The Death of God

Is God dead?

This is a question that I have been thinking about for almost ten years now, and especially so in the last four years. I think that the main reason why I found this question so attractive in the first place was the fact that it smacks of the paradoxical. If the word ‘God’ is defined as ‘that eternal reality which cannot die’, then the question becomes ‘Has that reality which cannot die indeed suffered death?’, and with my personal fascination for paradoxical statements I often caught myself mulling over this one. Over the years, I began to realise that there is no universal consensus not only on how the divine is to be conceptualised but also on the question of how the very term ‘God’ should be defined. That is, to a Muslim the word ‘God’ refers to a Personal reality who is all-Compassionate and to whom the entire creation must bow down with an attitude of loving adoration, to an Advaitin Hindu ‘God’ is at best a concession to the ignorant minds of unenlightened human beings, and to a Buddhist ‘God’ is simply one more finite being trapped within the miserable cycle of rebirth. Most of these ‘established’ religions also fall into one or the other of a variety of –isms : if you are a pantheist, ‘God’ is ultimately this very world in some form or the other, if you are a monist, the ultimate reality is One in a manner that is ineffable, and if you are a theist, there is a supreme Person who lovingly condescends to the depths of the human condition.

Consequently, the question ‘Does God exist?’ over which rivers of ink have been spilled is an extremely problematical question. It is so because the person who asks this question (usually) assumes that s/he and the person to whom it is put are referring to the same entity by the word ‘God’. For example, both a Jew and a scientist may agree that ‘God’ does exist, but whereas for the former the term ‘God’ refers to the personal Lord of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, for the latter ‘God’ is simply the ordered and harmonious functioning of the universe. Therefore, though the Jew and the scientist (apparently) agree with each other, this agreement is a superficial one : it does not address the more critical issue of what precisely they mean by the term ‘God’. In other words, the innocent-looking question ‘Does God exist?’ is potentially misleading unless it is put in this form, ‘What do you mean the term ‘God’?’ I have taken the example of a Jew and a scientist for this precise reason that Einstein was such a scientist who, though he was Jewish, did not believe in God as the personal Lord of Israel : for him, ‘God’ was just a name given to the never-failing harmony of the cosmos ruled by universal laws. Therefore both Einstein and an ‘orthodox’ Jew can agree that ‘God’ exists and yet disagree radically over what the term ‘God’ refers to.

Nevertheless, to make the discussion more specific let us define the term ‘God’ to mean : ‘a Personal reality who has created the world, sustains it at every moment of its existence, wishes to enter into a personal relationship with the different beings that constitute it and draws these beings towards the final goal of communion with Him/Herself.’

Is this God dead in today’s world?

A proper and exhaustive reply to such a question would demand volumes in paper, reviewing all the possible answers that have been given to it. Though such is not my intent here, I shall briefly consider three of the usual objections.


Objection 1 : ‘Science has disproved God’.

People who put forward this argument are usually suffering from a bad bout of intellectual laziness. This argument assumes that human beings have arrived at a universal consensus not only over what ‘science’ is but also over the process through which science ‘proves/disproves’ the existence of certain realities. (That is, it is much easier to claim that we have been blessed with the touchstone of the ‘scientific method’ than to actually describe how this method operates.) True, science has disproved the existence of unicorns but when it comes to terms such as ‘God’ it is simply quite out of its league. It is often forgotten in this connection that there is a crucial distinction that must be made between ‘science’ and ‘scientism’. The former may be defined as : ‘a tool which helps us to build up, piece-by-piece, through a processual investigation, a coherent picture of the world from the smaller bits of information that we have painstakingly garnered from controlled experiments conducted under specific conditions’. This is quite a ‘weak’ claim, and since the term ‘God’ does not refer to a reality on which human beings can experiment ‘science’ must simply remain silent on this matter, claiming neither that it has ‘proved’ (or can ‘prove’) God’s existence nor that it has ‘disproved’ God’s existence. This is a healthy agnosticism that accepts the limitations of ‘science’ as a cognitive tool and makes no rash extrapolations beyond its restricted field. ‘Scientism’, however, makes a much ‘stronger’ claim : ‘this tool called science is the only one that gives us a privileged access onto reality, and all other world-views that espouse other tools must be declared to be deviant, delinquent, archaic, mediaeval, reactionary, anti-humanistic, anti-progressive and superstitious’.

The basic question, however, is this : ‘Can scientism give a non-circular argument in its favour?’ In other words, if someone has not already accepted ‘scientism’ how would s/he know that ‘scientism’ is the only doorway to reality? Take a parallel case, the famous example of the ‘positivist’ dictum : ‘Do not accept anything that is not verifiable empirically.’ It sounds like good advice, and indeed it is in most cases, but trouble starts brewing when we ask : ‘Why should we accept this dictum since this dictum itself is not empirically verifiable?’‘Scientism’ has a similar problem of ‘justifiying’ itself. In other words, ‘scientism’ is what can only be called a ‘faith’, meaning by ‘faith’ not a ‘blind acceptance of anything that goes’ but a ‘a certain perspective through which a human being looks out into the world’. That is, ‘scientism’ is logically on the same level as any other faith which proclaims that it possesses the only correct perspective on the world, whatever this faith may be, Islam, Marxism, eco-feminism, Mormonism, Jainism, atheism and so on.

Of course, what I have said just now would be anathema to all proponents of ‘scientism’ especially because they want to claim that their ‘scientism’ is not a faith like the world-religions like Christianity and world-views like Marxism. There is, however, no easy way out of wriggling out of the conclusion that ‘scientism’ is indeed in the same boat with all other faiths. This does not in itself mean that we must reject ‘scientism’ (any more than we should reject the other faiths), only that ‘scientism’ cannot claim any immunity for itself with a ‘holier than thou’ attitude towards the other faiths.

In other words, we may, if we want to, say that ‘Scientism has disproved God’ but to say this is not to make a ‘scientific’ statement, it is to make a ‘faith-declaration’. Once again, there is nothing wrong with making such declarations, but what must be understood clearly that is that there is nothing ‘scientific’ about the above claim.

Objection 2: ‘God is an invention of psychologically weak people.’

Next, this argument makes an unwarranted leap from psychology to what may be called ‘ontology’, that is, to what really exists. The basic question in this context is not whether people who pray to God are psychologically weak (or strong) but whether God exists or not. Let us say that a woman prays to God only when she is distressed : this bare fact is not enough in itself to prove that God does not exist. The mere fact that a daughter goes to her mother only when she needs money does not prove that her mother does not exist. Such would be the case only if there was some independent means of proof : say, a death certificate signed by a doctor, an obituary in a newspaper and so on. (In the same way, a theist can argue that the fact that a certain woman prays to God only when she is scared of failing her exams does not prove that God does not exist : it only proves that the woman is operating with an immature understanding of God as a ‘grand mechanic’ who fiddles with the cosmic levers in a whimsical manner. Most religions such as Christianity have emphasised that there are two kinds of devotion, a lower one and a higher one. The lower type is the one in which a person prays, ‘God, grant me three cars, two sons and four hotels’, the higher is the one characterised by the prayer, ‘Not my will but Thy will shall be done.’)

However, let us accept for a moment the claim that people who do not believe in God are indeed those who are psychologically strong. Apart from the fact that this statement assumes too naively that psychologists have come to the final consensus on how to ‘measure’ psychological strength or weakness, one might want to know if what is being declared here is an equation of ‘truth’ with ‘psychological strength’. That is, is it a fact that whatever is stated by people who are psychologically ‘strong’ becomes through that mere connection something that must be certified as ‘true’? (Moreover, who are the psychologically ‘strong’ here? Even if we accept that atheists are psychologically ‘strong’, who exactly are the atheists that we are talking about? An American university professor and a Russian communist may both be atheists, but the latter can have serious doubts about the psychological ‘strength’ of the former.)

Though we must indeed accept that people who make true statements are usually not those who are on the verge of a nervous breakdown, to make such a straightforward equation is to overlook the fact that some of the greatest mistakes (such as the acceptance of the heliocentric theory, the phlogiston theory and so on) have been made by both psychologically ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ people. In short, then, the mere statement of psychological ‘strength’ or ‘weakness’ is not enough in itself to prove or disprove the existence of anything. (Besides, what about those painters, poets, writers and so on who were reviled as mad during their life-times? Does their lack of psychological ‘strength’ invalidate their claims about the nature of reality? Indeed, the study of the history of science will show that the very progress of science has depended on the ‘madness’ of some of its foundational figures. The proponent of ‘scientism’ may retort that this is ‘madness for a higher cause’, but this will be paralleled at once by the theist who will argue that the mystic too has a ‘madness for the highest cause of God.’ That is, the debate is not any more over sanity or insanity but over what ‘reality’ is fundamentally like.)

There is one further weakness with this argument : it can be turned around on the proponent of ‘scientism’ by the theist. Let us allow the theist to put forward the following case : ‘It is you, the proponent of ‘scientism’, who is bent on remaining psychologically ‘weak’. This is because true psychological ‘strength’ lies in expanding, training, refining and developing the capacities of the mind to such an extent that the mind becomes more and more receptive to supra-empirical reality. By assuming right at the beginning that such a reality cannot exist in principle you are simply blocking yourself off from the possibility of attaining the most fulfilling truth that liberates human existence in all its dimensions.’

In other words, the question is not that of who is psychologically strong or weak but that of whether or not there is in fact such a supra-empirical reality. If there indeed is such a reality, it will be the proponent of ‘scientism’ who is psychologically weak in not being able to develop his/her mind to ‘tune into’ into that reality, but if it is the other way round, then indeed it is the theist who is psychologically weak by believing in things that do not exist.

Take for example the celebrated arguments put forward by Freud which might be paraphrased thus : ‘Human beings need God because the notion of God gives them mental strength. Such people are afraid to step out into the ‘real world’ and to live in the harshness of that non-divine world where there is no such entity.’

Implicit in such arguments is the massive assumption that the proponent of ‘scientism’ has actually come to the final truth of what the ‘real world’ is. That nothing of this sort has happened can be seen simply by considering this fact : a Neo-Darwinian in Oxford, a post-modernist in California, a Marxist in Vienna, a Freudian in London and a capitalist in Canada may all be proponents of ‘scientism’ but they will have virtually insurmountable disagreements with one other regarding what the ‘real world’ is. If indeed that is the case, it is far from being a settled matter that the proponents of ‘scientism’ have given the final verdict on the nature of ultimate reality.

In any case, as I have shown above, ‘scientism’ cannot have a non-circular ‘proof’ to defend itself : the proponent can merely say, ‘Scientism is the only avenue to reality because there can be no other avenue.’ Or to put it more bluntly, ‘Scientism is the final truth because I say so.’ In other words, for such a proponent it is not even a matter of ‘proof’ that the term ‘God’ does not refer to a substantial reality; God is not allowed to exist by the very definition of the term.

A final comment in this regard. Most people who put forward this argument assume that the following two things are mutually exclusive : on the one hand, the fact that X exists and on the other hand, the fact that I derive psychological strength from the existence of X. In other words, they jump from the fact that the notion of God makes me feel psychologically healthy to the claim that therefore God cannot exist. This does not follow, however. If I feel psychologically happy in the company of my friend John, this psychological state in itself does not disprove John’s non-existence. One would have to appeal to some independent means of proving that the man called John in fact does not exist and is a mere figment of my imagination. Similarly, the theist can offer the following reply, ‘Of course, my belief in God gives me psychological strength. Why should this not be the case if God indeed is the ultimate reality? But this psychological stability does not disprove the divine existence any more than the psychological confidence that I obtain from the laws of my country proves that these laws do not exist.’

Now the proponent of ‘scientism’ can put forward this argument against the theist : ‘That may be the case, but I can prove that the laws of your country exist in a way that you cannot prove that your God exists.’ This is a completely valid argument and to reply to it the theist will need adequate reasons to justify his/her belief in God : I shall return to this point later. What I wish to emphasise at this point is simply the fact that psychological states of ‘strength’ or ‘weakness’ are not conclusive proofs to the effect that a certain entity does or does not exist.

Objection 3 : ‘Science will one day disprove God’s existence’

Carrying over from the previous two objections, we can now see that this objection should properly be re-stated as, ‘Scientism will one day disprove God’s existence’. Now put in this manner this sounds even more like a ‘faith-declaration’. Compare it to two other equally well-known faith-declarations, one of Christianity and the other of Marxism : ‘In the last day, God will be all and all’ and ‘In the future, the state will wither away and human relationships will become transparent’ respectively. In other words, like all other faiths, ‘scientism’ too makes ‘predictions’ about the future and puts forward its distinctive vision of the ‘final destiny’ of human beings. Once again, there is nothing wrong with all that, so long as it is remembered that, like other faiths, ‘scientism’ too is a faith which has a specific view of the future.

However, how ‘justified’ is ‘scientism’ in making that claim?

A lot depends on what is meant by the term ‘God’ here. Most people who seem to believe that ‘God’ will be dead in another fifty years of ‘scientific’ research seem to mean by this term something of this sort : ‘a finite reality who is sitting in the heavens up-there, who can be located within a definite spatio-temporal zone, a grand old Father with a white beard, and who now and then pleases human beings with nice goodies when He is sufficiently placated.’

There is only one problem, however, with this description : the serious enquirer into this matter would be hard-pressed to find any major theologian, whether s/he is Christian, (Vedantic) Hindu, Jewish or Muslim, who would agree with it. In other words, none of these faiths teaches that God is a finite entity who is localisable in space and time in the manner in which we say, ‘The sky is above my head’ or ‘I am drinking my tea now.’ That is, our usual vocabulary of space and time does not apply to the reality of God, and to claim that ‘science’, that is, that dimension of human knowledge that deals only with objects within space and time, can disprove the existence of something not within these limits is to make a claim that is grossly illogical. (The cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin is said to have made the declaration, ‘When I went up to space, I did not find God there. Hence God does not exist.’ This simply shows Marxist naivety at its worst : as I have said above, no major theologian has ever claimed that God is a finite object ‘sitting up there in the sky’. In this particular case, it is not Gagarin but the theologian who will have the last laugh at his lack of ‘translation’ skills.)

It would seem, however, that there is one way out for the proponent of ‘scientism’ who could claim : ‘Anything that is not within the limits of space and time does not exist.’

Induced to put forward this proposition, the proponent shows all too clearly the faith-nature of his/her claim. The above statement is brought forward in the manner of an axiom : but how indeed would we prove this axiom to be ‘true’? That is, it is one thing to say, ‘About things outside space and time I know nothing of and I chose to keep my mouth shut’ (this, in effect, was the Buddha’s position on such matters with the crucial exception of the state of Nirvana) but quite another to say, ‘By using science which deals with things within space and time I have proved that things outside space and time cannot exist’. The former is simply a claim based on (learned) ignorance, the latter is one that attempts in vain to cross the boundaries of its own discipline.

In other words, it is not a matter of time (another fifty years?) before God is dead, as so many people seem to believe. If God is an extra-spatio-temporal being, we may refuse to accept the possibility of such a mode of existence, but in no case can we claim that ‘science’ has actually disproved the existence such a reality for as we have seen above ‘science’, by definition, deals only with objects within space and time. (The case would be similar to that of a fish-scientist who might claim that because every fish lives in water, there can be no extra-aqueous reality. The fish-scientist should properly say, ‘There can be no extra-aqueous entity that is fish-like’ and not, ‘Since everything around me is fish-like, this in itself proves that there can be nothing that is non-fish-like.’ In the latter case, the fish-scientist is merely suffering from a piscean myopia.)

It is now time to make some summary comments on this interchange of views. First, the discerning reader will have noted that the main thrust of this essay is not to ‘prove’ or ‘disprove’ the existence of God. If anything, it has tried to show that there are major obstacles to be crossed even before such an attempt can be made. Second, it has insisted that there are no non-circular ‘scientific’ arguments to the extent that God cannot exist. That is, many arguments which are put forward in the intellectual bazaar as ‘scientific’ happen to accept the axiom that an extra-spatio-temporal entity cannot exist in principle, but someone who does not accept this axiom need not accept the conclusions that the proponent of ‘scientism’ arrives at. The proponent of course very cleverly disguises the axiomatic nature of this claim by hiding behind the protective smoke-screen of ‘science’ and by stating that ‘scientism’ is ‘self-evident’, ‘universally valid’ and ‘rationally perspicacious’. That is, by appealing to the authority of ‘science’, which is an authority that most people in our generation accept almost unthinkingly, the proponent of ‘scientism’ seeks, under its aegis, to make the unwarranted leap from ‘science’ to the axiom that ‘science is the only avenue into reality’. As I have emphasised above, anyone who does not accept this axiom is entirely free to reject the conclusions that the proponent of ‘scientism’ claims to have arrived at in a ‘scientific’ manner.

Thirdly, however, let me draw attention to some of the formidable problems facing the theist. So far, I have been trying to show that though ‘scientism’ has attained a near cult-status for the proverbial ‘man in the street’ by employing various kinds of intellectually dishonest means (such as the propaganda through the media that ‘God is dead’), it is not enough for the theist to expose the fundamental circularity of this allegedly ‘scientific’ position. (That is, to put it in a very terse form, ‘scientism’ cannot prove itself to be ‘scientific’.) In other words, the arguments have been of a (formally) negative nature so far : but now the theist will have to press on with some positive arguments as to why someone should accept the existence of God. This is a task which I do not intend to carry on here but make the following two points.

Firstly, it is not sufficient to have cleared the ground of simplistic ‘scientistic’ arguments for one will have to move beyond the logical possibility that an extra-spatio-temporal entity can exist to the positive claim that such an entity does exist. To this effect, one can appeal to the various kinds of experiences that human beings have reported of having been ‘in touch’ with such an entity down the centuries. The usual reply to such experiences is, ‘Such experiences cannot take place in principle.’ As it must be clear by now, this reply ultimately stems from the stance of ‘scientism’ that I have outlined above, a stance which rules out from the very beginning the existence of anything that is not confined to space and time. However, if someone, like the theist, does not accept the axiom that everything that exists is necessarily spatio-temporal there is no logical reason why such experiences must be rejected out of hand.

Secondly, one will have to move on to the ‘bolder’ claim that not only such an entity exists but that this entity has indeed, on its own wish, initiated a process of inter-personal communication with humanity. Here we are finally on distinctively ‘religious’ terrain : here ‘logical proof’ must flow into what is called ‘faith’. The latter must not be misunderstood as the ‘blind acceptance of what does not exist’ (this is the definition of ‘faith’ in the cheap propaganda of ‘scientism’ which wilfully refuses to accept that it itself is a faith), but as the ‘vision of the flickering lights giving a sense of direction towards the goal that lies ahead, though the actual path to be traversed remains largely unknown’. With the latter definition of ‘faith’ (and I have tried to show that ‘scientism’ too is a faith in this sense) the theist can move ahead on the way with the faith that the extra-spatio-temporal reality has indeed sent out an ‘offer’ to enter into some kind of ‘communion’ with it, though the exact nature of this ‘offer’ and the ‘communion’ will be understood in distinctive ways by the follower of Islam, Christianity, devotional Hinduism and Judaism. Why these different religious systems understand these basic issues in diverse ways is of course a crucial matter for another discussion, but this diversity does not affect the basic point I am making here : it is not the case that ‘faith’ is the ‘attitude of illiterate, reality-scared, demented, psychotic, and superstitious people’ for there are valid grounds on which such ‘faith’ is based.

Let me therefore end with a discussion two of these ‘valid grounds’. Firstly, there are no logically convincing reasons why an extra-spatio-temporal being cannot exist in principle. This is the ‘negative’ thrust of the argument. Secondly, all world-views depend on certain axioms on which they are based and this applies to as diverse systems as ‘scientism’, Marxism, Islam, atheism, Mormonism, ‘liberalism’, Satanism, Keynesianism, and so on. To take up the case of Marxism, for example, one does not become a Marxist at one stroke and on ‘one fine morning’. One first starts with a somewhat hazy understanding of the axioms of Marxism, for example, the law of dialectical materialism. Only gradually over a period of a few years does one learn to look at the world through the ‘spectacles’ of this law, and to see this law being able to describe ‘reality’ as seen by him/her. That is, there is a spiralling process of interaction between a set of axioms and the world-view which is founded on it. This applies to all world-views, and the (sometimes painstaking) process of accepting any of these world-views starts with the ‘faith’ in the foundational axioms (‘faith’ being understood as I have defined it above). Now it is crucial to note that the theist too is operating on similar principles. S/he starts with the basic axiom, ‘ An extra-spatio-temporal being can exist’ and then goes ahead to see the ‘world’ more and more in terms of this axiom. There is nothing ‘irrational’ or ‘illogical’ about this because this is precisely the manner in which the proponents of ‘scientism’, Marxism, atheism, ‘humanism’, ‘secularism’ and so on too come to see the ‘world’.

To conclude then, in the debate over God/not-God two regulative points must be operative throughout. Firstly, everyone involved in it must be aware of the fundamentally axiomatic nature of his/her world-view. The proponent of ‘scientism’, for example, must not be allowed to get away with the ‘holier-than-thou’ claim that s/he offers a ‘view from nowhere’ that is non-axiomatic and that can be (indeed, must be) accepted by all ‘rational’ people. Secondly, this debate is not one of seeking ‘knock-down proofs’ for either theism or atheism because I have shown above both the atheist and the theist come to their distinctive world-views in logically the same manner, and the discussion is consequently centred not around the ‘crusading’ notion of ‘the champions of modern rationality battling against the tribes of primitive superstition’ but over diverging fundamental axioms. For the proponent of ‘scientism’ who merely states that no supra-spatio-temporal entity can exist without giving further arguments as to why one should accept this axiom, his/her case does not even get off the ground. The same applies, incidentally, to the theist who simply repeats that such an entity may exist without being able to provide any positive arguments to support this axiom. Thirdly, to carry on from the second point, the notion of the antagonistic polarisation between science as ‘rational’ and religion as ‘irrational’ must be given up, for the betterment of both ‘science’ and ‘religion’. Only in this way can people realise both that ‘religion’ has a distinctive perspective onto reality (though this does not mean that they have to become ‘religious’ or that ‘religion’ is the only perspective) and that a ‘science’ that has arrived at the horizons of its conceptual limitations is one that remains vigorous through its involvement with the basic question, ‘Why does anything exist at all?’