Let us analyse the ten characteristics one by one and say why it is unlikely such a being can exist.
1. Spontaneous rebirth: So it’s arisen without visible cause, yet it cannot be uncaused as the law of kamma already rejected that as the causes for things to happen. Indeed, the gods arisen there because a virtuous being had died and in accordance to their kamma had gained the rebirth consciousness of a deva and arisen in the heavenly realms. Thus, conventional physics which do not include the laws of ethical cause and effect would naturally not regard spontaneously reborn beings to exist.
Analysing further, the word spontaneous most closely relates to the quantum side of physics, specifically on quantum randomness. According to some quantum interpretation (more on these later), include the pragmatic ones, quantum randomness is the one true source of randomness in the universe, the random number generator we normally use in most classical computers are pseudo random number generators. That is they look like random, but if you know how it was generated and given the seed, you can predict what number will come out exactly. What better way to have spontaneous anything other than to have quantum randomness thrown in as “uncaused” part of spontaneous rebirth?
Quantum field theories, the marriage of quantum theory and special relativity with excellent agreement between the prediction of the theory and the experiments tells us that the world is made up of fields. Each of the standard model particles (the most fundamental particles we know so far) has their own field, the particles are excitation of the field (the field given energy) at a point. These fields extend everywhere, so even empty space is not really empty, they have various subatomic particle fields and fields which supports force carrier particles. Quantum uncertainty between time and energy tells us that in a very short amount of time, a large uncertainty in energy can occur, allowing empty space to borrow energy from nowhere for a short while to create matter and anti-matter pair production. These particles immediately return their energy borrowed and are called virtual particles, maybe because they virtually do not exist. Yet they do show up in effects like Casimir effect and the Hawking radiation.
The Casimir effect is when two metal plates are close to each other in space, such that the separation between them is smaller than the wavelength of some particles (the bigger the energy or mass of the particle, the shorter its wavelength is, the wavelength refers to its quantum wavefunction) which can arise out of the vacuum. Thus there is less virtual particles in between the plates than surrounding the plates. This creates a push from the zero pressure from outside to the negative pressure in between the plates, the plates comes together on their own.
Hawking radiation is the application of virtual particles being considered at just above the event horizon (the surface of no return) of black holes. One of the particles created fell into the black hole while the other flew away before they had the chance to annihilate each other. Thus this was the discovery that black holes are not black, they radiate away their mass! Although not experimentally confirmed, basically no one thinks that Hawking radiation doesn’t happen.
Yet if anyone wishes to claim that spontaneous rebirth can fit into physics as gods arising out of the quantum vacuum like virtual particles, there are some huge problem to overcome. First up is the conservation of energy, the energy borrowed must be returned. Secondly, the time limit. Assuming complex structure for gods, they must be of macroscopic size, much bigger and massive than an atom. So the time limit for them to exist would be extremely small, contradicting the claim of them having long life.
A contrived explanation for why they can exist for so long would be that they are undergoing super near light speed travel all their life with respect to us (more on that in the next chapter). This is the accepted explanation for why subatomic particles in collides decay slower than at their rest state, because special relativity slows time down for them. Yet this contrived explanation breaks down when we consider that gods come and visit earth and thus has to remain at rest relative to us and still not immediately vanish back into the vacuum.
On second thought, the mechanism of the gods vanishing into the vacuum is that their anti-matter counterparts would be near to them to annihilate them. If a large amount of energy was used to separate the gods from their anti-matter counterparts, then it solves the energy requirement problem and the time limit does not apply anymore. It is unlikely, but gods can be spontaneously born from the Hawking radiations of a small, maybe primordial (created after the Big Bang, not as a result of star collapsing) black hole. The small is required because the smaller the black hole, the “hotter” it gets, which means more stuffs get radiated out of it, which means more chance for those radiated particles to come together and form a complex being.
A joke in physics is that a physicist regularly visits a tea house (I changed it so that it’s not a bar), and always ordered two tea (instead of an alcoholic drink) one for him, the other on for the empty chair beside him. After some time, the tea owner asked him why does he do that. The physicists replied, “believe it or not, according to quantum physics, there is a none zero chance that the particles in the chair and surrounding air and relevant materials may assemble themselves into a pretty young woman right next to me. You see this is the application of uncertainty of position and momentum, the closer we try to measure the momentum of a particle, the less we know about its position. So the position of those particles maybe found in the configuration of a pretty girl.”
The tea owner who knows some physics advised the physicist, “Yes, I believe you, but I would advise you to save that money from the extra tea and go buy some lottery instead. You have vastly more chance to win the jackpot and get many girls to want to be with you rather than to wait for a spontaneous reassembling of a girl.”
Thus indeed there is a super low chance of gods appear spontaneously out of quantum randomness, especially seeing that gods are very low entropy beings, or highly ordered beings, thus more unlikely to form compared to any disordered jumble. This statement would indeed parallel the Buddha’s saying that it is rare to be born as a deva (cite).
2. Invisible, but can reveal themselves, or be seen via divine eye: This one physics has no qualms with currently. Invisibility was invented via several ways, all of them technological rather than biological, so think of Harry Potter invisibility cloak rather than the Invisible man. Whatever mechanism the gods use to be invisible, it is likely not too hard for technology to catch up with. Already we know there are transparent sea creatures, octopus whose camouflage is really superb and we have genetic engineering, thus biological invisibility may not be that far away even for humans. Objections to the divine eye will be addressed in psychic powers vs laws of physics.
A few words on how the invisibility cloak works. The cloak is made of nano-materials whose properties are such that they can bend light completely around an object in the middle of the material. Current progress can cloak other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, but research is still ongoing to be able to cloak visible light spectrum. If we wish to be pedantic, we still do not have the exact perfected technology yet cite, but we are pretty close to it. On Brahma being higher level, thus invisible to the lower level devas, it suggests multiple higher dimensions or parallel universes as two of the most straightforward possibilities, both of which have no evidences in physics as well, so far.
3. Blissful, but not end of suffering: Physics does not cover feelings or the study of happiness. So no comment from physics.
Some input from Buddhism adds to the discussion, the bliss of devas are sensual pleasures for the six levels of heavens, from the four great kings heavens to the devas who control what is created by others heavens all have the six sense bases and are said to have their wish fulfilled immediately. So an immediate analogy that comes to mind is the internet. We currently live in a instant gratification world, just clicks away from earning money online, buying, downloading and playing any games, watch any movies or shows, listen to any songs online. Even 3D printers had been invented, so we can buy them and create whatever 3D printable stuffs that we can design or download. Just food, drinks, money and other physical stuffs which cannot be printed are still considered scarce and still need some effort to obtain. So we are living in a partially heavenly world, yet it is not the end of suffering, there are still feelings like boredom, dissatisfaction like first world problems. It is not too hard to imagine heavens suffering from some of these too.
For the Brahma realms, the bliss is from meditation. Many people who study meditation had already recorded happiness which is out of this world readings from their machines. Matthieu Richard, a Tibetan monk who was a scientist is famous for being the happiness man on earth. cite
4. Long life: There is as yet no physical reasons why we cannot have long life. Biologically however, our cells division to replace old and dead cells are limited by the length of the telomere which are the two ends of our chromosomes in the nucleus of the cell. Every time the chromosomes replicates itself in cell replication, the telomere shortens and thus giving our biological bodies a time limit. There is the enzyme telomerase which can add to the telomeres after cell division; but it is also the way cancer works, uncontrolled cell replication, leading to tumours, if the tumours spread to other parts of the body, then it becomes harder to defeat the cancer. We are still in the battle against cancer and many science fiction writers assume that we will win an find the answer to a long biological life. Reality check however does not guarantee this.
If we are to assume that gods has transcended the biological body based on carbon biochemistry and cells, then we may have strange new silicon based biochemistry and maybe new biological mechanism to deal with, estimation of lifespan then is unknown. If we assume robotic bodies, we are assuming that the mind can be uploaded to a computer, which currently there is no evidence it can be done. However, there are animals which can live to hundred over years and plants which can live to thousands of years, pushing the lower limits of the devas from 500 years to 16000 years in deva years. So currently there is no known way to live that long as well, but we sure do appreciate it if we can meet gods and learn their secret to long life.
In Buddhism they would reply doing good kamma like saving lives can extend the lifespan (like blood donation), not torturing beings, but saving them from cruel treatments (like maybe going vegan anyone?) can make our lives healthy. Meditation has been reported to be able to lengthen our telomeres. cite Taoism has their own way of practising for long life. Of course common sense like healthy living, exercise, healthy diet applies too, of which vegans has been known to have less risk of a lot of major diseases. cite Just remember that despite all these, we will still die. This is not the justification to continue smoking or drinking, but a refrain from obsessing with how to live healthily until forgetting to live or practise the noble eightfold way.
5. Many levels: This presents some technical problems, as if to have enough space for one kind of god is not enough, there must be space for gods on many levels. It may not always be possible to map the gods to very clear lines which separates the heavens very distinctly. However, the most important distinction would be between the gods and the Brahmas realms. Specifically the second Jhana Brahma realm, devas of streaming radiance, which are supposed to survive destruction of the world. This depends vastly on what is meant by the world. If it is any structure within our observable universe, be it a solar system or a galaxy, it would be easy to place the devas of streaming radiance elsewhere to allow them to survive the destruction. The theme of destruction of the world will be taken up in the chapter of the end of the universe.
For now, it seems that it would be hard to put in Brahma realms of even higher levels who survives even bigger destructions and live much longer, without assuming parallel universes or higher dimensions. Both of which as had been said before, have no empirical evidence to support them.
6. Superior powers, but limited knowledge: As we accumulate the knowledge of the sciences, our technology improves, thereby granting us superior powers over our ancestors who has no access to these knowledges. My grandfather lives through world war two as a kid, when computers are still huge machines, helped to electrify Malaysia during his working years and still live on until today to see the rise of internet and having to learn how to use smartphone to communicate with the rest of the family. We have seen just how much technology can improve by leaps and bounds within a single human lifetime and just how much faster it is going now. It is likely we are humble enough to know that by the time we (who are young) are old in this world, the technological improvements in our lifetime will be vastly bigger compared to the technological improvements of our grandfathers. We would also know that it is not impossible to have beings out there who view our technology like we view ants. However, this is just an expression of faith in the religion of technological improvement and scientific knowledge. Currently, we still have no idea how to construct spaceship which can travel even at a fraction of the speed of light, making space colonisation still a pipe dream for us, we have no technology yet to immediately help clean up Earth’s greenhouse gases at a large scale, independent of human cooperation. (Carbon capture technology exist, but it requires many parties to help utilise it to avert the worst of climate change.) We still do not have robots to do everything for us, so that we can live the Utopian economic life of doing nothing and getting whatever we want from robots. We still do not have technology which enable speed up learning, downloading into the brain decades of primary and secondary schooling into one night’s sleep. We have no idea if these things can really be possible, so no real data to support technological advanced gods, where their powers come from technology.
Yet, we are also of limited knowledge, as our island of knowledge grows, the border facing ignorance also grows. There are more questions to be answered. This is one viewpoint ventured forth by Marcelo Gleiser in his book: The Island of Knowledge. This is to counter the tendency in reductionist thinking that the whole is the sum of its parts, thus as long as we know the most fundamental equations which governs reality, we know practically everything. The progression of reductionist thinking goes like this:
History is a study of how all these stuffs below form the important events of humankind, and Cliodynamics is the science of history.
Business is applied economics
Political science is sociology concerned with power, economics is sociology concerned with distribution of resources. Religion is a combination of a lot of these stuffs, above and below.
Sociology is just application of psychology onto a group of people
Psychology, the study of mind (mind is the brain, physicalism philosophy enters here) is applied neurobiology, part of biology, ecology is just biology applied to the earth’s biosphere.
Biology is applied chemistry
Chemistry is applied physics
Physics is applied mathematics, with pure mathematics having almost nothing to do with real life.
Thus if we know all about physics, we can in principle calculate all of chemistry, biology, ecology, psychology, sociology, political science, economics, business and so on and so forth. Yet knowing the full equation of the so called “theory of everything” (TOE), which combines quantum physics, the standard model and general relativity into one big whole, would not allow us to predict exactly which movie will come out in the next 5 years, how much will they earn, who will play the newest hottest heroine and if she is still single now, so that single men can start to date her before she becomes famous. Each level of study is separated from the previous one because we implicitly recognise that the whole is not the sum of its parts. There are emergent phenomenon which is best studied and recognised at the level of each field of study rather than to be derived from first principles. Even if the gods would happen to know the TOE of physics and have fully functional Cliodynamics so that they can predict the future relatively accurately, without the knowledge to end suffering, they are still limited in their knowledge.
7. Virtuous conduct needed to be reborn here: Physics is not the science of ethics, so again no comment from physics. This is a very plain statement of the law of kamma, good actions brings about good results.
Some input from sociology would make sense of this statement. Heaven is a place of bliss, ideally without crime. Who normally commits crime? Not virtuous people. Indeed, there are recorded in the passage of devas who got angry at each other would both fall from the heavens. (cite) Even just looking at our own civilisation, we realise that the majority of the citizens of the human civilisation are civil. That is most of us do not kill or steal from each other. Most of us are honest most of the time, so that we do not have to worry about all the links online if they lead to downloading of viruses (some does, but most websites are honest). Most of us are faithful to our spouses, although this seems to be failing as the rate of divorce shoots up and the rape culture is still not yet eliminated, but at least generally we do not see all husbands hating on other men their wives sleep with or the gender reversal case. Most of us are not drunkards all the time. It would ideally be better if everyone in society can uphold the five precepts. By just imagining if everyone breaks just one of the precepts all the time, then civilisation becomes nearly impossible to maintain. Just watching the movie series the Purge, where one night a year all crimes are legal, we can see the horrors of evil acts and how society cannot be stable with those acts all the time. So sociologically speaking, admitting people with virtuous conduct in heaven is one of the good conditions to help ensure the quality of bliss in heavenly life.
8. Powers of instant travelling: Current physics forbids instant travelling. That is nothing with mass, energy or information can travel faster than light, this is the condition called locality, if one thing wants to affect another, they have to send the information for the other thing to react. Yet there are several options physics maybe non-local in nature, or by construction. The most famous of which is widely misunderstood is quantum entanglement. The more practical way is quantum teleportation, but that has a speed of light limit, so the best match would be a stabilised wormhole. All of which at current physics and technological levels cannot be used for instant travelling.
Quantum entanglement, commonly introduced as when two objects comes together, then no matter how far apart they got separated later on, they are still connected to each other, such that if one got measured, we can immediately know what state the other one will take. This might seem like a mechanism for superluminal signalling, but it is not, mainly because of our old friend, quantum randomness. When one quantum object gets measured at one end, the results which appears is randomised, so the correlated quantum object at the other end, maybe light years away would also have their correlated result randomised, just opposite or the same with the first particle, depending on which entangled state they were prepared in. Many physicist had thought long and hard about it and the result is clear, there is no superluminal signalling with quantum entanglement, nature is non-local in a strange sort of way which does not clash with special relativity, but still does not conform with our classical notions of locality.
Quantum entanglement can be used in the process of quantum teleportation. Simply put, it is to teleport the quantum information from one end to another. So both sites would have to prepare the raw materials, which are entangled to each other at both ends, a message would have to be transmitted from the sending and disintegrating end of the teleport machine to another end, which is the assembly or arrival end, so the fastest speed quantum teleportation can go is at the speed of light. Quantum information is the capturing of all the information of the quantum wavefunction of the object to be teleported. It is believed that it captures everything which makes the object the object, since all electrons are indistinguishable from each other, each proton, neutron, too, thus each isotope of the same ions or atoms is indistinguishable from each other too. What makes an object unique is its quantum state, which would include position, how their molecular bond stick to one another and so on until it describes an macroscopic object to be teleported.
That object to be teleported, in this case a god, will interact with the entangled material in the teleportation machine on the departing end, then gets destroyed at that end. The machine reads the results from the interaction, sends that data to the arrival or receiving end and do some tweak to the raw material there, now no longer entangled to recover the god which has been send through. In between the two chambers of the departure and arrival gate there is no information at all which a third party can use to reconstruct that god or any objects to be sent, which is why we call it teleportation. Each teleportation cost the whole amount of entangled material, so it has to have some time to reproduce their raw material to be entangled and then send off to both ends of the machine, which maybe light years apart, before being able to be used by another god. Sending macroscopic objects is also hard because we need to keep the chamber from interacting with anything outside it at all, including light to avoid decoherence of the quantum nature of the objects to be sent. Decoherence is basically the process which turns quantum objects into classical, after which it cannot be send via quantum teleportation. So far, teleportation is successful for the molecule of fullerene (cite), and it is believed that only funding and time limits how big an object can be send through via teleportation.
Obviously quantum teleportation does not meet the requirements of the powers of instant travelling for gods. The next candidate is stable wormholes. Wormholes are like black holes, except that they have two ends which are connected to each other. So the two ends can be separated very far in space, and even in time, but going through the wormhole is a shortcut through space and time. The problem with classical wormholes is that they are unstable, before even a single photon of light can pass any information through, the connection collapses. To stabilise it, we have to use exotic matter with negative mass or energy. This exotic matter is still not confirmed to be found or produced yet. So there goes the dream of instant travelling.
9. Luminous light shining forth from them: Based on Buddhism, self luminosity seems to have come from their practice of virtue, like how people with nothing to hide and no regrets seems to beam off as can be seen on their face. For Brahma realms, this luminosity may have been the result of the mind’s purity attained from absorption in meditation. One of the signpost before attaining to Jhana is that the five physical senses reduce their activities so much so that the mind, still, bright and luminous shows itself to the meditator, who usually perceive it as bright light. Thus the mind was originally pure, bright and luminous, just that non-meditators do not see it normally because being hindered by ill-will, sensual desire, sloth and torpor, restlessness and worry or doubt (about the meditation instruction and teacher) one normally gets caught up in the thoughts that comes and goes, busy with the six senses, not settling down and being still with one object. For those with virtue, there are less defilements covering the mind, thus they look more luminous.
This makes it very hard to match with physics as physics does not deal with the mind. The mind’s luminosity seems capable of being transformed into physical light, thus enabling the Brahma and devas to be self-luminous and be able to be perceived by others. One possibility is that the devas and Brahmas are perceived with the mind, with minds with lower attainments cannot perceive beings with minds of higher attainments, and the perception of the mind translate it to be physical light as it has not much recognition of mind objects alone, perception uses the closest thing in it’s dictionary to fit in with what was seen. Thus there is no physical light, just the perception of it. This can neatly explain why not all can see the light if there is a case where one person in the crowd has divine eye and can see the devas and Brahmas in some event, but the others there do not know they are present. However, it is the belief of Bhante Aggacitta that the lights are physical, just outside of our visible spectrum. So theoretically, this gives us a possible case for using an all range electromagnetic wave detector to sit at auspicious Buddhist chantings or ceremonies where gods were invited and try to see if there is anything detected.
Another clue from Agganna Sutta[DN 27] says devas who were reborn from the second Brahma realm, the devas of streaming radiance, into the world which is expanding after contraction has ended. These beings are mind made, feeding on delight, self-luminous, moving through the air, glorious. The world was just one mass of water and darkness, there were no sun or moon, no stars, no day or night, no change to mark time’s passage. Then a savoury earth appear and some of the greedy ones tastes that with their fingers and others follow, as a result of that their self luminosity disappears and the sun, moon appeared, day and night were distinguished, time’s passage can be marked.
In physical cosmology, there is one phase where this could roughly fit in, the recombination phase between the nucleus (mostly single proton, the hydrogen ion), and electron to become atoms. Before the recombination, the whole universe was so hot that atoms cannot exist, electrons are constantly having more than enough energy to escape any capture by proton. Electromagnetic waves, including light would be bounced off these ions (electron, protons, helium nucleus and other nucleus of simple atoms) constantly, never having the chance to travel far. After recombination, then atoms can start to form, then light can spread throughout the universe, we see this as the cosmic microwave background radiation. The light has been stretch in space as the universe expands that now it has the wavelength of microwaves. This happens roughly around 300000 years after the Big Bang, thus gravity should have time to pull the ions to become the first stars, which only shines forth when the universe becomes opaque. Actually this is worth the calculation, is there enough time and are the conditions right for stars to form before recombination era?
If this corresponds to the disappearance of self luminosity in the suttas, then we have the clue that luminosity means something which can travel inside ion soup, thus the light may not be electromagnetic waves at all, but some other yet unknown long range radiation. Thus far, we have no evidence for that kind of structure, although it is possible to construct elaborate theoretical models for it in physics, without raw data to guide the theory, there is little point to the exercise. Or we can interpret it to mean that the gods are plasma beings, having eaten something less hotter than them , their bodies turned into atoms instead of being made of ions, thus losing the ability to radiate light from plasma heat (which is basically fire). This contradicts physical cosmology, which says that recombination is a natural result of the universe expanding and cooling down as the energy density gets lower, not the result of greediness of some beings.
10. One for each world: The reference from the sutta mentioned that in ‘a thousandfold minor world system’, there are a thousand moons, a thousand suns… a thousand four great oceans… a thousand each of the six deva heavens, and a thousand Brahma worlds. It follows up that a thousand times of ‘a thousandfold minor world system’ is called ‘a million (I changed from the translated version of Bhikkhu Bodhi, he uses a thousand -to-the-second-power) middling world system’. A thousand times ‘a million middling world system’ is called ‘a billion great world system’. From the description, it is pretty unambiguous that a world system refers to a solar system, that is our sun, the planets orbiting around it, at least one habitable planet with a moon and sea.
For the level of science at that time, this statement that there are plenty of worlds would be simply unbelievable. Until the scientific revolution, stars were still not known to be just suns of their own up close, hence the believe in the celestial sphere of which the outer most celestial sphere are the sphere of stars which rotates around the earth. It took Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton to put the sun in the centre of their then universe. It took the creation of quantum physics to understand the process of nuclear fusion before we understood what the sun is, and the Big Bang cosmology to understand how stars out there can obtain their raw hydrogen and helium to start the fusion process which makes them shine. Now we also know that exoplanets (planets outside of our solar system) are not so rare, and possibly every star may have at least one planet. We also know the importance of a moon to enable earth to retain its atmosphere and ocean, without the moon, our planet may end up looking like Venus, with runaway greenhouse gasses and extreme temperature and very thick atmosphere. cite Our Milky Way Galaxy already contains more than a billion stars, however maybe not all stars form their own solar system, so a billion solar system in a galaxy of 100 billion stars seems like a good estimate for a billion great world system.
That the Buddha had already known the vastness of space at least until the galaxy level is pretty impressive. However, assimilating the information that the devas and Brahma (at least the first Jhana level), are also localised for each solar system, we are lead to a conclusion that their appearance must be as a result of the laws of nature. Since physics does not have this within its structure, either we accept that physics is incomplete in that regards, or we regard physics as complete and dismiss any possibility of gods. Obviously, the middle way out is more practical, that physics has no reason to expand itself unless there are some empirical evidence which calls for the existence of gods not already explainable in the possibilities which follows (actually many of the possibilities do require extension of current physics). To insist that physics is complete is not only untrue as we still do not know about dark matter, dark energy, the origin of high energy cosmic rays and also the correct fundamental equations of quantum gravity, but also arrogant as it is always possible that we may meet new phenomenon which requires extension of current physics. To insist that physics must change to accommodate gods without empirical evidences is to betray the scientific and Kalama sutta principle of experiments and experience as the final arbiter of truth. Of course, here it is speculation, not insistence, much like the activities of theoretical physics research, to extend physics and find some testable predictions (if possible).
Recapping, here are the ten conditions and their respective judgement by current physics, if we assign some point system to it, we can get an overall score. -2 is impossible, -1 is Very unlikely, 0 is unknown, irrelevant or neutral, 1 is possible but not there yet, 2 is already known to be possible. Thus the overall score of 20 is the current laws of physics fully support it, 0 is ambivalent, negative scores indicates the laws of physics is more against the existence of gods.
Spontaneous rebirth: -1.
Invisible, but can reveal themselves, or be seen via divine eye: 1.
Blissful, but not end of suffering: 0
Long life: 1
Many levels: 0
Superior powers, but limited knowledge: 1
Virtuous conduct needed to be reborn here: 0
Powers of instant travelling: -1
Luminous light shining forth from them: 0
One for each world: 0
Total score: 1, pretty close to ambivalent. However, if we read the gods as the literal way they were presented, current physics would undoubtedly be very fast in rejecting it.
- That is if spontaneous rebirth means appearing like magic out of nothing.
- Invisible because they are of a higher being, thus can hide from us at will, with not only one level of invisibility, but all the higher gods can hide from their lower ranking gods, Brahmas being higher rank than the devas in this case, we have no evidences of higher spacial dimension or parallel universes.
- Instant travelling, that breaks special relativity, thus very unlikely to be true.
- Agganna sutta describing the “devolution” of gods to become humans as their greed lead them to eat more food which turns their body courser and grosser, from non-gender to develop gender and lust, from spontaneous rebirth to become womb rebirth. Whereas science would describe the appearance of humans as an evolution from single celled organism to multicellular, from sea creatures to land creatures, some forming backbones, and branching from it mammals and the ape like group of families, by which we are descendants from a common ancestors with modern apes. Along the way, of course the cell division to be born turns into sexual union for birth to happen via eggs and womb. The food source for single celled organism is vastly different from the many stages of multicellular level organisms. Unless we take it that the gods are single celled organisms, with courser gods as the more advanced level of evolution, we have to reject Agganna sutta as not reflecting current scientific findings.
Having seen in detail what the rejection picture looks like and analysed in detail the characteristics of gods, we turn to the possibilities which are available that do not contradict current physics. It is worthwhile to keep in mind that 2500 over years ago, in the time of the Buddha, the general world population would have no idea of any physical possibilities which would allow for invisibility, long life, superior powers, instant travelling, self-luminosity and plenty of worlds out there. Currently, our level of science do not recognise spontaneous rebirth and has no capacity to comment on blissful, many levels, virtuous conduct needed to be reborn as devas. It would not be surprising as science advances to see that we will eventually see the characteristics of gods as trivially easy to obtain, that is likely when humans have evolved back into gods.
No comments:
Post a Comment