Hayagrīva: He based his arguments strictly on the Bible, Bryan. This is not Darwin, but the prosecutory.
Prabhupāda: What they... What is the beginning of Bible?
Hayagrīva: And he, he was ridiculed, Bryan, for his fundamental..., for his fundamentalism. The Bible says, "And God said let us make man in our image," etc. "God created man in His own image, and the image of God created He him," etc., and the Bible fixes the creation at about six thousand years ago, but science fixes, oh, ancient civilizations of China and India, oh, six thousand, seven thousand years ago, much... And the Vedas deal with a much, much broader time span.
Prabhupāda: Yes.
Hayagrīva: So...
Prabhupāda: So it is not the question of...
Hayagrīva: ...it was extremely difficult for Bryan to maintain any kind of prosecution with these...
Prabhupāda: But because both, we say that both of them are ignorant about the beginning. So if both of them are ignorant, so either you say six thousand, seven thousand, or six million, this is all imagination. It is not fact. But the six thousand or seven thousand, that is not the fact-millions and millions of years. But the fact is this, that God created this cosmic manifestation, and He impregnated the living entities to appear in different types of body according to the soul's desire. That I have already explained. The soul... "Man proposes; God disposes." Not only human form of life but all the animal forms of life, they are also from the very beginning. Not like Darwin's theory that there was no human form of life in the beginning. That is a wrong theory. All the forms of life were there, and the, actually the body is external; within the body there is the soul. So the body is created by material nature and the soul is part and parcel of God. This is the real idea. So how they can refute this idea if they have no idea about the beginning of life?
Hayagrīva: It was very difficult on the basis of the Bible. The Vedas date the creation back, oh...
Prabhupāda: That it is a question of time, and it is the beginning.
Hayagrīva: The beginning of the creation was when? No...
Prabhupāda: No. There is no question of when. It may be seven thousand years or seven millions of years, but the beginning should be taken like this, that God created this cosmic manifestation. And wherefrom the living entities came? That also came from God. That is explained clearly in the Bhagavad-gītā, that this material creation is composition of earth, water, air, fire..., like that, that this is also God's energy. The ingredients of this material world coming from God, that is called prakṛti and pradhāna. He is the creator. And then the living entities, they are also coming from God. So this material energy is explained as inferior energy, and the living entity is explained as superior energy, both of them coming from God. So the beginning of life simultaneously. It is not that matter later on developed to become life. That is a wrong theory.
Hayagrīva: So, so much... It's the end of Darwin. (break)