Science has not replaced religion, nor does it have the potential to do so. The two amount to different ways of knowing: objective and subjective; ascending and descending. Science pursues knowledge of the objective realm in an effort to master it, while religion pursues knowledge of the subjective realm in an effort to serve therein. Science can tell us much about the objective world in great detail, and this in turn gives it credibility. Religion, on the other hand, can tell us much about the subjective world, which is naturally elusive in comparison to the objective realm.

Consciousness doesn’t just mean perception or awareness. We can use the example of a light. A light itself is luminous and it also lights other things. In a similar way, consciousness sheds light on other things and it is itself luminous.

Descartes' conclusion that humans are devoid of conscious experience runs counter to the deeply rooted sense in all of us that we all have conscious experience—quallia, sentience, sapience—and that such experience is the essence of any meaningful life. John Searle says it well when he writes, “ . . . if your theory results in the view that consciousness does not exist, you have simply produced a reductio ad absurdum of your theory.”

Andrei Linde is the co-inventor of the theory of eternal inflation, which holds that the universe expands or inflates very quickly at first and that this sort of event may have occurred many, many times, perhaps an infinite number of times, in a universe that is constantly self-reproducing. Linde is a physics professor at Stanford University. Russian born, his spiritual attraction lies more with Hinduism than the Abrahamic religions.

We might translate Gaudiya Vedanta’s acintya bhedabheda as “trans-rational monistic dualism.” It is a form of substance dualism, but one in which the natural world (maya-sakti) is also one with consciousness (jiva-sakti), despite their larger difference from one another. They are one with one another in that they are both saktis of Bhagavan. They are different from one another in that one is experiential and the other is non-experiential.