Atheism is not a confession; it is a state of existence – the state of total ignorance of God and his decrees. Thus many people find it surprising when they are told that the phenomenon of atheism is on the rise, not only globally, but in our valley too. They ask for statistics and survey reports, without conceding that phenomena of qualitative nature are not best described by their quantitative equivalents. Thus the brewing state of atheism among youth is too evident a fact to be ignored and our preachers have for long ignored this fact or adopted a state of deliberate ignorance against this riding tide. A reaction to atheism has indeed emerged – unfortunately a reaction and not a measured and befitting response or reply. This reaction has manifested itself in the form of Puritanism, radical piety and rootless orthodoxy. Other people, who are deeply dyed in religion have gone to the extent of saying that the challenge doesn’t even exist, but is just a hallucination of a few over anxious readers. This posture is not only hazardous to any attempt of genuine engagement with the problem, but it also prolongs and elongates the issue in the realm of ignorance. What is the challenge of atheism in nutshell and what intellectual and emotional posture best fits in response to this malady? That’s what we shall explore here.
The revolutions of Newton and Galileo in science, of Darwin and Pasteur in biology, of Freud and Adler in psychology changed the landscape of human knowledge in an unforeseeable manner. All religions had born and evolved in the Pre-Newtonian universe and had evidently used language and knowledge as it was known and employed then. As the scientific paradigm underwent a shift and new facts came to the fore, the incompatibility of religion with this newly discovered body of knowledge became evident and it came to be concluded that religion is man’s primitive and infantile affair which can’t withstand the challenges of modern science and philosophy. Thus arose an attitude of mind which worked to exorcise religion from the realm of human affairs and placed it at par with fairy tales and defined it as a story of bygone days. The philosophical ventures of Locke, Hobbes, Voltaire, Spencer, Kant and others raised issues of epistemological order which brought the axioms of religion under serious scrutiny and forced religion to either flee the ground or redefine its nature, content and conceptualisation. Religion now became an object of inquiry, discussion and analysis which had never been the case in any phase of human history or in any part of the human world. Religion has always been seen as a living force, man’s second skin, man’s way of doing life, the very ground of life. It now became an object, and not a mere object, but to use the Hegelian term an object of man’s self alienating power. From an existential fact, religion came to be reduced to an academic category, an object which man can investigate independently and in a spirit of dispassionate and scathing enquiry and criticism. This change is too humongous for a modern mind to reckon with as it brought with it challenges specific to the post-renaissance existential paradigm. Earlier man felt the need to justify and prove himself before God, to speak metaphorically. But now conditions had changed so that men felt compelled to prove the existence of God, using methods of investigation and inquiry as were prevalent in the times, which had actually no bearing on the truthfulness and the authenticity of religion. Since God was provable neither by telescopic vision nor by microscopic vision, it was decided to leave out God from the scheme of things and to be content with a self-governing universe. Out of the denial of God’s existence arose the fallacy of rejection of graded scale of knowledge and being. Traditionally, the universe was seen as a panorama of graded existence of matter, life, psyche, angels and God. But this hierarchy was destroyed at once and matter came to be seen as the alpha and omega of existence. There was no place and scope for god in this scheme of things and thus the age came to announce “Death of God”.
While science was bombarding religion with the challenge of empiricism, philosophy was taking its own twists and turns and was shrinking the field for religion. By creating mind-body dualism, Descartes bestowed upon us a problem with which we struggle even today and confined religion to the realm of the spiritual, thus creating an eclipse and split of sorts. Kant demonstrated the impossibility of religion in its true sense, deducing it to a catechism of do’s and don’ts. Hegel, in an attempt of philosophical overstretching, arrived at an image of God which was so immanent in the universe and its history that it left little scope for his transcendental independence. Then came that master of explosives whom Iqbal positively characterised as “Majzoob e firangi” i.e. Nietzsche who once for all narrowed down the width of transcendental slit to the proportions that in his aftermath hardly any light seems to pass this slit and his successors like Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, Buber, Tillich and others have all mourned the closure of this transcendental window and the imprisonment of man in one dimensional world.
The findings of sociology and anthropology have further pressed upon man that religion is nothing like a divine business but a humanly mundane affair which has emerged at a certain historical stage as an inevitable synthesis from social dialect. This notion deeply wounded the believers who held that religion wasn’t a human construction, but the result of God’s interest, intervention and partaking in human history and the collective destiny of the universe.
The way modern scholars have interpreted the results of various sciences have explicitly created a godless paradigm and God isn’t needed in any scheme, in any branch of human understanding, to use the Laplacian term which he enunciated before Napoleon. Religion exists because of God, but God doesn’t exist because of religion, for he is the ground of existence and exists independent of everything else. But with religion falling under scrutiny and losing its importance in our lives, the reality and finality of God has come not only to be doubted, but rejected altogether. To borrow a line from Richard Dawkins, God is not only unprovable but impossible too. This leap from epistemological limitation one’s own to the ontological enunciation of universal order is a mistake of colossal order, but this mistake has indeed captured the attention of large number of youth who have not only abandoned their faith in God, but are finding it increasingly difficult to find a universe compatible with the God Hypothesis.
But if God is nothing except a making of human imagery and religion a hotchpotch of unintelligible rituals, rules and beliefs, one needs to ask how come religion came to have such longevity and how come religion to be the strongest rudder in the course of civilization. For unknown years of human history, mankind has adhered to the religion of one kind or the other, how is it possible to bracket this millennial behaviour as infantile and ungrounded? Is religion really a placebo which numbs us to the bruteness of naked, meaningless universe, is it the older version of the science, is it an evolutionary residual of group building and is it an anaesthesia we employ to deal with our loss, the grief of death or such other psychologically disturbing states? And if so, is God created in the image of man as Xenophones had it or is man the Imagio Dei “The Image of God”? These are the questions not of mere academic interest, but something which have a deep impact on our lives, our world, our civilisation and in fact the entire universe. But the answer to these questions must wait for the sequel of this article.
- Views expressed are personal. The author is a Srinagar based columnist
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