Whenever physicists can’t explain something, they just call it “dark matter” or “dark energy” and assign it properties they need to explain away their theories (well, that’s a gross exaggeration, and certainly not a criticism). Mathematicians come up with “imaginary numbers” (at least mathematicians have the guts to use the adjective imaginary directly.)
I don’t make any claims as to the existence or non-existence of God here, so don’t degenerate the comments section with those issues. The purpose of this post is to explore the very instinctual and primal necessity to believe that God exists. In fact, it is my contention that most people need to believe in God, rather than the other way round through a leap of faith, as most religions would have you believe. Heck, we desperately need to know God exists, because if he doesn’t, all hell would break loose.
To give you a context of what I expect to learn from your feedback, I am looking for answers to how one may truly become a God-believer without needing to, and if, assuming God doesn’t exists, then how do we reconcile the conflicting notions of fairness that I’ll come to below. Basically, what is it that keeps us from falling into complete anarchy?
We live in a world of symmetry and opposites (no, this isn’t turning into a Dan Brown-ish post). Ever since we remember, we are brought up in a profit-loss environment with an ideal zero-sum game. Basically here’s how our brain is programmed to look at the world:
1. All things being equal, the world is zero-sum. We give something, and we get something back of equal worth. We work for money. We pay money for services or goods.
2. Given a choice, and following our natural instincts (I can’t be sure whether these are natural instincts or something we were programmed with as children), we aim to upset the balance in our favour. We aim for “profit” which is a way of saying, an attempt at gaining a return worth more than what it was given in exchange for.
3. When we lose something more than what we get in return, we call it a “loss”. Loss hurts.
4. To keep the system in check, and to prevent a descent into complete anarchy or returning to our savage roots, civilization prides itself on it’s systems of rules and procedures to prevent (2) and (3) happening and to aim to keep the system at (1) as far as possible.
5. In a profit-loss scenario, the loser, blames the profiteer for being unjust or immoral or whatever. The culprit is quantifiable, identifiable and observable.
When it comes to feelings however, we have no one person to blame. We all try to be good people (yes, there may be bad people which I’ll come to later, but I don’t think you’ll find anyone who is truly convinced they are bad themselves.) Due to the Zero-Sum mentality above, we expect others to be good to us in return. This is compounded by the fact that faiths, religions and cults all have some justification for why we should behave morally and ethically.
However this seldom happens. We do get hurt. We feel betrayed, hurt or treated unfairly. And yet, there are no laws to combat or prevent unethical behaviour – since laws depend heavily on “intent” and in such cases, there is little chance of proving the intent to “hurt someone”.
So we end up in a place where the theories don’t fit:
1. The world is based on a Zero-Sum game, or so we’ve been programmed. Ideally, there is no profit, no loss.
2. The world doesn’t seem to work on a Zero-Sum principle. Sometimes we experience only loss – and if it was emotional loss, than all the worse because it is unquantifiable and unmeasurable. Or at least, we don’t see a civilized system of rules and regulations to give us justice when we experience loss.
How do we reconcile the two conflicting ideas above? Well, before that let’s attack why we need to reconcile the ideas above. For one, we all like to believe we have a purpose in life. If the first concept were to be shattered, the world appears to be a much crueller and harsher place than we want to believe. There seems little point to keeping up pretenses of morality and ethics. We would resort to anarchy and selfishness, and yet something conflicts inside us, because even this vision of the world seems equally frightening.
The reality is, the only vision of a tolerable world is one where everyone (at least, everyone except us) is good, and honest and ethical and moral. A view where only we are good, and the world is bad doesn’t fit. A view where we are as bad as the rest of the world doesn’t fit either, because well, frankly, we want peace and happiness. Getting a green signal to breaking morals and ethics isn’t very reassuring so long as everyone else gets that green signal too – we all know there will be stronger people, and a survival-of-the-fittest world would inevitably be horrible for us. For closure, I have to mention one other view appeals a lot more – a view where everyone else behaves ethically and morally, while we have a green signal to break ethics and morals ourselves – basically, given a choice, we want spiritual/emotional profit the same as (1). However, in a perfectly good world, perhaps there would be no point or purpose to breaking ethics and morals anyway, so this view may be redundant….. wait… isn’t this what we define as “Heaven”? We’ll come back to this in a moment.
So there we have it – the reason we want to reconcile conflicting observations.
a. We want spiritual and emotional profit
b. We have no way of knowing how to ensure it – the rules seem very arbitrary. But we already know a system in place where we can ensure profit – system (1) – the Zero-Sum game. So we want to somehow map spiritual gain into a system we are familiar with.
Let’s get back to how we end up trying to reconcile it. We begin with the assumption that (1) applies to (2) without first considering whether it does or not (except Gautam Buddha – the only person who actually even questioned whether (1) applies to (2) to begin with) So beginning with the assumption that spirituality is a Zero-Sum game, we now need to account for the times when we were good to people, or tried to be decent human beings, and yet we get treated unfairly and unethically. We behave in a remarkably scientific manner than most would like to admit. The way Mathematicians came up with imaginary numbers, and Physicists came up wtih Dark Matter and Dark Energy, we came up with God. (No, this still isn’t going in a Dan Brown-ish direction.)
We want to be good people, and we want the world to be good, or rather, we want to be good people because we want the world to be good – it’s the only way we are assured of happiness. So there we are, behaving morally and ethically, and we get hurt.
The system makes perfect sense now. Just as we have judges and rules and laws for our materialistic possessions, we now have a God for our emotional and spiritual ones. As with Imaginary Numbers, we can now assign whatever unexplained properties to God by simply saying, “Let us define God as having x, y and z properties. Now, using God in equations (1) and (2) we can reconcile them.”
As I wrote at the beginning, I’m looking for your thoughts, ideas and other viewpoints on this. Furthermore I want to know how I may be convinced God exists, especially when I have nothing to gain or lose from his existence. If he doesn’t exist, then I want to know how people reconcile (1) and (2). I want to know what prevents them from breaking every pretense of ethics and morals. Why doesn’t everyone turn into a raving murdering lunatic?
Is anyone of us really God-loving or God-fearing as opposed to being desperately God-needing?
(For the purposes of clarity, when I say “God”, I mean the various super-natural concepts around the world, or the concept of a “Higher Power”)
