| Math. and Spirituality Freewill and Karma All about Reincarnation The Pinnacle of Religion Buddhism and the Gita ... 13 Beautiful Stories Essay and Short Stories MATHEMATICAL FRAMEWORK FOR SPIRITUALITY (MFS) [Home] SUPREMACY OF THE BHAGAVAD-GITA FROM THE RATIONAL VIEWPOINT by Dr. Jagdish N. Srivastava Department of Statistics Colorado State University Ft. Collins, Colorado 80523 USA (This article was submitted for the Souvenir Volume at the occasion of the 12th International Gita Conference, to be held at Stanford University, 7-9 August, 1998. A talk based on this article was delivered in the conference on 8 August 1998) ABSTRACT This article gives a glimpse into the nature of the work done by me during the last 33 years in the general field of developing a rational approach to spirituality. The ideas of this mathematically based foundation for spirituality are introduced in a lucid manner through the story of how I happened to come to this field. Although born in a religious family, I developed an atheistic outlook at age 16. Many secularists and others regard atheism as the rational outlook, decrying belief in God, because they say that it is irrational to believe in myths and in things whose existence is not proven.This view ignores the fact that believing that there is no God is also a belief, which is on the same level of myth as its opposite. Thus, I was victimized for a while, until I realised that I could not prove that there is no God. At this point, I changed into an agnostic, and held Science and Service to humanity as the Highest Ideal, believing that God may or may not exist, but God and spirituality are irrelevant to us. As such, I pressed forward in the scientific field. I happened to study some physics and logic, and in particular Goedel's theorem. In layman's terms, Goedel's work indicates that if there is any mathematical system which involves the natural numbers 0, 1, 2,....and so on, then in that system there are questions that cannot be answered yes or no by using the axioms of the system, although there does exist a definite answer to these questions. In order to answer such a question, some more axioms may be introduced. However, now we will arrive at a new system to which Godel's theorem will again be applicable, and now there will be newer questions that cannot be answered. | |
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