Dr Nick Read

A Question of Faith

There is so much we do not know.  There is so much we take for granted.  There is so much that we think we know but we cannot prove.   How did stars form out of gases?  Where did the gases come from?  Was there really a big bang?   If so why?  Did life really start because of chemical coincidence,  a freak combination of nitrogen, hydrogen and carbon in a cooling world?  Did these chemicals arrange themselves to create molecules that could replicate themselves and encode for every other protein in the body?  How was the first unicellular organism created?  How did these develop into more complex organisms; plants, animals, fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals and finally man? Why is man able to reflect on things and create meaning? How can such phenomena as thought transference, dreams, synchronicity and distance healing be explained?    

Cosmology and evolution seem so far- fetched; a series of lucky accidents.  Left to itself, matter tends to disintegrate by processes of inertia and decay. So why doesn’t it?  For most of the world’s population, the answer is simple. God created the world and everything in it.  And he created man in his own image. 

Yoga, while believing in a super-intelligent design, is not against evolution or science or psychology.  All are  part of the divine plan. Everything that we perceive to exist contains the essence of the divine, the vibration in stones, the way a plant bends towards the light, the way a beautiful lotus flower will blossom in the mire. Divinity, it asserts, pervades the whole universe from the stars to the smallest cell in our body.  God creates life out of Himself, like a divine spider weaving a world wide web.  Scientists may claim to have created life,  but they had to rely on the forces and raw materials that God provided in order to do it.     

Just as a tiny seed has the potential of a tree inside it, just as a grain of sand can be made into a silicon chip, so the potential for humanity was there from the beginning in the DNA of the smallest organism.  Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.  The human embryo starts as a simple unicellular organism and from there develops through fish stages with gill arches, amphibians, mammals and man.  The philosophy of yoga acknowledges evolution as one aspect of a divine plan that conceived humanity from the start. ‘Karma’ embraces past and future lives and the ultimate purpose of our multiple lives is to merge with this divine being.   Thus yogis believe that man’s destiny is to evolve into a state of superbeings  at one with the divine.   

But hang on a minute, belief is one thing, but when faiths apply science to support their convictions, it doesn’t quite work.  Take the inertia argument. Things only disintegrate when you don’t apply energy to them.  If you apply the enormous energies generated by the birth of stars and locked up within the universe, then synthesis is not only possible but obligatory and there are an infinite number of chemical combinations to choose from, many of which may ‘work’.  But, we might ask, where does all that energy come from?   What caused the big bang?  Or is that just another act of faith?     

And is evolution evidence of divine plan or a wonderful genetic system through which life adapts to environmental change?   Did God really look at a chimpanzee, scratch his beard and say,  ‘Hmmm, there are capabilities there’.  Would an intelligent designer have built in so much junk DNA?  And why should a race of superbeings develop?  We might equally argue that we are in danger of generating a race of sickly degenerate beings only able to exist in our artificial environment. 

Karl Popper’s dictat that we can only accept hypotheses that are capable of being disproved  indicates that the creationist’s position is, by the rules we adopt to establish our universe, antiscientific.

The other argument for the divine is collectivism. All cultures on earth; Indian Yogis, Christians, Moslems, Buddhists, the ancient Greeks as well as primitive peoples such as the aborigines, American Indians and African bushmen, have at one stage or another believed in an all powerful divine presence, who created the world, watches over it and requires appeasement.  Certain truths seem to exist in all religions;  so many people seem to have independently experienced a similar concept of divinity.  In his book, The Perennial Philosophy,  Aldous Huxley describes how leaders of religions throughout the world  claim remarkably similar expressions of the divine.  But that does not constitute evidence of the divine existence, just a collective culture of meaning.   Millions of people believed the earth was flat.  That didn’t mean it was!  We are all of us driven to find meaning in our existence and God is the simplest and mast lazy answer.  We have a template.  Weren’t our parents originally our Gods?   So is it surprising that our Gods exist in their idealised image.  Life can be so lonely without anybody powerful to look up to.         

Many would see intimations of the divine in thought transference, synchronicity, dreams, premonitions, faith healing, fate, love, but can we always be sure that there is not a more grounded explanation?   Very sensitive people can ‘read’ subliminal signals in much the same way as aboriginal trackers can read the landscape.  They are very suggestible.  People, who know each other well tune into those signals and each other and think the same thought, do the same thing.   Hope and faith alter the function of the immune system and are the essence of healing.  Dreams, as Freud commented are often wish fulfilment or the enactment of dread and we can all have an unerring tendency to bring about what we most want or fear or to re-enact the conditions of trauma.  This is not fate; it’s more about the way experience wires our nervous system.  .    

Some people even claim to have had encounters with the divine being, but there is a rational explanation for this too.   Just as traumatic events can make us ill, they can also make us cleave to the idea of redemption by divine grace, the perfect love by an all caring deity.  This desire can be so powerful, it can create delusions, even generate hallucinations.  And because there is a collective impression of God,  then these hallucinations will appear similar.

We cannot know everything, but  is that justification to invent a divinity?      

And then there’s fate.  A person’s life can tend to run according to a script.  People do tend to make the same choices, make the same mistakes.  It’s what is called character or personality.  But that  isn’t evidence for the divine, merely that our personality is forged by the influences on us early in life and given the same set of circumstances, we will make the same decisions.  Change often requires a crisis.   Yogis also do not believe that fate is ineluctable.  Man does have choice.  He can change fate, but the pull to the divine is inexorable and the path is rarely direct and may take many lifetimes. 

If there really is a God, why did he create such an imperfect world?   Yogis would say that the divine plan does not exist to give comfort to human beings.  Sometimes it is necessary to create tragedies, disasters because these manifestations of the divine will are opportunities for spiritual growth.  How many people have come to terms with the reversals in their lives by being more reflective, more spiritual?   Don’t we all need grief to appreciate joy?  Don’t we need darkness to appreciate the light.  This argument has always seemed to me somewhat contrived.

And what about emotions?  Are not love, fear, shame, remorse and guilt, manifestations of the divine?  Or can they be simply explained by neurochemistry?  I define emotion as ‘feeling put into context’.  Many feelings have a chemical signature.  Hormones, a class of chemicals named after the Greek word ‘eremonos’, literally, messengers from the Gods, are quite heavily implicated;  adrenalin – fear and anger, cortisol – depression,  thyroxine – agitation, oxytocin – love.   They help to define the subjective self and underline such phenomena as awareness, experience, memory, meaning, metaphor and attitudes.

The other area in which people perceive the existence of the divine is morals and ethics.  It is the influence of the divine grace, the religious argue, that encourages us to live a good and honourable life.  I cannot agree.  It’s not God that encourages us to be good but the mores of the community.  God, I believe, is a human projection; the embodiment of an inner authority.  If God didn’t exist, then we would have to invent him. Instead of God creating man in his own image, it seems more likely that we created God in our image? The social argument of a man made God seems very powerful to me.  Gods are necessary to provide a moral and ethical framework for communities, to provide structure and security and belief, hope and meaning.  Without the belief in God, the world could descent into chaos. To my mind, whether God exists does not exist in reality does not matter.  It’s the fact that most people believe in a divinity and that that divinity represents a moral code that is important.   

To my mind, concepts such as soul and spirit represent the meaning we ascribe to life’s deeper issues .  And  thoughts and  meanings the generated by the activation of neural networks, established by experience.   Believers state that faith is the starting point of knowledge.  No.  Imagination is.  Imagination is a predictive construct based on previous experiential associations.  Discovery favours the prepared mind.  As King Christian X of Denmark said many years ago, we console ourselves with our imaginings and delusions.  A meaningful life can be so beautiful; it doesn’t have to be divine. 

Proponents of any a belief system, whether this be a religion, a cult, psychoanalysis or aspects of neurochemistry and cosmology,  insist that we suspend and ultimately surrender disbelief for the security of faith.  It is true that for a full life, we must liberate our slavish dependence on evidence and let our imagination free in much the same way as the artist, the poet, and the composer, but that shouldn’t mean adhering  to a particular faith because we have been told to.  We are all seekers, but our quest should be generated by our own observations and meanings and not by obligations to science or God.