Yes, Lord God, Should I Believe?

Image created by Bing Image Generator on 26/03/24

As a little girl, I was fascinated by a picture my Grandmother kept on her desk. It was a mesmerizing, awe-inspiring depiction of a storm at sea. Huge waves, threateningly hovered eternally over a tiny craft struggling to keep upright. The picture was so sharp and detailed that one could see the sinews of the sailors as they struggled with the ropes and oars! At the top right corner of the picture was a superscription “Yes, Lord God, I believe!”  Grandma told me, that to her, the picture, represented the sum total of human experience.  I looked at her curiously.  She smilingly pointed to the threatening waves and said “Look at these waves.  They are threatening, intimidating and frightening.  Death and destruction seem guaranteed. In the face of this threat, there are those who believe that an unconditional surrender to God alone can save them. They say loudly and clearly from the depth of their being ‘Yes, Lord God, I believe!’. They are confident that their faith will save them.  That is the path of religion.”  She then touched the portrayal of the struggling sailors and said “Look at the sailors. They have an immense belief in their own skills. They are drawing upon every bit of strength and skill they have.  They are entirely focused on getting themselves out of the crisis with the skills they have acquired.  That is the path of Science. Now step away from the picture and look at the composition as a whole. You will see the middle path. The sailors rely on their skills and do their best in the crisis, yet they believe in God. The combination of skill and grace is what will get them out of the situation!”

Hmm… I could see what Grandma meant.  I wondered how I would have reacted in a similar situation.  Perhaps I would have taken the middle path. One cannot sit idle and believe in a God one has never actually seen or experienced unequivocally, while life was under threat?  The instinct for survival and the rush of adrenaline would surely drive me to action? But, then the punishing strength of the wave would demand that I draw upon sources of power greater than myself!  I would certainly hope that there is a supreme intelligence which would intervene on behalf of my puny self!

Should we seek the wise counsel of Science?

            Growing up in a world that worshiped at the feet of science and technology, God was not a term one bandied about freely.  I was uneasily made aware that the world of rationalism and scientific temperament would frown upon, and perhaps strongly condemn, belief in any being whose existence was not repeatedly proven and objectively demonstrated beyond doubt.  Lack of explanations for natural phenomena or personal experience of miracles, would not be considered proof enough.  The scientifically-minded would laugh and say “Science may not have all the answers to what you call miracles, today. Someday, it will have those answers.  What you call miracles or gaps in scientific reasoning will be closed with objective and demonstrable explanations.  Science will be able to close the gaps in the “God of the Gaps” argument that are being advanced.  How can anyone risk life on a belief in a being whose very existence is in doubt?”

            Unfortunately, I found myself retreating from such arguments shaken and unsure.  “Was life just an accident? Is there no ordering intelligence that engineered this universe?”  Deep within me was a fount of dissatisfaction at the explanations offered by the Scientists.  My existential experience informed me that there was a consciousness and an awareness that distinguished me from the unthinking, sense-driven existence that seemingly characterized the plant and animal kingdom. “Surely, my awareness of existence had some meaning? That cannot be an accident!” 

The hard problem of consciousness

            Searching for answers to this extremely subjective and emotional response to the unsettling facts presented by science, I was surprised to find that scientists too had come up against this wall and were desperately trying to climb over/ walk through and find the necessary explanations for what they called “the hard problem of consciousness”. I gleefully joined the melee and read all the papers; watched all the debates and discussions on YouTube, that engaged, nay riveted the attention, of the hardened scientific community.  

Let me pause here, to warn you that if you join the melee, you are in for a merry ride down the proverbial rabbit hole!  Scientists and philosophers have entered the arena and are having a pitched battle out there.  That is not to say, that I did not enjoy the ride!

            Following the principle of KISS (Keep it simple stupid), I will try to reduce the discourses to the bare essentials for our understanding.  The “hard problem of consciousness’ is the gap that scientists experience when they try to resolve the “easy problems of consciousness”.  In other words, any ‘sentient experience’, that cannot be explained by a study of the functions of the neural pathways and brain (physical mechanisms), can be defined as the ‘hard problem of consciousness’.  If you experience fear, the adrenaline pumping into your system will force you to run from the object of fear.  That is a physical response-the easy problem of consciousness. You can report it, study the physical impact of it and even identify the triggers etc., If you ignore the bodily reaction (the adrenaline coursing through your bloodstream) and decide to undergo the suffering for the sake of a principle you hold dear, there is no physical explanation to the reaction.  You can report it. But you cannot study the physical cause of the reaction. Ignore the verbal reports and there is nothing to study.  That is the hard problem of consciousness.  Mother Theresa’s altruism in the face of the immense sacrifices she had to make is a classic example of the ‘hard problem of consciousness’!

Can religion explain this phenomena?

            Religion does not spend any time on analyzing the hard or easy problem of consciousness. They accept that consciousness exists and it is fundamental to our understanding of the world.  They are more concerned with the actions and reactions that are generated by the existence of awareness. Socrates, Aristotle, Plato and their ilk in the West and Vishwamitra, Vashishta and scores of others in the East, bent their minds to an analysis of fundamental questions that arose by virtue of the existence of ‘consciousness’. 

            The Western philosophers observed that sentient beings received inputs of the objective world through the medium of the senses. However, conscious (note the distinction between sentient and conscious) beings processed the inputs so received in ways in which other sentient beings did not. They related the object received as input with other similar objects and brought analytical acumen to dissect and ruminate on the physical object.  They concluded that awareness can be enhanced; new understandings gained and fine-tuned by actually dissecting, analyzing and studying the object of the sensory input.   Scientific thinking emerged as they pushed the boundaries of human understanding into the objective world.

            Eastern philosophers were convinced that consciousness is all there is. The world ceases to exist the moment we are unconscious or in deep sleep. Hence, the world emerges from our consciousness and therefore, the world out there, is an illusion created by our consciousness. While the illusion is valid, it is not real. In order to understand the world, one must understand the consciousness and its operations. They went within in an effort to understand this phenomenon and came up with a number of ways in which one can arrive at an understanding of the nature of this unique human experience. Yoga, meditation and a score of religious beliefs emerged as they dug deep into subjective experience. 

Are we any wiser?

                Has all the discussion above made us any wiser?  Should we go with science and assert that God is a “crutch for the weak to hold on at times of distress” or go with religion and affirm “God is the rock on which we must build our homes”? Or should we take the middle path and say with the majority “I hope there is God and I hope he/she will offer succor if I am in trouble! But, I must learn to rely on myself and my skills too!”  I do not think I am (for that matter anyone is) in the position to take a inflexible stand at this point in the history of man’s evolution. Most of us would, probably select the middle path.  Truly, it is not material whether you or I believe in the “God-of-religion(s)” or the “fact(s)-of-science”.  It is more material to keep an open mind and discover for ourselves, the true nature of our experiential self.  How we go about is it, is our business.