Of God(s) and Demons

The end result of four cups of strong black coffee, a sleepless night, and the Wikipedia page on religious and philosophical views of Mr. Einstein.

The relationship between religious authorities and science has never been a warm one through the ages- it took the Catholic Church 359 years to admit its wrongdoing against Galileo, and it’s interesting to note that this was issued only after the moon landings and operational success of the Hubble Space Telescope (seems like the Church needed some conclusive evidence, eh?). In a similar vein, Darwin’s (r)evolutionary theory wasn’t taken too kindly by representatives of the Church because the idea of our forefathers being some tree-hugging primates from Africa seemed a bit too unpalatable as compared to the Biblical story of us being descendants of Adam and Eve, having been forged in God’s own image. Now, in order not to appear as if I’m targeting a specific institution here, a more recent example would be the shutting down of universities and research centres in areas that were a part of the Daesh’s short-lived ‘Caliphate’, or the Taliban’s crackdown on subjects deemed to be not in accordance with the sharia law. In the eyes of a religious fanatic, those who have selflessly devoted their life to the sciences and to unravelling the infinite mysteries of the cosmos are minions of Satan, the demons which their revered scriptures warned them of, in material flesh. While this ideological conflict has more or less simmered out in the modern era, terrible things have been committed nonetheless under the guise of religion.

That being said, has not science helped us perfect the art of war and mass destruction? An entire generation has lived through an era where the world tittered on the verge of being reduced to a barren, radioactive wasteland in a nuclear fire that threatened to cleanse friend and foe alike of their worldly sins. And yet, this very nuclear energy holds the key to a greener Earth, with the promise of powering this ever-expanding, energy-hungry civilisation of ours for millennia to come. Another example of such a cruel twist of fate is the story of the German chemist Fritz Haber - the man who killed millions but fed billions. Almost a third of annual global food production is sustained by ammonia produced by the Haber-Bosch process, which revolutionized the mass production of fertilizers. And yet, Haber was directly responsible for developing and weaponising chlorine, phosgene, and mustard gas as agents of chemical warfare during World War I, which earned him the grim title of the ‘father of chemical warfare’.

Even scientific adventures need to be bound by certain moral principles, so as not to devolve into a soulless creature devoid of human emotion. But then, the age-old question arises yet again: what is the extent of this moral bound? What role does religion have to play in this game of cat and mouse? Can science and religion coexist? This reminds me of yet another such recent example of a tug-of-war between the scientific community and religious authorities (with some serious political ramifications) - the controversy over euthanasia and abortion. Are we within our rights to decide if a fellow brethren be put out of his insufferable misery? Is the wonderful gift of this life far more valuable to let go of, even when every second of it is spent in the dark pits of pain and the resulting semi-oblivion? Perhaps we shall never find a satisfactory answer for the same.

Nothing sums up the fundamental distinction between science and religion better than this profound quote by Max Planck:

Both religion and natural science require a belief in God for their activities, to the former He is the starting point, and to the latter the goal of every thought process. To the former He is the foundation, to the latter, the crown of the edifice of every generalized world view.

From these initial paragraphs, the humble reader might be wondering that I might harbour some sort of animosity towards religion and faith, having been blinded by my scientific “faith” instead. Well, not that my opinion is of any particular consequence, but rest assured, I do not despise religion for what I understand it to be- a set of practices centred around a set of beliefs, which in turn, revolve around the concept of a far more fundamental, or a sort of primordial force or entity. If there is something that every religion in the world has in common with each other, it is their incessant attempts at bridging the gap between the mortal soul and this primordial force of Nature. Not quite unsurprisingly, science too progresses in a very similar manner! We, too, have a set of rules which we firmly believe in (not without adequate reason), and these rules, when put together in a logical manner with the aid of mathematics, can help explain natural phenomena, or they might ultimately raise even more interesting and deeper questions about the cosmos and its workings. And so, the incessant search continues in the physical sciences for the equation of equations, the power of omniscience within mortal reach, a.k.a the ‘theory of everything’. So, religion and science are not so different, after all, when it comes to their end goal. What they do differ in, however, is the manner in which they approach this problem.

I do, however, strongly share Einstein’s distaste for the idea of a personal God, one who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings. Is it not naïve to believe in the idea of a God who happens to manifest himself in a human form, which just so conveniently reinforces the anthropocentric nature of our society? Humans, being humans, are obsessed with the idea of their superiority, that we have been granted a very special seat in this cosmos because of our heightened consciousness and the resulting intelligence. The idea of a personal God is a seemingly simple yet really deceptive solution to a very complicated problem, for which we shall perhaps never find the correct answer. It is a facade drawn over the true nature of the complex harmony that exists in Nature, which is perhaps the only way in which a ‘God’ would reveal his workings to us. Personally, I am of the opinion that the pursuit of this mathematical harmony, admiring this beautiful and complex dance of equations which lay bare the countless mysteries of the cosmos, is the purest form of religion ever imaginable.

Before I end this post, I would like to mention this beautiful quote by Einstein, underpinning his views on science and religion:

A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.

Well, this could, perhaps, be the first of many posts on this elusive (and controversial) topic, should I find the time to keep up this pace in the near future. I am no philosopher, after all, and this post was an idea I had been playing around with for quite a bit of time. My sincere thanks to the patient reader who made it this far, and I really hope I haven’t bored you with all this droning.