Approaching Belief

“Blessed is the one who believes.
Blessed also is the one who believes not.”

Some years ago, in the hunt for a job, I traveled to a distant city. I stayed with a very good friend of mine. An attending physician of critical care in a reputed teaching hospital, he is one of the smartest physician, I know. His dedication for the cause of community is awash with an unabashed religious sentimentality. In contrast to a lot with tinsel charms, his dedication is distinctively real. It was the time when Bosnia/ Herzegovina was turbulent with war and slaughter. It was the time, when the Bosnian Muslims were showing some vigor in the battlefield. And my dear friend believed in the “God-Sent-Angels” fighting battle for the Muslims. I was stunned to see the power of Faith that blunted the reason of an otherwise spectacularly reasonable mind. Unreal as it is, faith can not be too far form our tangled melee of unreal existence as embedded in a frenetically changing blob of material universe.

However wild they are, let us consider a few ideas:

# 1.
One may say that the house of faith is constructed upon the dogma that a GOD is there, that a “God” is a being in “God self” and that God is transcendent and is beyond all human aspirations and/or trepidations. Beyond but still is there over the yonder!

To a mind bent on the proposition that 2+2 = 4, and never less or more, God remains a perpetual beyond and never yonder. But this proposition of certainty is disposed of as we enter in the depth of our material being. There is no doubt that we, the earthlings are nothing but a sum-total of earthly materials that ought to follow the rules of this quantum uncertainty.

Can the arguments flowing from an organism, constructed of matter with innate uncertainty, be construed as certain? Faith, either in “GOD” or in “NO-GOD”, thus follows the same quantum predicament.

# 2.
It is possible, at least in theory, that a living organism in our universe may achieve such superior technological insight that they can simulate consciousness in their supercomputers. Eventual products being virtual worlds like ours, where peace and war, beauty and beast, and good and bad hang on a precarious balance. And curiously, the conscious beings may be totally unaware of the fact they are nothing but nothing - just simulations of some thoughtful original creator.

“There is no reason to expect our world – the one in which we all are reading this right now – to be real as opposed to a simulation. And the simulated inhabitants of a virtual world stand in the same relation to the simulating system as human beings stand in relation to the traditional creator.” (Paul Davis, professor of natural philosophy at the Australian center for Astrobiology, is the author of How to Build a Time Machine). May be, as Stephen Wolfram advocates, it is all but a caricature of a gigantic computer program. "I've come to have some sympathy with creationists, natural selection evolution is not everything after all”(Stephen Wolfram in Conversation with Graham Farmelo, Daily Telegraph, 05-15-2002).

Faith may be simplistic. But Boy! It definitely is comfortable. As Nietzsche would have said:

At the bottom of us,
really “deep down” there is
some granite of spiritual fatum

# 3.

Prometheus stole fire from heaven. Zeus was enraged. Revenge was in the making. In the form of a mortal woman Hephaestus created a paragon of exquisite charm and beauty. Gifted by all the Olympian Gods she was perfect in the image of a God. Aphrodite gave her beauty and sexuality, Apollo music, Hermes persuasion and so on. Thus equipped Pandora (meaning all gifted) was sent to Epimetheus, brother of Prometheus. Besides those seductive gifts, Pandora was also given a box, with a caution not to open. Ignoring his brother’s sagacious advice, enamored of an flawless mortal beauty, Epimetheus accepted this Godly gift. There were happy days and nights for Pandora and Epimetheus. Curiosity, however, was overriding. Pandora opened the box and thus out were all the human miseries hidden inside. And thus was the birth of sadness, sorrow etc. etc.…

A curious mind is none less than a Pandora’s box. The twentieth century physics is spawning with challenges only to be braved by intellectual Titans with ecstatic miseries. Let’s think of quantum entanglement and superposition. Erwin Schrodinger in his elegant thought experiment elevated this fundamental fact of quantum oddity to a macro level, where even a non-physicist can get a philosophical thrust of a hidden uncertainty. Until the box is open, the cat is neither dead nor alive. It is in a state of “superposition” of both states, i.e., both alive and dead. A kind of: - “To be or not to be…”

As Pandora regretted loosening the lid of the box, it is said, Schrodinger later wished that he never met the cat!

Whatever way one plays with the BOX, it is still boxful with mundane and not-so-mundane endless oddities of tangled superposition and miseries.
One who opens is baffled in a spooky state of exalted bliss.
One who opens not is still baffled in a rhapsody of the divine.

So, lastly:

Blessed is the one who believes
Blessed also is the one who believes not

“I speak my mind freely on all things, even on those which perhaps exceed my capacity and which I by no means hold to be within my jurisdiction. And so the opinion I give of them is to declare the measure of my sight, not the measure of things.” Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592).

Maybe Montaigne met the cat too!!