The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason
-Benjamin Franklin

NOTE : My post about the London trip that i promised in my previous entry will be continued later so as to accommodate this post.

At the outset let me tell you that the following reflect my opinion about religion and science. I am of the opinion that religion and science are contradictory and while they can definitely coexist in society, the same person cannot be religious and at the same time scientific. I do not have any political affiliation and my views have arisen out of being a researcher of biology alone.

Why are we here? This is the question that any sane human being would like to see answered. I am invoking the sanity of human beings here just to allude to the fact that even in the 21st century, we are still surrounded by hypocrites, charlatans and preachers of falsehood that don’t want man to question, to know why he is here and what he is doing here. I would like to use this forum to give my views on the science versus religion debate and I am going to talk briefly about how and why it was a magnificent experience for me to transform myself from being an ‘agnostic’ (not a true agnostic as you will come to know by reading below) to an atheist.

Till a few months back, I was not being true to science. For a very long time now, I have been skeptical about religion. My questions about the various rituals and ceremonies that I had to grudgingly be part of were usually greeted with indifference and sometimes open mouthed horror. I was told to accept god on faith and here is where I had trouble with religion. While I always knew that God was not probably a very good explanation, I did not have the courage to talk about it and hid under the cloak of being an agnostic (a cloak under which a lot of my friends and close relatives stay hidden even now). Then, an atheist friend indirectly questioned my integrity towards science and I started thinking about it. I came across "The God Delusion" by Dr. Richard Dawkins and it was truly a momentous 19 continuous hours that I read it front to back. I started reading his other works and also books by the famous physicist Dr. Steven Weinberg and the transformation was complete. I am now an intellectually satisfied atheist but I am far from being a fundamentalist atheist. Give me logical evidence for the existence of god and also subject it to rigorous double blind experiments. If your God hypothesis is able to pass the experiment, then I will be the second person to start believing in your god, the first person being Dr. Richard Dawkins. All sane atheists that I know of are actually agnostic because we are just trying to tell that the existence or the non existence of God is like any other scientific hypothesis except for the fact that you have no evidence to actually prove the hypothesis. While religion asks you to accept things based on authority, the scientific approach promotes questioning and finding your answers and accepting them based on logic rather than based on fear or coercion.

Irrespective of the religion that you follow, the basic principle is the same: there is a supernatural being far more powerful than we can possibly imagine and perhaps that power had a hand in creating each one of us. This concept when propagated from the point of unqualified and untestable spiritual superiority, few people can actually question. Well, science has a problem with this. Our job as scientists and more importantly as curious human beings is to find out whether we actually need such an explanation. Scientists have demonstrated that every species that exist on this planet as of now have arisen out of a well documented process of slow and DIRECTED evolution termed evolution by natural selection (For the millionth time, Evolution by natural selection is not a random process so don’t ask me “OK so you think all of the things around us came by chance?”) and this is where I think we contradict ourselves by thinking we can be scientific and at the same time religious. If you are a strongly religious person, you expect thing s to be accepted based on faith and reason has no place in faith. If this is YOUR belief system, I am fine with it. On the other hand we are the skeptics who believe that logic and reasoning is required for any concept to be accepted as a fact and faith has no place in Science. If you think you are able to balance both well, you know who you are deceiving.

There is the age old argument that religion has morality written all over it. The religious argue that religion helps to build morality and character. I think we as a species are pathetic if our only source of being moral comes from the fear of punishment as laid out by books and arcane anecdotes. As Einstein (incidentally an atheist and not a true believer) said, if religion is the only reason we are moral, then our species is in a sorry state of affairs indeed. Ask yourself: will you stop being good if your religious book said you didn’t have to? If yes, then you are among the most immoral of all of living beings and you will go to ‘hell’ (assuming such a place exists) :)

Though I am an atheist, I still am a cultural Hindu. I firmly believe that religion has contributed very much to literature, architecture, poetry and music. Some of the best musical compositions have been religious. Our epics are also strongly rooted in religion. I am an ardent fan of the Bhagavad Geeta and I think it is one of the best self improvement books that man has ever written. Having said all that, I am also aware of that fact that all religions are based on untested and possibly ludicrous beliefs. Religion might have some inherent good but overall it has succeeded to do just the following: Divide people, Control people and Delude people. A few of my religious friends say I am proud to the point of being arrogant when it comes to science over religion. My answer to them is this: We provide you with evidence and ask you to interpret them for yourself and then come to a conclusion about the truth and you call us ARROGANT. Whereas YOU ask us to belive something just because your parents and their parents before them were taught to believe in something based purely on faith and without any evidence whatsoever . Are YOU not arrogant??

“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life” ...

...Screamed the poster at the Heathrow airport. The 10 hours of flight punctuated by yes prime ministers and free food was surprisingly quick and did not give my back as much of a beating as I had expected it to. Flying over Europe, across the English Channel into the island country was pretty uneventful except for the rapid staccato of in-flight announcements by the possibly disgruntled pilot. Descending below the clouds, I was given a breathtaking view of London from the skies. It was love at first sight.

Watching the neat row of identical buildings streaking below kept me peeled to the glass windows. I could make out the Tower Bridge, the Big Ben among the other buildings and it was stunning to see the Thames winding across the city. Landing a brief 10 minutes later at Heathrow, I expected the place to be cold enough to persuade me to take the next flight back. However, it was comfortably warm and it was refreshing to give out puffs of smoke (minus the risk of cancer). Being detained at the immigration counter for having failed the first visa application, I was let off by the officer after a brief delay. It is quite ‘fun’ to be detained actually. It gives you a lot of ‘respect’. People in the immigration queue give you either a sympathetic nod of the head as if saying “oh you poor thing” or they just stare at you as if saying “Look! An illegal immigrant”

Coming out of the airport, I was received by a friend. Bright and sunny, it was the first in a number of days that London was having a pleasant weather. After a quick wash up, I set out to explore. Eager to travel on my own, I took the first tentative steps into the famous London tube. I was truly amazed by the complexity of their underground railway system. In Singapore, we have 3 train lines and I thought it was a big thing. London has around 10! Hopping from Uxbridge to Kings Cross and then to Victoria was a breeze. Catching a bus to Leeds from the famous Victoria coach station at the last possible instant, I hoped to catch a glimpse of the English countryside but was thwarted by jet lag and the freakishly quick sunset. Before I realized, I was asleep and it was dark. Waking up at 7.30 PM, I found the bus racing through the streets of Leeds which at first glance seemed more like a ghost town. Later I realized that most shops shut at 5 and people scurry to catch the warmth of their homes or pubs. After a night’s sleep at my friend’s place, I was itching to explore Leeds. I went to the University of Leeds (which looks pretty much like any other university), the city centre and a ruin that once was a monastery. I remembered one of my ideas on humans, the big wonder about old ruins, gigantic temples, pyramids, statues etc is not that they are things that our ancestors couldn’t have done but the fact that we don’t know how they were able to do it is the actual wonder. This, I think reflects man’s innate curiosity and thanks to that we have progress in Science and more importantly I have a ‘job’ and I get free food every Friday.

The same night (after an unsatisfying dinner at Burger king), we started for Glasgow. The train journey from Leeds to York and then from York to Glasgow was refreshingly short. Getting off at Glasgow, I realized that London was a LOT more comfortable. -1, -2 are abstract numbers and don’t give you a feel of what is it to be out there in reality. Walking as quickly as we could, we reached our friend’s place (it is funny how I seem to ALWAYS have someone any place I go. Maybe something to do with my magnetic and charismatic personalityJ) and after a dinner of vegetable biriyani and raita, (slurp!!!) I hit the sack. Waking up, I was greeted by the rising sun. It was unusually warm and sunny (again, something to do with me I guess). We started off by trying to meet up at one place (5 of my classmates from madras were in Glasgow and we had planned to meet up), from then on we went to the Glasgow Caledonian University (which seems to have been established solely to extract ‘talent’ from foreign students, talent here being an Egyptian slang for MONEY). George square, the main town centre in Glasgow was small but quite beautiful. Lined with statues of famous Scots, I could recognize James Watt (Steam Engine) and Francis George Scott (the Famous Scottish composer) but no one else. The next place to visit was the Kelvin Grove art museum. Though not a connoisseur, I was able to appreciate the amount of work that went into creating and maintaining the numerous priceless works of art. Four hours later, I had not been able to go through half the museum. This was a theme that was to become recurrent throughout my trip, the lack of time! Moving on to the transport museum, which was closing within the next 30 minutes, we hurried our way through the neat rows of cars, buses, trams and engines giving no more than cursory glances to each of them. Pausing at a selected few (such as the Ford Anglia used in the movie Harry potter and the chamber of secrets, among others) to take pictures, we were almost kicked out at 6 PM! My friends parted ways here and I made a last stop at the Glasgow University. The magnificent and imposing building that has come to represent the University of Glasgow was a sight worth missing the bus to London but the curiosity to explore London was so overwhelming that I didn’t find it hard to bid goodbye to Glasgow, which had now started to get uncomfortably cold. Settling down in the double decker bus that was to take us to London in 8 hours time, I found it very easy to get some sleep considering that we had mostly been on the move ever since I had got to the UK.

London here I come!