Man's Fate and God's Choice by Bhimeswara Challa (ereader for textbooks TXT) 📖

one is not qualified to be called a human being just because he is born in a human form, and deprived of the divine understanding, people become beasts and demons.539

 

 

 

 

 

537 Cited in: Paul Helm. Faith and Understanding. 1997. Edinburgh University Press. Edinburg, UK. p.92.

538 Swami Nikhilananda. The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. 1996. Sri Ramakrishna Math. Chennai, India. p.172.

539 Sikh Philosophy Network. Essays on Sikhism: Madness of Belief in Caste: Jaat-Paat. Accessed at: http://www.sikhphilosophy.net/essays-on-sikhism/14792-madness-of-belief-caste-jaat-paat.html

 

We cannot get a fix on the ‘phenomenon’ or the paradox and so we try all kinds of permutations and combinations to pin it down within the confines of our thought. As David Shiang puts it, “the question of God is ultimately one of knowledge vs. ignorance; not faith vs. reason” (God Does Not Play Dice, 2008). The problem is that we want to be ‘logical’ about something that is conceptually beyond our thinking; we want to apply ‘facts’ which are no more than conjectures and unsupported assumptions to ‘prove’ divine non-existence or incompetence. That confusion is best exemplified by our intellectual assumption that Darwinian natural selection conceptually and logically negates God, that it offers stellar proof of atheism. In the words of Richard Dawkins, that it enabled man to be ‘an intellectually fulfilled atheist’. The year 2009 happened to be both the 200th birth anniversary of Darwin as well as the 150th year of publication of his work The Origin of the Species, which has been hailed by the National Geographic magazine (February, 2009) as the ‘the most incendiary book in the history of science’. It is interesting to learn from a recent book by Adrian Desmond and James Moore (Darwin’s Sacred Cause, 2009) that the ‘sacred cause’ that imbued Darwin to discover evolution was emancipation and abolishing of slavery, which he considered a ‘sin’. The words ‘sacred’ and ‘sin’ inevitably drag us towards divinity.

Evolution and natural selection are simply processes; but who is the ‘Engineer’ who is controlling the process, the conductor controlling the orchestra? Darwin’s theory assumes the existence of something we call replicators; but who is the replicator and the regulator? We think that God must create everything the way we produce, but if we can use instruments and techniques in the laboratory, why cannot God do so in the divine laboratory? As Francis Collins, who led the Human Genome project puts it, “If God, who is all powerful and who is not limited by space and time, chose to use the mechanism of evolution to create you and me, who are we to say that wasn’t an absolutely elegant plan? And if God has now given us the intelligence and the opportunity to discover his methods that is something to celebrate.”540 In a similar vein, Michael Behe, professor of biochemistry asks: ‘If he wanted to make it [life] by the playing out of natural law, then who were we to object?’ It is a measure of the human mind that thinks that it is not possible to believe both in God and evolution, and that the mechanism of creation excludes random mutation and natural selection. Some thinkers have tried to use everyday analogies to explain creation. The British philosopher William Paley (Natural Theology, 1803), for example, likened the universe to a watch, arguing that if we were to discover a watch in the natural environment then, due to its order, complexity, and purpose, we would rightly infer that it was the work of an intelligent designer; these features are the marks of a design. The universe, Paley argued, exhibits the same order, complexity, and purpose, and so it too can be seen to have been produced by a Creator. In the book Signature in the Cell (2009), Stephen Meyer exposes the increasingly evident brittleness of materialist explanations of life’s origins and argues that the digital code embedded in the DNA points inexorably to a designing intelligence and addresses the question that Darwin’s theory of natural selection did not: how did the very first life begin? Meyer does not necessarily pitch for a God as the catalytic agent, but contends that such an agent is the most likely cause of the specified information in the double helix and in the information processing systems of the cell. Although some question the premise that complexity by itself cannot demonstrate intent, and rhetorically ask ‘who designed the designer?’, new discoveries are tilting the scientific scales in favor of transcendental Intelligent Design (ID) as the only rational — and probable and most likely — explanation.

 

 

 

540 Cited in: Steven Pinker. Can You Believe In God And Evolution?.Time Magazine. USA. Sunday, 2 August 2005. Accessed at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1090921,00.html

 

Despite the history of animosity between religions and the scientific skeptics, the good thing now is that, coupled with growing intellectual interest in myth, mythology, and occultism, the spiritual traditions of the world are engaged in a serious conversation with one another, without claiming to be the only path to the Truth, in a way they never were before, and that is bound to create a climate of clarity and consensus. Albeit the fact that it is still fragile, there is a worldwide ecumenism now, a momentum towards understanding other traditions because they are no longer ‘out there,’ far away; they are us. That gives us hope.

But we still have to face the problems of a world with all-but-dissolved-divinity, and religions that continue to be deeply distrustful of each other.

 

Free will, fate, and surrender

In such a climate of consciousness, we are both polarized and paralyzed and do not know how to strike the right balance between human will and divine omnipotence. What we face everyday are lives out of control, events out of control, joy and happiness always a stretch away, our loved ones in despair. It all seems so ‘unfair’. And we wonder, is there such a thing as destiny oblivious to human will and effort? Is it merely the name we assign to that legion of strong forces that we ourselves have set in motion, a net consisting of our accumulated motives, desires, and actions from out of the past, immediate or distant? And ‘why me?’ Faith and free will: which one is the determinant and a compulsive catalyst in human life? Is man’s fate man’s choice or God’s choice? Is fate a matter of fatalism and free will of free choice?

Does our free will make redundant the concept of predestination? Is Prarabdha karma fate or free will? Is free will God’s gift to man or is it also an illusion? Does what we believe really have the power to change the forces affecting our life? Is faith the bridge between free will and fate? Is surrender, to God (through free will) and to man (by force), the only way out?

The function of fate or the element of chance in the universe is a theme that runs from ancient to modern times, through all religions and all cultures. Whether man is the architect of his own fate, or fate is the arbiter of his destiny, has long been argued about. The range of beliefs vary all the way from anointing fate as the supreme force on earth, to what the ancient Indian text Yoga Vasistha describes as ‘fashioned by fools’. Much of scientific supposition often tends towards a rigid, mechanical interpretation of the laws of nature based on very narrow mathematical principles; and we attempt to apply the same rigid scheme to human life. Some have sought to represent nature as a system of linked causes and effects which, once started (who knows how?), goes on automatically like a machine without the interposition of any influences from outside the system. In spiritual terms, we choose the reasons and lessons for a particular incarnation before we are born. While on earth our spiritual memory is clouded from all but the most enlightened, to prevent it from distracting us from the fulfillment of our purpose in life. We have the free will necessary for us to gain the experience we came for.

We are presented with the circumstances that give us opportunities to learn our chosen lessons. Our free will may avoid these lessons, in which case we will continue to be presented with conditions suitable for the fulfillment of our chosen purpose. Thus, we have free will throughout our time here. The Islamic saint Hazrat Ali Murtaza, a companion of Prophet Muhammad, when asked to differentiate free will and fate, replied that he could lift his one foot from earth to keep standing out of his free will, but if he lifted the second foot, he would fall down. It means that man has some powers to exercise his free will, though Nature does not allow him to do everything out of his free will. While we have the power of choice on certain matters, we do not have control over issues such as the selection of life, death, children, parents, fame, etc.

Fate is a fact of life; indeed, life itself is fated. The ancient Indian poet Bharthari wrote (Satakatraya) that no hand can ever efface fate’s sentence written on the brow; and ‘whom fate has chosen to persecute; finds every refuge in vain’ (The Praise of Destiny).

 

Shakespeare compared fate to the wind and tide that cannot be resisted. Sherlock Holmes once told Watson, when we hear the steps on the stair walking into our life, and we know not whether for good or ill, they are of fate. Not a day passes in life without our coming face to face with one central fact of earthly existence: we bring to bear no decisive control over the myriad things we do in life; everything seems so random, so senseless, and so absurd. The short name for that is fate. We all know that things happen with or without our consent; we know that things have consequences, some to our liking and some to our dismay; yet we desire to deceive fate and maneuver the consequences to our advantage. When things go right we credit them to our effort; when they do not, we blame it on fate. We beseech God to rescue us when we are in trouble wrought by our own fate, putting Him in a quandary, being asked to violate his own law that for everything there is a sequel. Even the gods, it is said, are not immune to the will of fate, vidhi, as it is called in Sanskrit. Divine avatars too could not escape that law; indeed they did not make an attempt to escape by drawing upon the powers of divinity. This unpredictability, this brittleness, the uncertainty of the next moment, the disconnection between the sequences of events, seems to be increasing, not diminishing, despite our vastly expanded knowledge of the universe and our supposed ‘conquest’ of Nature.

Science too has traveled a good distance in trying to understand the determinants of human life. It has moved from Newton’s mechanistic ‘clockwork’ universe, through Einstein’s discovery that neither time nor space are as we perceive them to be, to quantum physics, that far from following the principles of cause and effect, reality at its most foundational level is indeterministic. The physicist Freeman Dyson recently wrote, “the more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense knew we were coming”. And Paul Davies, who in the past had denied divine existence, wrote, “there is something going on behind it all”. If we are ‘superbly placed in the right sort of solar system, in the right place, in the right sort of galaxy, at the right time to be able to study the rest of the universe, then who ensured it? But all through and since the inception of human thought, whether it is free will or fate or faith or destiny or knowledge of God or the ways of Nature, the aim has always been to ‘control’. The irony is that we