The Privilege to Question God

The Privilege to Question God

Bikash Sarmah

God exists because it is we who make him exist to secure ourselves from the uncertainties of life. God is a means to let the would-be, God-blessed certainties of life preoccupy our minds, and an excuse to even kill people

Does God exist? To the atheist, God does not exist. To the agnostic, God could exist — he believes that nothing is known or can be known of the existence or nature of God. To the theist, God is all who ultimately matters and, therefore, exists.Take the case of the atheist. He actually derides the idea of God. He would ask: Has anybody seen or experienced God, except for those who blindly attribute their rise or fall in life to some divine intervention? How justified is it to call God a supernatural phenomenon when the fact is that we are limited by the lack of an extended faculty of reason and human accomplishments to see beyond the natural and understand the varied, strange and at times hostile phenomena? Why should we invent God when our reason fails us, when our limitations cripple us? The atheist is a great optimist. He believes that one fine day man will surpass his limitations and what is strange or mysterious today will be decoded with remarkable clarity. The atheist is an adventurist.The agnostic is a befuddled man. In fact, he neither believes in God nor has the courage to deny what seems to be the varied acts of the divine entity. The agnostic is an opportunist then — because for him God is a possibility and, given the possibility, he is at liberty to deny God’s existence for the time being without inviting God’s ire.As for the theist, he is a simple person resigned to his fate. The theist believes in the existence of God without questioning the supernatural. In fact, he has no choice, given his imagined fears and a deep sense of insecurity. The theist feels empowered with God beside him. Without God he is both helpless and hopeless. The theist is a relentless struggler — he struggles to propitiate God in various ways without really bothering about whether the one being propitiated would listen to him instantly. This struggle is karmic — a kind of struggle that the theist derives pleasure from because he has the conviction that, however later, God will visit his lifeline and shape his destiny, and so he may not be bothered about short-term gains. In a sense, the theist too is an optimist. Only, he is a victim of his own inner fears, unlike the atheist.Who is the most privileged — the atheist, the agnostic, or the theist? Apparently, the atheist seems to be the winner, given his outright rejection of God’s existence and his marvellous engagement with the faculty of reason. However, if he does not question his own disbelief in God and merely pretends control over his destiny for the sake of his anti-God argument, he will be deceiving himself. After all, it is fashionable to say, ‘‘I am despite the God.’’ The problem with the atheist is that even he has drawn his anti-God conclusion without disproving the existence of God, quite like the theist who draws his God conclusion without proving the existence of God. As for the agnostic — an opportunist, to reiterate — he has to neither prove the existence of God nor disprove it. In that sense, the agnostic is shrewd enough because he has burdened both the theist and the atheist with the responsibility of proof in the rational scheme of things.Having said this, we must revisit the question: Does God exist? Albert Einstein, who revolutionized the concept of space and time with his theories of relativity, asked this question in a different way: ‘‘How much choice did God have in constructing the universe?’’ Einstein was perturbed by the implications of a newly emerging field in physics, quantum mechanics, which gives a probabilistic description of the universe — the ‘‘God’s empire’’. Einstein initially refused to accept the quantum mechanical interpretation of physical phenomena because the universe, in that scheme, would look too random and dicey. As he famously said, ‘‘God does not play dice (with the universe).’’ However, later developments in modern physics — especially the search for a ‘‘unified theory of everything’’ that is still continuing — have not only pointed to God playing dice with the universe, but, on the contrary, even to the possibility of God having to be without any choice in the creation of the universe!Of all the forces of nature, gravity is the least understood. Its interpretation has changed since the days of Isaac Newton who was the first to define its working in his universal law of gravitation. For Newton, gravity was just another force. Einstein countered that years later when in his general theory of relativity he described gravity as the manifestation of space-time curvature — in other words, space-time, a four-dimensional continuum, unlike the three-dimensional space we are used to due to our sensory limitations, is curved, and this curvature is manifested as gravity. Even that concept is beginning to change. Physicists, who have troubled God a lot, are now trying to interpret gravity differently — through the quantum theory of gravity which has given rise to a ‘‘no boundary proposal’’ that attacks the role of God in creating the universe.According to the no boundary proposal, there would be no boundary to space-time; in other words, the universe would be without boundary or edge, and without beginning and end — it would be completely self-contained. In his classic A Brief History of Time, celebrated British physicist Stephen Hawking, perhaps the most ardent advocate of the quantum theory of gravity, talks to the layman thus: ‘‘The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary also has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe... So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?’’As physics marches ahead with new, startling theories, and as the quest for the reality of the subatomic world intensifies, God will occur more frequently — as a subject of investigation. The rational minded will definitely not believe in a God who sits in heaven and makes a survey of the world to bless or curse people depending on how he is worshipped. The rational minded will not believe that God can be appeased by worshipping him, nor can one invoke God’s curse by defying him or by not worshipping him at all. Yet, even the rational minded cannot negate the existence of the master of all forces and phenomena in this universe, while arguing at best that the master could well be a master force or a process that helps the universe and us all sustain — and question it. It is to decode the mystery of this master force or process that theories like quantum gravity (which treats gravity as an exchange of virtual particles called gravitons and, therefore, a result of relationships therein) have come up and help themselves change over the time.The intelligent man is after God. Once the God riddle is cracked, man will script his ultimate triumph, and that will be the celebration of reason. As Hawking said, if we find answer to the ‘‘question of why it is that we and the universe exist’’, it would be the ‘‘ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we would know the mind of God’’. What is then unfortunate, and indeed stupid of human beings, is that they should continue to fight wars in the name of their ‘superior’ gods to establish their own ‘God-rule’. The fact that no such god exists who would tell his followers to fight worse than animals, eludes them. It is a choice though. The crux of the matter is that God exists because it is we who make him exist to secure ourselves from the uncertainties of life. God is an outlet to channelize our energies, a means to let the would-be, God-blessed certainties of life preoccupy our minds, and an excuse to even kill people. In other words, God, as generally understood, is a creation of the human psyche. And yes, without God so many will be unemployed! Source: sentinel assam editorial