Aneesh's Hinduism thread

[allhailIndia]

wow! that's pretty intense!! Something that perked my ears a little:

I was wondering if there is something of a 'creationist' movement within hinduism. What kind of relationship does hinduism have with science? Do people try to use science to 'prove' certain aspects of faith, like christian archeologists trying to find the ark on mt Ararat or contesting theories on teh age of teh earth, for eg.

There are any no. of 'scientists' who publish articles claiming to have found the exact place of Krishna's death and ascent to Vaikunta or someone who claims to have found Rama's footsteps in a remote forest and so on, but they are not the mainstream of research and not much is heard from them afterwards.
Most of the major religious landmarks, already have temples established so there is really no 'finding' to be done. E.g., the battlfield of Kurukshetra, where Ganesha fooled Ravana and prevented the latter from becoming invincible, where Vishnu was cast down as a mortal for having shown disrespect to his Guru, and various other places mentioned in the Ramayana and Mahabharata are already major pilgrimage spots accessible through your local tour operator..

As aneeshm has already mentioned, there are those who attribute everything everything invented or discovered to India and Indians (The British comedy show 'Goodness Gracious Me' had an Indian man in England who claimed everything including Superman and the British Royal Family to be Indian). This was partly in response to British historians classifying India as a backward culture and Indians as an inferior race, that several nationalist historians started reading the Vedas and older texts anew (and often incorrectly) to prove the British wrong.

No doubt a lot of important scientific discoveries (such as numerals, the Pythagoras theorem, damascene steel, among others) were invented/discovered in India, but to attribute the invention of the jet engine on the basis of a description in the Ramayana to ancient Indians does stretch it a bit.

An interesting scientific study was conducted recently under the Thar deserts using satellite imagery to see if the mythical Saraswati, oft mentioned in the INdian scriptures with the same reverence as the Ganga and Yamuna, did in fact flow on the Earth, only to dry up due to tectonic activity. http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/oct25/articles20.htm This article claims to have found a river which seems to have the characteristics of the Saraswati as described in the Vedas..