Part I: God’s Judgment Day
14 May 2009 1 Comment
in Science Vs Religion, Faith Vs. Reason
Since time immemorial it’s been the humanity in the confession boxes, prostrate before deities in temples and mosques, and just out there, looking heavenwards, crying and pleading for forgiveness and pardon from the lords sitting above jesting and mocking at their lowly creations for ‘sins’ which merit not even as much as an earthly rebuke. It’s time to redeem ourselves from darkness, self-deceit, servility and eternal fear and emancipate our race, the human race, from the shackles of the biggest ever con job played on humanity: religion. Today it’s god’s judgment day.
If the intended reader happens to be a devout ‘believer’, let not thou temper be raised my friend as to you I offer the revelry of watching me burn in hell till the far end of eternity for the above blasphemy. So dear reader, just chill and read on. I know this is a sensitive subject of debate for many people. It certainly is to me although I guess there would be a cosmic scale of difference between the sides of the debate that me and most readers would be emotional for. I am sorry to say that I’d be hurting some reader’s sentiments as there is simply no polite way to argue on this. But I would like to extend this argument further to tell people why they are wrong in being hurt.
Here is a little background to the construction of the edifice of my present beliefs. I was born in a Hindu family, and started out just as any other kid. Till the development of any conscious faculty of reasoning, I grew up to the weekly dose of mythological serials on television, recitation of fables and folklore about god before being put to sleep, and to the tales of how infinitely advanced our ancient ancestors were. I would admit I was quite fascinated with god. Beyond kings & dictators and the largest of magnitudes, there was the invincible god.
And people, as described in our epics, were either in direct contact with god or living in the dominion of one of his incarnations. But to my utter distress and beyond any faculty of reasoning was the fact that this was all way back in the past. And this bugged me no end. Why was it so? Why did only this period of our ‘glorious past’ not follow the natural order of progression while every other period did? Why did it sink without a trace, without leaving the slightest of evidence behind? How could such an advanced civilization with all of its wondrous accomplishments leave behind nothing more than some trivial accounts as epics?
Did we at some point of time, and then onwards, turn into such awful sinners that god decided against letting any of those marvelous – and I couldn’t find a word more apt than this — technological achievements trickle down the cascade of future generations? As I grew up further and acquired knowledge of history, this line of reasoning kept appearing increasingly absurd. Good and bad had always coexisted and so had the battles between them. We, in our present age, are no special kind of sinners.
The concept of god, and especially religion, kept making lesser and lesser sense to me and this process got expedited to its conclusion by the utterly ridiculous content of religious discourses I got to hear early in my life as well as miserable failure of the ‘god’ concept to stand up to any reasoning, even as little as that of my teenage brain. By the age of fifteen I was an apostate and not much later, an atheist.
A rather lengthy buildup for the actual debate on the topic but I feel it is important. The point I want to make here is that I am neither indifferent nor personally unexposed to the theistic view. But my metamorphosis was a silently churning and elaborately drawn out process. It was not a moment of epiphany. And a decade later I can still feel the freshness of having woken up from the trance. With this piece of writing I want to shake some things up in your mind, want to get you introduced to a new dimension, a new degree of freedom, and that heady feeling of weightlessness which is the quintessence of freedom, that you are sure to experience should you decide to shed the weight of religion and rise above the familiar old dimensions of life.
Part II: A test of faith
14 May 2009 Leave a Comment
in Science Vs Religion, Faith Vs. Reason
One of the earliest arguments with me that completely shook my belief in the idea of a personal god and let me to apostasy was what I would call the complete incoherency argument. The hypothesis of personal god always breaks down in meaninglessness no matter what way I model it. God gets trapped in the paradox of its own theological definition, either in ethics or intendment. And mind you, I am talking strictly in terms of theological definition.
Let me start with the assumption that there is one god, or one set of gods, for all humanity. Now the question arises, whose version of god is true? We assume one is true and the rest are false. If there is one god for the whole world, and if what religions say is indeed true, then why every religion has its own localized version of it? Why was lord Ram’s presence not felt in America or Jesus’ in India? Sounds absurd? Yes. It doesn’t make sense that a single god of all humanity had a marginal, much localized presence. What was the rest of the world doing while the god incarnate lord Rama was fighting the battles of good and evil in Indian subcontinent? No religion has the mention of any other part of the world whatsoever, else than where that religion originated. And I find it utterly foolish to think Rama, supposedly the incarnation of the same god of all humanity, didn’t know the world outside of India and Sri Lanka. The only conclusion that can be drawn here is that all religions have been carpentered by man.
Many religious apologists say that Rama, Jesus, Mohammed etc. are all multiple incarnations or messiahs of the same god. Here there is a conflict of intent. Why did all these different incarnations preach us antagonistic things and left us to quarrel in perpetuity? And it is not untrue that all religions have conflicting self-interests inherent in them. The same apologists would say that all religions send across the same message of love, peace and loving ‘thy neighbor’. Well this is just loose talk. ‘Thy neighbor’, during biblical times, wasn’t a man of different faith. Getting my point?
Islam is notorious for its concept of Jihad. I don’t think I need to elaborate on that. Take a look at this comment made by one guy on a religious website:
“One thing you said that I don’t agree with is the idea that people should not try to convert other people to their beliefs/religion. As far as Christians go the Bible specifically states that we are commissioned by Jesus/God to do this. (reference: Matthew 28:18-20, “Then Jesus came to them and said, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.’)“
If we are all creations of the same god then why would he create something so self destructive? Humanity has, in perpetuity, been on war on basis of religious differences. There cannot be such a god that destines its own, perhaps the most marvelous, creation for homicide.
Now, for argument’s sake, let us also consider the idea of different gods for different religions. This idea is preposterous right in its premise. In the whole darn universe, supposedly itself a creation of god, all the gods found only one teeny-weeny planet to locate all their creations? Each god could have created a planet, or for that matter a whole universe, of its own. So much for omnipotence! There cannot be such a god.
Also, according to theological description of a personal god, the god hypothesis fails on grounds of ethics. God, according to our pious elders and our religious gurus, demands from us unquestioned faith and obsequious servility. It despises the notion of a free mind and liberty of the spirit and preaches total submission. It demands disempowerment and surrender to the ‘larger force’. It gorges on masochistic sacrifices. It demands that we pity our material existence, live in eternal fear of him and sing hymns to him. Why does got need such condescending vainglory! These are not the characteristics of ‘god’. These are the characteristics of a dictator. If such is god, then he is no different from a despicable human being. Then he is no different from my previous boss whom I completely hate.
Why would a god that is omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent by definition, who is the supreme power, who is the creator of heaven and earth and this whole boundless universe care for something as trivial as who is praising him and who is not? Or even who believes in him or not. God, in my opinion, should not even mind someone who hates him. That a mere human does. God to me is the supreme judge and the first principle of law is that it’s blind. God has to be someone with a ruthless sense of justice. A judge doesn’t care for whether you like him or despise him. He delivers justice with a heedless nonchalance.
But our god answers prayers and forgives sins if you ask for forgiveness earnestly enough. What about the one who holds his head high, earns his living with utmost honesty, pays his dues & taxes with utmost sincerity, does not care much for the poor but is generally benevolent, loves his life and enjoy it materialistically, is a raging lover in bed (maybe to a person of his own sex! Or some other kind of sexual sinner!), and at the same time is someone who never prays, doesn’t even believe in god, or maybe is even anti-god and despises religion? What do you say, dear reader? Whom would you prefer? A corrupt person who goes to the temple, prostrates himself in front of god, begs for forgiveness for sins he consciously or unconsciously has committed and donates a large sum of money to the temple or a charity, or a perfectly honest person who follows a rational code of morality, does not care to ask for forgiveness and welcomes punishment for his wrongs, does not believe in charity but is generous to a person he feels is deserving enough of his generosity and denies, in the strongest of terms, the existence or even the need of god? I surmise you will pick the second one. I certainly will.
And on this premise, prayers or confessions become meaningless. Or even the belief in god. You get for your rights and you pay for your wrongs. That’s the rule of justice. The rule of ‘karma’. It’s deplorable that most people harmonize with this model of god. We are often told things like ‘if you take xyz god’s name hundred and seventy times a day and offer prasad to it every Thursday all your problems will be solved’, and a lot of us take it on ‘faith’. Else than being a plain superstition it is an utter disrespect of one’s self. It’s nothing more dignified than bribing somebody. And I am sure, if there’s a god, it won’t be such a dishonorable entity.
So we see that every conventional model of god is completely incoherent and thus fails. Now some people say their model of god is totally different from what institutionalized forms of religion preach. They make an abstract claim that their god is some ‘higher power’ which is ‘just’ and falls out of the domain of religion. If their definition of god is ‘laws of nature’ is or any such abstruse idea then they can hold on to it. But I wouldn’t prefer to call it ‘god’. To me laws of nature are laws of nature and the word ‘god’ conveys the idea of a personal god. If your god is a personal god then I have a lot more to say. You are my target audience. Read on. Till now this journey may appear to be treading its path on the road of utter cynicism but I promise as you go further you’ll feel a lot more sorted out about your opinions, whichever side they might be on.
Part III: Science is reason but Faith is faith
14 May 2009 1 Comment
in Science Vs Religion, Faith Vs. Reason
In the last post I argued on a philosophical premise and ruled out the existence of the religious version of god. Now let us take into deliberation the concept of ‘faith’. Faith doesn’t necessarily care for religion or any other such institution. In other words, faith in god might or might not be religious. But does faith stand up to the test of reason? Is it compatible with reason and science? Let’s examine faith through the microscope of reason.
According to Peter Schwartz, a writer and collaborator of Ayn Rand, faith and reason represent antithetical philosophies. The advocates of faith declare that we must accept as true that which is unknowable to the rational mind–that we must believe the pronouncements of some “higher” authority in the absence of any objective evidence or in outright contradiction to the evidence. The advocates of reason, on the other hand, maintain that man grasps the truth solely by a process of reason, which is based on the data provided by the senses.
Leading the charge of atheists are the four horsemen: Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and author of the international bestseller ‘The God Delusion’, philosopher Daniel Dennett, bestselling author of ‘god is not great: How Religion Poisons Everything’ and literary critic Christopher Hitchens, and philosopher & neuroscientist Sam Harris. I would be borrowing a few arguments and quotable quotes from their books. I also would recommend ‘The God Delusion’ to all the readers which is an unapologetically scathing but a cogent attack on faith and the idea of god.
To start with, Dawkins’ major critique of divine faith is that it has acquired a charmed, status of being untouchable. He argues that it should be treated on the same page as anything else, let’s say art or politics. Dawkins quotes Douglas Adams to make his point.
Religion has certain ideas at heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatsoever. What it means is, ‘Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about: you’re just not. Why not? – Because you’re not! If somebody votes for a party that you don’t agree with, you’re free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody says taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it. But on the other hand if somebody says ‘I mustn’t move a light switch on Saturday’, you say, I ‘respect’ that.
Why should it be that it’s perfectly legitimate to support the Labour party or the Conservative party, Republicans or Democrats, or this model of economics versus that – but to have an opinion about how the universe began… no, that’s holy
One of the ways in which divine faith dodges the surgical knife of rational scrutiny is by claiming that faith and reason are two non-overlapping entities. It says that science covers the empirical realm: what is the universe made of. Faith, on the other hand, extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. Or in other words science concerns itself with the how questions while only theology is equipped to answer why questions. Like why does anything exists at all.
Dawkins validly argues that not every why question has a legitimate answer. Nor every question starting with ‘why’ is a legitimate question. Why are unicorns hollow? It simply has no answer. Even if the question is a valid one, the fact that science cannot answer it does not imply that religion can. A theologician or any other person of faith is simply no more qualified to answer ‘why does anything exists at all?’ than he is qualified to answer ‘why are unicorns hollow?’ or ‘what is the colour of abstraction?’ or ‘what is the smell of hope?’.
The second way it dodges the knife is by claiming that the question of divine existence simply falls out of the scope of science. Maybe there can be no tangible proof of existence of god but neither can science disprove it. One of the reasons of that, at least on argumentative grounds, is because every such attempt to disprove divine existence is likely to get caught in the ‘infinite regress’ paradox. E.g. if one says; this is how the universe began, other might ask what caused it to begin this way? And what was the cause behind that cause? And behind that… it’s an infinite regress. And ultimately a theologician might argue that the cause behind all the causes, the first cause, is what we call god.
It’s a strong argument but here too, Dawkins validly argues, that it’s a totally unwarranted assumption that god himself is immune to regress. And even if he was the terminator to the infinite regress there is no reason to endow him with the properties we normally ascribed to god like omnipotence, goodness, creativity of design and the more human ones like listening to prayers, forgiving sin etc. And lastly some infinite regresses do have a natural terminator. Like the regress of cutting any piece of matter, say gold, is terminated by a gold atom. So you couldn’t possibly argue that you take a piece of gold and cut it, and cut it further till an infinite regress till you could cut no more. And you get to the root of matter and that root we call god. No. We call it an atom.
Another argument from the faith camp – and this one I find really shallow and mean– is that there are a lot of things for which science offers no explanation. Why does the universe exist, how did intelligent life come into being, to say nothing of various ‘supernatural’ phenomena, or miracles, that occurs and various luminous experiences that people have had. According to Sam Harris, one reason why it has become a taboo to criticize religion is that it is the only game in the town talking about them and dignifying them.
Well my answer to this is that if something is currently inexplicable it does not mean it’ll forever remain so. This is not an epistemological argument as it’s made out to be. We are still in a state of progression and will forever be. If we take a look back into history, it was riddled with superstition and occult. The sky was a gate to ‘heaven’, sun and moon were gods, and human diseases were considered a form of holy wrath for sins as per the religions. Cure for diseases consisted to making offerings to the god and asking for forgiveness, or going to a witch doctor, tantrik etc. There used to be belief in witchcraft and devils and miracles and people took all those things pretty seriously. They took it on faith.
Had it not been for Leeuwenhoek, who discovered microbial life, Louis Pasteur who proposed the germ theory of disease and people like them, who had the courage to question and seek the truth, we would still have been getting eliminated from earth en masse. It is sad that people still talk things like science can’t explain this and that and blah blah blah when they owe their life, its safety and its comforts to the wonders of science and those who dared to rise above and explore beyond faith.
And let us be clear on the fact that nature doesn’t allow anyone concession with its laws. It’s not that you follow the ones you like and defy others. There have been many great illusionists, take for e.g. Harry Houdini, Franz Harary, David Copperfield and these people have invented stunning illusions. Vanishing of statue of liberty, levitation, perfect mind reading, you name it and they’ve done it. They, by their own proclamation, are illusionists not magicians. And they don’t claim to perform miracles and yet their stunts seem to be exactly that. ‘Miracles’, by the same line of reasoning, are merely illusions that we yet don’t understand. I’ll quote a famous line from Franz Harary: “Today’s magic will be tomorrow’s science”.
And I don’t think I need to say much about luminous experiences of people. It is now well known that human brain can cook up a lot of crap like that. Like a computer, it is electrically wired, and like transistors on a microchip, there are neurotransmitters in the brain. And again like a computer, it doesn’t take much to get those things messed up.
Finally, let us come to the biggest bone of contention in this whole debate: the argument from ‘design’. This is one of the most contentious arguments between science and faith and has caused a huge political unrest in the west. The debate here is Creationism vs. Darwinian Evolution. Creationists are divided into two camps. The self proclaimed believers of divine existence and the others who pass themselves off as scientists. Creationists argue that since life, and especially intelligent life is way too complex to have germinated from a mere chance and the random process of evolution cannot account for it. It is simply a statistical improbability. It has to have an intelligent creator. The believers identify this creator as ‘god’ but the other half of the faith camp refrains from using the g-word. They simply call it ‘Intelligent Design’.
This shoddy argument stems from ignorance of evolutionary biology and people trying to invade into a field of study that is just not their area of expertise, with an unconscionably brazen confidence. There is mind-boggling amount of evidence that intelligent life has evolved from simpler life forms. Evolution is not at all a random process. And building up of complexity is a cumulative and exponential process. The principle of ‘natural selection’, which lies at the crux of evolutionary theory, breaks the problem of improbability into small pieces. Each of the small pieces is slightly improbable, but not prohibitively so. E.g. an animal with a slight variation in the structure of its eye – which is slightly improbable but not too much — which allows it to compete better than the other members of it’s species in its native environment will have better chances of survival. Over time, nature will select this attribute of eye for being propagated further, and the eye which was less suited to that specie’s survival will either diminish or perish altogether. Thus when a large number of these slightly improbable events are stacked upon each other, and that too over a time period of millions of years, what we get is, indeed, very very improbable.
Evolution is a step by step process and the biggest evidence of evolution is that intermediate stages of this process have been located in other creatures as well as fossil records. Sophisticated computer models show that evolution actually “works”. Among other evidences is the fact that if life was ‘designed’ by an intelligent creator, then the design would have been an optimal one. Our own human body, with all its astounding complications, is a far cry from an ‘optimal’ design. E.g. According to Dr. Michael Shermer the human eye is “built upside down and backwards, requiring photons of light to travel through cornea, lens, aqueous fluid, blood vessels, ganglion cells, horizontal cells and bipolar cells before they reach the light sensitive rods and cones that transducer the light signals into neural impulses”. This fact is also genetically supported. A major part of our genome is ‘junk DNA’, which means it has no function. Here is what Wikipedia has to say about junk DNA: About 95% of the human genome has once been designated as “junk”, including most sequences within introns and most intergenic DNA. While much of this sequence may be an evolutionary artifact that serves no present-day purpose. I wonder how lousy and clumsy a designer will it take to create an eye that’s upside down and backwards and a genome consisting of 3 billion base pairs out of which 2.85 billion are junk!
Another blow to the argument of god as the creator is the simple and intelligible fact that if we were created by an intelligent creator then the creator would have to be more intelligent than us. It is, indeed, possible in theory that we are the end product of an intelligent design. But that designer cannot be ‘god’. If we compare the present period with times a thousand years back, it is convincing to say, to the humans living thousand years back, we at present would appear to be no less powerful than gods. To generalize, any sufficiently technically advanced civilization would be no different than god just like any sufficiently advanced technology is no different from magic.
So, to say, the above argument inevitably leads to another question: Who created the creator? There are two answers to it, one that ends in itself and another that raises the same question to which it is the answer: Either evolution or another, more advanced creator. But who created that even more advanced creator? I could go on but the answer invariably and logically would end in evolution.
A question that still twitters around to the present day like an immortal butterfly from the Garden of Eden is the genesis of life. We are by now, many notches clearer on the view that even if god did create life, the life as we now it today only surfaced as a result of a billion years long game of nature called evolution. Then were Adam and Eve names of two bacteria or something? I wouldn’t want to speculate on that. But what I can tell you from my education in biology and from whatever science I have studied, is that molecular genesis of life is no big a deal. Yeah, we haven’t been able to duplicate the event in any lab but I think I can safely say that in not-too-distant future we’ll achieve the feat.
A part of the reason why I don’t feel the need to hedge my bets on the above prophecy is that, from education, I know that extraordinary things can happen under extraordinary conditions. And our earth, 4 billion years back, conditions were, in fact, extraordinary. Despite brave claims from creationists, citing the problem of ‘irreducible complexity’ and therefore requiring that certain whole systems must be formed intact if they are to have any functionality and that in turn requiring skill and genius to construct, I reiterate that what has not yet been achieved is not an implication of its unachievability.
The other part of the reason life had a natural molecular genesis is a beautiful theory from cosmology called the ‘anthropic principle‘. You see, it’s not only our life; it’s the whole universe that’s just too marvelous to be real. Our universe, much like life, rests on the knife-edge of physical constants that are scrupulously fine-tuned for this entire potpourri of structures to exist. Though the real cosmological versions of the anthropic principle are somewhat controversial, the biological version of it works just about fine. Notice the word ‘anthropic’. Its dictionary meaning says: of or pertaining to human beings or their span of existence on earth. The question that the anthropic principle answers is: How come is the universe so ‘fine-tuned’ to allow something as complex as life to happen? And that answer is: Because if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be here to witness it and ask this question! Baffling? Let me explain.
Over and above everything, the anthropic principle is simply an argument of probability. It is a way of lending life to an ‘improbable’ and make it probable. What is probability after all? It is the proportion of the set of favourable events to the set all the events that can possibly occur, called sample-space. And it magnifies this sample space and stretches it to the infinitude of the universe so that even a small, ‘almost improbable’ part of that sample space looks much bigger. In layman’s language, there are an estimated 100 billion-billion planets in the universe. And even if the probability of a region of universe being so fine tuned as to allow the existence of life is one in a hundred billion, there would still be a billion planets in the universe with life. And if there could be a billion planets able to support life, there could most certainly be one! And that would be ours. And here we are mulling about our existence! We are one among hundred billion-billion possibilities. That leaves us nothing much to wonder about, does it?
Here is where I would stop harping upon the scientific arguments against the existence of god. I would like to stress here that the above reasoning with all its evidences, does not disprove the existence of god. But what is does disprove is the need for its existence. Celebrated British physicist Stephen Hawking writes in his iconic book ‘A brief history of time’ that if there was a god, he would have to be within the universe and bound by its laws. In other words, god would have no role to play even if he existed.
God is loosing out to science. It is often seen that after a major scientific discovery, religious authorities jump to the fore to align their respective faiths with it. They’ll come out saying things like ‘see, this is what even our books say’, ‘see, we have known that since millennia’, ‘see, after all you didn’t find anything new’ etc. so ‘if we do not contest the legitimacy of your discoveries why cant you acknowledge our god’? The answer is that there’s no place he could fit into. Science works perfectly and elegantly without god.
What’s perplexing is why the faith camp seeks its validation in the enterprise of reason called science when it claims to be built upon the premise that it itself is immune to the scrutiny of reason. I feel some constantly growing uneasiness, some apprehension within the faith camp. I feel a constantly growing sense of loss of pace within the faith camp with the objective reality though that is what it has been in denial of since the time of its inception.. Take, for example, the superstring theory, which is the leading contender for a ‘theory of everything’ in theoretical physics. This theory says, in quintessence, that all matter and energy, even space and time is the manifestation of a single, one dimensional entity vibrating at different harmonics like strings of a violin. The religions contend that they have always been saying the same thing, that everything in the universe is unified by some single underlying principle. The difference here is between that of physics and metaphysics. The abstruse religious metaphysics is often just too flexible and consequently fits into any mould of objective reality. The faith camp just never let their ideas take a concrete comprehensible shape until it finds a mould for them. And that’s unmistakably always a one given by science.
Personally, I feel really irritated whenever there’s a new technological development and our indigenous Indian faith camp starts claiming that the particular technology was present way back in the times as described by our epics. They’ll say they had the ‘garuda’ in place of airplane, arrows tipped with mystical forms of super destructive energy instead of missiles, saints would live for a thousand years and all that crap. Here too, I would like to point out the difference. This religious crap stands in sheer mockery of the laws of physics, of nature. In one sweep of a hand, they trash all laws of nature, principles of thermodynamics, law of conservation of matter and energy and all of the human accomplishments.
People say science and faith are two sides of the same coin. Both seek the same end though by different means. I, as well as a lot of other intellectual people opine, that reason and faith, science and god, as a maxim, are irreconcilable. And it is precisely the means of seeking their goal that makes it irreconcilable. The problem with faith is that it is dogmatic yet formless. It is founded on the premise that if something cannot be proved, the opposite of it must be true. It has built itself on the premise of lack of evidence. It gives no rational justification for believing in one thing and not something else equally qualified, when even that something else would need no rational justification in exacting a belief in itself. This has achieved nothing for humanity else than a perpetual divide between people for antithetical faiths.
The only way of reconciling faith and reason is to have faith in the power of reasoning. Else at any moment, and across any lifetime, the choice is always either/or: either follow your reasoning mind, or abandon it and place something above it. There is no “middle-of-the-road”.
Part IV: Do we really need faith?
14 May 2009 1 Comment
in Science Vs Religion, Faith Vs. Reason
Does faith serve an ontological purpose? That’s a more important question than any scientific debate. Karl Marx once said faith is the opium of the masses. Do we really find the roots of our morality and the ultimate meaning of our life and our existence in religion? Is ‘god’ the reason why we are good to each other? What will happen if one day religion is expunged from the human memory and we are to start anew in building our moral foundations? Join me as I explore this territory and engineer your own opinions.
The above questions are a lot more intimate to a lot of us than the harsh glare of evidence. A lot of people, even big scientists, are people of faith even in the face of all the scientific evidence a lot of which they themselves might have generated. Various researches have proven that humans are not really rational beings. A big part of our driving force consists of emotions, instincts and belief. That is what makes the share market so unpredictable.
But it’s a question worth asking if we really need to be 100% rational. Would the world be a better place if we were solely driven by reason? Love knows no reason still it is beautiful. Often there are realms of life where there is no choice of action that can really be classified as completely rational. Often its all in the grey. And sometimes reason can kill. You might have heard of Jean Burdian’s witty and hilarious allegory of Burdian’s ass: Burdain’s ass perished of hunger stuck equidistant between two equal haystacks when an unreasoning call of hunger would have saved him. Is faith too a similar unreasoning call that has kept the humanity alive?
I must admit this is the section among this whole series of blogs that I had to think about the hardest. To gain some more perspective I conducted a small survey among my friends. I posed the same questions to them. And I got varied answers, all of them quite unique and enlightening.
Let’s start with beginnings of institutionalized religions. In ‘A test of faith’ I had argued about the hollowness of religion and the idea of god as preached by them. There should be no doubt left that religions are a man made myth. Christopher Hitchens’ book ‘god is not great: How Religion Poisons Everything’ is a 250 page magnum opus on, well, how religion poisons everything. Hitchens has traveled around the world, mingled with the locals and carries along an in-depth knowledge of history and knows all the nitty-gritty of religion. Another argument that he offers for artificiality of religion is the inconsistency within religious books. He argues that the religious books were written long after the time that they describe. Be it Islam or Christianity or Judaism he offers a blow by blow account of the corrupt beginnings of religion and their obvious fabrication. It’s quite apparent that religions were made to suit the need of those of wrote the holy books, those who wanted unrestricted control over humanity!
The world is rife with religious disputes. Even the ones that seem political have religious undertones. Religion draws boundaries not between masses of land, but masses of people, no matter where they are in the world. Be it the eon’s old discord between Christians and Jews, Islam and the rest of the world, the dispute between Israel and Palestine over the supposed “promised land”, the Gaza strip, or our very own Indo-Pak divide. I think nobody would dispute the fact that the dispute between India and Pakistan is more a dispute between Hindus and Muslims than a dispute between two nations for a little piece of land. India itself is has been torn, stabbed, arsoned, poisoned, lynched, and disconcerted by religious disharmony.
What provoked me into writing this whole series was when a good friend of mine opined that India should be declared a Hindu state. This from whom I supposed was a person with a progressive mindset. She said that is the only practical alternative. In my own survey some people showed a similar bend of mind. One guy wrote he would like India to be secular but there’s a lot of bullshit that goes around in the name of secularism. My friend said Hindus were mistreated in Muslim countries so the Muslim community in India, a good portion of which, especially in the lower strata of the society, share some amount of anti-India sentiment – and that’s a fact – should deserve no better.
For a moment, I too wondered if that was actually what should be done. Tell 200 million Muslims that this is a land of Hindus and they can either accept it or pack their bags and be off to Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan or wherever they want to! That would automatically imply to little children who have no idea what religion is and just happened to be born in a Muslim family. Hindu state would mean a Hindu way of life. So give an unconditional license to the likes of Shri Ram Sene, RSS, VHP and Shiv Sena and other Hindu radicalist outfits to murder whoever opposes the Hindu way of life, become the moral police of the country, tell us what we should wear and what we shouldn’t, what festivals we should celebrate, how we should conduct ourselves, beat up and molest women, demolish Islamic structures, manipulate history and saffronize the whole nation. That, my dear friends, is the Hindu way of life for you! It was pretty clear to me it was time for not Muslims, but religion itself to be shown the door. From all over the world.
But what’s it in religion, I often fascinate, that the masses of the world so hypnotically love? Man, being an intelligent being — well not intelligent in the real sense of the word, but you know what I mean – has a natural curiosity. He’s born with it. Biologically, we are blessed – being sarcastic here—with a certain amount of gullibility. And that’s the recipe. There’s an analogy given by British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell which when I read sent me frolicking with laughter. Here it is:
If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.
Do I need say more on that? Sam Harris contends if he were to propose a new religion who’s ten commandments included things like ‘ you shall educate your kids’, ‘ you shall respect every human’s right to choose his own way of life, including women, homosexuals and every other person who’s voice is repressed’, ‘ you shall not oppose a woman’s right to abort her child, plan her family, use contraceptives’ etc. etc. and not following these commandments would be a sin punishable by eternal torture by 17 demons in hell, would such a religion be accepted? It’s quite apparent that such a proposition would be beneficial to the humanity. What do you think someone would say to that? I surmise it’ll be something like “Ah, are you crazy? Torture by 17 demons? Come on it’s just a preposterous myth! But if the same thing was told to you every single day since you were born, you would believe it!
Is there an innate need of god in us? What does god mean to most of us? A recent research showed that when people pray, the area of brain that lights up in their head is the same one which does when talking to a friend. Maybe to a lot of us, god is that ultimate friend and means of solace when all earthly hope in life is lost. And your ultimate friend you wouldn’t want to loose would you? Even if you were told that that friend is an imaginary one!
I am sure all of us would have experienced the turmoil when our consciousness gets divided into two, one good part and the other one devil, and there’s a tug of war between them. All of us have had moments when the dichotomy was just tearing us apart. I often feel religion is the offspring of man’s distrust of his own nature. Our ancestors knew too well of their devilish leanings. That’s why made it so dogmatic, made a virtue of unquestioned faith in it, instilled a fear of holy wrath for letting in even the slightest of doubt in our mind against the veracity of the holy word, made a sin of all the material pleasures that, in those days, one knew no bounds to and if practiced beyond limits, as they quite often were, could ruin a life. From the day we are born, these things are nailed into our virgin minds and we do the same thing to our kids. Just make them blind to the light of reason. That’s the central dogma of religion. That’s its DNA. Like with life, where the only entity that we pass on to our children from us is our DNA and it takes care of everything else, so it is with religion. It’s DNA takes care that it keeps propagating generation after generation.
One of the eternal fears religion has instilled into us is that without religion, without god, the world would spiral into anarchy. People would be left with no good reason to be moral for it’s the belief in god that is our moral engine. I posed the same question to my friends and asked them what they thought about it, would all of the above happen if one day religion was abolished. One typical answer that I got was: “YES..coz some sort of belief system is the pre-requisite for lending any sort of meaning to life. If I believe in nothing..What the hell am I living for”. I completely agree with the above statement in general and completely disagree with it as an answer to my question.
Let me start with the facts. If you are well acquainted with world affairs and history – and make yourself if you are not— we would find it extremely easy to have a consent on the fact that the bloodiest historical crusades, the most gruesome genocides, the ugliest forms of terrorism and the most shameless form of corruption has gone on, not despite, but in the name of religion. Forget history, the present world is plagued with Islamic terrorism. Be it 9/11 attackers who gutted the WTC twin towers or our very own 26/11 attackers who held Mumbai to ransom for almost three days, the common thing among all of them was that they were in the impression that they were fighting for their religion, that they would be martyrs, and they were promised an eternity in heaven. And the most formidable part of all this is that these terrorists really believe in what they say unlike our spineless politicians who are just masqueraders.
Religious apologists utter stupidities like ‘Terrorists are misguided’ or ‘Terror does not have a religion’. Yes, how can it when – history stands witness of this—religion has been the biggest terror of all. It is a fact that many of the world’s religions impose a duty on its practitioners to conquer the world and bring all humanity into its dominion. The words unbeliever & infidel in their dictionaries do not mean someone who doesn’t believe in god but someone who doesn’t believe in their god. Many religious leaders agree on that and if you want to hear them say this live turn the news channels on.
Now let’s take a little case study of India. India is one of the most religious and also the most corrupt countries in the world. Maybe a baffling incongruity to most but not to me. During the Hindu-Muslim riots in Godhra in 2002, the Narendra Modi government with its ‘hindutva’ doctrine withheld the police from protecting the Muslims being lynched there by Hindu mobs. Hindus were given a free license to avenge deaths of Hindu pilgrims returning from their holy city of Ayodhya in Sabarmati Express train, allegedly torched by a Muslim mob. The whole state of Gujarat came to a standstill and the Hindu mobs ran wild not only killing Muslims but looting unguarded shops, in open or closed state, abandoned by their owners in a state of moribund fear. This army of Hindu crusaders fighting in the name of their god included not only the base masses but even educated well-to-do people. Photos of all this happening were published in most of the national magazines. Quite similar was the case during the 1993 Mumbai riots, a very graphic description of which you’ll find in Suketu Mehta’s book ‘Maximum City’.
These people, these human beings, were pious believers who were fighting for the pride of Hinduism. Where was their god and his holy word when they, they meaning people like you and me not the illiterate mob, took their cars to fill in the loot and their family members to help them? Richard Dawkins used another example in his book to state this point, which is that when people say they need god, they actually mean to say they need the police. It may seem blasphemous to say, but I strongly believe that it is the belief in god, not the opposite of it that breeds a corrupt mind. Because god is a police whose is a behind-the-curtain guardian, the smack of whose baton does not burn physically, whose existence you can afford to doubt while committing a crime and who probably really does not exist! God is also the corrupt judge who forgives given you offer a healthy enough donation in his temple or make a compensatory sacrifice.
Only when the only source of his morals is his own conscience, his own reasoning mind, does a man really become a moral being. Because his own conscience is the sole perpetrator as well as the guardian of his actions. Because he is his own judge, first and foremost. And if a man has a clean conscience and that is the only police he recognizes, he will never swerve from that single righteous path. He might deceive a god but with his moral engine firmly ensconced within his own mind, he will never deceive his own self. Moral dichotomies will disappear and he will see rightly, clearly without the burden of a borrowed code of moral conduct that he doesn’t really believe in. God can forgive him but not his own conscience.
I should stress here that I’m not trying to imply that belief in god necessarily leads to a corrupt mind. Seeds of corruption do not lie in belief or disbelief in god. They lie elsewhere. But belief in god does allow these seeds to thrive because an imposed or borrowed code of morality leaves very little room for self-introspection.
Now one might argue what about the person who does not believe in god and is a real disgrace to humanity. The whole history abounds in such people. Can it not be similarly argued that these people are the prime example of what can happen if one does not believe in god? No. I am going to have to buy the answer from Dawkin’s book, a counter argument so powerful that I’ll have to quote it verbatim:
Individual atheists do many evil things but they don’t do evil things in the name of atheism. Religious wars really are fought in the name of religion, and they have been horribly frequent in history…. A war might be motivated by economic greed, by political ambition, by ethnic or racial prejudice, by deep grievance or revenge, or by patriotic belief in the destiny of a nation. Even more plausible as a motive for war is an unshakable faith that one’s own religion is the only true one, reinforced by a holy book that explicitly condemns all heretics and followers of rival religions to death, and explicitly promises tat the soldiers of god will go straight to heaven.
By contrast, why would anyone go to war for the sake of an absence of belief?
When one states something like ‘Religion and faith are the source of our morals’, its usually meant that we have been taught so while growing up. So the proper question to ask would be: ‘Do we really learn morals by education? Why would we be good to each other if it not were for god?’ I’d want to start answering that by mooting another simple question: ‘What is life?’ My answer to that would be ‘something that reproduces and is able to sustain itself through continues reproduction’. Throughout animal kingdom, benevolence abounds. Parent animals take care of child animals, members of same species warn each other of predators, ants and bees display astounding social cooperation, and symbiotic relationship exists between members of different species. Why are we good to each other? Because life has to sustain itself. If everyone was only a predator, if everyone just killed each other, life would simply loose its meaning as its existence would become impossible. By sharing and caring we ensure the same for ourselves. By not killing every person who happens to come across our way, we increase our own chances of not getting killed. The principle of live and let live. It’s no rocket science. It’s simple, good old evolution. Natural selection has picked those genes that will ensure their own survival. Religion has got absolutely nothing to do with it.
In Dawkins’ book I found some case studies of moral dilemmas. I decided to test them myself. In my survey I presented my friends with a moral dilemma. All situations involved barter between saving five lives and sacrificing one. In one situation five people are trapped on a railway track with a train screaming down its way. The train can be diverted to another track on which one person is trapped. In the second case the train can be stopped by pushing a very fat man over the bridge. In the third case five people are dying in need of five different organs. They can be saved by killing a healthy man who has all five of them in good condition. I asked my friends how willing they would be to kill one man to save five if it was a split second decision. What was being tried to prove here was that morals are ingrained into our brains by evolution rather than by education. The expected answer was ‘most willing’ for the first situation and ‘least willing’ for the last one as one would be least conscious while killing the first person as he’s a collateral damage while the second situation involves a little, conscious act of pushing the fat man. In the third case it would be a cold bloodied murder. I got my expected answer from 90% of the respondents but what was really amazing was that nobody could come with the correct reasoning for their responses. And that’s an even stronger proof of what I was looking for. Their decisions came from the unconscious part of their mind because if it was coming from their conscious mind they would have been able to reason it out. They would have remembered something from education that they were told. Their decisions came from their own conscience a good part of which comes from centuries of evolution packed into our bodies in form of our genes.
So again, why are we good to each other? This is the most correct answer: It’s in our genes.
Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and provokes no argument. Because the moment we began to reason it out it starts to crack and crumble. It has no rational justification and if it does serve an ontological purpose, it’s by conning gullible masses and presenting a false picture to them, and has to be replaced by something else. We’ll talk bout that something else a little later.
And to my dear friend who said some sort of belief system is the pre-requisite for lending any sort of meaning to life I’d say believing in god means believing in anything but not believing in god does not mean believing in nothing. It is infantile to presume that somebody else has the responsibility to give meaning to your life.
I might be raising some people’s temper who might be thinking I am focusing only on the negatives of religion. Maybe I am. My writing might seem like a hatchet job. One might ask why not I consider the utopian side of faith. For a person who is just too daft to be able to understand anything beyond the antediluvian system of faith, which is the easiest thing to do, the ‘god’ concept provides a platform for building his belief system and that imaginary friend that’s always there. Why not I leave him to that? Because the same thing makes him vulnerable to being duped by unscrupulous religious leaders. It breeds superstition, does not allow for a clear conscience to form and ultimately leads one into wasting his life following something that is just a myth. And there’s simply no polite way to say this.
I might think in favour of leaving one person to his fancies. And seriously, I really have no claim on anybody’s life to ask him to abandon something he has put a lifelong of trust into. But if you look at it holistically it is from these individuals that fanatics and terrorists branch out. Superstitions of individuals cost the society as a whole. It cultivates genocidal social practices that harm both humanity and environment. The Hindu custom of Sati, though abominable, is still practiced in some parts of the country. The caste system has wrecked havoc on social structure which is capitalized on by greedy politicians. Also the Hindu custom of conducting a funeral by putting the deceased on a pyre and immersing the ashes in the holy Indian River Ganga has put an immense strain on the environment. Behind this is the belief that a dip in Ganga purifies your soul of all the sins and thus the soul of the deceased would reach god’s home in a pristine state. The pyre consumes a whole tree and Ganga, at some places, is as polluted as a gutter. So much for its purgatory powers! All these practices have sustained throughout the centuries precisely because they have been deemed immune to questioning.
Maybe faith did serve a colossal purpose in history and ancient times. Maybe it really was that unreasoning call that, through ages of darkness, kept humanity from becoming Burdian’s ass. But I think its day is done. Like an old friend, we have to say goodbye to it and move on to bigger and better and brighter things in life. Everything has to come to an end to allow place for new ones to sprout up. That’s the rule of nature. We have to embrace a new religion, a real religion of humanity, not some imagined being. We call it humanism.
Part V: Rise of Reason; The final nail in faith’s coffin
14 May 2009 3 Comments
in Science Vs Religion, Faith Vs. Reason
21st century is the age of knowledge and the celebration of humanity. But in some respects a lot of us are still stuck in Jurassic age. Let us open our eyes to the world and broaden our perspectives. All this amazing knowledge that we now have has given us a new vision and is a reward of centuries of rigorous toil and drudgery, sleepless nights of brainstorming, and being persecuted to death by the church. Let us for a moment, give those people their due respect and let us, for a moment, come out of our comfort zones, experience the real freedom and let our vision tear through the darkness of space and time and search the infinities of the universe and we will find the real world is lot more bigger and beautiful than the one that god built for us.
Often, even if we know something is wrong, maybe even harmful, we will still do it. Because we think it’s beautiful and the beauty is so mesmerizing that we just don’t want to look any further. It’s like when we go shopping, with an idea of the kind of shoe we’d like to buy, and if the first thing that meets our eye fit the description inside our head, we just don’t look any further and settle for less than the best.
That is what I really see around the world. A lot of people would have given up their faiths if it were purely on the grounds of reason but what holds them back is the beauty of the whole thing. They are addicted to it like smokers of pot. They don’t care for its truth. They just know the hypnotic pleasure that it gives them and stick to it till it consumes their life. Karl Marx chose the right words when compared religion with opium. It’s addictive and pleasurable.
But just like drug addicts we need to take a conscious stance and open our eyes. We all love the mythical tales and folklore. But we have to understand that these are allegories. They are just very fine metaphors and not something to be taken literally and seriously. Take your lesson and keep the story aside.
A lot of my friends in my survey said that the world won’t be as beautiful without god. I really really don’t understand that. They say what about those ultimate questions that will forever chase man’s curiosity. They say without god, it would just be a dull, inanimate universe. I very strongly believe it’s all an emanation from man’s desire to be controlled. To be given the answers without even thinking of questioning, like a slave. Weren’t we all first told the answers and then the question to which it is the answer? We are told “god exists” right when we are born. When we grow up, and we question why, it’s with the assumption that god does exist, and we’re told ‘ because if he didn’t then what else could be the purpose of our lives other than to reach him?’ And that becomes the obvious answer given you hold the assumption to be true.
But we are reasonable enough to know that the question should come before the answer. I once asked myself what is the purpose of my life. What does my existence mean? And fortunately, I never took god as a prime assumption. I’d say I am not here to find my purpose in life. I am here to make one. I am a free individual and I shall not hold myself bound to any rules other than those imposed by my qualified peers.
I feel people are just being indolent and obsequious when they say the universe would be meaningless without god. I’d say get up, go out and seek the truth. When I was in one of my senior years of school I read a book called ‘The Elegant Universe’ by Brian Green. That book changed my life. I realized that the real world is infinitely more mysterious and so much more wonderfully fantastical than any fiction writer could ever imagine or anything described in the holy books. And I mean it literally, word for word. No exaggeration. Reality actually outpaces human imagination, and our knowledge has actually outpaced our intellectual capacity. Famous physicist and author Michio Kaku said something in a TV documentary that I remember to this day. He said: “If a thousand philosophers were to sit for a thousand years and were asked to come up the weirdest, strangest thing they could concoct out of their imaginations, they still won’t be able to come up with something as strange as quantum mechanics“.
A lot of answers to the higher, existential questions that we like to raise are actually out there in the books and on the internet. I don’t know why we exist but I do have a fair idea about how the universe came into existence, why is has three dimensions, not more or less, how stars take birth and die, what really gravity is, how life evolved and how it works. I also know a lot of stuff that an uninitiated person would find difficult to comprehend.
Science apart, isn’t nature beautiful with all its intricate balances and breathtaking complexity? Why has there to be a creator? It’s wonderful, and that’s it. Why does it have to be given to us by someone even more wonderful? I think the absence of a creator makes it all the more beautiful. It’s like the perfect painting that took a billion years to complete and the painter didn’t even know what he was painting. And it turned out to be so beautiful! It gives us so much more to dig into and study. Every single brushstroke that was of no real purpose but still went on to make this painting so amazingly beautiful is worth a study. If you call in an omnipotent god as the creator of this beauty, it kills the wonder as it’s no big deal for him.
And I don’t understand why every existential question comes attached with a contingency? Why is there a ‘why’ in our existence? Why can’t we contemplate such an answer as ‘it just exists without there really being a reason’? It just is, and that is it! How’s that for an answer?
For those who still argue on the above, I have a question that will blow you away. Believers defend their beliefs as vehemently as atheists defend theirs. So you say god is needed to provide an answer to ‘why do we exist?’. Ok then try answering this:
Why does god exist?
What do you say to that? If our existence is contingent so should god’s existence be. So what’s your answer? To govern movement of stars and destiny of humans? That’s the dumbest of all answers anyone could give to any question. God, the almighty, doesn’t have anything better to do? He just sits up there with his levers, knobs and buttons and controls the universe! There’s nothing more to him? That’s like someone questions you ‘why do we exist’ and you answer ‘ to make a virtual reality video game and play it day in and day out’. Wouldn’t that be the most preposterous answer?
Maybe there will be some questions that will forever elude an answer by humanity. I think we should just leave some things to time to tell. As they say, journey is more beautiful than the end. And our quest for knowledge will make us endeavor into new dimensions, enlightening the path on the way for everyone to follow. And that to me is beauty.
Let us all unite, abandon all religion, and join one single religion of humanity. Let’s become humanists.
