Vimoh's Blog

In the comments to one of my last posts, Ankur Banerjee pointed me to a beautiful speech (even more so because it was made impromptu) by the late Douglas Adams. It was about the possibility of there being an artificial God — God imagined by man to fill in gaps in his understanding of the world. In one part of the speech, Adams suggests that early man, when he found that the world suited him so much, imagined that it must have been made for him, and that whoever made it must love him a lot therefore.

Let me start out by saying that I am not at all opposed to this idea. I have pondered this angle a lot and have even explored it in a post I wrote a few years ago. It is certainly possible that the idea of God came out of man’s mind and I would be lying if I said that this does not strike me as logical.

Having said that, let me also add that the idea does not negate anything in my belief system. I believe that God exists – either as an entity, or an idea, or a force, or a guy with a thousand arms and forty thousand heads – I don’t know. All I know is that he (or she or it) does exist. My personal definition of existence is very wide and allows for a whole lot of abstractions to share space with elements of the tangible universe. So when I say God exists, I may mean that he is in my head and that is quite enough for me.

But let us not make this about me. My interest in the question how God came to be is perhaps inferior to my interest in the question of why God came into being. The how-why divide may seem facile to some. So hear me out.

Regardless of whether God — a force superior to man — created him, or man imagined a superior force after he “just happened”, we are still faced with the inescapable presence of God in our lives, if not as a tangible reality, then at least as an idea.

My question is this (and try and think it over with an open mind): Why did man create God? Why did he imagine Him? What was the need for it? Why did he feel compelled to find a meaning in the world around him that there was no physical need for?

Animals don’t do this. They get along just fine without bothering with the meaning of things. Why is it only man that has this need to imagine things, to tell stories, to wonder about things higher than himself? Why does man have these fancy philosophical questions? Why does man feel humbled? Why is he always looking up? Why do we personify nature? Why do we imagine the wind to be a god? Why do we imagine the sea to be the thousand-eyed Varuna? Why to we consider the earth our mother?

Some will label it delusion of the mind. But I think that is simplifying it far too much. Imagining things is not an option that we exercise. It is a very deep-rooted human tendency. We indulge in little acts of imagination (acts of faith?) uncountable times everyday, mostly without even knowing it.

Many people cherish objects handed down to them by their parents. These can be a pen, or an item of clothing, or something like that. But to them, these are more than just simple objects. To them, these are something more. They imagine a higher meaning in them. Many people yell at their computer when it hangs. Many people find themselves considering certain places more significant than others – the house they grew up in, their first school, the bridge on which they kissed someone for the first time, etc.

These things, while they may not look related, demonstrate the same function of the human mind. Namely, the tendency to believe that the world is more than it appears to be. Belief in the existence of God is just a larger concept than imagining that the bridge on which you kissed your first girlfriend is somehow special and unique. It is all imagination.

My question (as if I have not asked it enough times already), is WHY. Why do we do all this? I have blogged before about our need for rituals and superstitions. Plus, there is scientific evidence of our brains being hard-wired to be superstitious. But that doesn’t answer the question, it only adds to it. Why is man built this way?

For the purposes of this post, I will ignore the idea of God as creator, because we started off with Adams’ suggestion of God being an artificial construct. Thus, we end up with the theory that man naturally evolved from lower animals and got to be this way. But even so, the god-damned why remains unanswered.

If man evolved from lower animals, and lower animals lack the sort of rich imaginative tendencies that man has, does it not naturally follow that what we have is something superior to what they have? Does it not say that the ability to believe and the ability to imagine meanings and the tendency to see things for more than what they seem to be, is something that we gained through the marvelously complex system of evolution by natural selection? May it not be that we evolved to believe in God? And if we did, the question that follows inevitably is – why. Why did we evolve to believe in forces higher than ourselves? Why can’t we just live our lives like animals without wondering about our place in the universe?

I don’t have an answer. But I will not pretend that the question doesn’t exist. So in order to show respect to the question, I will proceed to make some logical deductions.

Let us consider the human body to be a computer. It is a fascinating machine, capable of amazing feats. It boggles our minds. We grow curious and start exploring it. As time passes, our understanding of the computer grows better and better. We get to its very basics. We discover that it is made of metal and plastic. We go even deeper, down to the circuits. We find what makes the software work. We then sit content in the knowledge that our understanding of the computer is complete.

But what we conveniently ignore is (brace for impact) the why. Why is the computer there in the first place? Why is such amazing software installed on it? For what purpose? Ignore the question about who made the computer if you want to. What we should at least wonder about is why it exists at all.

This is, in fact, the single greatest philosophical question that has obsessed man since the beginning of time. Why does anything exist at all? What is the point of it? The name religion gives that reason, is God. Plain and simple.

And the question is not as hopelessly unanswerable as it may seem. We have the computer and we know what it can do. We know that there is an operating system (the soul?) and a web browser on it (imagination?). Does it not naturally follow that there may be a web out there, waiting to be browsed? I mean, why would we be given an Internet Explorer if there were no Internet to explore?

I think the problem here lies with our temporal way of seeing things. Humans have very definitive ways of defining concepts like “beginning”, “end”, “creation” etc. And as we have learnt more, these definitions have been challenged and, in many cases, demolished. For example, our ideas about “up” and “down” disappeared the moment we ventured into the weightlessness of outer space. Could it not be that the limitations of time (as we understand it) do not apply to the force that created us? Why does God have to be something that came “before” us? After all, there are objects in the known universe that mock “time” all the time (black holes for example).

The other idea is to look at the God concept as something resembling music. Music, as we know it today, didn’t exist till humans came around. But we definitely didn’t create music. It has always been around. What we really did was perceive it in a way that none had done before.

Why can’t this be the way man “created” God? The force that made all things may have always been around. All man did (when he got around to being able to do so) was perceive him with a faculty only he possessed — imagination.

In my last blog post on why religious myth relies on fantasy, I implied that superstition works better than a starkly objective view of the world. I can believe that superstition exists because it works; that it has fought for survival against a physical-only interpretation of reality and has stood its ground. It has passed the Darwinian evolution test.

But because that may not satisfy many, let me try and answer the question: Why are we superstitious?

It is easy to trace individual superstitious practices to their roots and say how they started. But that won’t really answer the question. The real question is why. Why do human beings have this need to believe in strange things? Why have people imagined incredible fantasies since the beginning of time? Why has the tangible side of existence consistently failed to satisfy mankind?

Stark atheists would say superstitions are signs of a weak mind that can’t handle reality and therefore must come up with fantastic explanations for things. I find that strange, seeing as how everyone is superstitious at one level or another.

When you yell, “Come on! Don’t do this to me!”  at a hung computer, you are being superstitious. It’s a machine, it can’t hear you, and you know it. If you feel the loss of your favourite pen, that’s superstition too. At a physical level, pens are just pens. The importance you assign to one pen over others is imaginary. The same goes for people being sentimental about their cars and motorcycles, people saying, “The damn door broke my nose,” and people cursing the weather. Nobody is utterly free from irrational behaviour (even though some might want to pretend that they are Vulcan). Human beings have this instinctive tendency of thinking up imaginary truths.

A recent scientific study by Bruce Hood, professor of developmental psychology at Bristol University, points in the same direction:

The findings of Bruce Hood, professor of developmental psychology at Bristol University, suggest that magical and supernatural beliefs are hardwired into our brains from birth, and that religions are therefore tapping into a powerful psychological force. His work is supported by other researchers who have found evidence linking religious feelings and experience to particular regions of the brain. They suggest people are programmed to receive a feeling of spirituality from electrical activity in these areas.

I believe that the act of storytelling roots from this tendency. As far as we know, man is the only animal that tells stories. We read books, watch plays, we pay to go sit inside movie theatres and allow ourselves to be moved to emotion with a narrative we know to be false, even if it is for a short while. This behaviour falls under the same category as the little personal superstitions I referred to in the previous paragraph.

There is something inside us that craves the imaginary. It is something inherent to human nature, something that makes us human, something that is essential to the human condition. There are those who believe that with the advent of modern science and the spread of education, the world will soon be rid of all superstition. I don’t think that will happen. Superstition is not rooted in ignorance. It stems from the same part of us that creates stories and myth.

What we call superstition is thriving in the modern world. Storytellers are some of the most prosperous and well-known people on the planet (writers, filmmakers, actors). Every year, more and more people spend their money to immerse themselves in imaginary worlds and situations. In fact, this is practically the age of imagination.

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle." — Albert Einstein

A miracle, by definition, is something that happened. It may be something extremely unlikely, but it happened. Miracles aren’t impossible. The impossible doesn’t happen, miracles do.

I also believe that a manifest miracle is a matter of perspective. If you look for a miracle, one is not hard to find. In fact, you will be hard-pressed to find something that is not a miracle.

I think it is a miracle I woke up this morning. It is a miracle millions survive road traffic everyday and get to their workplaces unharmed. It is a miracle that a million sperm cells take off for the egg and only one manages to successfully impregnate it. These things happen all the time, all around us.

Of course, it is equally possible to look at all this and say that there is nothing miraculous about them. That they are just things that happen. But where’s the fun in that?

Your average atheist is a seeing-is-believing man. His primary objection to the way of the believer is that God’s existence can’t be proven with any known means.

It appears to me though, that any self-respecting atheist must then believe in destiny – the idea that whatever happens, happens because it was set to happen, and that it couldn’t have happened any other way.

Of course, the destiny concept is often slotted together with the intangibles of religion and philosophy, thereby putting it slightly out of the reach of those that might want to debate it.

But when you think about it, it becomes very obvious.

There is no way to prove that what happened, could have happened differently. There is no way to know if something you did, could have been done differently. A moment, once it is past, is locked away securely in time. We can have another go at things, but we can’t change what happened any more than we can prove the existence of God using a telescope.

If I am to believe only what I can perceive and prove, then one written reality must be all that exists. There is no way to prove things that may have happened or might happen. So what has happened must be the only possible way things could have turned out. Right?

Narrowed it right down to claustrophobia, didn’t I?

But we are blessed to have the gift of imagination and can see things that didn’t happen or couldn’t happen. We can even see things that appear impossible. Richard Bach says faith and imagination are the same thing. I agree.

I grew up a staunch atheist in a family where the gods had their own separate room. Ideas and theories bunking the God concept were (still are and always will be) plentily available. I knew plenty of ways to get at you if you were out to prove God’s existence to me. What’s more? I was proud of having thwarted seasoned believers at the game.

Atheism was good training ground for me. It trained my mind in reason and taught me that whether I believe or not, God is something that would haunt my mind always.

But this was not just about God. It was quite some time before I started to see this as being about plain old trust. Believing in myself, my dreams, my vision of life, other people’s opinions and convictions. It was about working in the absence of evidence. About not being trapped by what is considered the very purpose of our existence — knowledge.

The need to know

We work under the assumption that when we are born, we know nothing. That we learn as we grow up and have learnt all there is by the time we are grown-ups. And yet, we conveniently forget that practically all the knowledge we gather in our formative years is based on an act of faith. We are told things and we believe them.

Faith therefore, is a quality we are all born with. It seems to exist in the absence of knowledge. Small wonder then, that we equate faith with ignorance.

Truth is, we never really stop believing. You don’t exactly know how your computer’s keyboard or TV remote functions. But you believe what the techies tell you. You believe advertisements. You believe signboards that tell you “road blocked ahead” and take the suggested alternate routes to your workplace.

Imagine what it would be like if you insisted on knowing everything!

What is the point of knowledge then?

Knowledge is important. But as I said, it has no independent existence. In my eyes, knowledge is an aid to faith. Jumping off a cliff believing you can fly is an act of pure faith (or pure stupidity, depending on your perspective). But if you have flown before, it helps you believe that you can do it again.

Knowledge is good to have. But it is not indispensable. Nor is it opposed to or superior to faith. It complements faith. In fact, you need faith to know. The most reliable encyclopedia will serve you no purpose if you don’t believe what it says.

Knowledge can be incomplete or fragmented (it often is). Faith can only ever be absolute. There is no middle path for the believer. Doubt, fear, and misery don’t walk alongside faith. If you truly believe in something (God for example), then there can be no doubt and hence no fear. If you are in doubt, you obviously don’t believe. Think about it. (I have written about this before)

Faith is a vastly superior quality than knowledge. It does not cripple. It is not a handicap. Those who believe can afford the ultimate freedom — fearlessness.

So we can believe whatever we want?

Yes. You probably already do that. You wouldn’t hear a word against your only son, would you? Even though your neighbours may know of him having broken into a local shop. Similarly, you believe in what your favourite charismatic politician says without giving a tweet about popular opinion.

Sometimes, it so happens that you want to believe something or someone, but simply can’t. With all due respect, it is NOT SO. If you want to believe, you can. You don’t have to learn faith. You were born with it, remember? I like Richard Bach’s way of putting it in his book Illusions:

“Humbug on faith. Takes zero faith. What it takes is imagination…

Two thousand years ago, five thousand, they didn’t have a word for imagination, and faith was the best they could come up with for a pretty solemn bunch of followers.

Consider this. There are millions of melodies, all made of just seven musical notes. The notes you can know, but you need to imagine the melodies in order to be able to make them.

I think I just figured out how some people manage to retain memories of their past lives. It is a reasonable enough explanation anyway. Listen.

In the universe, there is energy. It is everywhere and in everything. It is like Obi-Wan Kenobi’s definition of the Force, “…an energy field created by all living things, that surrounds and penetrates living beings and binds the galaxy together.”

There is also mass. Loosely defined, mass is stuff and energy is what makes stuff work. Everything is made of stuff and everything is being run by energy.

If you know basic level physics, you would know that energy can’t be created or destroyed, it can only be converted from one form to another. It is called the law of conservation of energy. The same energy runs our bodies, nuclear reactions, the stars, and all manner of living and non living objects.

If you put absolutely anything under the microscope, you will see molecules. Regardless of which element something is made of, there are, microscopically speaking, vast empty spaces between molecules. This seemingly empty space contains energy.

You will see the same vast spaces and the same vibrating molecules in pretty much everything. Your hand, your bed, your dog. The list, as cliche goes, is endless. Energy holds matter together and keeps it from falling apart.

Now, we know that memories are extragenetic (independent of genes). If you are cloned, your duplicate will not have any memories of your life. (Watch the action-packed movie The 6th Day. Schwarzeneggar alert!)

Here’s my point. Cloning replicates all matter in our bodies. But what of the energy? And what of that which the matter can not hold – memories?

What if, upon destruction of the body, the energy drifts away (soul?) taking with it memories, and just becomes a part of the sea of energy that is all around us. In due time when a new body made of matter needs mobilising, that bubble of energy enters it and brings the memories with it.

Some time ago, I wrote a post called Getting Ideas. In it I suggested that ideas are just things that float all around us and come to us when we seek them. I am saying that same thing about consciousness now.

Think of it as a like-attracts-like situation. A set of memories and feelings seeking matter will be drawn towards a body. Similarly, a body in need of a feeling will draw such towards itself.

Paranormal researchers say that many ghost sightings are a result of energy signatures left at certain places. So in a way, the universe remembers. (Read an oldish sci-fi book by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle called The Land of the Mists)

More proof that we are all connected. We are parts of each other and belong to each other, quite literally. Maybe the bright idea you just had was somebody’s dying wish. How does that make you feel?