Volume-1: Belief in God's Existence

For a very long time now, the question of belief in God’s existence has troubled me. It continues to do so. I still don’t have an adequate and sufficiently-satisfying answer. But through this essay, I hope to at least clarify to myself what my own questions are, even if I don’t have an answer to those questions.

Most people would like to answer the question—“do you believe in God’s existence?”—with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ or, at best, an ‘I don’t know’ answer. But unfortunately, I don’t enjoy that luxury, simply because I don’t even understand the question. If someone were to ask you “do you zxdfwe in woeruio cnmpiothsd?,” what would you answer? Would you say yes or a no? Would you even say ‘I don’t know’? No, you wouldn’t. That’s because you don’t even understand the question. That’s been my problem too. The question about belief in God’s existence is nonsensical to me. By the way, that’s not to say that it is nonsense…nonsensical is different from nonsense.

Let’s explore this further question of “do you believe in God’s existence?” by breaking it into my three unknowns—‘belief’, ‘God’, and, the most confusing one of all, ‘existence’, and talking about each one of those unknowns starting with ‘belief’.

So, now, what is belief? Does anyone really know what it is? If I pick up a red shirt and claim that I believe it to be a yellow shirt, is that valid? If not, then does that mean that there can be both valid beliefs and invalid beliefs? In which case, must we change the question to “do you validly believe in God’s existence?”? But what if, either due to a deranged mind or bad eyesight, I truly see the red shirt as being yellow in color? In that case, is my belief that it’s a yellow shirt valid?

This last line of thinking is approaching the concept of truth and whether it can be absolute or is it relativistic, which is a topic for a subsequent musings volume, and so will leave it at that for now and come back to the basic belief system.

All of us have hundreds of thousands of beliefs. I believe that my son’s name is Akhil; that my house is built of brick and cement; that I am typing this document on a flight; etc. You believe that Armstrong landed on moon (at least most of us do). You also believe that there are those that believe he didn’t. As you can see, our beliefs can vary from something as simple as 1+1=2 to a more complex and esoteric one such as God’s existence. How are beliefs formed? What is the source of those beliefs?

Our most immediate source of belief is our memory. Think about it for a minute. It’s pretty amazing. Every single belief we hold is from our memory. Actually, it’s not that amazing because it’s by definition, right? Everything from the time of our birth to the millisecond before now is defined as memory; so what else would we expect? But the question is, how do beliefs get created in memory? It is as a result of our senses. Information gets sensed by our senses, and that information is stored into our memory, which becomes a belief.

First, let’s talk about memory. How do you know that memory is ever reliable? Note that the question is not if the memory is always reliable; we all know that memory fails us from time to time. The question is even more extreme—how do you know that memory is reliable at all? Can you construct an experiment to show that memory is reliable even just once?

The first time I thought about it, I must admit I was pretty dumbstruck. How do you prove—just once—that memory is reliable? My first response was a dialogue along the following lines (between a Skeptic who believes that memory can never be reliable and me [

I

], who is exploring this question for the first time):

Skeptic : Show me that memory is reliable even just once.

I

: Ok, how about this? I’ll write the number ‘5’ in this notebook here. Two seconds later, I’ll remember I wrote down ‘5’. Simple, right? Ok, here we go. I am writing the numeral ‘5’ in this notebook. I am closing the notebook. I’ll now pause for two seconds.

I

: Ok, I will now open the notebook and you will see a numeral ‘5’ here. Voila!! Here’s the numeral ‘5’ that I’d said would be here.

Skeptic : But when did you say there would be the numeral ‘5’ in the notebook?

I

: Just now; just before I opened the notebook.

Skeptic : How do you know that?

I

: What do you mean how I know that? You were there. It happened a second ago.

Skeptic : But again, how do you know?

I: We both remember it. Don’t you?

Skeptic : But you are recalling something that happened a second back, which means you are using your memory, which is what you set out to prove to begin with. You can’t use memory to prove that memory works. You have to prove it independent of memory. Can you do it?

As we can see, experiments along these lines are defeated from the get-go, because we have to rely on memory to conduct one and in doing so are using the very thing we are trying to prove is accurate. Can we ever independently prove that memory is at all reliable?

Let’s pause here and move to the senses. How do we know our senses are ever reliable? Again, note that I am not asking if senses are always reliable, for which the answer is a ‘no’. I am asking if senses can ever be trusted. How can you prove it? Can you prove that you can rely on senses without relying on your senses during the proof? I.e., an independent verification?

Again, the answer is a no. You cannot prove your senses without somehow using senses and memory in that process, both of which are unacceptable as that’s what you set out to prove to begin with.

Let’s now take a different tack. How does science progress? Someone uses current data and proposes a theorem. If that theorem holds true under examination using currently available data, then that theorem is declared to be true. This remains so until one of two things happen: either we get new data that renders the old theorem to be untrue or at least puts in questionable light; OR we get a new theory that holds true under examination with current data, and this new theorem is in conflict with the old one.

Sounds familiar, obvious, and logical, right? So, let me now propose something drastic.

Remember all those beliefs you have about when you were born, to whom, you falling down the stairs, big bang, universe being about 14 billions years, dinosaurs roaming the earth 65 million year ago, etc.? These beliefs are a result of the theories that stand true in light of existing data such as birth certificates, pictures, accelerating distances between galaxies, microwave radiation with varying densities in different parts of the universe, meteorite explosion, etc. Now, what if I take all of that existing data points, and propose a theory that will stand the scrutiny of examination using that existing data?

Here goes: I propose that this entire universe, everything from the mole on your arm, to the ravines, to the dried-out river beds, to the dinosaur fossils, to the microwave radiation in the universe, to your memories, to your diaries, to your birth certificate—everything that you see was all formed, oh, say, about ten seconds back.

So, you on one hand hold the theory that the universe was created 14 billion years back and that you were born x years back. And I am saying that’s all a lie. I am saying that we were all formed literally as we see it about ten seconds back. Can you disprove my theorem? How can you? Anything you can point to, I’ll simply say it was created as such to give you the illusion that we are all older than 10 seconds, but that’s not true. Everything you see (or you think you see) was created exactly as-is about 10 seconds back.

Now, we have a problem. We have two theories that are at conflict with each other. If you try to prove the veracity of one versus the other using existing data, you’ll get nowhere, as both theories can accommodate existing data. So, per science, what are you supposed to do when you have conflicting theories that are both equally supported by existing data? You are supposed to suspend belief until you find some loophole in one of the theories or you come up with new data that convinces you to choose one of the theorems.

There are other variations of this alternate world-view model. One other example, and something that exists in a different form in the Vedic literature, is that nothing exists in this whole world as you think it does. It’s all Maya. Another example is that everything that you think exists is only part of a dream that an alien has induced in you. The alien has trapped a number of beings including you and has induced all these dreams in you (a la Matrix). How can you counter these theories? Every piece of existing data can be explained in this alternate model as well.

Does this mean we suspend everything we believe in? Where does this sort of skeptic argument leave us and our collective beliefs? One author had a non-conclusive, but nonetheless convenient, solution. The author came up with this ‘law of conservation of beliefs’, by which he says we should continue to hold on to those of our current beliefs that are fundamental and strong and intuitive and only give it up in the face of positive contrarian evidence. Pretty cool actually. It’ll solve the dilemma we were facing above. We can continue to believe in big bang and other things as long as someone doesn’t come up with positive proof that we were all created 10 seconds back. So, essentially, we put the burden of proof on the contrarian. But as I said it’s convenient, but not fully convincing.

[I want to acknowledge that the above spiel on the belief system was heavily influenced by many books, one of which was one of those 'Idiot Series' books, which I can't quite recollect.]

We’ll leave beliefs now and go to my next unknown, God.

As far as definitions go, God is probably the easiest of the three unknowns in the original question. Let’s use a definition that’s universally accepted: God is an omnipotent (all-powerful), omniscient (all-knowing), omnipresent (present everywhere, both in terms of space and time), and all-moral (all-good) entity. I don’t think any standard God-believing person will disagree with the terms used. They might add more, but wouldn’t necessarily take away any of these terms. [Even if we remove the "all-good" attribute from God as some believe that pagan and other early religions claimed a vengeful God, the following argument's crux remains the same.]

But although the definition itself is simple enough, the question is does anyone really grasp the true meaning of such an entity? I don’t think so. If one truly grasps the full, entire, and true meaning and enormity of that God, they wouldn’t be reading this article. Just meditate on the above definition for a few minutes. Stop reading, close your eyes, and mediate on the question. Do we truly understand what it means for an entity to be present everywhere in the entire time-space continuum? What is the nature of such presence? And how about omniscience? The magnitude of such an entity is just beyond the comprehension of man.

And finally, existence. What is existence? Normally, existence means something is present in the ‘real’ world. I say ‘real’ because if something is a figment of my imagination, like the house that I want to build, we would typically say that it does not exist (meaning that it does not exist in this ‘real’ world, but only in my dreams). But is the same thing applicable to God? Clearly not. God, by the very definition of omnipresence, exists in the real world, in our imaginations, the so-called (by Hindu philosophy) seven levels of consciousness and in the seven sub-levels in each of those levels, and every where in between. He exists in each electron of matter and anti-matter, in every dimension of the Universe, and every conceivable place and beyond. How can God exist in the Universe, when he created it to begin with? Can God exist when He created existence itself? That is to say, can He exist as we typically understand existence to be? Do we really know and grasp the entire meaning of existing here, there, and everywhere? What is the true nature of such existence?

Pause. Pause for ten seconds. Meditate on the magnitude of such an existence. Now, do you still understand the enormity of the nature of such existence? Absolutely not. At least, I can’t. I’d love for someone to explain it all to me. We can’t even begin to fathom the immenseness of such a God’s existence. How can He be everywhere and nowhere? In what form? Every form and no form! What does that mean? We don’t know. How does He do it? We don’t know. Let’s face it – we are clearly not equipped to grasp the fullness of such an existence. We simply don’t understand enough of what it means for God to exist.

So, what do we have now? We have a shaky and doubtful belief system. We have a vague notion of the human definition of God, but don’t understand Him. And we have no clue about the nature of existence, let alone understanding it. And yet, we continue to debate and talk about whether or not we believe God exists. We can’t even understand the question properly, so how in the world are people going about giving yes/no/maybe answers to that question?

I say my position is very simply and straightforward: I can’t fathom the magnitude of God and His existence and so I don’t fully understand the question. And so, when someone asks me if “I believe in God’s existence,” my response is “I don’t even understand the question, let alone give you an answer.”