Science And God: Belief In God Is The Default Position Of Humanity
By
Waheeduddin Ahmed, New Age Islam
26 January
2024
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.
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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.
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-science/science-god-belief-humanity/d/131587