Have we humans thought up an anxiety-relieving entity God because we suffer more anxiety than animals?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

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Is God an entity that we human beings have imagined because we face greater anxieties than other species and in order to relieve ourselves of that anxiety, we think up of an entity called God who will provide us relief. So, basically we created an entity.
I understood the question. So, now there are three different ways of looking at this. First is that it is not true that we human beings alone have anxieties.
All living beings have anxieties. The forms of anxieties we human beings have are different. Say now, after this program we will have some food.
We will have some prasad. Now, imagine that there is an ice feast and then you are eating the food and at that time suddenly you open the ice, plate has disappeared. What happened? Where did the plate go? So, we don’t face that level of insecurity.
There is a mosquito which is biting and for him it is just enjoying its food. And what do I do? I flick it off. I just take away its plate of food.
And I flick away the mosquito. I take away its food. That is if I am kind.
Otherwise, I just crush it. So, how many of us face the anxiety that while we are eating we are going to be crushed to death? A bird when it is pecking at its food, on top there might be some predator bird which comes. A deer when it is grazing, it is fearful a lion may come and eat it.
So, in some ways animals have also bigger anxieties than what we have. Their forms of anxieties may be different but they have also enormous anxieties. Just to be in material existence means to have anxiety.
And it is not necessary, there is no anxiety meter by which we can compare. But if we compare the threat meter, animals live in the threat of death at any moment which is not how we human beings live constantly. So, in that sense we could say that animals actually have greater anxiety than what we have.
Of course, in some forms we do have more anxieties because we have created greater arrangements for security. Now, we have created money as a means of security. We have created national boundaries as a means of security.
And each of these can also lead to anxiety. But there is no objective parameter by which we can necessarily say that we humans have greater anxiety and that is why we have created some greater entity called God to protect ourselves. The basic premise itself that we humans have greater anxiety, that itself is debatable.
Now, moving onwards, second point is that rather than seeing God as the product of human imagination, we can look at the lives of people who are devoted to God. There are many people who practice ordinary religion where they practice religion to get freedom from anxiety. But there are many who are devoted to God and it is their devotion to God that they take up greater anxiety.
So, especially saints throughout history, whichever religious tradition they have been in, they have often been persecuted. They have often been tortured. In the western tradition itself we have Jesus who was crucified for his devotion to God.
So, we find that in the lives of those who were the most devoted to God, they did not see God at all as a tool for anxiety relief. They actually took up anxiety for the sake of God. That means this simplistic idea that we imagine God as a device for freeing ourselves from anxiety, that just doesn’t work because there are people who take up devotion to God and not at all for the sake of freedom from anxiety.
They actually take up greater anxiety because of their devotion to God. So, that premise of the argument is also flawed. Now, moving onwards, yes, it is true that by devotion to God we can get relief from anxiety.
It is true that we human beings have a higher consciousness. And it is true that we human beings are actually capable of looking for some higher meaning in our life. In fact, even science is primarily a search for higher meaning.
Last year I was here in London and I was invited to Cambridge University for a talk on science and spirituality. So, while returning we passed by the tree where Newton is said to have seen or felt the fruit fall on his head. Now imagine if instead of Newton, a monkey had been sitting there.
The monkey would have just picked the apple, eaten it and gone on its way. And nobody would have blamed it for that. Most human beings would also have done the same thing.
Newton’s speciality was he asked the question, what made this fruit fall? Now, in science, we focus on the point of Newton’s brilliance in coming up with the theory of gravity. And that’s true, that’s his brilliance. But at the same time, let’s not focus only on the answer to the question which he posed, but let’s look at the foundation of the question itself.
When he is asking, what made this fruit fall? That means he is presuming that things don’t happen in a disorderly way. That there is some cause-effect connection in the world. Now, why should there be a cause-effect connection? If we were just products of random evolution, if our very existence was a product of just chance, then all that it means is that the whole world has emerged from an explosion or some other disordered mechanism.
Our own brains have emerged from some disordered mechanism. This disordered, this is some random mechanism. And why should there be a correlation between the way how our brain thinks and how the world functions? F is equal to gm1m2 upon r square, Newton’s law of gravity.
Now, equal to a square divided by, these are mathematical concepts. Mathematical concepts themselves don’t have any existence in nature. There is no such entity called divided by.
There is no entity called square existing out there. Maths helps us to do real activities in the world. But math itself is a system which we have come up with in our brain.
So now, why should if everything were just a product of unguided natural mechanisms, then why would there be such a precise correlation between the way how our brain thinks and how the world functions? Eugene Wigner was a Nobel laureate, prominent scientist. And he wrote a celebrated paper called On the Reason for the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics. So science can explain nature.
But the explainability of nature requires an explanation. Why is there such a correlation between the way my brain thinks and the way the world functions? If everything were just guided by the result of unguided natural phenomena, then there should be no correlation. What to speak of such a precise correlation of mathematical precision? So if we consider that way, the search for meaning, which is what has led to the scientific progress, that search for meaning is founded on the assumption of a meaningful world.
Science looks for patterns in nature. That means it assumes that there are patterns existing in nature. What is the rationale for that assumption? The most reasonable rationale is that the world out there and the brain in here are both reflections of a higher intelligence.
I won’t use the word creator in literal sense. Of a higher intelligence. You know India’s famous mathematician Ramanujan, he said that an equation for me has no meaning unless it represents a thought of God.
Why should E is equal to MC square be true? Why? That is a thought of God. So basically, God or the absolute truth, whatever you want to call it, that is the explanation for the explainability of the universe. When we say that God is just a concoction, then what do we have? We basically, through our scientific research, we end up with islands of meaning in an ocean of meaninglessness.
Now, why do apples fall like this? Okay, it’s because of the orbit. Why do the planets move in their orbits? That can be explained by the laws of motion. Why are the electrons moving like this? That is the principle of electromagnetics or whatever you want to say.
But what is the purpose of life itself? Why do we exist? That’s meaningless. Now, Steven Weinberg said the more the universe appears comprehensible, the more it appears to be pointless. So, what happens with the materialistic world view, with the godless world view, is that we are condemned to searching for islands of meaning in an ocean of meaninglessness.
Instead, the way science has progressed always is that when it comes up with a theory, the theory explains something. And when the theory comes up with evidence or some observations come up which are not explainable by theory, scientists don’t say that, oh, it’s not explainable. They say, maybe there’s some deeper theory.
So, Newtonian classical physics, it worked for almost 300 years. But for blackbody radiation, for fundamental particles, for universal objects. Yeah, quantum physics and relativity came up.
Scientists didn’t say, oh, it doesn’t make sense. They came up with a deeper theory. So, similarly, when we look at the, if we look at the divine intelligence as the foundational organizing principle of the universe, then our overall life acquires a context of meaning and purpose.
So, without God as the foundation of the reasoning process, we have islands of meaning in an ocean of meaninglessness. And we can’t even explain why those islands of meaning are there. We’re happy, oh, we made this theory, we found that, we found that.
But why should that meaningfulness be there? That also we can’t explain. But on the other hand, if we start with God as the foundational organizing principle, then we have a journey of ever deepening meaning. So, life is ultimately meant for searching this deeper meaning in life.
We humans all want to do that. We don’t just want to live for some time and die. We have a side within us which longs for life eternal.
All the movies, all the novels, most of them are about romance. And all these romance, they talk about actually happily ever after. Now, if we look around us, nothing exists forever.
In the biggest building, biggest mountain, nothing lasts forever. So, if nothing lasts forever, where did our desire to live forever come from? If there was a child who was being born and brought up by some tribal community in the deep forests of Africa, and suddenly that child says to his mother, Mummy, I want a pizza. Say, where did you hear about a pizza? No, where did you hear? There’s a thing in the environment that could have triggered the desire for a pizza.
So, similarly, you know, that question would come up, there’s nothing in the environment that would give information about a pizza. Where did the desire come from? So, like that, there’s nothing in the environment that is eternal. So, where does the desire to live forever come from within us? So, that is not circumstantial.
That comes from our core. That core is not circumstantial, that is transcendental. So, there is a spiritual core to our being, and that spiritual core naturally aspires for a spiritual reality.
So, the search for God is the ultimate culmination of the search for meaning that is expressed itself in science. So, why is it that Newton didn’t just eat the fruit and be satisfied? Because we human beings are capable of more than impulsive responses. Food, eat, that’s what all animals do.
We human beings also have those impulses, but we also have intelligence. By that intelligence, we just don’t respond to impulses, we look for patterns. We try to make sense of things.
And as our capacity to make sense of things expands more and more and more, the culmination of that capacity to expand, capacity to make sense, when its expansion attains its culmination, that’s where we come to God. So, we are made for God. We are made inherently to search for God.
Rather than seeing God as an entity which is concocted to relieve anxiety, if we go through this reasoning process, we see God as the foundation of our very reasoning process. And we see God as the culmination of our reasoning process. Why is the world explainable? The most reasonable explanation for the explainability of the world is God.
And God is the foundation of the reasoning process. And as our tendency to make sense of things through reason expands and expands and expands further, then the culminating explanation that we come to is God. So, that’s why God is what helps us to make the most complete sense of things.
And in contrast, when we use the same reason to come to a conclusion of Godlessness,