Atheist v/s the Believer

I grew up in a middle class family, in a middle class neighborhood of a large city in the late 20^th century. I studied in a public school where the curriculum was modern and non-religious. My father was a professional holding a typical executive job, while my mother was a home-maker. Both my parents believed in God as did my grandmother who lived with us.

Neither of my parents was deeply religious, although they did pray and went to a temple when their schedule allowed them to. They participated in religious festival and rituals, and performed the customary religious rituals on special occasions. My parents however were reasonably liberal in their views and never tried in any way to impose their religious beliefs on any of their children.

Growing up in this reasonably liberal environment I never felt the need for religion or God. As a teenager I found the Hindu mythologies and concept of God ridiculous and beyond logic. As I learnt about other major religions, I found their mythologies and concept of god equally illogical. At that time my father had said that when I grow older I would start believing in God.

I am now in my mid-forties and it hasn’t happened yet. I am still as much an atheist as I was then, although my understanding of religion and atheism is probably a lot more nuanced than what it was a teenager. As a teenager, I used to say that I believe in science and not in God. I would aver that if there is a God or religion that I believe in, then it is science.

Over the years I saw many of my friends and classmates who grew along with me become deeply religious, while others turned atheist like me. When I am talking about turning religious, I mean people who truly and deeply believe in God, not the people who are actually agnostic or mild believers but profess publicly to a belief in God, just in case He exists.

I have found no correlation between the education level, family background or intelligence and being either deeply religious or atheist amongst all the people I know. There are many with similar background as mine who are deeply religious, and others from deeply religious families who are atheists.

This got me thinking on a very fundamental nature v/s nurture question. My personal and empirical evidence suggested that nurture had a very small role to play in a person being deeply religious or an atheist. That meant that it must be something very deep in our human nature that makes us believe in God, even though at another level the same individual could be a highly logical, rational and a scientific person.

To say that the human brain is complex would be an understatement. What we also know is that the brain is the least understood part of the human body. A neuroscientist would be the first to tell you that we understand as much about the human brain as probably primitive cavemen understood about the human heart.

This lack of understanding about our own brains and hence our thought process reflects in the literature I have studied of anthropologists, evolutionary biologists and neuroscientists. None of them claims to definitively know why human beings invented the concept of God and find the need to believe in Him. The prevalent speculation amongst scientists is a follows.

Somewhere along the road to our evolution as modern humans, our brains developed the capability to believe in multiple concepts at the same time, even if some of those concepts were contradictory. These concepts do not just apply to the concept of God, but to almost any human endeavor one can think of. For example most of us abhor violence, but yet we can justify killing when one tribe wages war on another. One may be unable to cut the neck of a chicken, and yet be able to eat chicken fry at the dinner table.

Clearly being able to believe in contradictory things simultaneously had an evolutionary advantage, because all humans alive today have this ability. Thus a primitive farmer may pray to the fertility goddess for a good crop and believe that only her blessings would ensure a good harvest. Yet at the same time the farmer also knows that he has to water his fields to ensure that the crop grows. Just praying to the goddess would not help.

This still does not explain why human beings needed to invent God in the first place. My theory is that as human brains evolved, and they were able to piece together more and more complex logic, they figured out many cause-and-effect sequences that affected their lives. The farmer figured out that seeds are what grow into plants, hence he has to sow seeds in order to get crops. The farmer also figured out that plants need water and nutrients to grow, which he would have to provide in his farms.

Yet there were many events in the early human beings’ lives which would have seemed completely random. These events for which he could not figure out the cause-and-effect sequence also affected his life. A locust plague would ruin his crops and threaten the survival of his family. A flood could end everything in his life. To cope with these uncertainties which he could neither explain nor control, he invented an all-powerful God whom he chose to appease and hence indirectly control his destiny.

This is where being able to believe in contradictory concepts at the same time helps. If one is to believe in God who can do anything, then why not ask the God to sow the seeds and water the farms? Why do the backbreaking work when the almighty can do it for you? Obviously if humans didn’t have the ability to believe in contradictory concepts at the same time, then the moment they invented God they would have stopped working and hence perished.

Things have not changed in the modern world. There are many more things we understand today than our primitive ancestors. There are many more cause-and-effect chain of events we can explain scientifically. We can explain and even predict a locust plague or floods. However the more complex our lives have gotten, we have created newer uncertainties which affect us just critically as the primitive farmer.

We are just as afraid of being randomly struck down by an accident or contracting cancer. We are equally afraid of our livelihood today. Who knows when one might get fired from his or her job? The amount of uncertainty has not decreased in our lives and I can fully understand why modern humans would take refuge in the certainty of belief in God.

So that explains why highly scientific, logical and successful friends of mine are deeply religious. Where does that leave me however? I wish I could say that I don’t have any uncertainties in my life, but that is not true. I have just as many imponderables in my life that could affect me negatively as the next person. So why don’t I feel the overwhelming need to take solace in God and religion? Why do I and atheists like me stubbornly refuse to believe in God and stick to science only.

I asked myself the question – is science exactly the same thing to me as religion is to a believer? Just like every other human being, surely I must also be having the need to insulate myself from inexplicable uncertainties of life exactly the same way as my believer friends. Is it that I am also a believer? Is it that I have fulfilled my need to believe by merely replacing religion with science?

That can’t be true. The science that we know today cannot explain everything. It does not even claim to know everything. My religious friends believe in science just as much as I do. Religion to these friends of mine is in addition to science. Religion fills up the spaces left empty by science.

That is the fundamental difference between science and religion – any religion. Flowing from the concept of an omnipotent God (or multiple Gods depending on whether it is a monotheist or polytheist religion), is the corollary that religion can explain everything. Religion can explain every event in the universe, whether it is a personal tragedy or an exotic question like ‘how did this universe begin and who created it’? It is not just religion can, but religion has to be able to explain everything and hence know everything that happens in this universe, otherwise God has no raison d'être.

Science on the other hand is very comfortable with the notion that it knows and can explain only a certain fraction of the observed phenomena in this universe. It is an ever expanding cloud of knowledge as humans learn more, but that cloud is limited in its coverage which does not encompass every observed phenomenon. Science goes one step further and says that all that it knows till date is tentative in nature and could be all wrong or subject to revision, if in future evidence or theory is found that contradicts current knowledge of science. Scientific ethos is not just comfortable with this admission of partial knowledge but actually thrives in it. Scientists work with more enthusiasm and gusto when new unexplained phenomena are discovered.

In contrast to the admission of the tentative nature of all science’s knowledge, religion by definition needs to proclaim its knowledge as absolute and certain. The very basis of religion is that its knowledge is immutable.

In my mind, mirroring this fundamental difference between religion and science is the difference between atheists and people who are believers. A believer feels the compelling need to be able to explain each and every observed event and phenomenon both in his or her personal life as well as in the broader universe. What can be explained rationally or scientifically is accepted by the believer as such. Whatever cannot be explained by science, the believer takes solace in the explanation provided by religion or God.

The Atheist on the other hand is perfectly comfortable if a lot of events and phenomenon in his or her personal life as well in this universe remain unexplained. The atheist would accept such unexplained events as either random which don’t need an explanation or such phenomenon being beyond the knowledge of humans yet, which may be explainable in the future with increased knowledge. In either case those unexplained and uncertain events do not disturb them mentally.

This does not mean that every atheist is burning with scientific temper and hence making an endeavor to explain those events rationally. All it means is that they do not need to take refuge or solace in other explanations. In fact we need to separate out the question of scientific temper from atheism altogether. There are many scientists who are believers and by the same token there are many atheist who couldn’t be bothered with science, they just accept unexplained phenomenon as it is.