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Stop looking for scientific discoveries in holy books, be it the Vedas or the Quran

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It’s either ‘everything scientific was once found in ancient India’, or ‘everything that is science was invented by Muslims’.

There’s this thing I have noticed since I was a child: Whenever scientists make a discovery, men of religion become visibly discomfited; so much so that they felt the need to loudly claim ‘this was already in the Quran’.

When computers were discovered, religious organisations claimed that the machines had already been alluded to in a certain verses of the Quran. The same happened in case of the mobile phone. Even before that, when electricity was invented, it was claimed that Allah had already mentioned it in the holy book. The discovery of numerous planets and stars were similarly attributed. In fact, it’s not as if there are not enough people who similarly claim that answers to everything can be found in the Bible. Just like many Hindus believe in the absolute infallibility of the Vedas.

A while ago, on the occasion of the inauguration of the 105th Indian Science Congress, the Indian minister for science and technology, Harsh Vardhan, had claimed that the knowledge contained in the Vedas was more advanced than that of even Einstein. Speaking about Stephen Hawking, he had remarked: “He also emphatically said on record that our Vedas might have a theory superior to Einstein’s theory of e=mc2.”

When quizzed by journalists as to where and when Hawking had made such an admission, ‘you find the source’, he said.

Perhaps the minister for science had made a mistake. But I have met many educated Hindus who believe in the absolute veracity of everything that is said in the Vedas. Many believe that it was in Vedic and Puranic literature that modern IVF techniques of assisted reproduction were first mentioned; that one can find in the epics the earliest mentions of genetic cloning and plastic surgery. Since Karna was born outside his mother’s body, he must have been a test-tube baby, and the elephant’s head on Ganesh must have been a result of plastic surgery.

A recent trend is the practice of explicating religious fables using science. Many scholars of the Vedas in India believe that it is not the right attitude to dismiss ideas presumably found in the religious literature simply because they have not yet been scientifically proven. Previously, in the 2015 edition of the Science Congress, some of them had claimed that the pushpak vimana mentioned in the Ramayana was an ancient prototype of modern aviation technology.

Most educated people in this country will admit that without the discovery of the zero, there would have been no mathematics. That the zero was born here, in this land; and that without mathematics there would have been no science. Such claims cause a fair amount of anxiety. One cannot help but feel that such people are not really educated.

It’s either ‘everything scientific was once found in ancient India’, or ‘everything that is science was invented by Muslims’, or ‘everything came from the West’. Perhaps it would be more productive for everyone to concentrate on actual science than quibble over who has dominion over its finding. Many self-declared experts, conversant in perhaps the barest scientific knowledge, are working day and night these days to trace modern science back to the texts which are thousands of years old. Many believe that if science decries religion then the latter might not survive. But hasn’t religion survived all these years with scant support from the sciences? So, why the sudden fear?

Some read religious texts and produce their own interpretations in order to reveal to the world the science hidden behind them. This serves a dual purpose – it proves the existence of the divine while simultaneously elevating God, or religion, over science. Why does the search for a miraculous fact in religious texts commence only after the scientists have already come to that conclusion? Why does no one ever reach into the verses first to tell us about God’s amazing inventions?

Many devout Muslims, perhaps having not managed to find a verse foretelling man’s journey to the moon, have begun denying the moon landing.

On the other hand, a section of Hindus says that the ‘Vishwaroopdarshan’ episode between Krishna and Arjun in the Mahabharata was nothing but the Big Bang. Mrinal Dasgupta was a scientist in the Indian National Science Academy. He had claimed that all new theories and latest information being produced daily by modern science had all been originally propounded by ancient sages, all very clearly documented in the Vedas. According to him, even a renowned scientist like Robert Oppenheimer had been so moved by the ‘Vishwaroopdarshan’ episode that on seeing the power of nuclear energy in the laboratory, he had recited from the Gita: ‘If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendour of the Mighty One and I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.’

Some have even claimed that the Kurukshetra war was a nuclear war and that the Patriot missiles used in the Gulf War owe their origin to the mythical varun baan and agni baan of the Hindu puranas.

Nobel Prize winning physicist Abdus Salam used to repeatedly ask people not to conflate the Big Bang of astrophysics with some verses from the Quran. He used to say: “The most recent commentary on the Big Bang theory has provided us the best explanation yet for the origin and creation of the universe. If tomorrow an even better explanation is found then what will happen? Will verses have to be changed to make them match the new scientific outlook?”

When the Pope in 1951 had talked about the similarities between the Big Bang and the creation myth of the Bible, astronomer Georges Henri Lemaître had vociferously disagreed with him.

On the other hand, Frank Tipler, despite being a physicist himself, has feverishly applied himself to the task of making Christianity science-friendly. Even scientists can go astray and behave like narrow-minded bigots.

Many Muslims have claimed that certain verses of the Quran are direct proof of the theory of evolution. The word ‘khalaka’ has been used in the Quran to signify creation; the dictionary meaning of the term is ‘slow change’.

One good thing in all this is that religious fanatics no longer denounce science like they once used to. Perhaps they now understand that science is the truth and their losses would outweigh their gains if they went against it. The young are studying science in schools and colleges in the hopes of securing good jobs. If religion and science become completely contradictory, then they might express their doubts about the former. It is perhaps due to this reason that the religious are on a quest to find science in religion.

But I feel compelled to state that true religion is not the one found in the holy books but in the observance of humanity. The ones who can inculcate the latter within themselves are the true believers, the ones who do not need to resort to fabricated explanations of the verses in order to prove the existence of the divine.

Taslima Nasreen is a celebrated author and commentator. Translated from the Bengali by Maharghya Chakraborty.

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40 COMMENTS

  1. The contents in the article show the level of her immaturity. For every modern scientific, medical, astronomical expedition the roots are embedded in the ancient literature of the then Rishis, Saints, and Vedic scholars. Even if some to-day’s modern critics ignore their reporting as mere fiction and imagery, the basic ideology and technic are the same. It is undeniable.

  2. Instead of stop looking mindset, one must look into and delve deep inside the religious scriptures, the Quran, the Vedas, the Bible and others. Had this ‘ stop looking’ attitude been adopted by ancient thinkers and prophets,, the world would not have seen so much scientific advancement for the betterment of humankind.

  3. The Quran supports scientific research that brings advantage of human kind betterment. Knowledge of science and technology that is predominantly harmful is prohibited outright. The final Prophet Mohammad through the Holy Book Quran vouches for the protection of life, faith, intellect, property, lineage and human dignity as the Quran is the book for the whole universe free from regional or geographical parochial boundaries. It is misconception among masses that the Quran is the book of muslims and for the muslims, and is revealed to be read, and that too without understanding, confined only to religious rituals. Furthermore, it is not required or desired to be an atheist to become a scientist/Professor. One may well view the world through the prism of both a scientific lens as well as one of own faith. Numerous scientists carry out their research while maintaining personal faiths.
    These may garner some prints that long before modern science, every religion had its own version of some kinds scientific knowledge. Religion and philosophy may be logically considered as a precursor and presage to modern science by taking clues and connotations from the Quran or other religious scriptures like that of the Quran, the Vedas, Puranas, Itihasa, Bhagavad Gita, the Agamas, Bhagavata Purana, Yajnavalkya Smriti, the Upanishads, Manusmriti, Bible and Jewish Science: Divine Healing in Judaism in the great religious traditions of Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, and Buddhism. All Hindu scriptures are written in Sanskrit. The prophets and ancient thinkers did articulate many of the broad possibilities for answers to major questions that have since been, in a sense, adjudicated by science. The Muslim scholar-diplomat Al-Biruni spent a decade in India researching and documenting many aspects of traditional Indian science in his Al-Hind. Most Hindus of India have a deep credence in God. Besides the credence in God, Hindu trend is quite liberal and philanthropic. Hinduism comprises, besides rituals and festivities and detailed ethical regulations for individuals and communities, also the arts and sciences. Hinduism never knew the Western antagonism between philosophy and theology, nor does it have a history of warfare between science and religion. It was the highest aim of Hindus to find satyam, truth/reality, which could be approached in many ways and appear in many forms. The well organized, publicly sponsored ancient Indian universities such as those at Taxila and Nalanda at the time of Gautama the Buddha with thousands of teachers and tens of thousands of students, taught not only the Veda g and the auxiliary disciplines, but also the “eighteen sciences.” Religion, while suffusing all life and activity, was not isolated from other subjects or given exclusive attention. The brahmins, the custodians of the sacred texts, were also the leading intellectuals who studied and taught secular subjects. Nobel Prize–winning physicist Albert Einstein, who developed the general theory of relativity and the special theory of relativity, also known for his mass–energy equivalence, described Buddhism as containing a strong cosmic element.
    Einstein supported the compatibility of religion with science. Einstein said, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science” and “Science without Religion is lame; Religion without Science is blind”. According to NASA (a non-religious organization): “More is unknowgn than known. It turns out that roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest—everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter — adds up to less than 5% of the universe. Come to think of it, maybe it should not be called ‘normal’ matter at all since it is such a small fraction of the universe.” It is also interesting to know that Einstein said: “Before God, we are all equally wise—and equally foolish” and that “all religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.”
    Some members of religious groups like Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Christians might express religious concerns over some kinds of biotechnology research, such as gene editing to change a baby’s genetic characteristics and efforts to clone animals. Muslim may say cloning is tantamount to tampering with the power of God (Allah or Ishwar). The normal child has 23 chromosomes from the mother and 23 from the father; a cloned child has twenty-three pairs of chromosomes from just one person. The Quran refers to the natural way of human creation from male and female, and entitles the child to the care of a mother and father. Propagation of misleading and heretical information and evil agenda, and those that entail terrorism and loss of innocent life in the name of religion or jihad violates the Quran. Some Hindus and Buddhists may also voice concern that these scientific developments on gene editing and cloning might interfere with karma or reincarnation.

    Science is even more transient than theology. Galileo says that the earth moves and that the sun is fixed. On the contrary, the Inquisition says that the earth is fixed and that the sun moves. The Newtonian astronomers, adopting an absolute theory of space, proclaims that both the sun and the earth move. As a matter of fact, any one of these three statements is equally valid subject to the fixed sense of ‘rest’ and ‘motion’. The modern concepts of relative motion were then not germinated in mind. The statements were made in ignorance of the qualifications required for their sanctity of truth. Newton’s theory was that a beam of light consists of a stream of very minute particles, or corpuscles, and that the sensation of light occurs when these corpuscles strike the retinas of the eyes. Huyghens’s theory was that light consists of very minute waves of trembling, and that these waves travel along a beam of light. In the eighteenth century, Newton’s theory was believed, in the nineteenth century, Huyghens’s theory was believed.
    The Quran allows for much interpretation when it comes to science. Scientists of medieval Muslim civilization contributed to the new discoveries of science. From the eighth to fifteenth century, Muslim mathematicians and astronomers advanced the development of almost all fields of mathematics. At the same time, concerns have also been raised about the lack of scientific literacy in parts of the modern Muslim world.
    Scientists ought to leave it at that in the hope that scientists may gain some wider vision which reconciles both. The interdisciplinary field of “science and religion” also called “theology and science”, may well answer these and other related topics. If scientific research is pursued only to produce weapons of mass destruction for hegemonic purposes, which also exacerbates hostility and create conflict among people, this would violate the Quranic principles with respect to preservation of life, and the building of a safe and peaceful order on earth. It ought not, therefore, be supported in the name of Islam or any religion.

    • Yes, stupid and bigoted. She insists on equating Indian science and the Quran, proving only her enormous ignorance. For example she says that only uneducated people claim that the zero was invented in India and that its a critical advance in mathematics. I wonder if she studied math beyond 8th grade

  4. In fact every new religion and the discoveries are the ounces of vedas and sastras…. do your research properly u will find yourself … i dont say to believe my words but do ur research properly and u will get it👍🏾

  5. wow.. this is one really ignorant understanding or claim. Your writing is pretty good but your content is out of ignorance and lack of knowledge.
    Specially the one that indicates that “Science is the Truth”. I stopped reading after that because most likely what will follow is a series of assumptions. Science is a way to know and understand things based on evidence, observation and experimentation. Hate to bring it up to you buddy but “science” doesn’t know IF God exists or not. If you have evidence for that then hell yeah the world should be commending you for getting that evidence finally.
    You also mention about the holy books (Vedas and the Quran). I can tell that you actually don’t know what you’re talking about. These books are considered to be ‘evidences’ (testimonial). E.g. Your favorite scientist (maybe Richard Dawkins… most likely), wrote a book. A year later you read it. Do you believe it? He could have just made all that up. If yes, it’s evidence of something he knew. Same as the holy books. Also, I saw in your article that you didn’t really say anything about the book that the muslims believe. You just mentioned a bunch of stuff on the India holy book. As a matter of fact, you don’t know anything about what that book says. Here’s a good fact for you. The book that the muslims believe, the Quran? They are accurately proven in science to be 100% correct. And yes, there are some things in there that ARE already in verses but SCIENCE DOESN”T HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY TO PROVE IT YET.

  6. If your opinoin is true than who was Shushrut ? Who wrote book on Viman shastra and that proved true . Who wrote book Suryasiddhant ? Who was aryabhatt ? a book written by agust rishi mention how to make electricity ?

  7. Very true sir
    i was thinking about this topic and did some research myself and found that the caesar and many great rulers ruled during the time of dwapar yug if something really big happened in kurukshetra then why not they get a hint about it. It is mentioned in gita that the whole universe could notice it and the weapons produced so much power that there were earthquakes and flares but still there is no such evidence still found
    People must realise their is a difference between inspiration and discovery, there might be a chance that people could have got inspired by these stories and invented aeroplane, nuclear weapon etc but this doesn’t means that it was invented here.
    Secondly , it’s so hypocritic that we have found fossils of dinosaurs dated back to 66million years ago but there is no evidence about people who lived during dwapar or treta which is dated back to 12000 years only and also, we do not find record any other civilisation and animals who lived during those times. There were weapons, skeletons of monsters ,soldiers, armoury, gold where can this all go all of a sudden.
    I have read scientists claiming about time dilation and string theory being discovered in India and the kalp system is only solidifying discovery we have.
    It’s more like scientists giving credit to lucas for inventing warp speed engine or lightsabers or giving credit to marvel for discovering nanotech
    If there is a solifying reality in the texts then it’s time for them to prove it with an equation and a scientific explanation because that’s how science works rather than just keep taking credit for something unachieved

    • You pity!! is it that easy to find the archeological evidence for the incident mahabharatha and Ramayana.

      Many of the places mentioned in Mahabharata and ramayanam was still exist the geographical location and marks they described was still as such.

      Have you gone through Vedas the Veda is not only a holy book it contains our earth’s geographiCal, astronomical data’s, you know that we came to know that river saraswarthy was dried after marching towards the geological saying of vedas

      The Mahabharata mentioned all the rulers of its time period for your kind information the city ruled by king saguni was the west Asia,the Tamil pandiyan king was also mentioned.

    • Are you nuts
      Caesar was born in 100BC and Mahabharata took place 3000BC . Don’t just utter rubbish when you don’t have any knowledge about this.. Indian astronomy or vastushastra today also without any technology can tell when the eclipse would take place or has taken place in future or past ..
      Everyone says that Wright brothers invented airplanes.. do some research ,shivkar bapuji talpade had invented 6 or 7 years before these two brothers .. that too airplane running on mercury , the concept from Vedas vaimanik Shastra , and in present NASA is also doing research on the same thing and thoroughly going through Vedas , NASA last year found that suns surface is golden and looks like honey comb maze , and the same description is given in vedas , the things which were proved using such techniques spending billion $ , it’s been written in Vedas without any technology..
      Distance from sun to earth and radius of earth and sun is given in vedas . Distance of earth to sun is mentioned in Hanuman chalisa . This was written by tulsi das you can Google when he was born and when did science find the same distance but still not accurate..
      Want more such examples can give you more..

  8. Very true sir i was thinking about this topic and did some research myself and found that the caesar and many great rulers ruled during the time of dwapar yug if something really big happened in kurukshetra then why not they get a hint about it. It is mentioned in gita that the whole universe could notice it and the weapons produced so much power that there were earthquakes and flares but still there is no such evidence still found
    People must realise their is a difference between inspiration and discovery, there might be a chance that people could have got inspired by these stories and invented aeroplane, nuclear weapon etc but this doesn’t means that it was invented here.
    Secondly , it’s so hypocritic that we have found fossils of dinosaurs dated back to 66million years ago but there is no evidence about people who lived during dwapar or treta which is dated back to 12000 years only and also, we do not find record any other civilisation and animals who lived during those times. There were weapons, skeletons of monsters ,soldiers, armoury, gold where can this all go all of a sudden.
    I have read scientists claiming about time dilation and string theory being discovered in India and the kalp system is only solidifying discovery we have.
    It’s more like scientists giving credit to lucas for inventing warp speed engine or lightsabers or giving credit to marvel for discovering nanotech
    If there is a solifying reality in the texts then it’s time for them to prove it with an equation and a scientific explanation because that’s how science works rather than just keep taking credit for something unachieved

  9. With due respect Sir. Every knowledge of scientific approach have it have it’s own verse in the Qur’an. Qur’an have teach better than human knowledge.

  10. Science wants to (and has the right to) remain ‘in business’. There is huge funding involved and millions of careers dependent on that funding. And science has shown commendable achievements. The problem is that while these achievements are showcased in the forms of technologies that pervade our lives, science has NOT truly understood the REALITY. Will it ever? This is a big question. But since science wants to remain in business, it does NOT reconcile with the idea of ‘Intelligent Design’.

    • Well said. The main problem with science, that I find, is it becomes too rigid about its understanding of the “reality” around us. This inspite of accepting the gaps in its understanding. In fact there is much similarity in philosophy and the findings of theoritical physics. I say let both methods of finding the “truth” flourish without anyone becoming rigid about its conclusions.

  11. Tasleema Nasrin is neither a scientist nor a historian nor an expert on religious studies. It would be better if she keeps her intellect restricted to writing good novels (which she does). By the way, there are enough and more sientists and mathematicians who vouch for the scientific knowledge in ancient Indian literature.

  12. If this were the case, every Pandit and Moulana would be greater scientists than Einstein, Tesla, Flemming, Hawking and many other worthy scientists that we know today.
    It’s totally insane to relate the discoveries with Holy Scriptures be it any.
    When are you going to open your eyes?
    Instead of fighting and false determination on proving things in Scriptures’ way, why not apply your brain to reveal the mysteries of this world by actually studying and researching.

    All of you who relate these things with the scriptures are idiots.

    Grow up. The world has gone so far in technological advancements and you are still in your little pond.
    Stop the bullshit.
    Grow up India.

  13. Though I completely agree with the tone of your article and sincerely believe that some people overhype the religious scriptures to demean the hard-earned inventions and discoveries of scientists.
    But it would have been more interesting if your arguments was based on strong logics rather than some past incidents.

  14. I fully agree with Taslima. While I admire some degree of congruence between verdant and upnishadik philosophy with certain broad tenets of science, it is foolish and laughable to find science in as many places in scriptures or shashtras. We must stand guard against pseudoscience. I say this with a sense of regret and anguish because I am otherwise a supporter of cultural nationalism of Indic variety.

  15. The guy who wrote this…..there were never any writing regarding inventions or discoveries that mankind is going to achieve in quran,instead there was the path mankind is going to lead in the coming years /generation.
    And secondly that guy is right theres no match b/w quran and vedas .

  16. Science is a fact. You destroy all human knowledge and let next generation 3xpkore the world, they’ll come up with same conclusions. Religion isn’t , it’s a delusion and nobody can come to the same religion if all religions in the world were destroyed. Religions can’t even get people to believe in same at very existing moment. PythGoras theorems were proved by Pythagoras at another place , and at same time in india the same was documented using areas of square (which is again nothing but square of sides, look it up if you don’t understand). Both reached same conclusions because it is the truth, the science and maths, if religions were so true, we wouldn’t need the disputes in the name of god and people wouldn’t kill each other.
    The author is right, if you want peace with intelligent people, then stop saying everything was there in your holy books. Since , even if everything was there in holy books, you dint use it someone else did, who did and how matters. Think of it as morals too, even if your holy books had morals, a lot of sadhus, priests and maulana wouldn’t have gone out to do immoral things, so the point is that. Keep them separate and you don’t have to listen to scientific facts like plants dint come before Sun or earth is not flat or sun is not a horse riding primate, but a Hydrogen-Helium gas star. If you don’t like science , don’t science, but stop calling what you like as science whilst it’s not.

  17. I think the view point from the author says that you should find god without religious books….. But for humans the religious books are from god and there you can find something unbelievable at certain moments in first period but after a long time it gets proof from those who does not believe in god… The science you got till this period is because of religion because there was a time when anyone says to you that earth rotates around the sun but you don’t believe and you fall in search thus leading to the progress of science…. Similarly all the humans are in the search of god so they use science but they perish their life for without suceeding… I think that religion is the displacement and the science is distance towards the god…

  18. Scientist believe their is some natural power controlling everything if someone doesn’t understand science is a way to understand nature and its phenomena and not a victory war against them. Surely these big mouthed either dont read or aren’t humble enough to understand there meanings.

  19. plz have some scientific disorder in Quran to justify your lecture.
    Yes , I agree that if Big Bang theory is completely dismissed by today with a new one ,,, then quran will have problems in speaking about the creation…. But I wanna see where it is to criticize QURAN ????

    Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha……….

  20. When people try to find similarities between thousands of year old work of fiction and science, it disrespects all the hardships the scientist and physicists have gone through by studying most part of their lives. It disrespects the attitude of science where each and every experiment is performed with utmost care and repeated incessantly to prove the existing scientific theories wrong, only to find them verified in the end. Fanatics just read one book(most of them don’t even do that), comprehend nothing, imagine fantasies and start commenting on years of turmoil sensible people have gone through.

    I bet harry potter or narnia or any other work of fiction is far more “scientific”(according to absurd dictionary of fanatics) if you start looking in it the way they people do, by interpreting each line in thousand different ways, and choosing the one that suites them.

  21. Taslima should shut her trap and not wade in unknown waters. She has no authority to write about Vedas and no one wanted her views on them.
    If I prove that every verse of Rig Veda is on particle physics and cosmology will she quit writing?

    • Please give your proofs. I am eagerly waiting to review your highly researched articles because to me it seems like you just typed physics on google and copy pasted the words that seemed fancy.
      The scientific community is always welcoming to the new research work (they are not scared to be proven wrong, something blatantly contradicting in compared with religious enthusiasts). So why don’t you just go, read and publish the verses that provides the laws that are yet unknown to the scientific community. And then all that is needed is proof or verifications confirming your theories. Eureka, such an easy task and you will become Einstein in no time.

    • There is a certain degree of truth in what you say. For example, Carl Sagan says “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 the 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.” There are similar statements made by other Western science scholars in their books.

      However, this does NOT mean that some oblique references were based on very sound theories, not to mention, elaborate experiments. But yes, it may be safe to assume that this understanding seems to be borne out of very vivid comprehension of matter, motion and energy (much like Maxwell’s equations or Einstein’s thought experiments on space and time). Some of this understanding (for example, atomism) is evident in Greek literature as well. The key problem is that most knowledge in ancient Hindu society was pass on verbally. There was NO systematic effort at knowledge management. For this reason, most of the stuff mentioned in scriptures has transformed into myths. The same is the problem with recording historical facts, and for this reason historiology in India is of sub-standard quality, the consequences of which are manifest in conflicts such as Padmavati.

      The debate is mostly about approach to issues. Some cultures do NOT mind taking a short-cut to arrive at the concept of ‘God’ just because the first few seconds and some other parameters about the universe are NOT yet understood. That said, some of the text in these scriptures is amazing.

  22. The scriptures should be respected as providing us a moral compass, an ethical framework that allows people to live decent lives, in harmony with others of a different persuasion. Beyond that, searching for scientific knowledge and insights into compilations that go back thousands of years may not yield anything of practical value. Reformation within the great religions has attempted to retain the core, while discarding ideas that have become obsolete.

    • Scriptures don’t provide us with a moral compass. If we attained our morality from religious texts, then Sati pratha and polygamy would have been legal, Slavery would have been legal, everyone would have burnt all other books that didn’t agree with the Quran.
      But we realise that these actions are wrong and evil, even though the scriptures say otherwise.
      Ergo, our morality doesn’t come from religion.

  23. Why shall we stop looking for discoveries in Vedas? When we have enough proofs of that. When today all of the world is reverting back to Ancient vedic science? Nasa is doing researches on Ancient indian texts? Secondly, they shud not compare vedas with Quran. No Match!
    You people should have not put Vedas with Quran. They are totally incomparable.
    Aeronautics in Ancient India : http://kalkenews.com/aeronautics-in-ancient-india/

  24. I read the article with full attention as I did with her first book, Lajja, and found that she is in a haste to reach some kind of conclusion at the earliest. She, like our intellectuals and commies, believes that in the subcontinental India, all thoughts are archaic and do not have scientific sanctions, as if scientific ‘yes’ is the only thing and nothing beyond exists. She has less understanding of Veda, and for that matter holy Quran and Bible, for which she tries to keep science and religion on two separate platforms. It is good to have intellectual ability but not the pseudo type, it is more dangerous as it spreads disinformation very fast.

    • I can see the haste in Mr. Raja Mohanty’s comment. Subintellectuals nourishing envy for intellectuals is a healthy thing until it becomes factless, argumentless, personal attack and political rhetoric. If Mr. Mohanty is genuinely convinced about Ms. Nasreen’s ignorance, let him write a peer-reviewed article with exact verses without conjectures that those verses would provide scientific theories, algorithm, and solutions.

      • Yes, stupid and bigoted. She insists on equating Indian science and the Quran, proving only her enormous ignorance. For example she says that only uneducated people claim that the zero was invented in India and that its a critical advance in mathematics. I wonder if she studied math beyond 8th grade

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