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4/14/2018 Project MUSE - Hindu Theology and Biology: The Bhāgavata Purāṇa and Contemporary Theory by Jonathan B.

heory by Jonathan B. Edelmann (review)


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Browse > Philosophy > Philosophy East and West > Volume 68, Number 2, April 2018

Philosophy
Reviewed by Download PDF East and West
Chakravarthi Ram­Prasad (bio) Volume 68, Number 2,
Hindu Theology and Biology: The Bhāgavata Purāṇa and Contemporary Theory. By Jonathan B.
April 2018
Edelmann. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. 251. ISBN 78­0­19­964154­3.

Hindu Theology and Biology: The Bhāgavata Purāṇa and Contemporary Theory is a
conceptually ambitious book, because it seeks to articulate a program and a position so
novel that there is scarcely any extant literature to draw on. The reader with a
background in the study of Hinduism and Indian philosophy is likely to be puzzled by
the juxtaposition of topics indicated by the title of the book. But what Jonathan
Edelmann is setting out to do is to create an area of work in the study of Hindu thought
that is almost entirely missing in comparison to the work that has been done on Research Areas
Christianity (and to a lesser extent on other religious traditions): how should a person or Philosophy
community committed to a particular sacred narrative and transcendental reality engage
with the methods, epistemic processes, findings, and truth claims of contemporary
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Part of the puzzlement is over the choice of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa as the locus of the
Hindu worldview in this dialogue. It would be understandable if one were to think that
the systematic philosophical writings of Vedāntins of various schools—a Vedānta
Deṣika or a Madhusūdana Sarasvati—were more appropriate because of their self-
evident objective of developing a single coherent position on devotion, epistemology,
metaphysics, and action. But Edelmann suggests (although he does not explicitly argue
for his choice of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa) that this text offers a "world-view" that can be Frequently
compared to "contemporary Darwinism," being a comprehensive existential position. Downloaded
For him, this text "is a devotional crystallization" of "Vedic, Upaniṣadic, Vedāntic, View Citation
Tantric, and Indian philosophical thought, such as Sāṃkhya and yoga" (p. 1), a sort of Save Citation
maximal textual realization of how to think and exist in a God-given world. Although
the Bhāgavata Purāṇa is in fact important to all the many Vaiṣṇava traditions, Related Content
Edelmann's remarks throughout the book point to an approach to it through the Gauḍiya
stream of Vaiṣṇavism. When he talks of a Bhāgavata Theory [End Page 648] of
Knowledge, it turns out that in fact the text by itself does not explicitly offer one; rather,
within its capacious bounds it adverts didactically to philosophical ideas that Edelmann
can then trace back, in a way broadly influenced by Gauḍiya Vaiṣṇava teachers, to more
explicit arguments in Nyāya, Vedānta, and other systems. This is entirely consistent
with the Gauḍiya intepretation of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa as a compendious statement of
doctrine, but it would have helped for this methodology to be made explicit in order to
not be vulnerable to an unsympathetic critic, who might quibble at the presumption of a
historical and philosophical relationship between the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and, say, the
Nyāya Sūtras.
Against a Hindu God:
The other part of the puzzle will have to do with "biology," by which, it turns out, Buddhist Philosophy of
Edelmann mostly means evolutionary biology. But, in fact, for much of the book, even Religion in India
evolutionary biology stands in for a discussion of the larger implications of modern and (review)
contemporary science itself, for it is that which is juxtaposed with the Bhāgavata
Purāṇa's treatment of "nature" or "world." With this in mind, my remarks will mostly
concern the scientific episteme as a whole.

Edelmann starts with an introduction to the framework of the book, on the


relationship between religion and science, the nature of a worldview, and the two
worldviews that he wants to bring into dialogue, the biological/scientific and the
Bhāgavata. The first chapter provides an overview of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and an
Jump outline of the contemporary evolutionary reading of Darwinian theory. Chapter 2 sets up

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4/14/2018 Project MUSE - Hindu Theology and Biology: The Bhāgavata Purāṇa and Contemporary Theory by Jonathan B. Edelmann (review)
the tensions between the ontology of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and contemporary
physicalism, and, taking a cue from some Christian responses to physicalism, suggests
some ways in which Bhāgavata ontology might be reconciled with physicalism, too.
Chapter 3 brings together various elements of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and other areas of
classical philosophy in order to offer a description of its putative "theory of knowledge."
Such a theory is said to help articulate a theologically informed approach to scientific
knowledge. Chapter 4 offers a bold and wide-ranging picture of how the category of
"nature"—that is to say, the subject of modern science—may be found in the concepts
and practices taught by the text. Chapter 5 argues that the objectivity required by
science may also be found in Gauḍiya Vaiṣṇava theology, and that, conversely, the
reliance on testimony that is central to such theology is actually an epistemological
Seeing Gandhi Whole
mode required in science as well. Chapter 6 models a Bhāgavata theology that draws on
well-developed Christian approaches in order to suggest that study in science can also
be a religious practice.

The ambition of this undertaking is clear just from this outline. Given that the field of
Hindu theological engagement with science is itself ill-defined, one can appreciate the
programmatic nature of Edelmann's project, seeking as it does to suggest the shape of
such engagement across a variety of aspects. For that reason, it would be somewhat
unreasonable to expect in a book of this length (moreover, with its genesis as a doctoral
thesis) to tackle in greater detail many of the issues that it touches upon but cannot
pursue further. Edelmann usually shows keen awareness of this problem, and often
points to the possibilities of future research. For this reason, I will confine myself to
In a Double Way:
some observations and questions about the larger issues raised, and usually tackled to
Nāma-rūpa in
some extent by this intriguing and bold book. [End Page 649]
Buddhaghosa’s
Phenomenology
Dialogue and the Historical Experience of Religion and Modern Science

Edelmann uses the notion of "dialogue" rather loosely, when in fact he often seems to You have access to
mean something much more specific: the manner in which someone belonging to a this content
broadly theistic Hindu, or specifically the Gauḍiya, tradition can assimilate the methods
Free sample
and content of the sciences to the worldview of the theistic tradition. Sometimes he
seems to mean by dialogue the need for those working broadly in the academic space of Open Access
science and religion studies to take Hindu sources and reasoning as seriously as they do Restricted Access
Christian ones (or, perhaps, in the case of contemplative practice and neuroscience,
which Edelmann mentions from time to time, Buddhism). But does all this constitute
"dialogue"? I did not see here anything on what scientists should do with the sort of
Hindu worldview that Edelmann presents; and surely the basic requirement for dialogue
is symmetrical engagement. (Consequently, I am not inclined to endorse his definition
of "the essence of dialogue: a person of one tradition looking at another, and then back
at itself with an openness to critique and reevaluation" [p. 2]. That looks like considered
reflexivity to me.) But there is a profound historical reason for this, and one that
Edelmann works around but does not acknowledge.

Edelmann rightly points out several reasons why there is so little work on how any
theistic Hindu worldview may relate to contemporary science: there are aspects of
Hinduism that lead to a dismissive attitude toward science, and there are modern Hindu
teachers who claim that all science is contained in the Hindu scriptures anyway (p. 7).
He contrasts this with the situation in Christianity, which has "dealt with this problem
[of dialogue between science and religion] admirably by constructing a discourse
among scholars who can straddle both worlds, that of the scientist and that of the
Christian theologian" (p. 9) (he points somewhat contentiously to the great scientists of
early modernity like Bacon and Newton, Descartes and Kepler, and Darwin—they
would not count as "Christian theologians," and their Christianity itself is a focus of
much learned debate). Now, whether or not Christians have coped "admirably" is an
open question. But that they have been called upon to cope has to do with the particular
ways in which Christianity responded to and was implicated in the development of early
modern science, ways that continue to be influential today. This has to do with not only
particular interpretive claims about the world—turning a great deal on the reading of the
origin of the world and of human beings in Genesis—but the institutional conflicts that
marked the emergence of the modern world. It may well be the case that there have
been Christian theological views that have developed for good as a way of moving out

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4/14/2018 Project MUSE - Hindu Theology and Biology: The Bhāgavata Purāṇa and Contemporary Theory by Jonathan B. Edelmann (review)
of that contested and often violent history; but the point is that the specific history of
Christianity's conflicts with science determines the need for it to think through modes of
resolution.

Edelmann considers the absence of such a history in Hindu traditions a problem—


even, he quotes John Hedley Brooke, as a "double problem"—of religion in general plus
Hinduism in particular. But it seems to me that this is not the adding of the one problem
of Hinduism's lack of historical engagement with modern science onto Christianity's
conflicted engagement with that science; rather, Hinduism's [End Page 650] nature and
history cancels out the problem faced by Christianity. What I mean is that we must take
seriously the historical fact that as modern science took root in colonial and postcolonial
India, it was not seen as a threat to Hindu ways of life in any profound sense. (Let us set
aside the development in which some Hindus have sought to deal with the apparently
Western cultural form of contemporary science by making odd claims about the
presence of such science and technology in the scriptures—a category mistake if ever
there was one.) This is not just the oversight of random scientists or the result of some
cultural schizophrenia; we need to ask seriously why Hinduism has not partaken of the
agonism that has marked the Christian engagement with modern science. I do not
propose to give an answer here, but merely suggest that the various familiar (but still
understudied) features of Hindu traditions—for example their complex imbrication in
the larger history of premodern Indian scientific culture, de-centered institutional
authority, multiple teleologies, fundamental assumptions about time and the past—made
for very different responses to those methods of discovering the features of the world
that we now call "science."

My point is simply that the experience of early modern Christianity is not a helpful
parallel to—and therefore not a useful model for—conceiving of Hindu responses to
modern/contemporary science. Instead, we could much more sensibly frame Edelmann's
original and imaginative project of offering a Bhāgavata stance toward science as a
radically alternative experience of the relationship between religion and science, and not
as a catching up with Christian achievements, as Brooke's observation suggests.

Mind, Body, Physicalism: The Promise of "Science in a Dreamscape"

Edelmann, too, has to tackle the same problem all comparative students of non-Western
thought traditions have in today's world: how to work with a conceptual vocabulary that
is now inextricably marked by the history of Western thought, while at the same time
interrogate and enrich the ideas expressed in that vocabulary through non-Western
materials. The most contentious of these ideas in physicalism, and the most pervasive
vocabulary, concern "mind" and "body."

Edelmann makes the basic point evident to scholars of Indian philosophical texts:
when we talk of "body" and "mind" in these texts, we make analytic distinctions that do
not map onto the metaphysical divide of substance dualism that appears to be
ineluctably part of the Christian doctrine of a soul (that is then taken to be synonymous
with the "mind" of Descartes). Rather, the cut is made in many of these texts between a
self or consciousness and a body-complex (including the mind as a specific organ of
internal sense and thought). So, too, with the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, which mostly
espouses the Sāṃkhya metaphysics in which consciousness is apart from but mistakenly
identifies with natural matter including "mental" constituents. So, when contemporary
philosophers of science target substance dualism for elimination from any scientific
account of life, Christian but not Bhāgavata theology is vulnerable. In Edelmann's
understanding of this consciousness, as it is outside of [End Page 651] "nature"—which
latter is the object of science—it is not eliminable by adherence to a scientific account
of evolution and brain function because it does not come within the purview of science
at all.

Edelmann considers, then, how there can be any engagement on the issue of
consciousness. He briefly suggests that this is really a question of "how to define the
means of studying the subjective character of consciousness" (p. 90). This is certainly
true, but since this is a well-established—if entirely unsettled—issue in contemporary
Western philosophy, it is somewhat unclear what the Bhāgavata Purāṇa adds to the
matter. If, however, the "essential question" for the Bhāgavata Purāṇa is how
"consciousness can be attached to the mind-body-complex" (ibid.), then it is difficult to
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4/14/2018 Project MUSE - Hindu Theology and Biology: The Bhāgavata Purāṇa and Contemporary Theory by Jonathan B. Edelmann (review)
see how this is any different from the hoary problem identified in Western philosophy
since Descartes.

I think he is wrong here to locate the problem in the failure of "Hindu thinkers"—by
which one assumes he means those working out of Hindu textual materials—to bring
"consciousness into language and discourse that is readily available to Western
scientists" (p. 91). Much more needs to be done for sure, but such material is not
entirely unavailable in contemporary technical Indian philosophy—surely the problem
has to do with the institutional and intellectual barriers to the reception of such ideas.
Since Mohanty and Matilal, if not before, Hindu and Buddhist systems had been studied
for what they said about consciousness, and the recent recognition of Buddhist, more
than Hindu, views of consciousness has much less to do with the availability of
philosophical research and much more to do with the exigencies of funding, institutional
formations, and the politics of recognition.

But Edelmann is certainly right in arguing that Hindu models of consciousness would
reconfigure how the very problem of physicalism can be tackled. I would add, however,
that his own position might be strengthened if he asked tougher questions about the way
the philosophical—not empirical—claim of physicalism (in its various forms) has come
to be the official doctrine of evolutionary biology and neuroscience. In this, Hindu
approaches such as Edelmann's would contribute original angles of approach to the
critique of physicalist ideology that has been growing steadily within Western
philosophy itself. In general, Edelmann is more attuned to Christian critiques devoted to
rescuing the theologically ineliminable notion of the soul than to other Western
philosophical arguments drawing on phenomenology, Kantian transcendental
arguments, or the analytic deconstruction of physicalism as a pseudoscientific doctrine.
Widening these comparisons will only strengthen the potential of his program.

To Be a Bhāgavata Scientist: A Religious Methodology

Edelmann constructs a model of what one could call a Bhāgavata scientist that is
ingenious and thought-provoking, although it must be acknowledged that he covers so
much ground that we get the feeling that this book is still a sketch of what needs doing.
Edelmann mulls over the question of what the study of nature contributes to the search
for the ultimate good of spiritual liberation (in whatever way that is [End Page 652]
defined in various Hindu traditions). After a careful analysis of its narrative focus, he
concludes that the Bhāgavata Purāṇa treats the attainment of knowledge of the world
(that is to say, what would count as scientific inquiry) as instrumental to the
meditational attainment of approaching the deity. In this the Bhāgavata Purāṇa is more
or less similar to every other religious tradition that seeks to reconcile the aims of
science with the goal of the ultimate good. It may be that a scientist without a religious
life will wonder at this explanation, but it is no less baffling than why one might be
motivated by any scientific inquiry at all that is not merely about material well-being.

That the scientific life can be accepted but only subordinately by the devotee could be
granted a shrug by the secular scientist: "so long as you do the science, claiming it is for
a religious purpose is irrelevant to me." But Edelmann then makes three interrelated
claims that are perhaps bolder in challenging the secular scientist's implicit assumption
that the scientific inquiry is in no way comparable in itself to religious practices. He
identifies in chapters 5 and 6 the three ideas of objectivity, reliance on testimony, and
personal commitment to study as key to the scientific enterprise as much as to the
religious life. In short, when the devotee engages in scientific inquiry, it is not a matter
of an extraneous motivation for an intrinsically different project; to be scientific and to
be religious are equally matters of certain intellectual virtues.

Edelmann engagingly covers recent literature that nuances early modern fantasies of
absolute objectivity, not only by virtue of scientific subject matter itself (as evidenced
by the observer-dependence of quantum mechanical knowledge) but by other aspects of
the human subject (such as the role of gender that feminists have exposed). We
eventually recognize the elusive and contextual nature of objectivity—which is then
quite illuminatingly comparable to the dispassionate attitude taught by the Bhāgavata
Purāṇa. Edelmann continually returns to the theme of dispassion as a critical element of
the religious as much as the scientific attitude. Similar is the case for testimony. While
its role is central to a sacred text such as the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, only in recent decades
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4/14/2018 Project MUSE - Hindu Theology and Biology: The Bhāgavata Purāṇa and Contemporary Theory by Jonathan B. Edelmann (review)
has Western philosophy of science acknowledged that testimony is much more
significant to the scientific enterprise than the earlier and grander claims for strict
empiricism would have had it. Finally, in perhaps the most interesting of his moves,
Edelmann suggests that we take science itself as a form of religious practice (p. 201), in
that the commitment to epistemic responsibility and concern for human values inform
the best science, but are also intrinsic to the practices urged by the Bhāgavata Purāṇa.
Here, even more than in the rest of the book, while I well understand the need to work
from out of the existing developed and thoughtful Christian formulations of natural
theology, I look forward to Edelmann articulating in greater detail what a Hindu natural
theology will look like on its own terms.

Edelmann's suggestion of common ground between different religious traditions and


the sciences suggests that he thinks the relevance of the religious is methodological: it is
about meditating on the world, or developing a dispassionate mode of inquiry, or
treating scientific knowledge as essential to spiritual progression in some [End Page
653] way. But it cannot be contentful. The doctrines of different traditions are not
compatible (within Hinduism itself, let alone others), so their respective accounts of
their relationship with scientific truths—which seek a unity that does not permit
incompatibilities—will not usually be compatible either. This might have an impact on
how religious worldviews engage on the matter of scientific inquiry and truths: do they
collaborate in terms of their agreement over how to be religious and scientific, or do
they compete over which doctrinal commitment is compatible with scientific facts? In
Jonathan Edelmann, we see a young scholar whose thinking about Hinduism,
comparative religion, and science will certainly have a role to play in the development
of this nascent area of study. This book should be seen as the first steps of a larger
project, with all the promise and perils that it entails.

Chakravarthi Ram­Prasad

Lancaster

Universityc.ram-prasad@lancaster.ac.uk

Copyright © 2018 University of Hawai'i Press

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