Modernity’s Warfare in Life and Religion: A Meeting with Charles Darwin and the Bhågavata Puråna : Journal of Vaishnava Studies

Abstract

In this essay, we will look at two aspects of modernity: the notion of the struggle for existence, and the notion that religion and science are in conflict with one another. Firstly, Charles Darwin formulated our current understanding of natural history in the nineteenth century, and his view has come to influence almost all academic fields. Darwin, along with a number of other influential nineteenth and twentieth century naturalists—such as Erasmus Darwin, Charles Lyell, Robert Malthus, Steven Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins—speak of the life as a “struggle for existence.”
The Bhågavata Purå∫a, a prominent Vaishnava-Hindu theological text, speaks of embodied life in a similar manner. For the Bhågavata, giving a factual description of natural processes is an integral part of its theological aims. Although the way the two traditions talk about biological life is similar, their use and application of that knowledge is different. The copious examples of “struggle” and “warfare” in nature that evolutionists have brought to light could be subsumed under what the Bhågavata would call vairågya-jñåna, or “knowledge that leads to renunciation.”