A Clever Trap

There is a set of ideas in hinduism that I have been thinking about. Its the whole karma-papa-punya thing. Here's what I know about it.

1. All organisms are only a manifestation of their souls. When an organism dies, it is reborn either as another member of the same species or another species. The only exception is when that soul has attained moksha.


2. There is a score associated with every soul. That score increases when the organism does good and decreases when it does bad. This score is called karma. This score carries over from one birth to the next.


3. An organism has no direct way of knowing what its score (karma) is. (If it accepts the theory) It can only deduce its score by examining what species it is! (This is an implicit assumption - never stated as such).


4. When an organism dies, its score decides which species it is reborn as (assuming that it has not attained moksha). If it has low scores, it is born as a creature that is considered despicable (like a worm or pig etc). Better scores cause it to be born as better things - horse, dog, cow etc. Human birth means that it has the highest of scores.


5. Moksha is a threshold score level. If an organism has score more than that, it is not reborn.


6. After a soul has attained moksha, it will go to heaven where it stays forever.


7. If an organism does good, good things will happen to it. If it does bad, bad thing will happen to it.

The above postulates are what most hindu people generally have in mind.

There are some things that I am unsure about:

1. Is the score numerical? If so what values do all souls start with? Do all souls start at the same time? What is the moksha threshold? The theory is unhelpful - it uses vague terms as earning punya and incurring papa. What is the unit of measure of these things? no idea. The overall idea seems very much like that of money and bank accounts - but it is slippery enough to escape from that pattern.


2. There does not seem to be a lower threshold like the upper one. So I am not sure under what condition an organism goes to Narka (hell). But the concept of hell is there in hindu philosophy.


3. It isnt clear if there is a relationship between having bad things happening to you and your score. One thought is that if you do good - you have a choice - either you increase your punya or you experience good things. And likewise for bad things - either have you punya decreased and experience no bad things or let your punya remain the same and experience bad things. Or is it that if you do good things there is a double reward (increased punya and good experiences) and a double penalty if you do bad things (decreased punya and bad experiences)?


4. Is there a database kept somewhere which records every good and bad thing that a soul did - and what effect that had on its karma - and what good or bad happened to it as a result? Can an organism/soul see this database if it feels that justice has not been done to it?

I think that the above is a very clever mental trap. If you assume that it is impossible to track rebirth, then it is impossible to test the claim that the world works like this.

Lets say that we want to test if the world works like this within the limitation of not being able to track rebirth.

Any experiences of animals cannot be used for this testing - we cant ask them "what good or bad happened to you?". Even if we do, they may not understand us or we may not understand their answer.

So we must only consider human experiences. There are only two types - good and bad experiences. Lets consider them. For simplicity, lets assume the human is female.

1. She experiences good. She is not really going to question anything. She is going to assume that it must be because of her punya (of this life or the past)


2. She experiences bad. She is probably going to question why. If she has a consience and knows that she has done something wrong in her past in this life, she will assume that the experience is a result of that. If she feels very strongly that she has done no wrong in her current life, then the only possibility is the she had done bad things in her past life. Since we have assumed that we cant track rebirth, we cannot validate the assumption.

So, in the absence of rebirth tracking, no test can prove the claim wrong. Any and all observations can be claimed to be in conformance with the theory. Consider

1. A person does good and experiences good. no problem


2. A person does bad and experiences bad. as expected


3. A person does good but experiences bad. It is the effect of her misdeeds in her past lives.


4. A person does bad but experiences good. Again it is the effect of her good deeds in her past lives.

So the theory explains everything - every possible turn of events. In fact the theory explains anything! This theory is not falsifiable. No possible scenario can be imagined which where (in principle) the theory could be false.

So should we then accept the theory to be a scientific one and moreover as true? Well, not so fast. There was a philosopher called Karl Popper who said that a theory is scientific only if it can in principle be proved false. His ideas were paraphrased by another philosopher A C Grayling who said "A theory that explains anything explains nothing".

What it ultimately means is that the theory makes no predictions. By saying that anything is possible, it is not saying anything of value. Whatever happens, the theory will say - "so? Big deal. I have predicted that.". It does not say that the world works in a certain way and not in another.

And now notice how convenient all this is to the friendly neighbourhood temple pujari or the guy who comes to your home to perform the so called "good deeds" like 'homa's 'havana's and 'shanti's and what not. He is doing a *good* thing for you (and of course taking good money from you as well - and you also have to spend good money to buy things for the function he is performing). He is increasing your punya. Now if good things happen to you, you will not be worried. If bad things happen, he will say that you need to do more good deeds to overcome your 'dosha's (and he gets more money of course). As far as the pujari is concerned, he (notice its always a he) is not really concerned if the above mentioned theory is true or false. For him, what is important is that you believe it is true. If you do, then he is assured of a steady income. This theory is a meme (see wikipedia for what the word means) that acts as a parasite. Its effects are that it causes anyone who it infects to give money to people who claim to do good deeds on their behalf.