The Gnostic
God is in the air. Again. After Dawkin's God Delusion and Hitchen's God is not great left scorched earth (but no prisoners) in their wake, comes a more subtle book written by Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the existence of God - A work of fiction, where the protagonist, an "atheist with a soul", contemplates the universe that has suddenly made him rich and famous after his public confession of atheism.
Arguments about God, and the ripostes thereof, have been an ongoing (and mostly mundane) phenomena for many centuries. Things got a bit more interesting during Enlightenment. Voltaire lies in his deathbed and a worried priest comes up to him and tells him that it is not too late. He can yet renounce satan. "Now is no time to make new enemies." says Voltaire. And dies.
Although things had turned interesting, it isn't until the twentieth century, and until both sides had fully heard out the other side, that the arguments became stylized. They now share the coiled spring in a lock-box quality of a koan.
We were at lunch rehashing old styles and inventing new ones, all for the same old arguments, when suddenly there came the first lateral thrust of the afternoon. "Everybody is an agnostic if they are rational." Said a friend of mine. This not being my understanding, some clarification was necessary. Agnostic (it was explained) is someone who does not know if God exists or not. Since there is no rational argument that has yet proved or disproved the existence of God, everyone is an Agnostic as long as they are rational.
If everyone is rational, then everyone can get past the God question. Buddha did - more than 2 millennia ago, refusing to answer the God question one way or another. I cannot but help wonder what's with all the chants and the incense and deification of Buddha today. One can imagine the committee talking at his funeral, deciding on the way forward. "This thing that he taught," someone must have said. "we know it works in Practice, but does it work in Theory?". So they applied theory, deified Buddha, and spouted forth, centuries later, the erstwhile majesty at Bamyan. Man created God in his own image, and found his (own?) deification quite natural.
My inner Buddha shivered that day. I am myself of the opinion that the key metric in the God question is not existence but relevance. For what am I, if not an agnostic, that wishes the God question unasked?
In my more fashionable days when I thought, for some unfathomable reason, that people knew and cared about my thoughts, I would hear myself say "God is not the problem, it is organized Religion that is the problem." I had polished a large body of thought into a shiny bullshit of a soundbite. I was (and remain) mostly confused. Yeats said the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. That feels like a self serving tranquilizer to me. If anything, I lack conviction with passionate intensity.
What to make of this confusion? Does not religion bestow clarity? In the city of Beziers, year 1209, the Pope's army was slaughtering all heretics in sight. Suddenly they were faced by a terrible dilemma. Many people they suspected of being heretics were claiming to be Christians. Records do not indicate who the commander was talking to. But he sure had clarity. "Kill them all," he said. "God will sort them out."
Clarity was definitely lost as I had my first tryst with the practical need for god. I was living my life in its unasked equilibrium, which I now know as not agnosticism, when everything changed on the unforgettable day when my daughter was born. She was coming 6 weeks early. I had no idea what would happen. I knew that probabilities were certainties in populations, but they meant nothing in individuals. In the face of this nothingness, this uncertainty, this abomination called helplessness, I prayed to the God of Probabilities to throw the dice in my favor.
The means of a population of random samples will always create a bell curve around the population mean. I have often asked myself since that day of my personal Genesis: How is God to maintain the pristine ring of the bell, given the pulls and pressures of a billion desperate prayers? God could be God so as to provide justice in every case while still managing to preserve the inviolable symmetry of the curve. Or he could throw a dice to decide how the dice falls.
The old lady told the young man that the earth sat on a tortoise. She was not unduly bothered when he asked what the tortoise sat on. "It is tortoises all the way down.", she answered nonchalantly. I know what she meant. For I believe our lives rest on a stack of spinning dice all the way down to the unpalatable truth.
Vijay Ramachandran
Arguments about God, and the ripostes thereof, have been an ongoing (and mostly mundane) phenomena for many centuries. Things got a bit more interesting during Enlightenment. Voltaire lies in his deathbed and a worried priest comes up to him and tells him that it is not too late. He can yet renounce satan. "Now is no time to make new enemies." says Voltaire. And dies.
Although things had turned interesting, it isn't until the twentieth century, and until both sides had fully heard out the other side, that the arguments became stylized. They now share the coiled spring in a lock-box quality of a koan.
A monk said to Master Sydney, "Stuff Exists. God caused it.." Sydney said, "If there was nothing, you would still be complaining!"
Master Sydney heard a monk thinking, "Real things are greater than imaginary ones. God is the greatest thing, and is hence real." The master asked, "Existence is such a lousy thing, how could God go and do it?"
We were at lunch rehashing old styles and inventing new ones, all for the same old arguments, when suddenly there came the first lateral thrust of the afternoon. "Everybody is an agnostic if they are rational." Said a friend of mine. This not being my understanding, some clarification was necessary. Agnostic (it was explained) is someone who does not know if God exists or not. Since there is no rational argument that has yet proved or disproved the existence of God, everyone is an Agnostic as long as they are rational.
If everyone is rational, then everyone can get past the God question. Buddha did - more than 2 millennia ago, refusing to answer the God question one way or another. I cannot but help wonder what's with all the chants and the incense and deification of Buddha today. One can imagine the committee talking at his funeral, deciding on the way forward. "This thing that he taught," someone must have said. "we know it works in Practice, but does it work in Theory?". So they applied theory, deified Buddha, and spouted forth, centuries later, the erstwhile majesty at Bamyan. Man created God in his own image, and found his (own?) deification quite natural.
My inner Buddha shivered that day. I am myself of the opinion that the key metric in the God question is not existence but relevance. For what am I, if not an agnostic, that wishes the God question unasked?
In my more fashionable days when I thought, for some unfathomable reason, that people knew and cared about my thoughts, I would hear myself say "God is not the problem, it is organized Religion that is the problem." I had polished a large body of thought into a shiny bullshit of a soundbite. I was (and remain) mostly confused. Yeats said the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. That feels like a self serving tranquilizer to me. If anything, I lack conviction with passionate intensity.
What to make of this confusion? Does not religion bestow clarity? In the city of Beziers, year 1209, the Pope's army was slaughtering all heretics in sight. Suddenly they were faced by a terrible dilemma. Many people they suspected of being heretics were claiming to be Christians. Records do not indicate who the commander was talking to. But he sure had clarity. "Kill them all," he said. "God will sort them out."
Clarity was definitely lost as I had my first tryst with the practical need for god. I was living my life in its unasked equilibrium, which I now know as not agnosticism, when everything changed on the unforgettable day when my daughter was born. She was coming 6 weeks early. I had no idea what would happen. I knew that probabilities were certainties in populations, but they meant nothing in individuals. In the face of this nothingness, this uncertainty, this abomination called helplessness, I prayed to the God of Probabilities to throw the dice in my favor.
The means of a population of random samples will always create a bell curve around the population mean. I have often asked myself since that day of my personal Genesis: How is God to maintain the pristine ring of the bell, given the pulls and pressures of a billion desperate prayers? God could be God so as to provide justice in every case while still managing to preserve the inviolable symmetry of the curve. Or he could throw a dice to decide how the dice falls.
The old lady told the young man that the earth sat on a tortoise. She was not unduly bothered when he asked what the tortoise sat on. "It is tortoises all the way down.", she answered nonchalantly. I know what she meant. For I believe our lives rest on a stack of spinning dice all the way down to the unpalatable truth.
Vijay Ramachandran
Comments
1. Many accounts have Voltaire stating "Now is no time to make new enemies" on his deathbed. But a few claim he said "Let me die in peace" instead.
2. The commander at Beziers actually seems to have said "Kill them all, God knows his own". But the version mentioned in the article ("Kill them all, God will sort them out") seems to have atttained greater popularity.