The watch analogy

[Surya Deva]

There is a controversy in India over whether or not Sanskrit was actually imported into India, but that is a political controversy. There are solid linguistic arguments that establish the homeland of Proto-Indo-European outside of northern India--actually probably in the steppes of Russia--and there is archaeological evidence to back up that claim. However, Hindu nationalists have taken this question up as a cause. I suppose that they see it as a matter of national pride that the "aryans" originally came from India.

This is a veritable strawman. Aryan invasion theory is dismissed not just by Hindu nationalists, it is also dismissed by a growing number of scholars, including non Indian scholars. The reason for this is not some sense of nationalistic pride, but the fact that the preponderance of evidence has shown that no Aryan invasion ever took place and this theory was the product of a racist scholarship. It would make no difference to me if the Aryans were from India or not from India, I would still have pride in India.

Linguistic theories are not hard archaeological evidence. Now, I am sure you can admit your lack of expertise in archaeology. I have some knowledge in Indian history because I am well read on the subject. The arcaheological and historical evidence shows the following

1) Indian historical records as recorded in the puranas which mention the geneologies of kings and their respective durations go back 10,000 years. This is supported by Greek historians who recorded the geneologies the Indians recorded. According to Indian history around 3000BCE was the time Krishna lived and the Mahabharata war took place.

2) The astronomical evidence as recorded in the Rig Veda records astronomical data that was not possible until prior to 3000BCE. Playfair, a astronomer and mathematican calculated from the astronomical data gleaned from the Indians that civilisation was as old as 6000BCE.(Archeaological evidence supports his calculations)

3) The archeaological evidence from the excavations of the Indus valley civilisation has proven the Aryans were already in India prior to 3000BCE. This is proven by discovering unmistable Aryan icons such as Swastikas, fire altars and Aryan metric systems that used in later India. In addition a river described throughout the early books of the Rig Veda, "Saraswati" has been now discovered through satellite imagry, but which dried up around 1900BCE. The majority of the settlements of the Indus valley have been found on the banks of the river.

4) The Rig Veda very explicitly mentions the geography of India. The Indus valley civilisation is the only civilisation in the world that matches its description, such as the Rig Veda describes maritime activity. It known that the Indus people were maritime people and had dock yards.

5) The preponderance of dozens of Genetic studies shows that those of Aryan descent and those of so-called Dravidian descent are actually the same stock.

6) There is no memory of an Aryan invasion or of Aryans being outside of India anywhere in the entire history of India. No Indian had ever heard of such a thing, until the British invented it in the 19th century. The scholar, Max Muller, who originally proposed it later detracted his own theory by admitting he was guessing. The data of 1500BCE for the start of Vedic civilisation was fixed based on nothing more than guessing.

In addition to that we have evidence of political and racist motive in the founding of the theory. Max Muller was a Christian missionary and he admitted in his published letters his aim to convert India to christianity by destroying its indigenious culture and religion through his translation of the Rig Veda. Similar racist views on India can be found in other British scholars at the time, saying very racist things about Indian culture and history based on little knowledge of it. Most of the original scholars from the West barely even understood Sanskrit. The translations of the Rig Veda done by indigenous Sanskritists using the ancient vyakarana method produces a completely different translation.

Therefore based on the preponderance of evidence it is clear to me that no Aryan invasion ever happened and it is a total fabricated myth from Western racist scholarship from a time when white supremacy was accepted as a fact. The history of a people is recorded by its own people, and I go with what my people recorded and not what some Western person says about it. Anybody telling me otherwise, without strong and hard evidence will be perceived as racist by me.

 

[Surya Deva]

By the way we are way off-topic now. Why don't you start a separate topic on linguistics and Aryans and keep this discussion about evolution/intelligent design

 

[Copernicus]

Surya, I've had my arguments with Hindu nationalists over the so-called "invasion theory", thank you very much. I probably have a greater chance of convincing a "birther" in the US that President Obama was actually born in Hawaii.

Thanks for the lively discussion. I don't really have time to pursue it further right now.

 

[Surya Deva]

It is not really about arguments per se, but evidence. Aryan invasion theory has all been but discredited and debunked in scholarship. Even recent Western scholarship has adoped a softer version of it called Aryan Migration theory. The historical and archeaological evidence simply does not support it.

The theory was never based on any evidence in the first place. Linguistic theories are not evidence. Moreover, there is proven racist and politica motived behind the theory. By todays standards of scholarship this theory would never have got any acceptance. It has stuck only because it has been repeated enough times. They say tell a lie and repeat it constantly, eventually it gets mistaken for the truth.

 

[Copernicus]

It is not really about arguments per se, but evidence. Aryan invasion theory has all been but discredited and debunked in scholarship. Even recent Western scholarship has adoped a softer version of it called Aryan Migration theory. The historical and archeaological evidence simply does not support it.

Surya, it does not matter to me whether there were invasions or migrations. That the language came from further to the west is not in serious dispute among scholars.

The theory was never based on any evidence in the first place. Linguistic theories are not evidence. Moreover, there is proven racist and politica motived behind the theory. By todays standards of scholarship this theory would never have got any acceptance. It has stuck only because it has been repeated enough times. They say tell a lie and repeat it constantly, eventually it gets mistaken for the truth.

I cannot honestly take the time to explain to you what the linguistic evidence is, and you pretty obviously do not know what it is. All I can do is advise you to discover that for yourself. Or you can just go on believing what you want to believe. If you are going to start calling me a racist, then I think that it is time to disengage the discussion.

 

[mitchellmckain]

After reading the Wikipedia article on this topic, I can only say that I would personally be very skeptical of so called evidence taken from the Rig Veda for the invasion theory. But I find the linguistic and genetic evidence to be much more objective and convincing. It seems obvious to me that the objections to the theory are politically motivated.

 

[Copernicus]

After reading the Wikipedia article on this topic, I can only say that I would personally be very skeptical of so called evidence taken from the Rig Veda for the invasion theory. But I find the linguistic and genetic evidence to be much more objective and convincing. It seems obvious to me that the objections to the theory are politically motivated.

It is an intriguing question. When you look at the rise of the Indus River Valley civilization and the Sumerians, it is probable that they had some trade relations. But the Indus civilization appears to have collapsed well before the Indo-Aryan tribes arrived in the area. (By way of contrast, the Sumerians tended to co-exist with Semitic Akkadians, who came to replace them.) The Indus civilization did not apparently have much to do with horses, but horses were a signature phenomenon among Indo-Europeans. There were other interesting cultural differences, not the least of which is some traces of the Indo-European pantheon in the Hindu religion. The most favored speculation now (not proven, as far as I know) is that the Harappan culture was Dravidian, which is still an extant language family in the South.

It is worth remembering that language does not always follow racial patterns, either. So the fact that most Indians bear DNA affinity to the Indus valley inhabitants would not contradict the linguistic facts, which overwhelmingly suggest that Sanskrit was not native to the Indian subcontinent. Too many of its cognate words have shifted away from common meanings found in other branches of Indo-European, and many reconstructed words suggest flora and fauna that were not native to the Indian subcontinent when Prot-Indo-European probably existed as a more homogeneous set of languages. Hence, the language could have taken hold in India, but the gene pool could have been dominated by different ancestors.

 

[Surya Deva]

I am familiar with the linguistic theory and I conclude

1) It is not conclusive
2) It is contradicted by hard empirical evidence

1) First of all, we will begin with facts. PIE is not an actual language that has been discovered, it is a language that has been constructed with linguistic theory. There is no conclusive proof that such a language ever existed. Secondly, the fixing of the origin of original source of PIE was based on spurious theories of linguistic centre of gravity: which states that the origin of a language is to be found where you find the most members of the family and highest diversity. As most of the Indo-European languages are found around Central Asia, it was concluded that the origin was somewhere in the Steeps of Russia. This conclusion was not taken to be axiomatic by other Western scholars at the time, some of which favoured the origin to be in India itself. However, the central Asia thesis was accepted because of its political significance. This lead to Aryan race myths and white supremacy movements(Later used by Nazism).

So for you to argue to posit origins of Aryans in India serves the political agenda of Hindu nationalism, it can equally be argued that to maintain the origins of Aryans in Central asia as Caucasians serves Western political agendas. In fact the Aryan notion has been used for many political agendas in the West.

Unfortunately, for the West, they will have to humble themselves to the fact that there exists different civilisations in the world and these different civilisations differ on various things. Indian civilisation has its own traditional systems of science, medicine, education, economics, religion, literature and its own history - that has nothing to do with the West. Nowhere in Indian history does it mention Aryans coming from outside of India. On the contrary we have a continuous 10,000 year old history recorded by our historians in great detail of the geneology of dynasities that have ruled in India going back to Vedic times, which is the start of Indian civilisation. We have our grammatical tradition and our own language of scholarship(Sanskrit) and a vast scholarship on the Vedas which is thousands of years old. There is a very precise way of reading the Rig Veda using the vyakarana method(Sanskrit grammar) which has been taught to Vedic scholars again since thousands of years.

Now one fine day a Western man turns up in the 19th century and says that thousands of years of our scholarship is wrong, our history is wrong, our Vedas are wrong. Then they proceed to tell us what is right: what is right is that we were invaded by the ancestors of the West in 1500BCE who bought our Vedas. That the original founders of the Vedas were nomadic savages, racists and tyrants and not philosophers and seers. That our 10,000 year history is in fact wrong, and our history is only 3000 years at most. They tell us our grammatical tradition is wrong, and that they have superior methods in reading our own Vedas. Then they tell us we are an inferior race and that we accept the hegemony of their pure breed Aryan race - who have come back to recivilise us.

I am sorry but how can you expect an Indian to not see this as racism? Pretty much our entire history has been rewritten by a people who know barely any Sanskrit, in contempt of thousands years of our own scholarship and our own scholars at the time(who were just as bemused as I am by what the Western scholars were doing)

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Now, it must be admitted to go to a foreign land with a long history and then rewrite their history requires extraordinary evidence. What evidence did the Western scholarship furnish? They didn't furnish any evidence whatsoever. They made up a linguistic theory, and the leading Western scholar even admitted he was guessing.

Linguistic theories are not evidence and nor is linguistics a hard empirical science. Extraordinary evidence must be furnished to show that the Aryans came from Central Asia into India in 1500BCE. And there is absolutely no evidence to date to support this conclusion.

However, hard empirical evidence has indeed shown the opposite. The Indus valley civilisation is consistent with the descriptions in the Rig Veda. The Rig veda describes its geography, its rivers. Fire-altars which are used in Vedic fire sacrifices have been found in the IVC. In addition major Aryan symbols like swastikas have been found there. Moreover, the Rig Veda describes and extolls a river that had long dried up before 1500BCE. This dried up river was the main locus of the majority of Indus settlements and cities found. Therefore it is clear the Aryans were already in India during the times this river was thriving.

This means only one conclusion is possible because the Indo-European migrations started around 2000BCE. The Aryans migrated out from India, rather than vis versa. They took their Aryan culture and language with them and the language proliferated around Central Asia and degraded(Sanskrit is more complex than other IE languages) over time. This conclusion is of course obscene to Western scholarship for it suggests non-Western origins for Western civilisation.

The nationalism argument cuts both ways. Rather, we should take out the nationalism factor from our honest discussion of the matter and simply focus on the preponderance of evidence.

 

[LuisDantas]

Theories are not evidence, but they only earn that name when there is enough evidence to make them believable.

I only mention this because you fell prey to the same trap that Creationists often use, of emphasizing the word "theory" while at the same time disrepresenting it. It is a common mistake, yet one that hurts your arguments, and it is also easily corrected with a little bit of effort in your presentation. Maybe you want to comment on the evidence itself instead of "melding" it wih the word "theory".

 

[Surya Deva]

As this debate was off-topic here, I have started a thread to continue this debate in the historical debates forum in the general forum

 

[Copernicus]

Since this is a debate that you want to have Surya, it is far better that you start the thread. I'll search the forums for it. I would suggest that you edit your previous post by putting a link to it at the bottom of the post.

 

[kowalskil]

I want your views on the analogy of the watch and the universe. That a watch is intricate and must have a creator and the universe is more intricate and unique therefore it must have a creator and the creator must be God. I need your views soon. Thnx for reading. Please reply.:shout:help:

A watch can be made by a qualified human being. There were no human beings to create the universe. That is why I reject your analogy.

Ludwik

 

[Rosco James]

Two things:
1. Those who use the logic that because the universe is intricate and unique it therefore must have had a creator, and the creator must be God (flawed right there, but let's move on), always stop at the obvious "therefore" because God is intricate and unique he, too, must have a creator. When pressed for a response to this conundrum their reasoning becomes as solid as oil on water.

2. The watch is intricate at this stage of the analogy, but it was not always so. Whoever is responsible for the watch in question didn't create it, he/she improved a previous version which came from a previous less improved version which came from . . . and so on.