The Intelligent Design Argument has a well-known flaw that is often used by critics against it: The world is not perfectly designed. In a hilariously perverse example of this argument (that I saw on YouTube a few weeks ago), an atheist argues that men’s testicles are not perfectly designed because they are hanging outside the …
Two Kinds of Mahattattva
A friend today pointed out to me a seeming anomaly between two descriptions of the Mahattattva. The first description appears as the second covering of the universe in Vedic cosmology, where the first covering is the Ahaṃkāra or ego. The second description appears in Sāñkhya where the Ahaṃkāra is said to be a byproduct of …
Leaders vs. Managers
According to a recent Gallup survey, only 15% of the global workforce is “engaged” as most people “hate their job and especially their boss”. The reason for this disenchantment with people managers is not hard to find: Leadership requires character development but that is not on the curriculum of any management school. If you search …
The Problem of Evil
The problem of evil refers to the question of how to reconcile the existence of evil in this world with an omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent God. The argument for the problem of evil goes as follows: We can see that evil exists in this world—cheating, misery and suffering, poverty, disease, etc. Why would God create …
Philosophizing in Six Perspectives
In my first book—Six Causes—I described a theory of creation that comprises six causes, namely, Material Cause, Efficient Cause, Personal Cause, Formal Cause, Instrumental Cause, and Systemic Cause. This was in a way a contrast to the Greek use of four causes (Final, Efficient, Material, and Formal). Now, as I work on the Six Systems …
How Shankaracharya’s Philosophy Made India Weak and Poor
There is a popular narrative in India at present that Islamic Invaders and British Colonialists destroyed India’s traditional culture and civilization. That is not entirely false. But any serious student of history is led to ask: Why did these invaders succeed in conquering India when numerous such invasions were repelled previously? The Mauryan Empire in …
The Philosophy of Contracts
Modern society is constructed on the idea of contracts. This idea can be traced back to Judaism which instituted a “covenant” with God in which God will do certain things for Abraham if Abraham did some things for God. The first covenant of Judaism for instance says: “You shall be circumcised in the flesh of …
An Illustration of Semantic Addition
As a follow-up to an earlier post, where I described how natural laws arise as a result of qualities, this post explores this idea further using an example. Since modern science grew out of the idea that matter is res extensa—i.e., that it has only one property of extension in space—this post also illustrates the …
Krishna is Jealous and Nonchalant
Many people say that the God of Abrahamic religions is a “jealous” God. However, they don’t ask: If we can be jealous, then why can God also not be jealous? Similarly, if we can be non-jealous, therefore, God must also be non-jealous. This contradiction makes it very hard to understand God’s nature.