Reponse to comments

This is a response to the comments that I have received for my articles (“God of small things”^[1] and “Down the rabbit hole” ^[2] ) and arguments/discussions that I have had with friends (GH, TTV, AS, AB, EP, BV, SB, DJ, RG, OM and others).

This is what I hear often:

1. You cannot disprove the existence of anything supernatural.
2. So the scientifically correct position is to say that you are agnostic.
3. Since you call yourself an atheist, you are being irrational.

And to make sure that we are talking about the same thing, I looked up the oxford dictionary.

Agnostic: noun a person who believes that nothing can be known concerning the existence of God.

Atheism: noun the belief that God does not exist.

I was interested in knowing whether an agnostic friend of mine believed in God. (I must admit, I still have no idea). His reply was “No.” But ofcourse, he added “I donot NOT believe in God either.”

Bear with me while I digress a bit…

We have a lot wonderful mental phenomena: Dreams, feelings, emotions, ideas, feeling-of-oneness-with-the-universe… you name it. We (humans) have always been wonderstruck by these and have sought explanations. We started off imagining a “mind” that did all the thinking and somehow communicated with the body. That did not explain much but atleast we got started. And then as we started cutting open people and studying what they were made of, we started making sense of a lot of things. Physical phenomena were no longer mysterious. They were still wonderful but no longer mysterious. The same started happening with the mental phenomena. We injected radioactive substances into the bloodstream and studied the flow of blood in people’s brains during different mental activities. We slowly started mapping the brain and realizing that most of what we had attributed to the “mind” was a result of what was happening in the brain. We did not just assume that. We made hypotheses to explain observations and data obtained by studying activity in the brain objectively. We derived predictions from these hypotheses and eliminated hypotheses which did not make correct predictions. We kept the ones that did and improved upon them as we started learning more about the brain. And throughout this process, the role of the non-physical non-detectable mind (which was postulated for want of a better explanation) kept diminishing. Now we stand at a point where only super-mysteries like consciousness are attributed to the “mind”. And since we know that we have only scratched the surface with our studies of the brain, we know that the brain has potential to explain all that and more. In fact the philosophers and the neurobiologists are doing a wonderful job in providing convincing explanations to these “mysteries”.

Ask me if I “believe in the existence of a non-physical mind” and my answer would be “No”. And that is not because science has “disproved the existence of a non-physical mind” but since we have “explained- away” the non-physical mind. Wait. We haven’t yet “explained it away”. But I have enough reasons to believe that it would soon be.

(end of digression, should I say?)

I suppose the parallel is more than obvious. When we knew next to nothing about the water cycle, God was an excellent explanation for floods and droughts. Now we know far too much to make him responsible for any of that. Much like how the non-physical mind has been reserved for the absolutely mysterious (unexplained, not known to be unexplainable) none use God as an explanation for any phenomenon on this side of Big Bang today. Except for selfish reasons ofcourse ^[1].

As far as being technically right by calling oneself an agnostic goes… what exactly are you trying to say? Is your point that the existence of God cannot be disproved? Do you believe in the tooth fairy? Do you believe that Santa Claus exists? Do you believe in the flying spaghetti monster? What about the invisible pink unicorn? Or the teapot in orbit? ^[3][4]

Am sorry, I’d rather be technically incorrect and answer in the negative.

References:

1. http://masoia.blogspot.com/2007/08/god-of-small-things.html

2. http://masoia.blogspot.com/2007/07/down-rabbit-hole.html

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

4. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/113