Vimoh's Blog

Once upon a time, on a world not very different from this one, there lived a race of people with very short memory spans. They remembered nothing of yesterday, and only very little of what had happened a few hours ago. Their view of the world therefore, was mostly limited to what was happening now.

One popular debate that raged among the people was about the existence of the sun and the stars. During the day, one group sang praises of the sun and laughed at those who spoke of the night sky and the stars. They said that all that needs to be seen can be seen quite clearly in the light of the sun. Anyone who, in spite of the sun’s very real presence, insisted on believing in fairy tales about a so-called star-studded night sky, was clearly delusional.

After sunset, the other group praised the stars while singing and dancing under the beautiful night sky. They ridiculed the sun people and asked them where their sun was, now that the glorious stars had appeared to prove them wrong. Revelling under the starry sky, they denied the importance, and even the existence, of the sun. They declared that the stars were all anyone should ever need and that no sun could ever stand against the sheer awesomeness of the night sky.

There was a third group on this world, a relatively small minority of people. This was composed of those who knew of dawns and twilights. They knew that while it was true that the sun lit everything up when it was out, it also blinded people to the beauty of the stars. They also knew that even though the night sky was beautiful to behold and brought them much joy, it wasn’t really much of a light source, especially when compared to the sun.

They did their best to point this out to the day people and the night people, but nobody much listened to them. And thus, the quarrels went on as surely and as frequently as the sun rose and set.

Some time ago, during a debate about God as creator, I found myself running into a wall with my atheist opponent who kept refusing to acknowledge anything “magical”. Funny thing was, I wasn’t even talking about anything magical. I was only suggesting the possibility that something intelligent may have created the universe. My friend kept insisting that the idea of something magical having created the universe was preposterous.

He was making the common mistake of equating higher intelligence with magic. He probably wouldn’t have resisted my suggestion as vehemently if I had said that an intelligent alien race created the universe. It was the word God that he wasn’t comfortable with.

But this disagreement pointed me in another direction. I realised that we tend to label a lot of concepts as ‘supernatural’ without a second thought. Things that science can’t explain are labeled supernatural. Ideas that are not reflected in scientific literature of the time are labeled supernatural. The God concept, of course, gets thrown into that pile as well.

Basically anything that isn’t part of the tangible, knowable, visible universe; is classified as supernatural. But it is not a valid classification, is it? The mistake we make in making such a classification is assuming that nature is only made up of things that we know. We mistake our view of the world to be the absolute world. We confuse the subjective with the objective.

A few centuries ago, the idea of man flying across continents in minutes may have been labeled supernatural. People recovering from utterly destroying injuries was supernatural some time ago. Now, thanks to advancements in medical science, such events are seen as perfectly natural. History has repeatedly rewritten our definitions of what is natural and what is supernatural. Our view of nature keeps expanding as time passes.

Religion, sadly, has often encouraged the facile divide between natural and supernatural. God has been put on a pedestal and his images have been lined with armies of priests specialising in incredibly complex rituals. What should have been man’s direct line with God has been turned into a veritable industry with all manner of middlemen telling you how to go about finding God. God has been taken from his rightful place – that is inside man – and imprisoned in an imposing “out there” and “up there” structure.

In The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell describes the nature of the killing idea that the modern world has come to refer to as the supernatural:

The idea of the supernatural as being something over and above the natural is a killing idea. In the Middle Ages this was the idea that finally turned the world into something like a wasteland, a land where people were living inauthentic lives, never doing a thing that they truly wanted because the supernatural laws required them to live as directed by their clergy. In a wasteland, people are fulfilling purposes that are not properly theirs but have been put upon them as inescapable laws. This is a killer.

I myself used to think of God as something beyond nature. But when you actually think about it, there is nothing magical or supernatural about God or the so-called miracles. They are only aspects of reality we haven’t been exposed to yet. Once you understand them, they simply melt into the natural, becoming parts of it.

The divide between what we call natural and what we consider supernatural roots from the tendency to see certain things as being “beyond this realm”. In truth, there is no realm other than this one realm. It is only our faulty and limited understanding of reality that causes such bogus divisions. At the end of the day, there is only one universe that contains it all.

Many religions say that what fuels us is something indestructible and, for all practical purposes, invisible – the soul. Hinduism believes that all living creatures — from the tiniest of germs to largest of the redwood trees — have a spirit energy fuelling them. This invisible field of energy does not end when the body is destroyed. It merely leaves the body, to return later on in another one.

Without going into the dynamics of reincarnation, karma, and the whole train of concepts that lie in that general direction (perhaps I will go there some other time), I would like to propose an argument in defense of the spirit/soul idea.

The scientific view of an organism is that it is a machine. A very complicated and highly developed machine, but a machine nevertheless. Science believes that all that is to be understood about an animal is in plain sight. All that we need are powerful enough instruments. Oddly enough, it is this very machine view that trumps science’s dismissal of the soul.

To me, proof of the soul’s existence lies in the difference between a living creature and a dead body. If organisms were simply a superior variety of machines, they would end in as straightforward a manner as machines do. But they don’t — there is a crucial difference.

Think about it. What differentiates a living being from a corpse? What really happens when we die? Machines stop working when a crucial function ends or when they run out of fuel. In case of humans, crucial functions end all the time. Accidents destroy vital organs, disease eats up parts of the body, various illnesses happen. But these are not the causes of death. If they were, we could (in theory at least) find cures to them and prevent death. What about the inevitable kind of death? What is it that causes a man to die of old age? What leaves him that does not come back?

We are told the body’s chemical composition changes, turning it from a life-supporting structure to something that is no longer suitable for the purpose. But truth be told, it is all guesswork. We don’t really know how chemical composition changes, or even if it does change. If we did, we would be able to change it back. If nutrition is what the body lacks, we would be able to give it nutrients and bring it back to life. If specific conditions are what caused someone to die, then we would be able to change those conditions and bring them back to life.

But we can’t do any of those things. What differentiates an organism from a machine is that beyond a point, it cannot be repaired.

None of the above “scientific” reasons are that crucial deciding factor between life and death. Science simply does not know what causes people to die. Conditions, failures, old age, accidents and diseases are mere circumstances. They do not cause death. Death happens when life leaves, whatever the reason. We can go ahead and make a list of things people die of and then proceed to find a cure for every single of those conditions, but people will still die. Science can’t “cure” death for the simple reason that science does not know what causes it.

What stands to logic however, is that something vital does leave the body at the time of death. Call it the immortal spirit, the pristine soul, life force, the aatma. Heck! Call it life if the other names sound fancy and magical – it doesn’t matter.

To be fair, it is entirely possible that one day there will be a scientific way to “see” this vital differentiator between life and death. But in order for that to happen, science has to start looking for it. Blunt denial of the soul’s existence will not get the job done.

“Doubt is the beginning of wisdom. BUT Faith will move mountains.”

The French philosopher Blaise Pascal once proposed something that has come to be known as Pascal’s wager. The theory goes to suggest that regardless of whether God exists or not, it makes more sense to accept him (or her, or it) as real. Pascal did it by calculating likelihoods and possibilities.

Since then, the wager has faced criticism and challenges from many quarters and has been accused of being impractical, illogical, pointless and other things. One particular criticism among these attracts me more than any other, mostly because I am living proof of it being untrue.

The criticism in question is that the Wager is rendered pointless by the fact that even if one accepts Pascal’s logic as valid and accepts God as real, he wouldn’t really be believing. He would be accepting God merely because his existence is more of a statistical possibility than his non-existence. It wouldn’t be real faith, it would be make-believe devotion.

What exactly is belief? Is belief in God any different from the momentary belief we exercise in the reality of a movie or a book when we are in the middle of it (and are probably in tears)? Does momentary suspension of disbelief count as “true” belief? Can we decide to believe? Is faith in God an option within anyone’s reach at any point of time?

There are those that would say yes and there are those that would say no – that faith can only be had through reason and evidence. I wouldn’t do either of those. Instead, I want to tell you how I came to believe in God.

I grew out of the norms of a traditional Hindu family quite early in life. I couldn’t see the point of spending large amounts of time in pursuit of beings whose existence was largely questionable. Sure, Shiva was meditating on Kailash and Vishnu was lying in the comfortable coils of a large snake floating in a sea of milk somewhere and Brahma was sitting on a lotus whose stem grew straight out of Vishnu’s belly button. It was all a lot of fun when I didn’t know any better. But then education happened and I realised that there was no Kailash and no sea of milk and no city of gods and no army of demons and no nothing. Anywhere. At all. They were all just stories.

Thankfully, I was never the sentimental type and the realisation didn’t hit me hard. I did however, grow openly dismissive of the God concept. The family didn’t care much for my disagreement as long as I toed the line (attending religious festivals, praying, chanting during ceremonies etc). But eventually, I couldn’t continue with the appearance of it either. I was not a hypocrite, I had self respect. I couldn’t lie and pretend to believe something I knew to be untrue.

I broke rank with the family on religious matters. I stopped paying even the rudimentary lip service to God and religion. The family, being the family, put up with it.

In the meantime, education continued to happen. My mind opened up to entire new worlds of knowledge and imagination. I devoured all manner of books from wherever I could. I read more of science, not because I disrespected the arts, but because I liked to have answers to my questions (and I had tons of questions). Science had all the answers. In due course of time, I did turn to fiction. But what I found was that all the arts gave me were questions.

These were not questions that could be answered with calculations or by putting two and two together. These were amazing questions. These were questions about me, about my identity, about this universe, and my place in it. These were the questions that drove me mad at first, and then taught me to accept them and to live in their shadow.

I remembered that long ago, religion had seemed to address these same questions. Questions about who we are, and where we came from, and why we are here, and where we go after we are done with whatever we are doing here.

I remained an atheist for quite some time after that, trying to balance the equation out in my head, and failing. I had refused religion on the basis that I could not live a lie. Now, for that very same reason, I couldn’t carry on believing that there was nothing more to the world than what I could see, feel, or judge based on existing evidence or extrapolation.

Atheism became a very unattractive place to be in – a place with walls all around. Not only did it not provide me with satisfactory answers, it even refused to acknowledge the questions as valid. As far as science is concerned, “Who am I?” isn’t even a valid question.

But my fancy philosophical quest didn’t even come close to pointing in the general direction of God. I was, for all practical purposes, an agnostic. I listened to people on both sides of the fence and tried to make up my mind. What if there is really nothing more to the universe than what science can show us? Were my prized questions pointless? Even if something resembling God did exist, what is the point of worshipping him? Why not go look for the creator from a scientific standpoint? Why is man obsessed with the question about who he is?

Being agnostic made me feel honest to myself. I didn’t know the answers, but at least I was admitting it – I was being open-minded. But realising God’s existence was going to take more than an open mind, at least in my case. It was going to take effort. It happened on a day when I was in my first job, in Mumbai.

I worked for a web portal (one of India’s biggest), as a sub-editor. My job involved updating the news headlines on the portal’s main page as and when things happened and reports came in (breaking news!). Most of the time, there were three people at work, given the sheer number of things one had to pay attention to all the time (maintaining web pages, updating headlines, editing news reports, updating SMS headlines). But on weekends, when the news cycle was slower, fewer people were on duty.

It was my first Sunday at work. I was going to be on the news desk all alone all day. I came in hoping against hope that I would be up to the task of keeping the whole system running all by myself. I also prayed (out of sheer habit) that no big news should break that day.

At around 10 am, news came in of a massive earthquake that rocked large parts of Pakistan and north India. Reports full of casualty numbers started coming in from various sources. Our correspondent in Srinagar called and breathlessly dictated a preliminary report – he was running towards his little daughter’s school building, which had probably collapsed.

Stuck with insufficient data and a correspondent who couldn’t have added much even if he had wanted to, I turned to the TV channels for help. Nobody on the screen had any idea what was happening. What little they had, our good correspondent had already told me. I began switching channels, hoping to find something new on the earthquake.

I found a news channel patching through the signal from PTV (Pakistan’s official state channel). What I saw was two gentlemen sitting in a TV studio — one was the anchor while the other was an elderly Mullah. Around them, the studio seemed to shake like mad and the cameraman was perhaps doing all he could to keep the camera upright. I saw dust falling from above them. The set elements behind them started to collapse as the show proceeded.

The two men, surrounded by this mayhem, looked ordinary – no different from each other. What set one apart from the other was the way they reacted to the chaos. The anchor fidgeted in his seat, wondering if he should get up and run out. But he was not sure if the danger was serious enough for him to risk looking like a fool on national television. So he stayed where he was, undecided, doing nothing. He was getting up, sitting down again, looking around, asking if they should go, then looking at the Mullah, then deciding to get up again, and so on.

To me, he looked weak, unsure, and even pitiable. He also, for some reason, reminded me of myself. In contrast, the Mullah was the very image of peace and courage. He sat steady, chanting whatever he was chanting, paying no attention to the chaos around him. Till date, I have no idea what he was saying or thinking, but I do remember being struck by his calm. It was in complete contrast to what my mind contained. All I had were doubts.

I decided then, that I wanted to be him. I decided to believe in God. It sounded stupid to me even as I made the decision, but I figured that if deluding myself is what it takes to gain that kind of courage, then so be it. I will be delusional and I will believe in whatever religion wants me to believe in. I wanted the courage and calm of that Mullah and I wanted it at any cost. I couldn’t carry on being indecisive any longer.

How could I do this? It wasn’t that hard. I merely dismissed my disbelief like people do when inside a movie hall (and end up in tears, or angry, or moved). I figured the end result will be the same, that is, evoking of a feeling – courage and calm in this case. Never mind the fact that I was, in effect, pretending.

The decision took some serious effort on my part. I was actually committing to taking things at face value. That is the exact opposite of what years of scientific education had programmed me for, or so I thought.

As I proceeded with my self-imposed courses of studies, I found that what religion told me was not altogether as delusional as I had imagined it to be. Here was acknowledgment that the questions I had been grappling with were not aberrations. That many before me had asked these same questions and had walked the same path. Here was assurance that there was a world out there, just as I had suspected. Here was language I thought I had invented in my restlessness. I discovered the universe all over again, and it was far bigger than I had thought it to be.

In addition, I found God. I think what religion did to me was that it taught me the language God speaks. I found his presence in everything around me and actually felt him working through the world around me and speaking to me through it. I have witnessed events that I would have passed off as coincidence had they not happened in perfect synchronicity with each other, leading up to a goal I explicitly asked for.

Did I find my answers? A few yes, here and there, partially. Some more, I like to think, I am on my way to finding. But the larger understanding I have come to is that the world is perhaps far too big to span with numbers and equations. That some things do not translate to language at all and can perhaps only be understood with imagination. That the amazing storehouse of stories in our mythology serve to act as metaphors for a reality that defies words.

I am aware that this post does not do much by way of proving God’s existence. That was never my purpose. I don’t think that is even possible (although who knows, it might be). I only wanted to put down in writing my own personal quest for truth. I started off as a half-hearted believer, went on to being a radical atheist, moved on to be an agnostic, and then came to absolutely believe in the existence of God.

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.

At TED India this year, mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik spoke of the difference between the absolute universe and the subjective universe — between the world as it exists and the world as we perceive it.

Pattanaik said, “The world tells us how the world functions, how the sun rises, how we are born. My world tells us why the sun rises… why were we born?”

This how-why divide, in my opinion, says a lot about what keeps the scientific and the religious worlds apart. The scientific mindset often undermines the why (choosing to focus on the mechanics of how things work) and the religious mindset often ignores the how (choosing to focus on why things came into being).

I, being one of the unfortunates who choose to take the middle path, believe that both views of the world are equally important. Man isn’t going to get where he is going on a bicycle with one wheel missing.

However, I will be quick to admit that the divide is a very distinct one and it is not going to get blurry any time soon (perhaps it shouldn’t). While objective observation of our surroundings don’t allow the world to be anything more than a series of phenomena, mythology goes right ahead and turns the world into something full of magic (flying people, talking animals, moving trees and all that). No wonder scientific people often balk at the sight of religion (and vice versa).

I want to try and explain the why behind this strange behaviour by mythology in a way that would make sense to the scientific mind.

Let us take the environment for example (since everyone is fresh out of the movie theatre after having watched Avatar). It is something that both religious mythology and science look upon with great amounts of interest. Both recognise the environment as important and in need of attention. Both say man’s future is inextricably linked to the way he responds to the various issues facing the environment today.

The scientific view of the environmental crisis facing us is that if deforestation continues, man himself will be in danger one day. Science tells us that destruction of forests will cause harm to animal species, which in turn will affect the food chain, which will eventually get to us one day. By then, it will be too late to do anything about it. So if we want to survive that eventuality, we better start caring for nature.

I don’t know about you, but to me that sounds like, “Listen! You are pissing your rich mom off. If you keep doing this, some day she will die and leave nothing to you. Then you will be out on the road with no money. If you don’t want that to happen, start showing her some love.”

Does the argument make sense? Of course it does. Does it make us feel ashamed of ourselves? If it doesn’t, it should.

Religious mythology makes things a lot more straightforward. It personifies nature, turning it into a woman. It tells man that nature is his mother. It tells him beautiful and moving stories about how she has cared for him in so many ways since the beginning of time. It makes man emotional. It means to make man act out of genuine concern for nature, as opposed to acting out of fear for his own life.

It is perhaps for this reason that forest tribes fight against deforestation with more passion and urgency than we (the urban educated and so-called scientific-minded) do. To us, nature is a system – something mechanical and clockwork-like. To those who listen to (and probably believe in) outlandish stories about talking trees, noble animals, and a benevolent spirits, nature is everything a mother is.

Joseph Campbell once said that mythology turns an it into a you. All around us in the modern world are forces that desensitise us to the world. A bomb explodes somewhere and hundreds of people die. We switch the channel with a straight face. The tally is simply a number to us. Then someone makes a movie on the event, making it into a story, bringing us closer to the people who died. We are moved. We start caring.

In the end, it probably doesn’t matter why you care for something as long as you do care. But then again, maybe it does matter.