Friday, July 7, 2006

God - His story


In the beginning, there was nothing, or maybe something. And that something evolved over years to form man. Man was a somewhat handicapped animal compared to his peers. He lacked the sheer brawn of the apes, and he could not outrun his prey like the panthers. All he had was an opposable thumb, an erect spine, better vocal chords and a somewhat bigger brain. So he got to working on a simple puzzle– how do I survive with these seemingly useless tools? To fully exercise his opposable thumb, he built powerful tools and weapons to forage, hunt and farm with. He used his erect spine to stand up tall and look beyond the wild grass and spot approaching threats and potential food. He used his vocal chords to communicate in richer ways. Using these primitive faculties, he survived against the many threats and competitors for resources.

Some of his neighbors (like the predators) were threats, while some were opportunities for food (plants, cattle). Some were a bit of both (like the river, which provided water necessary for life, but also killed in the form of floods). He had to overpower all these to survive, procreate and flourish. He used tools to tame plants and hunt animals for food and clothing.

To appease a hungry tiger headed his way, the shepherd put his sheep ahead of him, and sometimes the tiger would eat the sheep and go away. Man thus learnt the power of sacrifice.

He had evolved to communicate with his fellow humans effectively. He could shout at them to run when he spotted an approaching mammoth. He tried the same thing with predators. I can imagine an early man shouting at a tiger to go away, and the tiger walking away in fear of the noise, while he perceives it as the tiger understanding his request, or answering his prayer. He thus learnt the power of prayer.

The ability to communicate and the corollary skill of reason led to a sense of superiority of man over other creatures. In spite of the hugeness of mammoths and swiftness of tigers, man prevailed. So, man began to venerate the human form over other forms.

The river would sometimes flood his land and kill his family and wipe out his home. He had almost no power over the flood, and he couldn’t move too far away from the river, as water was critical to survive. So, he used the two faculties he had learnt – prayer and sacrifice – to deal with the river. He first assumed that the river, since it did seem to have volition (it lazed around at times, and flooded furiously at others, just like, say, a lion, which basked in the sun sometimes, but attacked man at other times), was similar to other living things. Since the river clearly was superior to him, he considered it a God. Since the human form was superior to all other forms, he ascribed to the river a human form – a deity. Thus were created the river Gods, such as the Goddess Ganga (or Ganges) in Hindu mythology and the Greek river God Phasis.

Man then did what he did best to appease the river Gods. He prayed to it, and offered sacrifices to it – after all, if the tiger could be satisfied with a sheep, then the river may be happy with it too. He comforted himself in the fact that his prayer probably worked – until the next flood. Now, he needed an explanation – what did he do wrong? And then, the seers, the intellectuals, the thinkers among men, needed to extend the model to accommodate the flood in spite of prayer and sacrifice (they couldn’t possibly abandon prayer and sacrifice, since then, they would feel helpless). So, they came up with some of the wonderful stories of mythology – which include the wrath of the river Gods. Hindu mystics, who were somewhat more inward looking than their Greek counterparts, ascribed it to human action – we must have been bad, that is why the God is angry. Now, a certain man who was known to be the noblest in the region, who did everything considered ‘right’ and ‘moral’ and God-pleasing, still lost his family to a flood. He came wailing to the elders, who then had to come up with a convincing argument. In those early days where rigorous logic or the scientific method had not yet been born, a convincing argument was probably very different from what we would consider a convincing argument today. To be convincing, an argument merely needed to be a consistent extension of the accepted beliefs and facts up and until that point. Hence, the Hindu elders invented the notion of Karma (actions, including those in previous births)to answer the bereaved noble fellow. You have doubtless been noble in this life, but in a previous life, you must have sinned or angered the Gods. That fit in well with the rest of the model, and thus was born the notion of rebirth and karma. Greeks were a bit more practical, and restricted themselves to actionable explanations – we probably need to provide more sacrificial offerings. Gods are angry because they are not happy with what we have given so far.

So, then, there were Gods for every natural thing that man had to deal with – the more popular and revered among them being the ones with the higher impact on man – sun, fire, ocean, rivers, etc. And then, there were Gods for other things invented by man – such as the war God.

Unknowingly, man had found an even more powerful tool – the power of mapping. He had mapped every aspect of physical life to corresponding Gods. Then one day, a fleet of warships set out to sea to war against the neighboring tribe, assumedly under the blessing of their war God, and a storm devoured the fleet. The elders were now faced with a predicament. Why would the sea God go against them when they were acting under the blessing of the war God? It was simple – the Gods themselves must have clashes between them. A similar incident could well have been the basis for the conflict between Poseidon (the Greek sea God) and Athena (the Greek Goddess of war) in Greek mythology.

Having mapped the world around him to Gods, and having woven sophisticated tales of how the Gods interacted with each other and mankind, man then evolved the powerful tool of abstraction. As fire and sea were ruled by Gods of fire and sea, the Gods themselves, having conflicts between them needed a ruler – hence was proposed a God of Gods – Indra in Hindu mythology and Zeus, his Greek counterpart. And then, more stories of mythology were woven to explain the realities of the world. And then as all models do over time, this one began to break down – there were too many stories of Gods and there were glaring inconsistencies – for after all, all this was being invented by people, and people often conflicted with each other on viewpoints, driven by power, or just plain pride. Also, as man continued to exercise the faculty of thought and language, he thought up questions around the origin of the world, how the world was sustaining itself, and what would happen if men did whatever they liked with no concern for others. The Hindu and the Greek philosophers dealt with this in different ways. We will discuss the Hindu approach below.

The Hindus saw it this way: things were at a point where God represented hope in an otherwise cruel world. So, the challenge was to come up with a consistent model that involved hope in the form of God, and at the same time answered the questions of origins, and also resolved the overly human nature of the Gods as portrayed by the stories around them. The Hindu mystics began to generalize the Gods from the polytheistic multiples to smaller numbers driven around answering the basic questions of origin, sustenance and punishment to retain order around the world – the Hindu trinity of the creator (Brahma), the sustainer (Vishnu) and the destroyer (Shiva) was formed, and a parallel set of tales were created around their interactions – now, having tasted the success of building consistent stories, the thinkers spun tales prolifically. Again, contradictory viewpoints arose amongst these tales. Factions began to develop around the different Gods as superior to the other. A new theory emerged in the form of a single all powerful God, who represented hope and to whom we should surrender. All things living and non-living began from this God and ended in this God. To some, this God was formless, while to others this God had a form. While this theory gained wide adoption, proponents of the earlier Gods each adapted themselves to this new theory by saying that their favorite God was this supreme God – so to some Indra, the God of Gods was the Supreme God, whereas to others Varuna, Vishnu, Shiva, and other Gods were the supreme God. It is interesting to note that the majority of Hindus today are Vaishnavites, or believers of Vishnu, who is the sustainer – that makes sense when you consider the alternatives – Brahma – the creator – his role is in the past. Shiva – the punisher – his role is related to when we sin. The most relevant is the God who sustains the world – Vishnu - the most representative of hope in the here and now. And then, there were the few men who, consciously or not, anticipated the risk of ascribing any identity to God as leading to the same cycle of stories and inconsistencies and loss of credibility. They decided to accept God as a single infinite formless entity – the monists. And this was the most powerful concept, because there was far less room for failure. The only critical question for monists was, of course, the question of how do you know this Supreme Being exists? If it has no form, how do you perceive it? And the only possible answer to that was proposed: you cannot sense it, you cannot grasp it rationally. This makes sense too, because many men would have tried, but no one actually sensed God physically – but they weren’t quite ready to renounce God yet. So, they simply said – you cannot perceive God, but He exists.

The Greeks took a different and bolder approach – they were as frustrated with the unruly and contradictory nature of the Gods, which effectively translates to the fact that in spite of their following all the rules, they were still dealt blows by God that was not justified. So, the early Greek philosophers, beginning with the pre-Socratics, turned to reason to provide alternative answers. They began propounding rational theories of the world which negated either partly or entirely the mythological religious movement that existed before them. These theories led to a lot of what we see as scientific law and theory, and its corollaries – engineering and technology – in the world today.

Other religions and cultures had other variants of these early concepts. In later days, the importance of human word over the written word passed down through the ages, led to human saints and Gods playing a predominant force. Mere quoting from an ancient scripture provided less force than actual men that had lived. So, stories involved real people, selecting the most well known people from suitable eras. Hindus chose rulers like Rama and leaders like Krishna to be symbolized as incarnations of God. Gilgamesh was written by the Babylonians to describe a (real, as of current thinking) king. Jesus and the saints by the Christians and the prophets by Muslims added the human factor of credibility to laws, codes and rituals beyond the scriptures from the distant past. However, all of these efforts retained a connection with God, to provide a kind of higher weight to the theories. The risk of making a completely human driven religion that denied the existence of a higher God ran the risk of being diluted by other human beings in the future. God was an eternal unquestionable entity, by definition, and had a lot of backing in terms of early scriptures. On the other hand, the word of a man from the past was far less credible than a flesh and blood person of equal oratory skill standing in front of me today, propounding an opposing viewpoint. This paradoxical and synergistic link between human saints and the Supreme God led to almost all religions retaining a notion of God combined with human saints and messiahs who represented either incarnations or sons or messengers or prophets of God.

Another way to look at the reason for a physical representation of God – either in the form of deities or idols or in the form of human representatives, is based on a powerful principle of communication called ‘Show not Tell’. This is the principle where making a statement like : “there is a God who said that …” is a tell statement – you are expecting me to accept your statement that there is a God. However, if you give me a form that I can see, touch, smell, etc. – in the form of an idol or a human messenger, then I will find that much easier to relate to, accept and follow. This principle is used widely in creative arts such as fiction writing today. This same principle motivates the need for a physical manifestation of God over an abstract representation.

The persistence of the existence of a God in some form continues to prevail through the ages, still holding the majority viewpoint. On the one hand, we are getting very good at being skeptical at accepting things directly sent to us: if someone sends us email promising us huge returns by investing in their scheme, we apply very rigorous and sophisticated degrees of skepticism in evaluating the credibility of their claim and identity. Most legal systems reject quoted evidence as hearsay, and even eyewitness accounts are known to be an approximate representation of reality even when the witness is entirely sincere and honest. However, most people still continue to accept the handed down (and several times reinterpreted and distorted) words of the scriptures, which were originally propounded to explain natural phenomena that were not as well understood in those days.

The question of God is, in fact, many questions in one –

  1. Did any external entity, so far unperceived by us, create the world around us?


The purpose of this question is to achieve closure, i.e to explain all of existence. In other words, the question exists, because we expect everything to be created by and from something else, based on our observation of the world. This question is then inherently self defeating, since even if such a God created the world around us, then there is always the question of who created that God.

  1. If there is such an entity, does that entity still wield power over the goings on in this world?

This is a more practical aspect of the question – and quite relevant to conducting our life. It can be restated as – is there an entity that we cannot perceive that directs the world in its own ways? What are its rules? And this is the question that science endeavors to answer, beginning with the discovery of the rules of nature, followed by the search for the entity driving those rules. We are still floundering with the rules themselves, so finding the nature of the God behind these rules is probably a ways in the future.

  1. If such entity wields powers, are they merely the same as we have and understand, or are they superior (and hence would seem magical to us)?

The magic behind the universe is revealing itself in modern science, in the form of rules that counter our intuition – relativity, for instance, where we expect two bodies moving towards each other to have a relative velocity of the sum of the two, and at the same time, no object can travel relative to any other object at a speed greater than that of light. Quantum physics is another example, where, counter to intuition, it is impossible to pin down the location and speed of an object at the same time. These are examples of magical rules that defy our common model of the world.

  1. Does such entity have a moral code? Does such entity expect us to follow such a moral code? Does such entity spend the effort to enforce such a moral code on us? Does it punish us when we do not follow such moral code?

By being good to other people and things we increase the likelihood of others and nature being good to us, and hence, reduces the threat to us from our immediate surroundings. So, the only real code of ethics, to be followed on best effort, on a case by case basis, is to treat others the way you would want them to treat you.

Beyond that, any hope for a universal moral code relies on universal acceptance, which is impractical. Even if such a code existed, there is no reason to believe that such a code is enforced on us. People good and evil have had good and horrible lives and deaths – there is enough variety in such things to refute any claim to a universal moral law. The only value to believing in a universal moral law is to provide us with an incentive for restraint when we are driven to do things that are harmful to others. In that sense a universal moral code as enforced by religious, philosophical and legal systems has played an important role in controlling the instinctively unrestrained nature of people.

  1. Can we in any way communicate with such an entity? Will our regular means of communication – talking (in the form of prayer) – reach such an entity?

As a scientific curiosity, the question of being able to communicate with an entity that may have created this world or wields some power over this, is a fascinating one. However, the scientific process has very little support for an effort to understand the existence of such an entity or to attempt to communicate with it. Given this sad lack of sophisticated tools to communicate with such an entity, the effort to talk, just because we can, is very similar to trying to talk to a diamond ring that has fallen into the lion’s cage to come back to us, just because that is all we can do. It may provide a release to our frustration, but we are deluding ourselves if we expect any response to such communication.

There is a simple common sense based argument that refutes the ‘existence’ of God. You can accept the ‘existence’ of things you can sense, but they do not communicate with you directly – a stone for example. You can see it, touch it, but it doesn’t say anything to you volitionally. You can also perceive ideas, even if they conflict with your senses directly – for instance, many effects of the laws of quantum theory have been observed, though they clash with some of our intuitive model of the world. So, we can accept the quantum theory, at least as a candidate for ‘existence’ in the real world, in the hope that some day, the contradictions with other observations will be resolved. But then, the God cannot be sensed, nor does God communicate to us in any way. Of course, there is a statistical chance that God seems to listen to you. For instance, you could toss a coin and ask your little finger to make it land heads up. And if it does, you may actually believe that the little finger did it for you – so you could believe your little finger listens to you, on average, half the time. The other times, you may blame it on yourself, your karma, or spin a more imaginative tale. Maybe the coin landed the way it did, just because it did.

There is no denying the psycho-therapeutic value of an abstract form of hope and an abstract form that answers otherwise unanswerable questions of origin of the universe, etc. There is also proven relaxation value in meditating and reflecting on a single point, and God has proven to be a worthy candidate for such meditation, representing something powerful and awe-inspiring to the imaginative human mind. But the unfortunate downside is that with acceptance of the existence of a God, has arisen debate over His form, nature and rules, in the form of multiple religions, which have led to vast loss of life, enmity and hatred between people. This continues to be the case from early religious wars and in recent times the clash between world regions in the name of something nebulous that combines religion with political and economic factors. Given the vast unjustifiable loss of life as a result of these differences, it is time for us to use our most powerful faculty of reason to question the worth of sticking to every aspect of our religious tradition, versus abandoning the boundaries created by religion to get together with each other to work more harmoniously to make the world a better place. Even God, assuming that He does exist in some form, would forgive our choice to deny Him if it meant saving all these lives being taken in His name.



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