Scientific Foreknowledge in Sacred Texts - Vedic Texts

Vedic Texts

Hindu tradition sometimes holds that all knowledge is pre-existing, to be "recovered" rather than "discovered", and is echoed can be found in the Vedas and other ancient texts.

The Hindu revivalism movements that emerged in British India from the later 19th century developed an idea of a "Vedic science" found in the corpus of Brahmanas, Sutras and Shastras of Indian antiquity that supposedly anticipated certain results of modern science.

Of notable influence were the writings of Swami Dayananda Saraswati and Swami Vivekananda. Dayananda rejected the older commentaries of the Vedas by Sayana, Mahidhara and Uvata as medieval corruptions "opposed to the real meaning of the Vedas". He summarily renounced the academic philological work of western scholars as being misinformed by such corrupted Indian commentators. For example, the first volume of the Sacred Books of the East series, containing editions of some Upanishads, had appeared in 1879. Dayananda's writings are recognized as having an element of religious fundamentalism. Dayananda's Arya Samaj experienced a gradual renaissance in the 1980s.

It has been said that pseudoscience was unwittingly helped into being by the postmodernism embraced by Indian leftist "postcolonial theories" like those of Ashis Nandy and Vandana Shiva who rejected the universality of "Western" science and called for the "indigenous science". According to the historian of science Meera Nanda:

any traditional Hindu idea or practice, however obscure and irrational it might have been through its history, gets the honorific of "science" if it bears any resemblance at all, however remote, to an idea that is valued (even for the wrong reasons) in the West.

In 1900, Vivekananda said that:

"the conclusions of modern science are the very conclusions the Vedanta reached ages ago; only, in modern science they are written in the language of matter." In one lecture he claimed that: "Today we find wonderful discoveries of modern science coming upon us like bolts from the blue, opening our eyes to marvels we never dreamt of. But many of these are only re-discoveries of what had been found ages ago. It was only the other day that modern science discovered that what it calls heat, magnetism, electricity, and so forth, are all convertible into one unit force. But this has been done even in the Samhita", thus identifying concepts from physics like gravitation, electricity, magnetism and other forces with the mystical Vedantic notion of Prana.

Some of the authors "seeking to modernize India by recovering the supposedly pristine Vedic-Hindu roots of Indian culture" revived these notions.:

"By postulating interconnections and similarities across Nature, they were able to use logic to reach extremely subtle conclusions about diverse aspects of reality."

In response to criticism to the effect that this is essentially the religious worldview prevalent in early Europe succeeded by the scientific revolution of around the 18th century (Nanda 2003:116), Hindutva authors answer that the distinction of science and pseudoscience (or proto-science) is Eurocentric and inapplicable to Vedic science:

"Western scientic thought draws on the traditions of Greek rationalist thinking according to which only what is within the purview of the five senses is taken cognisance of. Scientific methods follow some kind of closed scientific reasoning which insulates itself against facts that its methods cannot account for. How else can they dare dismiss Jyotisha which sees a level of existence beyond the purview of the five senses?" (Vasudev 2001)

Or even that in India, science and religion are fundamentally identical:

"The idea of 'contradiction' is an imported one from the West in recent times by the Western-educated, since 'Modern Science' arbitrarily imagines that it only has the true knowledge and its methods are the only methods to gain knowledge, smacking of Semitic dogmatism in religion."