Why is it so tough to be an atheist?

Well, the debate about God has been a long and wordy one. Millions of logical arguments fall short of defeating one single word ‘faith’. Our daily experiences, daily haps and mishaps, inexplicable occurrences, now rapidly explicable natural and biological phenomena, fossil researches with solid proofs of natural evolution, scientific theories about the origin of the earth (in addition to the solar system and the universe as a whole), profoundly inexplicable natural symmetry (the balance of forces holding the universe in a revolving, periodical, harmonized symmetry), all these and many more keep us in wonderment about the possibility or impossibility of a creative design behind all this.

Given our varying situations in life we rush either to the Darwinistic evolution concept or the concept of creative design, both occupying their extreme positions! Most of the time with tidbits of scientific facts in our puzzled heads, taking cursory looks at the Darwin end to do justice to our modern educated selves, we blindly, helplessly move to the extremity of faith. The latter with its swiping injunctions of mysteries of life, with one solution pill called ‘belief’ makes life far less complex. It gives respite to the hassled logic-laden senses as well. It is a good addiction to this blind supposition. Religion indeed ‘is the opium of the masses’!

Let us first take the religionist theory. Drawing inspiration from the mythical clues (vaguely and always open to interpretation in convenient ways) in the yellowed and much hallowed pages of scriptures and holy books, it maintains that this beautiful planet dazzling with life and much more has been created by the Lord or the God Himself or an all potent entity for some Godly purpose. Believers maintain that the faith has to be unquestioning and blind and beyond the reach of all our senses, except one super-sense of ‘faith’. The belief cannot be made to stand in the witness box to be questioned by the pinning arguments of the so called atheists in a court presided over by an indifferent agnostic judge. Since we are not animals, we with our evolved brains possess the faculty of seeking the logical foundations to our blind ‘belief’. However very cleverly the act of mere questioning anything holy has been termed as heresy, a nice nipping in the bud, a nice way of bypassing all the arguments that might at a point leave ‘the defenders of faith’ at the dead end. It is considered sedition against the Omnipotent, as if the all absolute, the all Potent Potentate is an unsparing monarch demanding unflinching loyalty from the subjects without ever giving any clue about Himself. Since he has allowed us to evolve with an evolving brain, reasoning by the organ cannot be a taboo. A thing created by Him, or at least allowed by Him to take its present shape, doing what it is just supposed to naturally do cannot be a taboo and sacrilege. So we are allowed to follow the path of reason (gyan marga) to seek proofs leading to His existence or nonexistence. The institutionalized religion but seems to be a game stopper in this venture.

Religion with its tools of sin (and consequent loss and punishment) and pious deed (leading to profits and His blessings) seems insufficient in providing a logical backdrop to our actions, reactions and the outcomes if we drop the further conditionality of the past (previous birth with its unknown summary of good and bad deeds) and the future (with its yet to be list of gains, losses, punishments and rewards). These two unseen voids have enough space in them to eat any ‘what, when, why, how, where’ questioned by the present. If we just analyze the present we find glaring incongruities: mountainous efforts ending in molehills of achievements; tiny actions resulting in sky high rewards (like a lottery draw); a person born in a slum and dying in a still dirtier gutter; someone being born with a golden spoon and dying in a still more glittering palace; some nice fellow getting a disease inexplicably and suddenly; a wretched human being with his still more wretched deeds continuing to enjoy perfect health; sufferings and tears incessantly striking a life even though nobody has a word to justify the victim’s punishment of this nature; amazing and unjustified profiteering and consequent happiness showering upon somebody against whom many can point out hundreds of reasons to make him eligible for punishment instead of this blessed state. To cover up these mocking loopholes we have this account book of sins and pious deeds full of unknown statistics of the previous birth, the ones belonging to the present, and to be carried onto the next birth in future. These are but grossly hypothetical conditions to shut down the voices of protest against His justice (or injustice) by condemning unjustifiably suffering nice human beings for the unproved, unknowable misdeeds of the last birth and warning the unjustifiably fattening and prosperous piglet version of a human through punishments for his misdeeds in an unknowable, unproved next birth or afterlife. With these two open-ended eventualities at the extremes in the past and the next birth, we need not even question any state of affairs on the earth. These are the super dead-ends for any kind of logic or reasoning. It literally means to shut down the basic faculty of the questioning brains. Then we have other protective layers in religiondom: it is a series of immensely pacifying nouns like luck, fate, destiny! This series further patches up any remaining loopholes in the believers’ fabric. In religion with its indefinitely unfathomable dark seas of the past and the future, beyond our time span on earth, the boat of reasoning just falls short of any chance to reach the coast with any proof to the contrary.

If we accept the validity of the preordained law, guiding every activity (right from the littlest movement of a tiny sapling from among the millions of others like it), we need to accept that not a littlest step in our life is caused by our free will. We then become slaves and puppets in the hands of that invisible player doing puppetry with invisible, untouchable cords. But how much of puppetry is sufficient for the unseeable actor? Isn’t He ever bored of the play across billions of years?

Suppose we have to draw a card from a pack. What are the factors that define and control which card lands in our hands? The mathematics theory of probability (with its assumptions of limited number of players and elements) makes it look like a subtle nuance born of free will (of touch me, touch not others) of the static card and the free will (will I touch this or that one) of that hand controlled by the brain.

Religion says there is no chance factor in the phenomenon of an unknown card landing in the hand that just moved uncertainly. If it is accidental, the phenomenon becomes more important than the players (card, the hand, the brain). If the chance factor is assumed to be valid at all hierarchies (stretching up to the utmost question of our very existence and the existence and origin of the universe itself), we can vaguely surmise that the creation has been an infinitely mammoth chain of chance phenomena spreading out in a chain reaction constituting a series of accidents. But as a series of accidents, why does not it get annihilated? Why does not it abruptly end in a collapsing chaos born of a momentous slipup in the sustaining chain of infinite chances and the chosen causative chances (like the sudden emergence and bursting of a bubble)? Possibly it is a cosmic bubble born of some accidental coupling of chance phenomena and it will burst out without any reasonable causative factor, again a bigger destructive chance factor.

Why do we believe in God? Generally under the burden of circumstances we have to drop our reason to take shelter under the tree of faith and save our skins from the scorching sun of realities hammering down merciless hot rays. Reason is very heavy. Blind belief is very light. Under the bombardment of uncountable forces beyond our control, we are bound to feel left out in the race of life. We are supposed to get depressed about many whys and whats. The reasoning with its cold hard ramrod of objectivity is a poor comforter. It’s like a cactus in the path of a tired desert traveler. It has no water. It has no shade. It has just prickly unlikeable facts. So the tired traveler follows a mirage to reach an oasis, an oasis of blind make-believe faith where he gets shade, solace and cold water. A perfectly reasonable human being deprives himself of the luxury of all these weightless fruits of ignorance. Once the heavy sack of reason is dumped it becomes easy to glide through testing times. The simple elements involved in a God-believing head just pay a small-time lip service to the achingly grinding realities and the world beyond.

Fear is the reason why we cannot carry forever the atheistic load. The fear of uncertainty. The fear of loss, pain, disease, death. With so many negative possibilities it is difficult to carry a scientist’s brain all the time. The reason leaves you all alone in the dusty blizzards, the chancy falls, the accidental winds that may strike you, your possessions, your near and dear ones. We thus seek a divine guard. We are habituated to His presence, as a word, as a never seeable, just feelable (decided by us how to feel it) entity. This surreality is strongest of any proveable reality around us.

Every living cell is led by the natural instinct of survival undermined by a fear of mortality. From the savage times to the present civilized ones, the fear of the one beyond our comprehension (rather than the love and devotion of it) has been the driving force in institutionalizing our surrender through reverence and rituals. The nerves of the institutionalized religion throb with the lifeblood of fear. The strength and girth of our reason depends on how much capable or skilled we find ourselves in our fight against the unknown or the unknown forces. Lesser insecurity means stronger footing of the reason and the vice versa.

The world of believers teems with tools to appease the Almighty to save us from the unseen perils and fetch us boons and blessings. It is utmost selfish give and take relationship with God: give us your blessings and we will pay back in the form of reverence. The mountain of belief has too broad a base and too high to be broken down to pieces with the tiny hammer of reason. Religion has been a multi-pronged weapon all through the ages of our evolution. By the way, was there religion during the times of single celled amoeba in the primordial sea? Or the God was just happy without the pompous ritualistic show? Quite wonderfully, religion has been an all nice type judge between the exploiting classes as well as the exploited ones. It has maintained itself pretty well I must say. Both the exploiter and the exploited have received equal solace from it.

When no worldly human help is coming forth, the feeble flickering otherworldly light steadily burns inside that pitiable creature who drops his reason and falls on his knees to pray. It is the oasis stay for the worn out desert traveler. Reasonless, beyond earthly justice and injustice, smitten with a meek acceptance before the pleasantly hallucinating light, he becomes oblivious to the present’s pains. His heart mellows with genuine tears of repentance for those unknown, unproveable past birth misdeeds. He has bargained to get something in future. He has accepted his unidentifiable culpability in lieu of blessed and gainful future. It helps him in wading through the foaming and furious desert sandstorms. He constructs this strong, illogical, unreasonable check dam to cut down the furious lashes by the circumstances. It provides him strength, solace (this unseen brother, father, mother, patron in the unseen, unapproachable world) without being there, he being the only witness to his own prayers. He thus is able to take those steps that he won’t have taken otherwise in the absence of his never-to-be-seen friend. The idea and concept has gone so deep in our biology that even in its surreality it has acquired more concrete acceptance and shape than a stone pillar just by our side which we can touch and kick to verify.

Religion also is the dustbin of our wrongdoings and sins. Many of us take shortcuts to bypass the pious injunctions to follow the path of suitability, practicality and efficiency; getting those pin-prickings and chidings by the conscience. In lieu of hundreds of intentional and unintentional wrong-doings we try to counterbalance the negative karma through some willing unwilling charity, pilgrimage, prayer and even meditation.

There is no fixed religiosity. We adapt our faith to its suitability to our lifestyle. Our God is our own making. So rituals and the means of appeasing Him are even more directly manipulated by us. To meet diverse demands, we have hierarchy of Gods and Goddesses ranging from ancestor and corpse worshipping, animistic deities of the savages to the new corporately branded, more powerful, more beneficent, more cultured and cleaner Gods of the uppermost class.

If we take our reasoning to the extent of denying God’s existence, we need to contrive a whole new hypothesis to explain the glaring inexplicabilities tonking their heads against the firm, proven walls of science. Science has not been perfected. Till science gets perfected, the concept of God will remain relevant. Moving backwards on the path of evolution with its sequential linkages of cause and effect, passing through millions of interlinked causes and effects across the billions of years of time and infinite distances of space, we arrive at the final entity—the Big Bang, the so called first event to take place in the primordial vacuum from whence our notions of space and time flow outwards.  This is what our astro-physicists try to make us believe. How can but we assume a primary cause without no further preceding cause or causes?? A commoner like me is plagued by such neighing doubts. Just have a look at the vast and infinite fabric of the sky at night and you just marvel that no it just can’t be the simple handiwork of some suitably fallen chance on the event horizon which explained by the scientific parameters has resulted in the infinite network of astronomical (heavenly) bodies. A mere thought about the perfect balance of the forces in nature is sufficient to make one again fall prey to the hand of some Superiormost designer behind all this. The nearer you look around you, the more proofs you get to become an atheist. The farther you look, belief sneaks into your wondering eyes and puzzled mind.     

Just like we have tried scientifically to define the edges of the solar systems, is it possible to take our know-how to the outermost edges of the universe? Suppose we succeed in accomplishing this one day, what will lie ahead to explore. What beyond? Will we reach God then?! 

        

Astro-physics is based on the space-time model mostly based on the emanation of light travelling at the speed of 300,000 km/sec. With our rapidly improving telescopes we are peeping farther and farther into the space to retrieve the light travelling to us from the farthest possible body. Will we ever reach the farthest source of light—the last primordial flicker at the farthest most end? If we provide some representation to the God, I think this final object has to be the one!

Lost in our inability to either prove or disprove His true nature, we have contrived this immensely utilitarian hypothesis that like all other man-made systems has immense usage for the humanity both at the individual as well as collective levels. I don’t know what will be the nature of this argument once artificial intelligence starts its path of inevitable evolution further down the path of scientific progress when most of the natural functions (having a long and arduous trail across millions of years) will be replaced by metallic, mechanized short-cuts; when the artificial intelligence will learn to sustain itself without the control of its erstwhile master, the man. Possibly in his quest to know the truth and the consequent booms showered on him as a result of utilitarian science, man himself will one day become all powerful possessing super-intelligence. May be then the debate about God will come to an end as science will pluck out one mystery after the other; we will overcome one obstacle after another that during the previous generations had forced us to become helpless leaving us in a state of dumping our reason to surrender before the blind faith in some superpower; a time when the all powerful reason will become so strong that the vulnerable soft skin, warm blood and the heart’s mysterious sensations will turn obsolete; when we will harness the full potential of the brain’s billions and trillions of neurons to be further aided by the artificial intelligence to peek in every nook corner; may be then the present shape and size of God will become obsolete and outdated (like we condemn the savages for animism). During that era of cold, hard, steely reasoning, the man will himself achieve (in what form the species will be then we do not know) the Godly status and turn himself into an all powerful entity matching the supernatural hypothetical entities of now. Whatever hypotheses mankind has contrived across times, he has always surpassed it and proved yesterday’s fiction into tomorrow’s reality. Then may be the fiction of God will be made a reality by the man himself, making him capable of performing supreme feats that we presently ascribe to the Almighty. All along we have believed and prayed to the God to become as powerful as Him. Or the God of those times will still be a more powerful being because the concept of God is in our genes? It just might adapt to some new form!!