Creator or Imaginary Friend

By Mayank Goel

For centuries at the center of casual and intellectual discourse alike a question that has permeated the minds of all is “Is there a god?”

Religion, which is an intrinsic part of our being, has lost the value it had back a hundred years ago. With the scientific revolution, skepticism and rational logic have been accepted as standard metric to judge anything.

First, lets look at the origin of religion, which is an organized system of belief in God. Back in the ancient and medieval days, there were no rational or scientific explanations for phenomena such as turbulent weather, crop failure, disease and death. These phenomena were out of the direct control of humans and caused uncertainty and fear amongst people. They needed an explanation to assuage them. Religion at the time being was the perfect social contract to explain such things and drug the people with information about high powers and fate handling everything, in turn alleviating the people from fear. This is the reason that Karl Marx called religion the ‘opiate of the masses’.

But this characteristic of religion yields a lot of power to the people who are authorities on such religion over the masses. This can be seen in examples of exploitation by the Clergy in the name of Christ during the Dark Ages. Such a destructive attribute of religion that makes use of people’s irrationalities to fulfill its ludicrous mandate is what has turned many intellectual atheist and agnostics against institutionalized religion.

Such differing interpretations of God across various cultures have also lead to inter religion conflicts along with oppression within the same religions. The crusades way back in the 11^th century to the communal riots in today’s day and age are examples of such differences acting out.  Also, since religion is expansionary and depends upon the number of followers, religion was and continues to be an ideological race, rather that a construct of spiritual fulfillment, one of its more noble objectives.

But now secondly, we can look through all various interpretive religions and ponder upon a more fundamental question: “Is there a god?” This does not ask whether Jesus or Allah or Yahweh or Vishnu exists but whether a higher metaphysical force exists and tangibly affects the world as we see it. It is easy to deny such existence by basing everything on scientific rationale but the proponents of such an existence bring forward a very interesting case questioning right back to the big bang or the beginning of the universe. Their explanation is that for an initial atom to be created, that ‘initiated the universe’ so to say, we needed some supra force. But this idea of creation puts in question a very simple axiom – Matter cannot be created nor destroyed. So there had to be some omnipresent variable to bring this into existence. Also another aspect to this is how did the phenomenon of motion come up that gave rise to the concept of time? Or what kick started the time continuum? This force also had to be some eternal variable to set the first atom into motion. Stating these two attributes we can say that only thing that could have started the space-time continuum is this variable that goes against the axioms of the continuum. Hence, the attributes omnipresent and eternal are some things we even hear in common songs of praise.

Also, this variable, which is assumed to be priori the space-time continuum could not have been something like a flux capacitor as that is something governed by the laws of physics and physics is defined by the continuum, not physics defining the continuum. So we just call this variable ‘God’.

So eventually, we can still find some reason to the existence of something higher that explains the unexplainable, but if we still want to hang on to problematic institutions that form themselves perfectly to their idiosyncratic fit, is a question to be answered.

 Mayank Goel is a second year student at SRCC pursuing B.Com(H). But his interests stretch way off from his college-course combination. Coming from a family of artists and journalists, he has been an amateur drummer for a long period of time (long enough for someone to move on from amateur). He has a keen interest in subjects like economics, behavioral economics and even philosophy and psychology. Although open to opinions, he can spend hours on frivolous talk just to win an argument.