On the topic of God...

Being a privileged being on a unique planet I feel the need to delve into this topic at least once in my life despite the limits of my knowledge and deduction abilities. I cannot remember when as a child I first encountered the word ‘god’. Neither can I say since when I started associating the word with a vaguely understandable, immensely complex abstraction rather than pretty looking beings with human faces living up in the heavens. However this relative upgrade in concept must have given me a sense of maturity. At the same time it preserved my earlier belief in the existence of controlled order in everything around me. I lived with this imaginary concept for many years invoking it only occasionally when something too good or too bad happened to me.

Now I ask myself: do I honestly understand this concept to the point where I can defend it to myself with acceptable logic? The answer is a clear ‘no’. It may or may not be the limits of my intelligence that leads me to such an answer but at least I am not deluding myself. This by no means allows me to throw away the concept since there are other abstract things which I use in daily life and believe in, without being able to comprehend them in totality. Some such things are infinity, imaginary numbers, gravity, quantum mechanics, emotions etc. However one important feature of these concepts is that they have been identified by requirement, can be tested by logical means, and I can see their manifestation in the form of irrefutable evidence. In that sense the notion of god is indeed different.

At this point it becomes necessary for me to scan through the set of arguments which, to many human minds, ‘validate’ the existence of a complex supernatural controller of Nature.

A common argument stems from the ‘laws’ of Nature - trying to imply that their existence is synonymous with the existence of a ‘lawmaker’. One must not forget that the laws of nature are quite unlike human laws that are made by and thrust upon humans. Laws of nature simply refer to a description or interpretation of nature and anything that exists is in principle describable. It is useful to note that Nature is neither completely homogenous nor completely random – it is something in between. What if it was completely inhomogeneous and each miniscule constituent was different in behavior? That would simply mean a huge increase in the till known finite set of laws and an enormous increase in God’s already immense calculation job. Patterns or types in nature lead to degeneracy and reduce the number of laws compared to the above imagined situation but definitely do not lend any extra weight to the argument of God’s existence! This line of argument takes us back to the supposition that existence of things in the universe requires a creator rather than substantiating it. Recognizing patterns and mathematical harmony is just our way of simplifying the way we understand Nature to make it usable knowledge and that is what we named the “laws of Nature”. It is a fact of Nature that such simplification is possible and we are lucky to be intelligent enough to see it.

Another argument based on the ‘wow’-factor comes from the rich diversity of life forms each of which is an instance of hugely complicated biological machinery. I must admit that as a boy when I first saw the colorful tapestry on a peacock’s feathers I thought to myself that the hand of an intelligent designer is self-evident. But now I know from the fact of biological evolution that a series of mutations in a gene pool over a long period of time can lead to both extraordinary complexity and captivating beauty! The voluminous data from fossils and observations like the increase in percentage population of the darker variety of English moths from 2% to 98% over 50 years (1848-1898) establishes the fact of evolution, which is smoothly interpolated by the mechanisms of natural selection and genetic mutation. So we have a perfectly plausible, partially verifiable mechanism which unravels the grand mystery of biological diversity and complexity and not once do we need to hypothesize God’s role in it.

Some of us find it demeaning to be considered as biological machines and as cousins of apes through evolution. We would rather think of ourselves as connected in spirit to an almighty God and like to believe in His perfect orderliness ignoring facts like ever increasing entropy of the universe or the deep embedded unpredictability of the quantum world. We would turn away from scientific facts and plausible arguments and creep into our cocoon of emotional security. So long as there is no proof or evidence of its presence God appears to be a redundant concept shrouded with ambiguity. Its staunchest believers cannot decide amongst themselves about its attributes – some reckon it to stand for all that is good while others are fearful of its capricious nature.

Nature is a vast mystery and to people like Einstein served the purpose of God. It encapsulates beauty, diversity and enormity and also makes us feel connected through interactions. There is no need to hypothesize a creator without evidence and fall into the slippery slope of searching its origins. Nature is fact and it is enough! To say that the answers we don’t yet know has to be known to some omniscient being is merely wishful thinking.

At the end I must say that the hypothesis of God is not falsifiable primarily because it is ill-defined. If we were to start with an unambiguous definition it may or may not be falsified through facts and logic; but surely we can realize its high implausibility. There is no good logical premise to accept it unless we deliberately want to suspend disbelief and go with it anyway.