Between the Worlds: Faith and Reason

I started reading religious books when I was eight or nine years old. At first, I liked the stories. They were much better than the usual stories I found in Chandamama. Soon, I became the designated reader for an odd assortment of women who gathered every evening at the house of Alivelu Mangamma, our local saint.

Most of them were widows in their forties and fifties who had worked hard all their lives and could not read. After I came back from school, I would sit among them and read aloud from whatever books were there: the Bhagavad Gita, Puranas, biographies of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and Vivekananda, and somewhat abstruse books such as Yoga Vasishtam.

I understood very little of Sanskrit and even less of the philosophy and neither did they. We creatively interpreted the texts with our limited understanding. Perhaps all this got me used to abstract ideas early and shaped me later. But never mind about that.

At that age, I believed in all of it: Gods, ghosts, karma and quite a bit of the supernatural. When I had nightmares about some dark creature hiding in our attic, my mother brought sacred ash from Alivelu Mangamma. It worked. I stopped worrying about the creature.

By thirteen, though, I had discovered another set of books. I enjoyed reading Ranganayakamma, but that was just fun. The first writer who made me think probably was M. N. Roy.

In one of his stories, a cat reasons about salvation. Hindus say that repeating God’s name can lead to salvation. But God has no particular name. So why couldn’t the cat call God “Meow”? If the cat spent its life saying “Meow, Meow,” surely it would accumulate plenty of good karma.

I thought this was a devastating contradiction. If an argument led to an absurd conclusion, something in the argument must be wrong. I was discovering logic and reason, and I found them much better tools than simple faith.

Didn’t I say I was thirteen?

Nobody had really explained the much-praised “scientific outlook” to me. I learnt it on the streets, from books, and from whatever mathematics I was studying. Induction, deduction, reductio ad absurdum—all these became part of my belief system. For a while, I thought consistency was a reliable path to truth.

By the time I came to graduate school, that picture had become considerably messier. Induction has its famous problem: just because something happened a thousand times does not mean it must happen the thousand-and-first time. Deduction gives us conclusions from the assumptions we put into it; it does not tell us whether those assumptions describe the world. And any model we make of the world leaves something out.

Even the apparently simple idea that something must either be true or false has complications. Constructive mathematicians, for instance, do not accept the unrestricted use of the law of excluded middle. Jain philosophers, centuries earlier, had their own way of qualifying statements by standpoint: in one sense it is so; in another sense it is not.

Nor does a contradiction always tell us what has gone wrong. Perhaps one statement is wrong. Perhaps both are wrong. Or perhaps the system in which we are trying to reconcile them is too small. Take a simple mathematical example. (x^2=-1) has no solution if we allow only real numbers. Expand the system to complex numbers, and suddenly it does.

That does not mean every contradiction hides a profound truth. If I tell you that I am simultaneously in Hyderabad and Detroit, you are entitled to become suspicious. It only means that finding a contradiction may be the beginning of an investigation rather than the end.

We also deal differently with a mathematical theorem and with our evolving understanding of the physical world. One counterexample can destroy a theorem. When an experiment disagrees with a scientific theory, scientists do not immediately throw away the theory. They check the experiment, the instruments and the assumptions. Sometimes they constrain the theory. Sometimes they change it. Sometimes they discover something new.

Over time, I became less certain about certainty itself. Consider a broken clock that stopped at 3:17. Twice every day, it shows exactly the correct time. At 3:17, is the clock right? Yes. Would I use it to catch a train? No.

So being right is not enough. We also want a method that lets us predict what happens next. We want other people to use it and get similar results. We want it to keep working when conditions change.

Science does remarkably well at this. It lets us predict eclipses, build bridges, test medicines, and send spacecraft to meet planets millions of kilometres away. It does all this with great reliability without promising us the final Truth. We can keep testing it, correcting it and using it.

But then another question arises: what exactly are we asking religion to do?

During my years at Rice, I stumbled upon Jung indirectly via Robert Bly. Iron John led me to Joseph Campbell and The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and from there I went deeper into Jung. I started looking at old stories differently.

A story did not have to describe an event that actually happened before it could do something useful. People had passed stories from parents to children for thousands of years. Through them, they talked about growing up, leaving home, temptation, courage, betrayal, marriage, death and return. Religious stories were, among other things, training material for the tribe.

Once I started looking at them that way, I could return to those women sitting around Alivelu Mangamma. Why did they come every evening? They were certainly not trying to determine whether the cosmology in Yoga Vasishtam agreed with modern physics.

They came because they wanted to be there. They listened to stories their parents had heard. They talked. They prayed. They gossiped. Religion gave them rituals for birth and death, festivals, songs, stories and a calendar. It connected them to their parents and grandparents, and to people they would never meet. Most importantly, it gave them a community. Science was never meant to do any of this.

Does that make the religious claims true? No. When sacred ash stopped a frightened seven-year-old from worrying about a monster in the attic, it did not prove that the ash had supernatural powers. But the boy did sleep better. We do not have to choose between those two statements.

Nor does that make religion right. Religions carry practices that are outdated, regressive or simply useless today. They have changed before and will have to keep changing. But underneath all that, they still serve some basic human needs. 

We do more than measure the world. We mourn, celebrate, tell stories, sing together and remember people who died before us. We wonder what our lives mean. We want to belong somewhere. Religions have served these needs for thousands of years — even if imperfectly.

I am still an atheist. Not an agnostic. A plain old atheist, with increasing emphasis on “old.” Yet, whenever I can, I go back to Sowpadu for Sivaratri. People who left the village years ago come back. My cousins come. There are pujas, songs, performances, all-night vigils and, naturally, plenty of food.

I can listen to Viswanathashtakam and imagine the Ganga falling onto Siva’s head. I can enjoy the poetry without believing that Siva lives on Kailasa. I can reject the faith and still understand what the religion gives me.

Religion is too important to leave only to people who believe in God.

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