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

God’s word is simple, clear, and straightforward. But we find it very hard to ‘take God on His word’ and to ‘seek refuge in Him.’ We are full of doubt and disbelief and find it almost impossible to take anything or anyone, other than our own selves, seriously. The mind says, ‘Where is the proof?’ But where is the proof for ‘proof’? We associate rationality with reason, knowledge with intelligence, and proof with truth. This temporal trinity of reason, intelligence, and proof have blinded and brought mankind to the ‘brink of the precipice.’ But we want ‘proof’ for that too. You see an abyss ahead but you want proof for that! As the American professor of philosophy and author Peter Kreeft says, “You cannot scientifically prove that the only acceptable proofs are scientific proofs. You cannot prove logically or empirically that only logical or empirical proofs are acceptable as proofs. You cannot prove it logically because its contradiction does not entail a contradiction, and you cannot prove it empirically because neither a proof nor the criterion of acceptability are empirical entities. Thus scientism (the premise that only scientific proofs count as proofs) is not scientific; it is a dogma of faith, a religion.”560 Self- absorbed, dissatisfied, and disillusioned with both science and religion, many are turning to a motley mix of mystics and mavericks, guns and gurus, scriptures and science fiction, to anyone or anything that seems to promise hope, however slender or sleight of mind it might be. The hope is that humanity might still get rid of its ennui, reclaim its élan and keep its tryst

 

 

 

 

557 Cited in: Tulsidas Sundarakand. Part 4. Saranaagathi - Surrender to the Divine. Accessed at: http://saranaagathi.wordpress.com/online-devotional-works/tulsidas-sundarakand/tulsidas-sundarakand-4/

558 Cited in: Wayne Blank. Why Isn’t Infant Baptism Valid? The Church of God Daily Bible Study. Accessed at: http://www.keyway.ca/htm2007/20070210.htm

559 Annie Besant. The Bhagavad-Gita. 2003. The Theosophical Publishing House. Adyar, Chennai, India. p.255.

560 Peter Kreeft. Truth Journal. The Case for Life After Death. Accessed at: http://www.leaderu.com/truth/1truth28.html

 

with its destiny. A nobler calling for man is ahead of him. Ideas and idealism are still valid. Caring and compassion still count. The still surviving human goodness must converge and coalesce and become a positive force for the good of the global community. The immediate task is to create the ‘minimum mass’ of men who not only combine, at least in partial measure, the intellect of Aristotle, the humanism of Einstein, and the sagacity of Gandhi, but are also capable of welding their individual energies into a systemic whole. Each person becomes both a participatory actor as well as an agent who will replicate the same context in two or more persons, culminating in the uplift of the mass of humanity.

It is not only philosophers and scholars who have pondered over the question of ‘what to do with God’. Almost every ‘who is who’ in every walk of life, from saints to scientists, celebrities to the common folk have said something or the other, some thought-provoking, some hair-splitting, some profound, and some utterly pedestrian things. To recognize that God exists, that God is “there,” is to believe in God. To recognize that God is “an ever present help in trouble” — that God is here — means having faith in God. At the end of it all, the magic and the mystery, the lure and the allure of God still endures. That is not going to change any time soon — despite God-gene and God-particle — and we will all probably die drowning in that divine black hole. Even to stay afloat in that black hole, which is what the state of the world now is, we need That right now, whatever we might think it is, an idea, an ideal or an idol, a Father or a Force, a comedian or a mathematician. We have to fall back upon what Voltaire said: if God does not exist, we have to invent Him. And if He is in eclipse, we must remove the cover. And if ‘we are in exile’ from God as the Flemish mystic John of Ruysbroeck said, then we must redeem ourselves through our conduct on earth.

Whether or not science proves the existence of a ‘God-particle’ or a ‘God-gene’, God will remain as a matter of ‘best belief’ and last resort. We have simply run out of all other options to change course and save ourselves. And that brings up the ‘mother of all questions’: Can a species-saving tectonic transformation occur without divine acquiescence, if not intervention? If we cannot control the way we live, how can we manage the alchemy of our  transformation? Does it all depend on what we mean by ‘transformation’? Is it to ease the birth pangs of the advent of the posthumans, our ‘successor species’, that is, to play the role we are playing on earth but with vastly technology-enhanced intelligence? Or will it really be an ‘improved version of the human species’? Ray Kurzweil opted for the latter and said that he would define the next human species as that species that inherently extends our own horizons. We did not stay on the ground, we did not stay on the planet, and we are not staying within the limitations of our biology. Kurzweil hit the nail on the head when he positioned technological manipulation of the human organism on the same footing as our ability to fly a plane or sending a man to the moon. But he was also the one who warned of the unintended consequences of ‘self-replicating’ nanobiotechnology. The danger is not only in the know- how getting into the hands of ‘terrorists’ but, even more, the product itself being or becoming a potential Frankenstein.

 

Transcendence, immanence, and indifference of God

Our multidimensional relationship with ‘God’ brings up an important issue: the apparent dichotomy in divinity and how it affects our lives. One of the principal attributes most religions associate with divinity is immanence, which means the omnipresence of the divine essence. Or that the omnipotent divine force, the all-encompassing divine being, pervades through — and beyond and behind — all things that exist, and is able to influence them. The axiological question then is: if God is in everything, is everywhere and knows everything, and can do anything, why is the human world — let us, for a change, leave other creatures aside — so full of exploitation, misery, unhappiness, and evil? And why do evil-doers seem to have all the fun and luck? And why does not God step in every time we are in trouble? It is

 

our ‘suffering’, not divine potency or prevarication that is the issue. In other words, is our suffering the evidence against, the reason to doubt His immanence? This age-old question has cropped up every time a horrific thing happened in human history. And it crops up whenever a personal tragedy strikes. When an earthquake swallows up children, or a child dies in an automobile accident, or a friend succumbs to a deadly disease (almost everyday occurrences in practically everyone’s life today), we ask ‘why’ and point the finger at God. At a time when ‘casual’ suicide and ‘reflexive’ murder have become both prosaic and pandemic, it is impossible for the human mind to insulate the divine from the dastardly, the god from the gory. What we are saying is that God must face the consequences for our wrong choices because He gave us the freedom to choose. The image of an apathetic and indifferent, if not callous, God and the corresponding ideal of a solitary, autonomous self comes to the mind, both of which are socially and spiritually destitute. In a sense, the answer depends on how one deals with the six implicit assumptions: 1) that God is caring and cares for what happens to us; 2) that God is beholden and accountable to us because we are, after all, human; 3) that we, the ‘virtuous’, are ‘innocent’ not only in relation to other humans but also in relation to other species; 4) that we are worthy of divine help; 5) that ‘suffering’ is pain unnatural to the human condition; and 6) that the time-frame is this, our present life. For none of the above assumptions do we have, in the human language, any ‘evidence’, much less any ‘proof’.

There is no such being as an ‘innocent victim’ or a ‘virtuous sufferer.’ Life is unthinkable — maybe untenable — without pain, as it is without pleasure. And both are highly individualistic. None of us (not even a serial killer) really thinks he is evil — on the contrary, he thinks he is a victim — and our sole test of divine intervention is our personal present life. And we forget that by relieving any particular person from suffering, God might have to let someone else suffer, someone who may be less deserving of suffering and more in need of His help. Even if we ignore for the moment the karma theory and the transmigration of souls and rebirth with a bearing on past lives, we should not forget that God is, as described in the scriptures, not only kind and forgiving but also just and fair. In the Bible, He is called ‘a just God and a Savior’. And being ‘just’ might sometimes require some to suffer: ‘and God proclaimed that He will slay the wicked and shelter the virtuous’. The Bible contains many examples of divine punishment for transgressors. For example, it says: “For we know Him who said, ‘Vengeance is Mine, I will repay’ (Hebrews 10:30). And when the people of Egypt set themselves up against God, He threatened that “the land of Egypt shall be desolate and waste; and they shall know that I am the Lord” (Ezekiel 29:9). And He alone knows where to draw the line between punishment and forgiveness, and how to ‘punish’ or ‘forgive’. In the Hindu epics it is said that the greatest act of divine mercy is to slay an erring bhakta or devotee; such a person directly merges into Him.

And then we have a category of events which, in law, are called ‘acts of God’, not related to what God does but what, in our mind, he should have done and did not, causing us suffering and bereavement. When Nature does not behave as we want it to, we call it an ‘act of God’. Even if we directly cause an event that we do not like, we call that outcome (for instance, a flood) an act of God. Going by this ‘logic’, we can ‘explain’ away global warming as an act of God. Despite the indictment of God as a Father who does not care about the suffering of his children, there are also some avowed atheists who have lately discovered the conventional God. Such as, for example, Antony Flew, dubbed the world’s most famous philosopher of atheism, who initially proposed that one must presuppose atheism until evidence of God surfaces, and later came to advocate deism of the Aristotelian kind.561 Flew

 

 

 

561 Wikipedia. Antony Flew. Accessed at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Flew

 

came to the conclusion, like many others, that the existence of a super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of Nature. While statistics vary, and belief or skepticism in God is too subjective, personal, and emotional to lend itself to simple yes or no answers, there is also a wide gap between ‘belief’ and ‘behavior’. The fact is that there are a good number of people who have serious reservations about God as portrayed by the scriptures. According to one estimate (2005 figures), about 2.3 percent of the world’s population describes itself as atheist, while a further 11.9 percent is described as non- theist.562 In a nutshell, one could say that after millions of words written and spoken about God, the human perception of divinity remains as hazy and as confused as