Our main objection to Darwinian evolution is that it sees consciousness as a product of matter. We cannot agree with this proposal, nor does it make much sense in terms of verifiable evidence. Where do we see consciousness arising from inert matter and what scientific experiment can prove that this occurs?

The poetry of Srimad Bhagavatam posits a multiverse cosmos with innumerable universes emanating from the pores of the body of Vishnu as he exhales in yogic sleep. With his inhalation they all collapse and then again expand in a beginningless and endless cycle of samsara. The world is but the dream of God.

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.

Until the dawn of Christianity, all of the Eastern and most of the ancient world conceived of time as cyclical, not linear. In the West, Augustine was among the first to insist on linear time as opposed to cyclical, although arguably the seeds of his insights were drawn from the Old Testament. Augustine was confident that time was real, linear, and going somewhere. It was increasingly filled with meaningful content, and nothing that occurred along its course would ever be repeated. In Christianity there is a sense of a “fall from grace”—being thrown out of paradise, to live in sin until Armageddon—a belief that works well with linear time. But Christianity aside, much of Western society, both religious and secular, has been driven by a linear notion for quite some time, drawing a diagonal line through cyclical time in minds of many