Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Been thinking about God and morality off and on these past couple of months. I feel every thinking man, if he really examines the question, will find it hard to justify hie faith in God. Is there a God? If yes, then what is his contribution to this world? How does he play a part its day to day workings? The more I look at it, I find myself veering to the point of atheism. But years of religious background doesn’t wash off that easily. And I find myself retreating to the cosy, safer and much more comfortable embrace of Deism, the belief that the Creator set out some rules at the beginning of Creation and hasn’t since then taken an active role in the play of existence. I look at the formation of stars and planets and they seem to follow strict physical and chemical rules. I look at the emergence of life and there seems nothing divine about it. An amalgamation of self-replicating molecules in a constant struggle to multiply and pass themselves on, in an unending battle against others of its own kind. In a few hundred million years, the sun will die out and earth will be uninhabitable and there’s nothing God is going to do about that either. Meanwhile the struggle for the survival of the fittest continues in its own ferocious, pitiless way and I don’t see any intervention there either. So if creation, nurture and annihilation are preset in our universe according to known, immutable laws, whither God? Wherefore God? Did He just set some rules and then sat back to enjoy the show? Something like making a complex graphic program and executing it for His amusement? Where is the evidence of his direct intervention? “Ishwar Allah, terey jahan mein, nafrat kyon hai, jung hai kyon?” the Upanishads ask, “Why is it that Brahma made this world and leaves it so? If, being all-powerful he leaves it so, he is not good; if not all-powerful, he is not God”
These are valid questions and I find the answers religious men give to them almost farcical. The good that happens in your life is due to His benevolence, the bad is despite His efforts. I can’t find a more masochistic system of thought. If I win, it’s not because of all the effort at preparation I put in, but all due to God, who presumably likes me more than all the other competitors. If I lose then it wasn’t because God failed me, but because I deserved it. Such was my fate. Of course the weapon of last resort that religion has is to claim that we are too ignorant and small minded to really understand God’s master plan for us all. Maybe your kid who dies at the age of 2 due to some horrifying genetic disease was sent to you to teach you suffering. I might ask why that poor infant was made to suffer on my account. And if I were to ask how exactly God bring this whole thing about? Did he knowing that I needed to suffer pain, brought me to fall in love with and sire a child with the one woman with the exact genetic makeup to compliment mine and then make sure that on the sperm with the relevant genes to cause that specific abnormality ended up fertilizing the egg? Imagine God messing around the Fallopian tubes! Not to mention the 256 people who set about mating 8 generations ago to bring about me with this specific genetic makeup. Like I said, farcical. Look at anything you attribute to God and ask yourself what did God do to make this thing so? Anything. I have yet to find one thing I can truly say was made by God to be exactly like that. All that you see around you is like it is for a reason. A chemical, physical, biological rule explains it fully. If not, then you can rest assured there is a reason though we haven’t worked it out yet. And don’t go around ascribing these rare things to God, for once they are explained, God will be responsible for one less thing in your count. Like the formation of the earth, our heliocentric planetary system, the evolution of myriad forms of life with the same basic genetic code, our descent from ape-like ancestors and so on. Look at the things we attributed to God and can’t anymore.
So I return to my original question, is there a God? I honestly don’t think so though I just as honestly hope there is something akin to Him. Even coming from a family with the least little bit of religiosity in its veins, I still find it disconcerting to completely disbelieve in God. I hear voices saying, “There still is meaning in life” but I find a little measure of despair. The idea that there is no Great Plan makes sense to me in a logical sense, but it’s a hard thing to accept. I consider myself an intelligent, thinking individual and if I find it so difficult to accept, how much more so would it be for a person of lower intelligence (not being vain or anything here; I know there are people with greater intelligence than me and similarly those with lesser), especially one brought up with a religious background to accept atheism. His whole world would come crashing down around him. Religion is one of the strongest moorings for so many that I think it would be impossible for them to imagine a world without God.

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