God Is Made To Enter the Home of Science

‘We do not know now’ is the rational answer to a mystery.

Let us not say, ’God only knows’; let us say, ‘we do not know now.’ ‘What is there after death? Is it a spirit? Is it a ghost? Is it the other world? Is it the rebirth? What is it? None returned after death. None brought a report after death. Does this matter for life on this Earth?’-Dr D.V.Gundappa, a well-known Indian poet.

‘Does this matter for life on this Earth?’

What happens after death is nothing more than just the memory of death. There is no evidence for the afterlife. Human life ends with death. This is the well-known monistic view of the rationalist. But for the religious apologist, there is life after death; the human soul survives his death. For some, what happens after the human’s death is a mystery.

Carl Sagan, the well-known cosmologist recollects: ‘Probably a dozen times since their deaths, I have heard my mother or father, in a conversational tone of voice, call my name. Of course they called to me often during my life with them-to do a chore, to remind me of a responsibility, to come to dinner, to engage in conversation, to hear about an event of the day. I still miss them so much that it does not seem at all strange that my brain will occasionally retrieve a lucid recollection of their voices.’(quoted by Michael Shermer in Heavens On Earth). It is an admitted hallucination. Some may, however, treat it as an unexplained experience, a mystery.

The pandemic, Covid-19 is not a divine punishment meted out to the people, as such other pandemics as plague, and so on were believed to be so in the past. It is not a mystery now. It is known exactly as it is: It is a highly contagious infectious disease for which medical science is still to manufacture a remedy.

Human consciousness and the origin of life have been still mysteries to science. These two mysteries have been unresolved by science. This epistemological situation is called a gap in the scientific explanation of natural phenomena.

The theist grabs such an absence of scientific explanations of things(gap) as God’s field. He is sure(how?) that only God knows these gaps and the gap is God!

Allama Prabhu, well-known Indian mystic’s poem quoted below appears apposite here:

‘You say you know.

Tell me how you came to know?

Those who truly know, do they say they know?

Those who know the unknowable supreme

live like those who do not know…’

The words, ‘the unknowable supreme’ is the cosmic energy (which the mystics call as Creation or God(not a supernatural God)) of which the human being and all other sentient beings are parts. This concept of God is pantheistic. The mystic has a rational vision of cosmic energy and he can explain it.

I hold the view of another twelfth-century Indian rational mystic, Basavanna that there is no afterlife. Man has only one life. There is no duality in him: With his death, his brain dies and with his brain’s death, his mind dies. No disembodied soul exists.

Science explains the facts of nature, animate, or inanimate. Scientists do not simply ‘say they know.’ They prove what they know.

The theist hinders the progress of science by categorically insisting that God knows certain things thought by him to be beyond the boundaries of science. He has no reason for his insistence. His belief is without evidence.

He gives birth to superstitions in this way. He does a disservice to society.

This has been going on for centuries-to the colossal detriment of the world.