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Vishnu avatars are not related to evolution!

I see a lot of Hindus claiming that the Vishnu avatars showcase the evolution of living organisms on Earth.

Here I debunk their outlandish claim.

The 10 Vishnu avatars mentioned by Hindus are:

  1. Matsya (Fish)
  2. Kurma (Tortoise)
  3. Varaha (Half boar - Half human)
  4. Narasimha (Half lion - Half human)
  5. Vamana (Dwarf human)
  6. Parshuram (Warrior)
  7. Ram (Virtuous man)
  8. Krishna (Learned man)
  9. Buddha (Intelligent man)
  10. Kalki (According to Hindu mythology, he is yet to appear)

First of all, Darwin explained natural selection, which leads to the conclusion that all living organisms had a common ancestor.

When you say that the 10 avatars of Vishnu explain evolution, are you talking about the evoutionary timeline of humans?

Human minds are hard-wired to seek out patterns. If you look hard enough and take as many parameters into account as possible, it is very easy to find two phenomena to coincide in many aspects.

About 3.5 billion years had already passed before the evolution of anything that resembled a fish.

The following characteristics outline the major evolutionary checkpoints before that:

Prokaryotes > Photosynthetic organisms > Eukaryotes > Multicellular organisms > Development of muscles and nerves > Development of brain > First vertebrates > First jawless fish

None of them have been mentioned in the Dashavatar. We straight away jump to Matsya (fish).

As for Kurma (tortoise) and Varaha (half boar - half human), out of all the properties, they had to choose the most trivial ones like being an amphibian and being a mammal to compare it with our amphibian and mammalian ancestors.

This is an example of seeking out patterns desperately to make things look similar. Besides, our amphibian and mammalian ancestors were nothing like a tortoise or a boar.

Narasimha (half lion - half human) doesn't fit in the equation of evolution as well.

A half-human half-animal is a famous misunderstanding of evolution which goes something like this: If birds evolved from reptiles, why aren’t there “crocoducks” roaming around?

Wouldn't that be a reasonable transitional organism?

Our ancestors were shorter when they started walking on two legs about 3.5 million years ago, but they were more ape-Iike than human-Iike unlike what is proposed in the Vamana avatar (dwarf human).

Humans were shown to be living during the time of the emergence of early avatars (Matsya, Kurma, Varaha, Narasimha and Vamana), but modern humans only emerged in the last 0.005% (200,000 years ago as opposed to 4 billion years) of evolutionary history.

The reasons used to compare the Parshuram, Ram, Krishna and Buddha avatars are just cherry-picked to conform to some people’s understanding of evolution of humans and humanity.

Depicting “early human”, “virtuous human”, "learned human" and “intelligent human” as a series of evolutionary points has no basis. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

So the conclusion is, the people who feel proud and arrogant to boast myths and pseudoscience must enroll back in school and study basic biology.

Spread science, not nonsense.

Monty13 4 Apr 25
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2 comments

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You appear to have A Lot of free time....

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Why even bother debunking religious nonsense? That being said, you're 100% right.

Because the government of India enforces children to study religious nonsense.

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