is evolution, but we have seen that each evolution presupposes an involution. The whole of this life which slowly manifests itself evolves itself from the protoplasm to the perfected human being---the Incarnation of God on earth the whole of this series is but one life, and the whole of this manifestation must have been involved in that very protoplasm. This whole life, this very God on earth, was involved in it and slowly came out, manifesting itself slowly, slowly, slowly. (Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Vol. II, p. 228)
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According to the Hindu tradition, 'a jiva (from the stage of a protozoan, perhaps) attains competence for a human body after undergoing 8,400,000 births.'
Sir John Woodroffe (1865-1936), Advocate General of Bengal and Legal member of the erstwhile Govt. of India, had the same revelation after the study of Sanskrit texts.
He said and I quote,
"Ages before Lamarck and Darwin, it was held in India that man has passsed through 84 lakhs births as plants, animals, inferior species and then came the ancestors of developed man existing today. The theory was an act of brilliant deduction in which observation may also have had played part!"
It may be interesting to note that some ancient Puranas of the Hindus record in detail this evolutionary journey. For example, the Vishnu Purana states that there are a total of 8,400,000 species in the following order:
20,000 species of non-mobile plants etc. Sthavara); 900,000 species of aquatic creatures; 900,000 species of amphibian and reptiles, 1,000,000 species of birds, etc.; 3,000,000 species of other creatures such as animals, etc.; 400,000 species of anthropoids (Vanaras), after which the human species (Manushya) of 200,000 varieties come into being, and Man then engages in purposeful activity to attain perfection.
You will be hard-pressed to find a Hindu who is fervently opposed to the theory of evolution like many religious people in the west are. This is partly because in India, all knowledge is welcome and open enquiry is encouraged. It's a cultural quality.
It is the great burden of religious orthodoxy for those subscribing to the Abrahamic precept that God directly spoke to a single prophet and that message is unerringly transcribed in The Holy Book, to perpetually face the empirical advancements of science with distrust and fear. Entire schools of theology since the Enlightenment have been, and still are, it seems, occupied with confronting, disproving, or mitigating the fallout from the heretic contentions that the earth revolves around the sun, the Big Bang, and Darwin’s theory of evolution. Once ancient books, transcribed as they are by mortals--albeit enlightened--are seen as literal words beyond interpretation to govern every mode of life, arguments ensue over what a “Judeo-Christian” society really is or what one governed by Sharia actually means.
So as the brilliant cover story in Christianity Today elucidates, theologians are working with three options towards reconciling science and Genesis: a) God created “mature, fully functioning creation in six literal days 6,000 years ago”; b) reject evolution but believe in the planet’s ancient origins; or c) intelligent design theory that a supernatural force guides the vagaries of nature rather than “natural selection.”
It is interesting that Hindu largely recuse themselves from all of this angst over evolution. Indeed, cosmology, science, and the ancient Vedas--Hinduism’s sacred scripture--are eerily complementary. Lord Brahma, the Lord of Creation, often depicted as one of the Hindu Trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, is described as creating the universe in an unending cycle over each of his days and nights. In his classic, Cosmos, Carl Sagan describes Hinduism’s agreement with modern science best:
"The Hindu religion is the only one of the world's great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which time scales correspond to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long, longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang.”
If the Big Bang theory is posited to have occurred 13 billion years ago, Hindus would have no trouble at all agreeing that an Intelligent Designer, Lord Brahma, indeed guides the creation of the universe. Even more, Swami Vivekananda, one of modern Hinduism’s intellectual giants wrote in the early 20th century, whether an intelligence made the material world, or whether, as some scientists believe, the material world led to the creation of intelligence, does not much matter. For in his words, “Indian philosophy, however, goes beyond both intelligence and matter, and finds a Purusha, or Self, which is beyond intelligence, of which intelligence is but the borrowed light.”
And as to evolution, more than 2,000 years before Darwin rocked Christendom with his heresy, the Hindu Puranas described the “Dasha Avataras”--the ten Avatars, or incarnations, of Lord Vishnu. Lord Vishnu is said to assume an avatar at various periods in history to guide creation and preserve its eternal dharma--meaning that which is necessary to sustain and uphold. And so God is described in the earliest of creation to have taken the avatar of a fish, followed by a tortoise (amphibian), boar, half man-half lion, short human (scientists only recently found that early humans were likely short-statured), and then a warrior with an axe. The latter incarnations are the well known avatars of Lord Rama, Lord Krishna, and Lord Buddha as the most recent.
The Hindu and Abrahamic conception of time, human origins, and creation, then, are diametrically divergent. Hindus conceive of creation as part of an ongoing cycle of creation and destruction, with our current universe forming several billions of years ago, and God manifesting along the spectrum of evolutionary speciation when necessary.
The Thiruvasakam, written by Appar in 8th Cent. AD, speaks about evolution. The descent of man is
chronicled by and large along modern evolutionary order. It furthermore concludes that humankind is the most evolved animal.
The Sanskrit writings of India mention creatures with apelike bodies and humanlike intelligence. The Ramayana speaks of the Vanaras, a species of an apelike army of men that existed millions of years ago. According to the Ramayana alongside these ape-men existed modern humans. Thus according to these ancient writings the status was a state of coexistence for certain durations which is very consistent with Darwinian evolution.
Puranic view asserts that the universe is created, destroyed, and re-created in an eternally repetitive series of cycles. In Hindu cosmology, a universe endures for about 4,320,000,000 years (one day of Brahma, the creator or kalpa) and is then destroyed by fire or water elements. At this point, Brahma rests for one night, just as long as the day. This process, named pralaya (Cataclysm), repeats for 100 Brahma years (311 trillion, 40 billion human years) that represents Brahma's lifespan.
Science writers Carl Sagan and Fritjof Capra have pointed out similarities between the latest scientific understanding of the age of the universe, and the Hindu concept of a "day and night of Brahma", which is much closer to the current known age of the universe than other creation myths. The days and nights of Brahma posit a view of the universe that is divinely created, and is not strictly evolutionary, but an ongoing cycle of birth, death, and rebirth of the universe. According to Sagan:
The Hindu religion is the only one of the world's great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which time scales correspond to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long, longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang.
Capra, in his popular book The Tao of Physics, wrote that:
This idea of a periodically expanding and contracting universe, which involves a scale of time and space of vast proportions, has arisen not only in modern cosmology, but also in ancient Indian mythology. Experiencing the universe as an organic and rhythmically moving cosmos, the Hindus were able to develop evolutionary cosmologies which come very close to our modern scientific models
British geneticist and evolutionary biologist, J B S Haldane, observed that the Dasavataras are a true sequential depiction of the great unfolding ofevolution. The avatars of Vishnu show an uncanny similarity to the biological theory of evolution of life on earth.
Best article i ever read about evolution of species and even universe
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