Discussion – God is not dead 1

Podcast

Hello Krishna, can you hear me? Yes. So are you okay with my recording the conversation that we are having? Okay. Yeah, of course, I know you'll be recording and you'll be putting on your channel later.

I think on my side, I'm not able to hear your audio. So I may repeat the question for my recording purposes as well as for making sure that I understand your question so that I can respond. So thank you for inviting me for this discussion.

And broadly, if I understand, your thrust of the discussion is to understand the initiatives that theists are undertaking to try to prevent materialism, atheism and leftism, if you want to say, to dominate the discourse as it is happening in the mainstream media, television, radio, news and TV. Yes. Okay.

And you would like to focus this discussion primarily on the God is not great movie. First the part one and then the part two. Right.

Yes. And we will also discuss about your flex. And the idea is also what I as a yoga practitioner from the Indian traditions have to say about these attempts within the Christian tradition.

Yes. Firstly, I'd like to start by focussing on the common ground that there are many areas where there are commonalities between theists. Vatsalya Prabhupada, the founder of the movement wherein I encountered Bhakti Yoga in a serious way, wrote a letter, Vatsalya Prabhupada wrote a letter to Pope John Paul II, stating that he would request a meeting so that theistic forces across the world could unite for countering the increasing surge of atheism that has taken over the world.

So in some ways, Vatsalya Prabhupada was prescient. The kind of aggressive atheism that we see in the world today was not there in the 1960s and 70s when Vatsalya Prabhupada shared Bhakti Yoga. But there was another kind of atheism or you could say the modern, the current postmodern times, aggressive atheistic movement has started at that time.

Started might not be the right word, as you say. Atheism has always been present, but its popularisation with the aggressiveness and vehemence towards religion happened with Friedrich Nietzsche and that went on further. So God's Not Dead is a documentary produced by the Pureflix, which is the Christian equivalent of Netflix.

So if I understand right, what you are saying is that one criticism of God's Not Dead as a catchphrase is that Friedrich Nietzsche has been misrepresented. Yes, I agree with you in many ways. Nietzsche is often portrayed as one of the intellectual founders of the nihilism and atheism and of course postmodernism that has consumed the western and westernised world today.

But one major difference between the new atheists and the old atheists is that the new atheists are much more utopian about the prospects of atheism as compared to what the old atheists like Nietzsche were. So Nietzsche describes the death of God as a horrible event in terms of its consequences on people. So he has a madman coming into a village and announcing that God is dead and we have killed him and all the water in the world will not be enough to free ourselves, free our hands from the stain of the blood with which we have all become sullied.

So the death of God is not announced by Nietzsche as an event worth celebrating, but it is an event of momentous consequence, very little of which is celebratory in tone. He considers humanity to be the murderer of God and that we are culpable as murderers and we will have to suffer the consequences. The bottom has spun away from the foundation of the social structures that has sustained us for long.

Thus, Nietzsche's production was gloomy, but somehow atheists have taken that slogan as celebratory and the title God is not dead or God is dead is used by atheists, not so much to say that God was a real person who lived sometime and had died recently, but that God as a concept is no longer needed and has gone out of circulation. Just as you might say, a language may be dead. Latin is considered to be a dead language.

So, it might be studied as a historical artefact by some scholars. Similarly, God might be studied in the same way by some people. But beyond that, the statement that God is dead has no semantic meaning in the literal sense of a person, So, what do I think of a series with the counter title God is not dead? Certainly, it catches attention and it is using fire to fight with fire.

It is using the same catch slogans that were used earlier to respond. Here, what are my thoughts about the movie itself? To be honest, if I had seen this maybe a decade ago, I would have found the storyline unrealistic. But now, after having travelled across the world, after having interacted with the academia, after having sensed the atmosphere of dominance and intimidation that pervades the academia when it comes to religious expression, I can empathise with this.

So, you would like me to summarise the storyline? I think most of your viewers might be knowing about it, but my audience may not know. So, God not dead is the story of a student in a philosophy 101 class, who is told by his professor that he has to sign, not he alone, but his whole class, has to sign a statement saying that they all accept that God is dead. And thus, they can go on and move on to other statements, other topics.

So, one of the strategies for manipulating the audience is to list big names to support one's own agendas and ideas. The professor begins by giving an impressive list of illustrious thinkers of the last 200 years. What do they have in common? All of them are atheists.

So, the list includes Nietzsche, Russell and goes down to Chomsky and Dawkins. Now, if I consider the courage of the student who chooses to oppose that, that is laudable. Very few students would want to risk their academic career, risk their losing their friends and earning parental and social disapproval for standing up to their principles.

When I saw the scene of the professor threatening the student privately that if you dare to continue the charade of going against me, I will destroy all possibility of you having a career in law in the future. I was thinking at that time that if the tables were turned, if a religious teacher had made such a threat against an atheist, there would have been enormous uproar and that would have been considered an outrageous infringement of the freedom of thought and speech and belief and religion of that student. So, atheism has become the default thought system in the mainstream academia and media as well as the respectable one.

So, the dismissiveness with which theism is treated by the professor indicates a prevalent attitude in the academia that religious belief is meant for less intelligent people. What do I think about the strength of the arguments and buddhai from a bhakti yoga tradition present in the alternative arguments? I would say not necessarily. I feel that the various traditions, especially if you want to look at theistic traditions, they have, if we consider students who specialise in certain faculties, they may study up to their 10th or even their 12th, the same subjects.

And then for their graduation, they may choose to go in specialised lines. Similarly, the theistic traditions go along the same path for most of the initial territory. So, the conception of God within the bhakti traditions, at least at a basic level, is significantly similar to the conception of God in the Abrahamic traditions.

And this is where you need to stress that the bhakti tradition is not polytheistic, unlike most of mainstream Hinduism, which is also labelled as polytheistic. Although polytheism is a label that would be rejected by most thoughtful Hindus, even if they are not from the bhakti traditions. The technical name for the Hindu tradition would be Kathinotheistic.

There is one non-differentiated reality from which a multiplicity of divinities emerge. That's a complicated thought system and that's not the primary thought system of the bhakti tradition with respect to God. So, of course, the bhakti tradition's conception of God we would not call only as monotheism.

It would be more appropriate as polymorphic bimonotheism. That there is one God who manifests in two forms, bimonotheism, and who manifests as a divine couple and as many divine couples. So many forms, polymorphic is many forms, bhaya is in each form has two manifestations as a divine couple.

But I think these are technicalities that do not have much bearing on the preliminary topic of establishing the existence of God through empirical and rational means as compared through revelational means. So, empiricism, reason and revelation are considered to be three broad ways of acquiring knowledge in our tradition. Yes, you are saying that in your case the tradition is also an important source.

Yeah, I would say revelation includes the tradition. In fact, there are two main bodies of knowledge in our tradition. We call them as Shruti and Smriti.

And Shruti can be in a simple way translated as revelation and Smriti can be translated as tradition. So, coming back to the discussion. Yeah, I wouldn't say there are any major differences from a Bhakti tradition if I would like to prove the existence of God or to use a more precise language to offer persuasive pointers so that thoughtful audiences can arrive at a reasonable inference, can see the existence of God as a reasonable, intelligible and intellectually acceptable or respectable inference.

Maybe I would argue some points slightly differently, but let's go along with the points mentioned over there because they are reasonable and respectable for that particular audience. After all, a movie is also meant to be dramatic and there is very little drama in deliberation on deep intellectual concepts with subtleties and nuances. We could say there is intellectual drama, but intellectual drama is very difficult to depict in dramatic forms such as movies where action and emotion are what are the primary currencies for circulation.

OK, so you would like me to go into some specific arguments. Yeah. OK.

So what do I think about the initial argument about how so many of the prominent founders of science accepted the existence of God, but say modern thinkers like, modern scientists like Stephen Hawking do not accept the existence of God. This is a common and I would say to some extent a cunning argument because science inexorably rests on the presumption of progress and scientific knowledge today is considered to be more advanced, more progressive than scientific knowledge 50 or 100 years ago. So therefore, the inference that is drawn or at least that which the atheists want us to draw is that because people today believe in, scientists today believe in atheism rather than in theism.

Therefore, it is through the progress of scientific knowledge that theism has been rejected and atheism has been accepted. But if at all there is an increase in atheism among scientists, that is more due to the overall intellectual and cultural atmosphere of the times, than because of any new significant scientific discoveries that have tilted the scales of the debate in favour of atheism. That's one point.

Second point would be that many scientists nowadays have become much more brash in making claims that go beyond their specific field of specialisation. So as the movie itself depicts, Stephen Hawking made the audacious statement that philosophy is dead. And I have read his book on the grand design.

The title is, I would say, designed to be a grand deception because the grand design might naturally make this thing that he is talking about a grand designer. But it is deceptive because he is presuming that this design is so grand that it does not require a designer. So the thread of his argument in that context is that philosophy is dead and therefore science should take its place.

But first of all, philosophy itself cannot be dead. And secondly, science, if it's true to its definition, cannot take the place of philosophy. Let's look at both these points.

So the way this discussion is going is that we are discussing the merits of arguments and the merits of presenting atheism through social media, through the media of entertainment. And we are also discussing about a particular documentary. So I would say the particular documentary would be more like a takeoff point.

So rather than analysing it sequentially, frame by frame, you would see it more as a takeoff point for our discussion. Hope that's okay with you. So what he was saying essentially is that I would try to bring in a bhakti perspective as contrasted with a Christian perspective, or as it agrees with the Christian perspective, either way.

Yes, I'll definitely do that. Okay. To say that philosophy is dead and then to engage in philosophical discussion is as preposterous as saying that, say, writing on a notice, writing on a whiteboard, all the announcements on this whiteboard are false.

And then proceeding on that same whiteboard to make some discussions, some arguments, and writing points for those discussions and arguments, while maintaining all along that everything on the whiteboard is false. So if everything on the whiteboard is false, then you cannot have any argument because every statement, every thesis of that argument, every assertion within the discussion will be automatically designated as false by the starting declaration of foundation itself. That's interesting.

So let's divide this question. So you're saying that, can I explain what is the difference between science and philosophy and how what Stephen Hawking did in his book was not science but philosophy? Yeah. Philosophy, we can look at it etymologically.

But more importantly, we have to look at it contextually today. Etymologically, the meaning is very generic that the search for truth. Philly is love, so force is truth.

So the philosopher is essentially the lover of truth. The science that comes basically from the word to know. So it is a systematic body of knowledge.

So in that sense, science and philosophy could be said to be similar. But as they evolved, science, as used in the mainstream academia, is said to be that body of knowledge which looks at the natural world and seeks natural explanations for natural phenomena. Science largely operates on the presumption of methodological naturalism.

So the foundations of the scientific worldview is that the material world, originally it would have been equated or a few decades ago it would have been equated with the universe that we exist in. Now, some physicists, especially those who draw their basis from quantum physics or string theory, they talk about multiple universes, but even those universes are considered material. So the arena of matter is the valid jurisdiction for science.

Philosophy talks about the nature of reality. The question of science is what all exists in the cosmos. So here we can use the word cosmos, not to say equal to the universe, but to the totality of existence within the universe or within the level of matter.

So science asks the question, what all exists within the world and how all it functions. Philosophy's fundamental question is whether this world is all that exists or actually that's one of the important questions. And if anything exists beyond the world, then what is that and how does that relate with this world? Where did the world come from? Now these are questions which are philosophical in their very nature.

If a scientist while explaining the origin, can science validly ask questions about origins? Certainly you can ask, but if the answer to the question requires going beyond the laws of nature as we know, then the jurisdiction of science falls apart. It's like if we go into a discussion about the system of justice or the system of taxation in India and then we look at the system of taxation in some other country with a very different economic structure, say a welfare state like Australia, then the natural consequence would be that we couldn't have any kind of rational comparison simply by arbitrary comparing of statistics or simply by comparing of statistics because the whole socio-economic structure's framework would be different. And if an Indian citizen who goes to Australia starts using Indian tax laws to pay taxes in Australia, that would be rejected.

The laws there are different, the scope, the jurisdiction is different over there. Similarly, as soon as science starts talking about situations where the laws of nature, which are the basis for all scientific theories, when we don't know that they exist, or when we're talking about times when they were not yet existing, then science is clearly going beyond its jurisdiction. Therefore, when Stephen Hawking makes that claim that because the law of gravity existed, so the universe can and does bring itself into existence, then that begs the question, where did the universe come from? Sorry, where did the law of gravity come from? And answering that question, where laws come from, that is more a question of philosophy than of science.

So that doesn't mean that scientists cannot comment on it. These are universal questions. And every human being, thoughtful human being, will sooner or later consider them.

And thoughtful human beings, of course, have a right to not only think, but also to express their thoughts. But the challenges or the caution that is required is to not impose one's or not to label one's own thoughts with the respectability of one's profession, or not just respectability, but the authority of one's profession. So whatever Stephen Hawking says about the origin of the universe, that is his personal opinion in a field that he's not professionally trained in, that is philosophy.

Certainly he can have an opinion, but his scientific stature as a pioneering physicist does not in any way give his statements any greater credibility than what it would give to any other person who made similar statements. Yeah, it's just like if somebody were a great doctor and we want to invest our money, we would obviously not go to a doctor to ask about where to invest our money. Even if the doctor is an expert in their field, once they start giving investment advice, that doesn't mean that they cannot give or they should not give.

But we wouldn't by default consider them to be sources of authority who cannot be challenged or whose medical degree gives them the authority to make definitive statements. So making distinctions about areas of specialisation is vital. Now moving on to the subsequent parts of the discussion where the social pressure is born on him.

So I would say that there's a journey in that movie from the ideological to the personal. Ultimately the question of God's existence is something that has to be resolved in the court of one's own heart. It cannot be resolved anywhere else.

That's because each person has to make that choice. Yeah, so you're asking whether there are any knockout argument for the existence of God. I would say no, because the very existence of free will is predicated on the assumption that we have the facility to choose.

And if the evidence for a particular thought system becomes overwhelming, then the free will to choose the opposite thought system becomes compromised for us. So in that sense, there is enough evidence for a person to, based on the evidence and reason, to turn toward God. But there is also an experiential aspect which cannot be denied.

And that experiential aspect is what each one of us needs to experience for the lack of a better word. So at the level of intellectual reasoning alone, we could make a defensible argument for the existence of God. But ultimately this is not an abstract theoretical matter.

It's not like, say, some subject like whether the Higgs boson exists or not, or whether some other fundamental particle with a queer name and even queerer behaviour exists or not. Those are abstractions within the world of physics with near zero relevance to our lived realities. But answers to ultimate questions about the nature and purpose of our life and the nature of existence, even if they don't feel relevant to us during the routine course of our action, they do become immensely relevant during special moments in our life when the layers of illusion that normally cover us with complacency and apathy, when those curtains or layers of illusion are broken apart, are torn apart by life's upheavals and we are forced to confront the question, what really counts? So this was a part of my answer to the point that the arc of persuasion needs to move from the philosophical or the intellectual, the personal and the experiential, if that persuasion is to be complete and lead to a transformation.

So the problem of evil, we see that the professor goes against God, rejects God because he prayed that his mother be saved and his mother is not saved. That is understandable. If we grow up with the conception of God as a cosmic protector alone, then I think we are setting ourselves up for a rude reality check.

And that's why in our tradition, there is an emphasis on transcending the world by growing in our spirituality. That means we can't merely expect that by our devotion, by our worship, by our religious practise, by our rigid adherence to the sacred texts that we revere and follow, that by that alone the nature of the world is going to change. That this world is a place of distress, that it is a place of test and tribulation is a given that is repeatedly stressed in the Yoga texts, including the Bhakti Yoga texts.

So I feel this is something which is missing in most popular conceptions of religion and most popular depictions of religion. The problem of evil gets punctured even before it can attack. If we begin by declaring that the world is an arena of evil.

So we could say that there are three broad factors which shape human actions. There is God's will, there is free will and there is evil. So to take only one of these and to base the entire discussion on that, to say that how can God allow terrible things to happen, children to become orphaned or even children to die with painful diseases.

How can God allow that? A question like that misses the point. Okay. Yeah.

So does evil have an independent existence in our tradition? Yes and no. Ultimately nothing has an independent existence. So there is no conception of Satan in our tradition unlike in the Abrahamic traditions.

But there is an illusory energy often called as Maya. But this energy is not intrinsically opposed to God. And that energy is not Maya is not considered evil.

It is we when we succumb repeatedly to Maya that we go towards evil, that we gravitate towards evil actions by default when we give in to the temptations of illusion and thereby start doing evil actions repeatedly. So we could say that evil exists as impressions within our consciousness and personifying it as a dark force is helpful for recognising the gravity of the challenge that we face. So when I say talk about these three factors, God's will, free will and evil.

So evil is not an entity because we're not talking about God and human beings. We're talking about will over here, the forces that shape our will. So you could say that broadly speaking, how we act is within the restriction of the arena that has been given to us by God's will.

So we human beings can't fly in the sky the way animals do. So with the bird zoo, for example, so that is we can only walk on the ground. If you want to fly, we need to construct aeroplanes or some kind of devices like that to supplement what we have physically.

So that is God's will sets the broad parameters within which we can choose our actions. And what actions we choose that is determined by our free will and how we use our free will is also shaped by evil. By evil means by the impression that are stored within us.

Of course, those impressions can be positive and negative, but quite often a large part of the impression that are stored within us are negative. And also to the extent we are considering the problem of evil in terms of why bad things happen in the world, then it's natural to consider that side of evil primarily as impression within us. So I would say that the problem of evil is itself a big subject and that could have been more satisfactorily addressed over there.

Yeah. One more problem that comes up is that, OK, what explanation does atheism have? And if there is no explanation, then if ultimately everything is chaotic, if nothing makes any sense, as he quotes Shakespeare, the professor, that life is like a tale told by a fool with much sound and no meaning. Paraphrasing over here, if that is the case, then why have education? Why try to have meaningful discussions? Why try to even advance in philosophy? If everything is meaningless, even atheism is meaningless.

We intrinsically seek meaning. And it is the absence of meaning that is so bewildering for us because there is presence of meaning. So the absence of meaning at some level should not and does not lead to the rejection of meaning per se.

Because if that were to happen, then we wouldn't be able to function at all. So I think this is a complex argument, but let me summarise it quickly over here that the absence of meaning is what or absence of logic, sense, meaning, that is what atheists argue about. How could there be a God who allows such terrible things to happen? But then you could turn around and ask, why is anything meaningful at all? If we are simply creatures driven by evolution for survival, then why should anything have any meaning? Why should we even have genes organised in such a way that we can have language, we can have literature, we can have philosophy, that we, there must be something wired within us, something within us that makes us long for something more than what our bodies are driven for.

And where does that come from? If our brains have been designed by nature simply to find out how to maintain our existence, then we can never discern any truth. Then the chance of atheism being true is as remote as the chance of theism being true. And if that is the case, then why argue against theism? Well, yeah, here you could say something, the atheists would say that it's functionally harmful.

Now that is one of the biggest challenges which science has thrown to atheistic dogma, is that time and time surveys have shown that atheism is not functionally harmful. While incidents of terrorism get a lot of media attention, but overall the benefits of religious faith on people are undeniable. Just as it can give strength to people at an emotional level to cope with distress and difficulty, so too it can give us the hope to move beyond our problems, that there is some higher reality beyond these problems and thus we can move beyond it, we should move beyond it.

Just as it was said there that atheism does not remove any problems, it just removes the hope that we may have for solving those problems. Okay, you might say that's a false hope, but on what criteria are we saying it's false? That God doesn't exist? Well, that is not a scientific or a rational conclusion, it is an atheist presumption towards which scientific evidence has been tortured to go along. Is it functionally harmful? Again, so many studies as in the Oxford Handbook of Science and Religion have shown that religious commitment leads to beneficial effects on people.

Now this of course does not necessarily prove that God exists, but the point here is that why would nature give us a longing for meaning at all and why would there be meaning present in the world at all if we live in a cosmos that is ultimately and essentially meaningless. So the absence of meaning is what theists need to answer, but the presence of meaning is what atheists need to answer. Atheism doesn't remove problems, it just removes the hope that the problems we are going through are meaningful and purposeful.

Atheism can't explain the longing for meaning within us and the presence of meaning around us, at least at some level. Okay, let's consider. Okay, this can be the last question.

Sure. Thank you for inviting me once again. Now what about the personal transformations of people that happen to atheism? For making them to atheism, how strong is that as a testimony? I feel when making the transition for somebody who is inclined to make the transition, the conversion experience, I don't like the word conversion, you could use the word elevation experience, that for somebody who is open to that, or at least is considering that, it can be a powerful testimony.

But beyond that, for those who are not even considering that experience, then for them, basically conversion is treated as perfidy, as betrayal of one's own side, and just by that, that person's testimony is no longer considered valid. That person is considered to have lost the good sense, the inner compass by which they could make any decisions, and thus their credibility is lost. In fact, Anthony Clu was one of the most prominent atheists, and he advanced arguments and wrote articles that significantly advanced the cause of atheism.

But toward the end of his life, when he chose to become an atheist, even if at least not a personal, not a believed person god, but still, he was denounced, and his testimony was denounced as senility, and so he was rejected. His testimony has been largely rejected by atheists. So the point here is that personal experiences are powerful for the one going through the experience, and the one willing to go through the experience.

But for those who consider the personal experience itself to be brainwashing, to be kind of a virus infection by a dangerous pathological virus, for them the experiential part will be alienating, and thus we need to, I think that is where a lot of work is needed, to communicate the experience in a way that doesn't alienate or antagonise those who do not have that experience and those who do not wish to have that experience. So I feel that's a major challenge, and even in our tradition I've seen those who write their memoirs or their personal stories, their personal stories might be very strong, but they often write it in a way that is meant for insiders, and it ends up not explaining them to outsiders, but only explaining them to insiders again. So overall, the discussion on God is not dead is a very important discussion, and surely it can inspire a lot of people to delve deeper into their own spiritual journeys.

Thank you again for inviting me for this discussion, it was a joy talking with you. Thank you.