Hinduism...How do we spiritually explain extinction of species?
Can any one explain the extinction of dinosaurs and other species from the spiritual point of view? Does Dinosaur appear in any of our mythologies? If not, why? It is a fact that they existed on Earth and they were not too small in size to be ignored? People who wrote Purana's have not mentioned dinosaurs in it, why?
@ Nitai Gaura.
Existence of Dinosaurs are confirmed by scientific and authentic methods. They seem to have existed much before our Purana's were written. But no mention of these creatures in our Puranas. You may want to check this link in Viki.
God simply got tired of pretending that he was a dinosaur and wanted to pretend he was something else. Every now and again you have to change the game just to keep it interesting.
But, who has seen that dinosaurs existed. No one has seen and therefore they did not come to extinction
Dinosaurs existed only in the imagination of fertile brains. Not in real life.
The Purana's give the exact number of living entities
Jataka naval lasagna
StavroRaaksa vimsati
krmayo rudra-sankhyakah
paksinam dasa laksanam
trimsal laksani pasavah
catur laksani manusah
900,000 forms in the water
2,000,000 forms of trees and plants,
1,100,000 forms of insects,
1,000,000 forms of birds,
3,000,000 forms of beasts and
400,000 kinds of human species.
So totally there are 8,400,000 species of life. Exact number. Not perhaps, maybe, possibly this number of dinasaur or that many speculative numbers.
Please chant HARE KRISHNA and be happy.
hare krishna hare krishna
krishna krishna hare hare
hare rama hare rama
rama rama hare hare
I do not want to claim or prove anything, but once I read a certain story in the Bhagavatam and I came upon the following verse.
SB 8.10.10-12: O King, some soldiers fought on the backs of vultures, eagles, ducks, hawks and Lhasa birds. Some fought on the backs of timings, which can devour huge whales, some on the backs of Sarah's, and some on buffalo, rhinoceroses, cows, bulls, jungle cows and arenas. Others fought on the backs of jackals, rats, lizards, rabbits, human beings, goats, black deer, swans and boars. In this way, mounted on animals of the water, land and sky, INCLUDING ANIMALS WITH DEFORMED BODIES, both armies faced each other and went forward.
Visualizing the forms of certain Dino's I thought; "yes of course, for what purpose, other than to serve as fighting machines for these demons, could these bodies have been created?"
I don't know, just a thought that came up in my mind when i read that story.
As to the extinction of species:
All species eternally exist in their full number (8.400.000 according to the Vedas), spread all over the universes. But not all of them are all the time manifested on every planet. Species are manifested and extincted in due course of time, according to the will of material nature, who acts under the superintendence of the Supreme Lord. the whole material world evolves under the will of material nature, manifesting one thing and folding up another. Our bodies are simply part of that nature like puppets on a string, but we, souls, although within the body, can go beyond all this. Material nature may manipulate our body, but not the soul within. The soul inherently, has nothing to do with material nature, unless it wants to be part of it. Then it's tossed around along with the body, as a boat is tossed by the waves of the ocean.
Whatever one can imagine is there on earth irrespective of its form or characteristics. This is also applicable to the dreams that comes during sleep. Thus say Hinduism.
One can say that "it is there", ""the other is there", " another is there" and so on. But no one is privileged to say "it is not there". Such is the world and the world contains everything one can imagine or dream.
A small example, there was no cellular phone or television about 50 years back, which are said to be inventions. So how something has come and where from.
If a thesis or an article is written by somebody, it means, he collects the particles from various other sources and compile to one as a new. Before Newton, magnetism was there. Before Einstein relativity was there,
Same is the case, the species are not only result of transformation, evolution, but creation from different contents. AND THEIR EXTINCTION ALSO. It is the nature of the world and the scholars say - not creation of God (or God comes under a definition).- the phenomenon - which a study or research is not going to do any good in the long run.
It is said, many of the size of the people mentioned in Puranas were much bigger than the size of the people seen today. Perhaps like Gulliver appearing to Lilliput men. Even among those people there were still biggies. When Ghatotkach fell in the battle of Mahabharat, he is said to have destroyed an army of normal soldiers then. Bhimsena is said to have strengths of ten thousand elephants. If this is something about which Srimad Mahabharath talks of regarding 5000 years ago, maybe the fossils retrieved millions of years ago might be even of some so called Lizards or crocodiles then, where likes of Madhu and Kaitabhas lived (of whom the Science is yet to find any fossils).
Perhaps something like the DNA of smaller cockroaches might have developed the mechanism that can even survive nuclear holocaust might have got the fossils of those lizards / crocks of that time to contemporary century. Maybe evolution brought in changes in their structure something like length of men shortening and starting to walk.
There are possibilities with logical thinking, but for solid proofs maybe nothing in the world might appear solid enough in the most micro mini analysis, even the basis of carbon dating (Assuming current rate of change of transformation need not have been the rate before or in future in micro mini details). In a macro way everything could be possible with this vast universe.
So maybe the so called Hindus can still argue that, there is nothing other than what is vomit ted by Sage Veda Vyas in the World in its essence.
Hinduism...How do we spiritually explain extinction of species?
