I recently had an interaction with a young Indian friend of mine, a teenager with a rather religious Hindu background. This young man was sure that God does not exist since there is no proof that he does. On second thoughts, he however, chose to categorize himself as agnostic rather than atheist 😉
It seems that it has become fashionable to declare oneself as atheist. And this young man, like all his contemporaries is so confident about what he believes, so certain about things, and would love to be seen as different. Well, we all have gone through that stage in our lives, and we know how it feels like 😉
But as we age, we mellow down and tend to be less and less sure about our views and beliefs. Life is not as predictable, as we would like it to be. I am not a proponent of “God exists” view, nor I would like to categorize myself as an atheist. In real life, things are not so black and white. More so, as you keenly keep observing the world around you.
If you look at the internet, there are quite a few well-known intellectuals, who proudly declare themselves to be atheists – be it Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, or for that matter Christopher Hitchens, just to name only a few. Some of them adopt a “holier than thou” kind of attitude and seem to have taken on the responsibility to reform the world 😉
Among these self-claimed atheists, the one I am quite impressed is Richard Dawkins – a Kenya born British Citizen, now settled in UK. There is no doubt that Richard is a great intellectual. Being an evolutionary biologist, Richard impresses you with his mature and polished arguments, wonderful articulation, quite indicative of his scholarship and ripe age.
Richard was brought up as an Anglican Christian, with deep faith in God and Biblical narratives. Richard used to be quite amazed at the apparent purposefulness and intricate design inherent in the world around. He was convinced that not only God exists, but it is He who created this world.
But not for long. Richard says that when he came to know about Darwinian theory of evolution, he felt that that theory had a better explanation for how the world came into existence. He also felt that Darwinian theory almost made God irrelevant and a relic of the past.
As Richard grew up, he almost became a Darwinian Evangelist. He was horrified by the “cruel God” (not my words) of the old testament, and declared himself as an atheist. But then, he would not like to conclusively state that God does not exist. He puts himself at 6 in a scale of 1-7, with 1 being believers in God and 7 being outright atheists.
In his talks, Richard traces the origins of human belief in God, and how humans have progressed over time to a stage where belief in God is seen no more than a superstition. He claims that Darwin’s theory of evolution “almost” explains the existence of the world and there is no need for any God who would have created it.
I admire Richard’s sincerity and concern for humanity, but throughout, I was appalled how ignorant many of these thinkers are! Barring a few like Sam Harris, for many of these thinkers, religion meant Abrahamic religions; God meant the one described in those religious texts. They seem to have no idea about the thought process that had gone on for thousands of years outside the Biblical world.
“Whether God exists” was a hotly debated topic for thousands of years in many of the eastern regions of the world, especially in India. These debates predated Biblical time frame by centuries if not more. Among the 12 major ancient Indian schools of thought, only the Vedanta school was strongly pro-God. Rest of the schools almost denied the existence of God.
There were the Samkhya philosophers who argued that the existence of the world can be completely explained without taking recourse to the concept of God who could have created it. So also, the Atomic theorists or the Vaisheshikas, who had their own theory of emergence of this world purely based on combination of indivisible atoms, without need for any God. Even the Vedic ritualists, namely the Meemamsakas, took an almost agnostic view by saying that whether God exists or not is immaterial since a specific ritual produces specific result irrespective of the existence of God.
On the other hand, there were the Jain philosophers, who believed in no creator God. According to them, the world emerged purely by chance and developed as a result of causality. Different “things” interacted and produced the world that we see around. There is no need for the intervention by any God. Different sects of Buddhists also believed in no creator God. Some even went to extent of questioning the very existence of the world!
So, what was a great moment of enlightenment for many of the modern self-claimed atheists, was a passé for those ancient Indians 😉 They never subscribed to any belief system without questioning them. Calling them as primitive and superstitious is outrageous.
Even the lone school of thought, namely the Vedanta, did not talk of a personified God who created this world. In fact, Vedanta does not talk about creation as such. For it, God is more of a concept than a person.
How these great thinkers came to a conclusion that some such concept called God does exist is depicted symbolically in the following verse from one of the Upanishads namely the Swetaasvatara Upanishad.
“kim kaaraNam Brahma?
kutah sma jaataa?
jeevaama kEna kvaca sampratiShtaah?
adhiShTitaah kEna?
sukhEtarEShu kEna vyavasthaam?”
“Did God create this world?
From where did we come?
How are the beings sustained?
What holds all the beings in one place?
What governs our pleasure and miseries?”
These were some of the questions raised by a group of ancient Indian thinkers. They did not lookup into any religious scripture to find the answers to these questions. They debated, considering various possible answers. But rejected all of them as insufficient to explain all these questions.
Finally, they resorted to meditation and came up with the answers. Meditation is considered to be a gateway that allows to peep into domains beyond our perceptible world. They envisioned the power which is behind all these and called it Brahma or God.
But what they talked about was an abstract concept and not a personified God. They were using the same “God language” as used by Einstein or for that matter Stephen Hawking. I am alluding to Richard’s explanation of Einstein’s and Hawking’s references to God on several occasions. Richard cautions that the God mentioned by those two great thinkers was just symbolic and did not mean any personified God 😉
So, does God exist? Vedanta terms this question as absurd. Vedanta “defines” God as existence, consciousness, and Bliss – Sat, Cit. Ananda. God is not someone who exists – God IS existence itself. God is not someone who has consciousness, God IS consciousness. God is not someone who is happy, but God IS bliss. Does that mean anything to you? 😉
No comments:
Post a Comment