The God Question

There is much hype on social media about the recent debate on God between Javed Akhter and Mufti Shumail. I was least interested in the debate when it was suggested because that question seems long forgotten to me. I wrestled with the question in my college days and having seen the best of debates, from whom both sides from recent one borrow heavily, the question was settled in my mind. But I had to watch because my socials were filled with the apparently winning arguments of Mufti. So I watched the whole thing and here is what I think about not just the debate but the question itself.

The existence of God is I think as old as our history. So it seems childish and hopelessly optimistic to wave goodbye to the question. It is the tragedy¹ of rationalism and scientism(a post enlightenment trend to theorise everything instead of having humility to say we don’t know anything conclusively) to think that humans can live with the unknown without invoking some kind of consensual meaningless method to organize around the unpredictability of world as reflected in Voltaire’s observation that “if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” So when we debate the existence of god it is simplistic and reductionist to debate the existence of entity God entails. The essential debate is around the limits of our knowledge and how to live with it.

When I say God is our answer to uncertainty I mean it in the same sense as some pseudo/proto religions like scientology, astrology etc are answers to questions science can’t say anything about yet. It is then outside the rational domain and purely serves a functional one. The issue though is these have not evolved enough to pass judgements on out social, economic and political organisation but religions do and therein lies our basis of the conflict. That is why the question ‘Does God Exist?’ is so inconsequential in its true meaning and any debate ultimately turns on religion and its inability to negotiate with the contemporary trends. Look at religion as a moment in history where a new way of life was tried and it greatly improved the life of people. So it got codified and duplicated across populations. But over the time the slow and non religious developments which culminated in the renaissance greatly increased our understanding of the world. As a result these new ideas stood in sharp conflict with the archaic religious ideas frozen(in some way) in time. The whole package i.e religion can and have transitioned, reformed or vanished. Hinduism vanished for a while when buddhism came around, it resurfaced only later when it had also adopted the buddhist principles somewhat. Same fate has met the abrahamic religions. Christianity was Judaism 2.0 and Islam was supposed to be Christianity 2.0. Within religions too there have been reinterpretations. In islam it is by the concept called Mujaddid supposed to bring about reinterpretation every century. But after the last century defined the nation states religion has increasingly been either separated from state or kept as a hostage. So what remains of religions is little and partial say in human affairs and the codified, frozen in time laws if attempted to be brought back are regressive and impractical in current times. So all issue boils down to the tradition of revision and scholarly reinterpretation to suit religion with evolving morality to get the social cohesion it promises.

One of the terrible conclusions drawn is that it is that it is mostly religious people who have tendency to unleash evil. I don’t believe it, I feel it is a confirmation bias. People who commit crime by deception are and should be noticed and highlighted. But even allowing for that, suppose there is no concept of God. Will the evil no longer exist? And in absence of the concept of God, whichever ideology takes up the space(lets say astrology) will it not creep in our language and worldview by default. In such a situation a strong believers in astrology and laymen equally will be susceptible to crime and we would arrive at the conclusion that astrology is corrupting in nature. In fact we need not suppose anything. Take communism, it started out with it “opium of masses” campaign and ended up murdering people. So does the concept of God make us evil- I heavily doubt it. I believe people susceptible by nature to harm and hurt will under every prevailing ideology devise tools to further their cause. It is simply an error with human judgement and our inability to predict it.

Next we turn to the question, is the concept of God unscientific? It is unscientific like a cricketer doing all his training but then doing some weird ritual before he goes to play like say he pinches his thigh. His coach knows it no way improves his ability to play but I bet if the coach is any good he will never sit him down a lecture on irrationality of the ritual. Not only is it a waste of time it is counterproductive. His belief in the ritual makes him susceptible to bad performance if he is somehow banned from the ritual. So it is with the concept of God. Don’t we know many a great scientists(including Einstein) who believed in God yet no one can claim that it hindered with their science. The father of Quantum Mechanics Erwin Schrödinger writes, and I think this nails down the argument about confusion between the two pursuits:

“It is certainly not in general the case that by acquiring a good all-round scientific education you so completely satisfy the innate longing for a religious or philosophical stabilization, in face of the vicissitudes of everyday life, as to feel quite happy without anything more. What does happen often is that science suffices to jeopardize popular religious convictions, but not to replace them by anything else. This produces the grotesque phenomenon of scientifically trained, highly competent minds with an unbelievably childlike—undeveloped or atrophied—philosophical outlook.”

To conclude I think the biggest trap of the debate is reducing it to such simplicity as to render both sides wrong or at-least disagreeable. It so happens that the dogmatism usually attached to the religious side is mirrored in perfection by the Dawkins-Hitchen’s side who seem too sure about science and don’t get the social utility of religion. There is a humility in saying we don’t know enough but that which we know by proof and stands in contradiction to the traditions of past ought to be separated from the theology of religion for it to be compatible with the present. “God exists because we exist.”