Is spirituality the explanation that we resort to when we can’t get explanations?

From Raghunandan P

Considering the basic human character of finding reasons for what we see i.e. perceive , why should it not be that we try to give ourselves the idea of god spirituality because we don’t reason

Transcript

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question from considering the basic human character of finding reasons for what we see that is perceived why should it not be that we try to give ourselves the idea of god and spirituality because we don’t reason answer the question basically means that we human beings have a tendency to reason to try to find out explanations and when we can’t find out explanations then we come up with explanation of god and spirituality so when we stop using our reasoning faculty then we come to explanations about god and spirituality is it like that answer this is a common charge which is made by people who are anti religious and anti spiritual they say that when there is no explanation then god is seen as explanation so god is treated as a refuge when people don’t use reason and this is a very simplistic and naive understanding of religion and spirituality and god’s role in the set up of the universe because there is reason within spirituality also and there is reason that leads to spirituality so let me explain these two points but before that yes we human beings have a tendency to reason and when we reason it is because we reason that we have come up with advancements in whatever fields of knowledge that might be so Newton saw the fruit falling and he reasoned why did this fruit fall? most people might have eaten the fruit and forgotten the whole thing so he reasoned and that’s how we made progress so with respect to say understanding the law of gravity so after observing we try to reason about things so spirituality is not something which we resort to when our reason doesn’t work rather spirituality is what we turn to because reason points towards that so because logic and reason points towards spirituality how is that? for example all of us have an innate longing to live and to live forever no one wants to die no one wants to end one’s life even people who commit suicide they just feel that the suffering in their life is so great that they feel suffering that death will be an escape way from that suffering so it’s not that they don’t want to live or that they want to die it’s just that they want to be free from suffering and death appears to be a way from suffering so my point here is I’m not going to suicide right now but the point is why do we want to live so desperately where is the biological origin of this desire for living especially when we see that everything material around us is destructible it is inevitably going to be destroyed so where does this longing for everlasting life come from if I’m in a room and suddenly I see a gold particle lying on the ground I wonder where does this gold particle come from so similarly in a world where everything is destructible where does our longing for being eternal come from so matter is by its very nature destructive and science has great difficulty in explaining how matter produces consciousness it’s almost impossible science magazine said this was the top second top question which is unanswered by science the first is where does the universe come from and second is where does consciousness come from the fundamental question this is science magazine 25th and one of its anniversary editions listed various questions and one of these was questions so the point here is the reason here takes us towards an inference that there has to be something which is eternal and that eternal is expressing its desire to be eternal so matter is not eternal so that means there is something spiritual within us which is eternal and that is what is expressing its longing through our longing for everlasting life so this is a whole elaborate reasoning and I’m not going to go into that in an upcoming book on the history of reincarnation I’m explaining this more in detail but another example of reasoning could be that what is called as cosmological argument in philosophy cosmological argument for the existence of god we see philosophically speaking everything doesn’t come from nothing everything has some source so what is that source science also doesn’t have any answer about what ultimately was the source of big bang or super string or whatever be the theories what is in the beginning science doesn’t have any explanation for that so we may say that there was some singularity some some sort of space time vacuum or whatever scientists have different conceptions but that is still something that is not nothing so we have a choice whether we can have a lump of matter which expanded into universe or we can have a conscious person who with whose super intelligence the universe manifested in our own experience we see that unconscious matter doesn’t organize itself but a conscious human being can organize if there is a lump of concrete that doesn’t organize itself into a building but if there is a conscious builder person can organize things into a building so it’s reasonable to postulate the existence of god this is the cosmological argument so in this way there are many the first thing I said is there is reason points to spirituality reason points to god and further there is reason within spirituality also if you study the scriptures there is so many so much analysis about reason based on reason and logic scripture is the authority but while having scripture as authority there is also reason which helps us to understand scripture in fact this is called as vichar, contemplation and this is considered to be very important for understanding scripture especially when scripture seems to say contradictory things, they are paradoxical they seem to be contradictory but the point is there is a huge amount of reason within scriptures if you read the vedanta sutra it is full of reason and logic the supanishad says this and the supanishad says these two statements how do we reconcile it the statement says this what is the actual meaning so there is all reasonable arguments and inferences from those arguments so we don’t turn to spirituality because our reason fails but because our reason points to spirituality so we don’t reject reason but rather we reject materialism fanatical materialism when reason warrants that rejection so fanatical materialism means that matter is all that exists and there is nothing spiritual now this is fanatical materialism because it is intolerant of anything any alternative just as religious religions can be intolerant they want to destroy other religions similarly materialism can be intolerant and it can it may intend, it may want materialist aggressive materialist, aggressive atheists in fact they often label themselves as anti-theists not only they don’t believe in god but they campaign against god and they may reject religion they may reject anything apart from materialism and that is spirituality so they are not using their reason over there it is their own ideology which they are expressing so we reject the fanaticism of materialism where materialism fails to provide explanations and spirituality provides explanations we turn towards spirituality now within spirituality also there is some aspect which may not seem reasonable for example some aspects of Krishna’s pastimes some aspects of Vedic cosmology, some aspects of the philosophy may not be comprehensible to us, may not seem reasonable but then that is a limitation of reason, that is not a limitation of philosophy and this limitation of reason we will encounter even in material subjects, quantum physics the whole much of quantum physics just doesn’t make sense there is a famous quote by a physicist I have quoted in in one of my articles about seeing and believing so he one of his students asked him yes sir, what is this quantum physics, how do we visualize the model of the universe which is being postulated by quantum physics and this professor replied, stop thinking start calculating so they say quantum physics whatever are the theories they make sense when you use mathematics as a language to understand it but in a conceptual sense in a visual sense it doesn’t make any sense and still because it works people use it so we see incomprehensibility in terms of not being comprehensible to reason even in material fields and we don’t reject material fields and we don’t consider quantum physics as a result of intellectual escapists no, there are certain things which are not comprehensible many things are comprehensible many things help us in terms of the technologies that emerge from them so similarly with respect to spirituality there are things which help us we will see an inner transformation that happens even if everything that is there in spirituality doesn’t make sense to us we will find there is an inner transformation that happens in terms of depression, self-centeredness irritability all such negative emotions will start decreasing, enthusiasm confidence, positivity selflessness all these positive emotions will start coming up within us, so we will experience the potency of spirituality in practical experiential ways and that’s how it becomes there is faith involved in quantum physics and there is faith involved in spirituality but there is reason also involved in it and so that is why we choose spirituality because it is based on reason and it is also based on experience of its benefits and the same principle applies even in many fields of science of course because god is supreme and he is supremely intelligent there are many things about him which we cannot understand but then in one sense it’s a matter of intellectual humility which is also reasonable that the infinite cannot be comprehended fully by the finite just as we can’t have say elephant going through the space below a door we can’t have elephant going through that, similarly our intelligence is finite, god is infinite so we cannot understand him fully and that is a reasonable conclusion so accepting the incomprehensibility of god is not an abandonment of reason, it is an acknowledgement of reason and rather rejecting the incomprehensibility rejecting the inconceivability of god that is an abandonment of reason because it is reasonable to postulate that the finite cannot understand the infinite so in that sense we could turn the whole argument around and say that it is rejection of spirituality that is unreasonable not the acceptance of spirituality acceptance of spirituality is eminently reasonable thank you