Do We Need God?

Men for long have invoked God to explain existence. Science has comprehensively usurped this role. Does God fulfil some other needs of humans?

-I-

Is belief essential to soothe a wounded mankind, battered repeatedly by the harsh blows of a nonchalant fate?

Born of stardust worked upon by the laws of nature for billions of years, humans are like all living beings on earth; Yet unique. They think. They remember past and reflect on future. Griefs and joys of past colour each moment of our lives. Our present is forever a hostage of our past and future. We are never free to wholeheartedly indulge in the passing moments. Human suffering is thus, illimitable. Neither its source nor its remedy is known to the afflicted soul. Nature, though the source of everything that we are, is supremely indifferent to human condition. Each of us is an island in themselves. Company of fellow humans, however soothing, is transient. One covets a source of constant solace, of infinite compassion, that is accessible every moment.

Is it then beyond reason to posit and believe in an omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-beneficent God?

Belief in God comforts many in their deepest grief. God undeniably is the Johnny-on-the-spot who rescues a believer from many doldrums. I must reproduce here A.A. Milne’s poem Blinker, that most clearly and beautifully captures this concept. Richard Dawkins quoted this when he wrote on this subject. I think, I’m guilty of plagiarism – If not of the content, certainly of the idea.

Binker

Binker—what I call him—is a secret of my own,
And Binker is the reason why I never feel alone.
Playing in the nursery, sitting on the stair,
Whatever I am busy at, Binker will be there.

Oh, Daddy is clever, he's a clever sort of man,
And Mummy is the best since the world began,
And Nanny is Nanny, and I call her Nan—
But they can't
See
Binker.

Binker's always talking, 'cos I'm teaching him to speak:
He sometimes likes to do it in a funny sort of squeak,
And he sometimes likes to do it in a hoodling sort of roar …
And I have to do it for him 'cos his throat is rather sore.

Oh, Daddy, is clever, he's a clever sort of man,
And Mummy knows all that anybody can.
And Nanny is Nanny, and I call her Nan—
But they don't
Know
Binker.

Binker's brave as lions when we're running in the park;
Binker's brave as tigers when we're lying in the dark;
Binker's brave as elephants. He never, never cries …
Except (like other people) when the soap gets in his eyes.

Oh, Daddy is Daddy, he's a Daddy sort of man,
And Mummy is as Mummy as anybody can,
And Nanny is Nanny, and I call her Nan …
But they're not
Like
Binker.

Binker isn't greedy, but he does like things to eat,
So I have to say to people when they're giving me a sweet,
“Oh, Binker wants a chocolate, so could you give me two?”
And then I eat it for him, 'cos his teeth are rather new.

Well, I'm very fond of Daddy, but he hasn't time to play,
And I'm very fond of Mummy, but she sometimes goes away,
And I'm often cross with Nanny when she wants to brush my hair …

But Binker's always Binker, and is certain to be there.

Distress in life is inescapable. Show me a person without one and I’ll show you one who has grown wings on his back. One has to gaze at the world only cursorily to see how widespread is misery: Millions die when a virus hops from its animal host to humans; People of a nation are overnight shorn off their homes, their land, their country, by the nefarious designs of a diabolical politician; Thousands die in their sleep when the floor of the seas are torn apart. Most of these victims were god-fearing people who believed in a just God all their lives.

Relief obtained from belief in Blinker can only be fleeting. It may also dull the analytical faculties of a person in distress and prevent them from adapting remedial measures, if such were available. But even if belief is a source of consolation and comfort, it doesn’t prove the existence of the entity being believed-in.

All religions teach that in death only the body perishes, while eternal soul is reunited with its creator. I do not know that a believer fears death less, in the light of this knowledge. Each human clings to life with a tenacity that is not influenced by their beliefs, but is an attribute of every life on earth.

Non-believers are as happy or distressed in life as are faithful. A rational understanding might teach one to accept life – with its unavoidable tribulations and joys – with equanimity. We have evolved to agonise in suffering and rejoice in pleasures. No belief, however comforting, can make our minds alter its ways; ways that are hardwired in its very structure. Bertrand Russell wrote this in his essay ‘What I Believe’.

I believe that when I die, I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting. Many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold; surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about man's place in the world. Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own.

-II-

Late Kishori Amonkar, leading Hindustani vocalist, composed music for only one Hindi movie, Govind Nihalani’s Drishti. She sang three short Alaap tracks for the film. These are ethereally beautiful. One of these was used in the background of a love-making scene. Kishori was infuriated. She believed her music was her worship, a means to know her creator. Love scene being enacted in the foreground of her music was a sacrilege. She shunned films till her death twenty-seven years later, depriving her bred-in-the-bone fans like me of some otherworldly experiences. I had found the particular alaap apt for the scene. Love and religion both, are source of forceful overwhelming emotions.

Some of the greatest creators attribute their art to divine inspiration: in architecture, painting, music, literature, and even science. Is belief in God essential to inspire men to attain the peak of their creative powers? I believe, it’s a matter of taste and what moves the artist. Magnificence of nature is dumbfounding. Man with his paltry strength and evanescent life, is astounded as he contemplates the infinite spread, an eternal existence, and the formidable power of universe. These strong emotions churn every mind. One wants to believe in and wholly surrender unto the supreme power that created this stupefying universe. A bestirred heart in a skilled body generates astonishing art. But it is poorly equipped to set forth on an enquiry into the deepest mysteries of existence. It is wise to indulge in the creation of such minds – and ignore their belief in a creator. Work of these incredibly endowed artists excites my awe. I enjoy it without restrain, immersing wholly in the disembodied unearthly joys that ensue.  

Rational belief is equally potent in stimulating a rousing work of art. Carl Sagan’s famous ode to Earth, in his book Pale Blue Dot (Earth in space appears as a pale blue dot viewed from a spacecraft), moves one to tears with its shear eloquence and evocative imagery.

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam…

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark…

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. 

Splendour of life moves Richard Dawkins to achieve similar elegance of prose in his book, The Devil’s Chaplain.

There is more than just grandeur in this view of life. Bleak and cold though it can seem from under the security blanket of ignorance. There is deep refreshment to be had from standing up and facing straight into the strong keen wind of understanding. Yeat’s ‘winds that blow through the starry ways’.

Belief in God is the derivative of common sense that evolved to enable our ancestors to survive in their environment. Science is stranger than this common sense. Most scientific facts therefore, are counterintuitive. They enlarge the arena of human thoughts in unbelievable ways. What our eyes see, what our ears hear, and what our skin feels is an infinitesimal fraction of reality; not the tip of, but a pinpoint on an iceberg. I cite just one example. Human eye can see only .0035% of the light spectrum. A butterfly perceives light of much wider range, seeing patterns in flowers not available to human eye. Science provides a rich inspiration for a creative mind. J.B.S. Haldane in his essay, ‘Possible Worlds’ wrote, ‘Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose…I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy.’ A theist friend of the nuclear physicist Richard Feynman once chided him for his scientific outlook, which he said, prevented Feynman from appreciating a flower’s beauty. Feynman replied thus:

…the beauty that he (his friend) sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is … I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes…

-III-

Nothing seems to need God inevitably. Morality must be the Rosetta stone that will suggest why belief is indispensable for mankind. Believers contend that without a God to guide the inherently depraved man, as to the right and wrong in their actions, humanity would degenerate into a cesspool of irredeemable perversion. Believers, it appears, have an abysmally poor opinion of human nature. It is true there is much meanness, much self-indulgence, and much cruelty in us. But human nature is also seeped in benevolence, self-sacrifice, and indomitable courage. Evolutionary and cognitive psychology have now revealed that altruism, i.e., regard for the welfare of others, is as much a feature of human nature, as its regard for self-preservation.

One doesn’t need edicts from an unseen entity to inform them that killing, stealing, raping, disrespecting elders, cruelty are bad behaviour. Would you think highly of a people who behaved well only because they feared God’s retribution otherwise?

I do not suggest that we deduce morals from our biology. It is a fallacy to derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’. What I state is that humans do not need a supernatural agent to keep them on the rightful path. Even if one supposes that moral behaviour is decided by God, it implies that God is free to choose what is good and what is bad for us. Could he then choose racism over egalitarianism, slavery over liberty, malevolence over benevolence, as moral rectitudes? If not, it implies there is something inherent in moralistic behaviour that makes it good for humans. God has no choice in this matter. Hence, is not needed for this purpose.

-IV-

When the greatest minds in science invoke God to explain the inexplicable wonders of nature, who are we the plebians, to doubt existence of supreme? This is allegedly the most potent argument for belief. Religion teaches its followers to revere dogmas and this is one example. Scientist’s utterances, often misconstrued, are taken on their face value. A statement isn’t true because of the eminence of the person mouthing it. But most of the examples cited do not withstand a careful scrutiny either.

Einstein’s statements, ‘God does not play dice’ and ‘Subtle is the lord, but malicious he is not’, are the most quoted phrases in this context. Einstein’s exalted stature amongst twentieth century scientists lends an aura of gospel to this proclamation. Though considered the godfather of Quantum physics, Einstein was opposed to some of its basic assertions. He particularly could not bring himself to believe that uncertainty is built in the fabric of nature. Nature’s laws and the uncanny orderliness of its organisation excited Einstein’s awe. He believed that nature’s deepest secrets, as to how it works, are hidden from us, not because of its devious intentions, but because of its lofty magnificence. Man had to work hard to understand these – and this lifelong effort was his religion. His notion of God was like Spinoza’s, the seventeenth century Dutch philosopher. Einstein categorically repudiated belief in a personal god. I quote only two excerpts from his numerous writings on this subject.

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious than it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

-          Albert Einstein in a letter March 24, 1954

 

I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.

-          Albert Einstein, upon being asked if he believed in God by a Rabbi, April 24, 1921

 

Stephen Hawking, another physicist with a formidable reputation, ends his great book A Brief History of Time thus.

…if we do discover a complete theory (of universe) …it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we would know the mind of God.

This reference to God is also deviously appropriated by believers to support their belief. Here, Hawking was clearly referring to the ultimate reason for existence. His choice of the phrase, ‘mind of God’, was a skilful use of a figure of speech that beautifully conveys the awe, inherent in the concept of the Grand Unified Theory – a theory that will explain every known fact about universe. Hawking’s reference to his ‘no boundary solution’ in the same book, where he emphatically denied need of God to explain origin of universe, is conveniently glossed over by defenders of belief.

-V-

‘Tell the people that there’s an invisible man in the sky who created the universe and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.’

-          George Carlin (American stand-up comedian)

How does a mind equipped with extraordinary reasoning powers to figure out the way the world works, also believes in gods who have to be appeased to beget happiness? Belief in supernatural is ubiquitous. It cuts across time, geography, and race.

Many insects are attracted by light. This intrigued people for long. One possible explanation is this. Insects evolved in a world where source of light was natural like the Sun and Moon. These sources are distant. Their rays are thus parallel. Insects use light to navigate. Flying at a fixed angle to parallel rays they keep a straight path. But manmade sources of light emit rays that are not parallel and an insect spirals into the source. Thus, to ask why insects indulge in self-burning behaviour is misleading. To understand this strange insect behaviour the right query is why insects are attracted to light?

Religion is one of the weirdest attributes of a mind capable of spectacular reasoning. To understand the origin of religious belief we should ask what makes human mind to seek these beliefs so avidly? And not why we believe in the evidently fictitious explanations for natural phenomena?

Like language, belief is an inescapable trait of human mind. Circuits for learning language, i.e., facility to grasp the syntax, are inherent in our brains. A child fills these up with the words of the language it is exposed to in its formative years. Within a short span of a couple of years, a child has a vocabulary of a few thousand and can form meaningful sentences without being taught grammar. Religion must use similar mind pathways. When exposed to such beliefs one can’t help but accept them as truth. Questioning comes later – if at all. Even if one desires, one can’t avoid seeing faces in the clouds, in the patterns on a damp wall or gather the meaning of words spoken in a language one understands. Face recognition and language are indelibly imprinted on our brains. Similar must be the case of passive acquiescence of religious beliefs.

Phenomenon of belief needs to be investigated scientifically. I read the most comprehensive and plausible account of this search in anthropologist Pascal Boyer’s book, Religion Explained. Boyer contends that religion is not the product of human urge to explain the world. Human minds are not explanation-devices to explain all the common phenomenon in the world. We know that desires and thoughts generate physical action. Intention to examine the book on the shelf makes one shoot their arm to pick it up. We also know that thought and intentions are not physical forces. How do they acquire power to bring about physical change? Mind does not bother about such imponderable queries, though the phenomenon occurs every minute in our environment. On the other hand, we have no difficulty in explaining why a ball is flying in a field, why an animal is startled and is scooting, why teacher is frowning in the classroom? Ball was thrown by the playing children, animal feels threatened by a predator, teacher is unhappy with students, our mind tells us without any effort.

Human mind is equipped with inference systems that enable it to impute reasons to specific phenomenon in its immediate environment. A mind thus endowed helped our species to survive and prosper in the world. Religious beliefs which deal with similar enquiries, as are the domain of mind’s inference systems, appropriate them for their proliferation. Religion is thus, like a virus that piggybacks on the DNA copying machinery of the host cell to produce more copies of itself. I must not dwell more on this here, for my intention is to confine to belief in God and not religion in general.

-VI-

Universe, with its billions of galaxies, each containing billions of stars like sun, is a product of chance. Humans – an inseparable part of the universe – are no exception. Chance led quantum fluctuation in vacuum to start the Big Bang that gave birth to the universe. Our universe with its set of certain unique constants proved to be favourable for the birth of life.

Each individual life is also a product of chance. During each copulation, male partner releases 200-500 million sperms. Each of these sperms, when united with the ovum, is capable of producing a unique individual. But only the sperm that carried your genotype fertilised the ovum. You are thus born of a one in five hundred million chance.

Steven Weinberg, noble laureate in physics, ends his mesmerising account of the early universe in his book, The First Three Minutes, thus:

…It is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes, but that we were somehow built in from the beginning. …(Weinberg was flying when he wrote this) Below, the earth looks very soft and comfortable – fluffy clouds here and there, snow turning pink as the sun sets, roads stretching straight across the country from one town to another. It is very hard to realize that this is just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe. It is even harder to realize that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

Life-giving Sun will one day exhaust its nuclear fuel and die as a red giant star. Long before that homo sapiens would have been extinct. No evidence might survive of a race that had a mind to think about its origin and the beginning and the end of time. Even if some evidence persists, there may not be an intelligent life to weave this glorious past. Universe itself will end one day in a Big Crunch as its expansion slows and all the matter collapses in black holes. Or it will die a cold death in Big Freeze if it keeps expanding.

This is a bleak picture to contemplate in our lives bustling with numerous joys and sorrows, memories of a harsh past or easy circumstances, anxieties from an unknown future, and a heart full of endless yearnings. Most of us find this world-view, woven of hard scientific facts, cruel, disheartening, and disconcerting. We want to believe that universe was created for an end. Our lives, we conceive, have a purpose – unrevealed though it may remain till the end. It is indisputable that belief in a God who created universe and each individual and ordained existence to serve a purpose, comforts many souls. This belief lends meaning to many lives. We are not the chance flickering of an ephemeral flame, fleeting glory of a shooting star, but have been destined for an end, the belief seems to whisper in our ears.

Scientific world-view based on facts does not rob one of the joys of existence. It enhances these. Isn’t it exhilarating to know that of the millions of lives that were possible at the time of your conception, it is only you that are fortunate to be breathing today? Why should the knowledge that our species will probably be dead in a few million years disturb us? In the history of 3.5 billion years of life on earth, we have been around only for 250000 years. Isn’t it liberating to know that we are not here to serve a hidden agenda of an unknown entity, but a chance occurrence dictated by simple laws of nature?

We are free to look nature square in its face and exult in its wonders, however transient may be our existence. Each one of us is free to carve our own path through the maze of hopes and despairs, triumphs and trials, love and neglect, that make a life. On the way one might discover the truth that gives meaning to their lives: pursuit of knowledge, creation of a piece of art or music, writing of a book, search for pleasure in the humdrum of a work-a-day life, redemption in service of mankind, or fulfilment in the love of beloved.

Search for meaning in the design of universe will forever be futile in an essentially meaningless world. We must look within to discover the meaning of our life. I end this series of essays on my meditations on belief with a passage, once again, from Steven Weinberg's First Three Minutes.    

But if there is no solace in the fruits of research, there is at least some consolation in the research itself. Men and women are not content to comfort themselves with tales of gods and giants, or to confine their thoughts to the daily affairs of life; they also build telescopes and satellites and accelerators and sit at their desks for endless hours working out the meaning of the data they gather. The effort to understand the universe is one of the few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.