Propaganda: An Art of War

 

Science and God:

Waheeduddin Ahmed, Ph.D.

 

How do religion and science deal with the fundamental question of being, i.e., how everything came into existence? An example of the religious point of view on the subject is the Bible’s declaration:

He said Be and it came into being.

“It , we presume is the whole universe as it came into being instantaneously in a certain initial form. Since we witness that the universe is not static but dynamic, its initial form must have been quite different from what we see now. We see that the universe is a highly organized assembly of congruent matter interacting with clockwork precision. We deduce therefore that at its inception the universe must have been in an elementary, chaotic form, with all its elements existing loose and separate.

Also, the Bible tells us that our progenitors: Adam and Eve, at first lived in the Garden of Eden, where waters flowed, vegetation flourished, and reptiles hissed. When they were sent down to earth, the earth’s environment must have been similarly life supporting. It is thus reasonable to assume that life began on earth much later in time after the Big Bang, whence vegetation grew, and serpents hissed in the bushes. Another astronomical period thereafter would have to elapse before Adam arrived on the scene and saw the rainbows. The first act in the story of Genesis appears in the Bible without a prologue and a depiction of the scene.

Science, on the other hand, posits that the cosmos was, before time began, a dimensionless dot, contained in something, compressed under untold pressure to an unimaginable magnitude of density. Then, all of a sudden, there was a “big bang” and the universe exploded into existence. Out came three entities: matter, time, and space, carrying in their bosoms the laws of physics, that governed the way in which they were to interact with each other. In other words, the script was already written and preserved to the minutest detail in every particle of the matter. We can say that if the universe was an organism this script was the DNA of its gene. Next, the matter condensed to form the lumps that became the galaxies. The difference between Be and Big Bang, is now beginning to be somewhat obscure.

Significantly noticeable is the fact that both, God’s, and science’s narratives begin in the middle, the causal part of the event having been brutally truncated and rendered unknowable. Also, we humans have been deprived of any understanding of the past in historiographic terms, nor any cerebral provision is thrown our way.

Science not only offers us humans a vast field of exploration, it also tells us our limits. The brain cells are only so many. Therefore, our brain’s storage capacity is limited. We live within the boundaries of our specific capabilities. Whether it is our vision, hearing, thinking, understanding, lifespan, any other sensory capability or physical growth, we live within ranges that are assigned to human species. Other species have their own specific ranges. So, we have to gracefully accept the fact that our knowledge cannot possibly be all encompassing. Why should we not believe that in the limitless expanse of the universe, except for a tiny sliver, there is much that is unknowable to us.

 Scientists are all insomniacs, dealing with puzzles, drawing lines and connecting dots. They go to their graves clinging to puzzles. If life is about struggle to achieve satisfaction and internal peace, scientists are the most miserable creatures on earth. On the other hand, in religion puzzles do not exist, because Faith fills every gap. Faith is as organic as hunger and thirst.

Civilizations came into being because of man’s quest to achieve safety and solace. The earliest settlements that have been excavated have revealed structures dedicated to the worship of gods. Their morphology aside, the idols of all forms and shapes contain a common spirit that represents man’s spiritual resignation, the gaps in his physical and mental prowess. This man is practical. He is unwilling to lose sleep in trying to solve puzzles, which are unsolvable. Therefore, he hands over this arduous task to a deity or a pantheon and then turns his attention to mundane day to day tasks that demand his attention. To him it does not matter whether his idol is made of gold or mud, is male or female, has one hand or many; the object of his worship is transcendent. It is the deity’s assumed source of beneficence that he is worshipping.

IF Faith is body, Fate is its soul. They are two faces of the same coin. Fate has no rationale. It is immoral, cruel and yet woven into the fabric of life. It is the latter’s defining trait. Consider these two scenarios, we are all too familiar with: I am driving on a fast, busy road listening to music. In a spur of a careless moment, I make a mistake but avoid serious accident, narrowly escaping death. I remember that before me thousands of individuals under similar circumstances had been instantaneously killed. What was special about me that I was spared? A statistical puzzle no doubt! A child dies in a family, leaving his young parents and ailing grandparents behind. Why do young die and old live? What wisdom and what purpose is behind this travesty of justice? I am left sleepless with this unsolvable puzzle. Science is hiding its face. All I see is fate, a random distribution of misfortune, the invisible hand, omnipotent, and omnipresent. If I had no Faith, I would be tormented into insanity, but Faith gives me consolation and the troubling questions that arise in my mind are erased.

Reason has been challenging Faith ever since the beginning of human consciousness. The Age of Reason came and went. God did not give an inch. The age of Atheism opened its books with Socrates and Democritus. Friedrich Nietzsche in Germany declared that God was dead. Marx’s axiom: “religion is the opium of mind” held sway in much of the world from Berlin to Beijing but in a swift turn of events, turned its tail after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Almost all the “enlightened” atheist thinkers in Eastern Europe rushed back to the Orthodox Church, the Poles returned to Papa, the East Germans revived their memories of Martin Luther and the Qurans once again started to be sold in Samarqand and Bukhara. The faces of Marx and Lenin were defaced, never to be refreshed again. Such was the fate of Reason and Enlightenment within just one century of its prevalence.

We conclude that nothing is more certain than uncertainty in life. Luxurious lifestyle, happiness, blissful moments, fame, power, prosperity --- they are all volatile and transient. Today they are, tomorrow they are gone without a trace.

They say life has a purpose but in my “being”’ I did not see any global purpose or a grand design. My birth was without my consent. As the Urdu poet Mohannad Ibrahim Zauq has said:

لائ حیات آۓ قضا لے چلی چلے

اپنی خوشی نہ آۓ نہ اپنی خوشی چلے

 

(Life brought me here, death carried me away.)

(It was not my wish to come, nor did I wish to go.)

 

So, what conclusion do we draw from the above legend? It is obvious from the statistical (empirical) analysis that Belief in God is the default position of humanity from day one. It is so, not because of an aberration of thought but because of a genuine need of humans to be at internal peace.

Waheed

January 2024

 

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