An Open Letter to Richard Dawkins

posted in: Dada's posts | 7

Dear Dr Dawkins,

Having just watched The God Delusion, I must say that I agree with your views on religion and the concept of heaven and hell.

However I believe you have a blind spot that, in someone of your intelligence, I can only imagine is due to your reaction to organised religion.

This blind spot, quite simply, is that while discounting religion you also discount the possibility of a higher intelligence. This is a classic case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Perhaps it is due to your insistence in equating religion with spirituality and therefore confusing man-made gods with a rational concept of one all-pervading infinite and eternal consciousness inherent in everybody and everything.

I am sure you would agree that rationality begs that we not discount any possibility unless and until it is scientifically disproved. Not to do so would be an insult to the scientific method we have cherished since the renaissance. And yet you seem to be blind to this key and self-evident principal of scientific enquiry.

You also use the argument that religion brings up the problem of who created the creator. Then what about the problem of who created the created (matter)? If the former argument is valid then surely the latter is too. The former creates an intellectual problem with the concept of religion while the latter creates an intellectual problem with the concept of materialism.

In short, the possibility of a higher power is not discounted by discrediting religion, and while religion is an irrational phenomenon, so too is atheism. Both are dogmatic. In fact, one could make the case that certain aspects of modern science have replaced the religious dogmas of the past as our very own modern-day dogmas.

The fact is that the existence of a higher power, or an essential self, or higher consciousness or whatever else you want to call it is neither provable nor disprovable by objective scientific equipment, measurement or even cognition. Just as a lightbulb can shine light on the room around it but not on the power that illuminates it, so too are we capable of understanding the world around us but not the power which animates us.

Therefore, a more rational position than taking the default stance of atheism would be that of agnosticism, whereby one could rationally say, “Okay, we cannot prove the existence of God but we also cannot disprove it.”

So let’s keep an open mind about it lest we fall into the trap of creating our own flawed fundamentalism. Both religious fanatics and atheists indulge in irrational fundamentalism.

So for example, in relation to your analogy of the myth of a teapot orbiting the earth as being unprovable and therefore false, it would be more rational to say that simply because one cannot prove it does not mean that it does not exist. What you don’t see is possibly not there. Not definitely nor even probably not there: possibly not there. Here again your blind spot is exposed: you have automatically gone one way without considering the possibility of the other, and in so doing you are only looking at one side of the equation. Your reasoning is therefore defective.

As a scientist, surely it is incumbent on you also to consider the valid possibility of the existence of a higher consciousness instead of discounting it outright. As with the myth of the teapot, the fact that there are numerous irrational and dogmatic myths and mythologies inherent in the religions should not blind you to the possibility of the existence of an essential reality which due to the subtlety of its nature (as potentially being the very essence of our existence) cannot be either perceived nor conceived by the mind, let alone scientific measurement. In fact, one could make the case that its only validation lies in the subjective experience of realising it as one’s deepest reality through introspective practices such as meditation, which I recommend you try.

Sincerely,

Dada Gunamuktananda

 

 

7 Responses

  1. cristian

    We Physicists Are the Only Scientists Who Can Say the Word “God” and Not Blush
    by MICHIO KAKU

    Albert Einstein once said something very profound. He said the Universe could have been chaotic, random and ugly—and yet we have this gorgeous synthesis at the origin of the Universe itself, giving birth to the galaxies, the planets, DNA, life. Einstein said that the harmony he sees could not have been an accident. We’re not necessarily talking about the design of humans; we’re not talking about an intervention that gave us eyes, noses and ears, but where did the laws of physics come from?

    As you know, I work in something called String Theory which makes the statement that we are reading the mind of God. It’s based on music or little vibrating strings thus giving us particles that we see in nature. The laws of chemistry that we struggled with in high school would be the melodies that you can play on these vibrating strings. The Universe would be a symphony of these vibrating strings and the mind of God that Einstein wrote about at length would be cosmic music resonating through this nirvana… through this 11 dimensional hyperspace—that would be the mind of God. We physicists are the only scientists who can say the word “God” and not blush.

    The fact of the matter is that we are dealing with the cosmic questions of existence and meaning. Thomas Huxley, the great biologist of the last century said that the question of all questions for science and religion is to determine our true place and our true role in the Universe. For both science and religion it is the same question.

    However, there has essentially been a divorce in the last century or so between that of science and the Humanists and I think that it’s very sad that we don’t speak the same language anymore.

  2. gunamuktananda

    Yes, especially the early quantum physics pioneers.

  3. P

    This article is right on point and deserves consideration by Richard Dawkins and anyone else confused between ideas and institutions of God — as they spread out in innumerable forms throughout the ages — and the actual personal realization of our deepest inner essence, whether we call it God or give It any other name. While approaching this topic with rationality, we should also acknowledge the limitations of relative language in encompassing infinity.

    In fact the point presented by this article, if developed further and practically, might help us to fill up various blind spots of understanding in most of our academic/scientific communities, potentially bridging gaps of language between scientific jargons and common sense, expanding our collective understanding of life, humanity, society and reality itself.

    In a similar way that physicists baffled themselves with quantum discoveries and just deal with the uncertainty principle, humanity (including Mr. Dawkins) should look honestly at the possibilities referred to in this article. Perhaps the human resistance to confront ingrained beliefs — it doesn’t matter if we call them scientific or religious if we allow them to bind us — comes from a certain fear that facing our unknown inner realms would dissipate our structures. The trick is not to react to such fear, but to balance ourselves and take practical steps, considering the possibility that human wisdom has found inner pathways which individuals can go through with firm determination, achieving useful results and explosive insights to a plethora of philosophical inquiries. Nowadays philosophy and science have been often been reduced to an empty play of continuously discovering very complicated and different ways of going around in circles with compulsive questioning without getting to a point in REALITY. Asking ourselves which is the central point of all centers and all points might lead us to a shift of perspective, which might lead us to the nucleus of consciousness itself, to the essence of ourselves and all things.

    HOWEVER, I’d like to add to the article that none of this will make any true sense until and unless the scientists within each one of us develop subtler and practical experiments in our inner labs, expanding inwardly and shattering the dogmatic circles and bubbles we have drawn within our own minds and thrown out to safeguard our environments — whether we call such boundaries religion or science, atheism or theism, belief or assumption.

    Yes, if we overindulge in intellectual extravaganza we may never be able to grasp with our own minds the essence of all , but specific practices have been taught by masters over millenia to help us reach deeper states of concentration, awaken cognitive faculties and develop capacities which may allow us to TRANSCEND our limited identities and INTUIT the concept, FEEL the presence, REALIZE the closeness, and eventually MERGE ourselves with that CONSCIOUSNESS which is beyond mind and physics, but pervades both. That’s what yogiis and mystics have taught in practice to the world. Whether we consider or call ourselves scientists, artists, philosophers, believers or non-believers, we all may try an introspective practice, like the author of this article recommends.

    I recommend it too, as I observe that all humans come to recognize, earlier or later in life, that he or she has an innate thirst to seek deeper. In those moments it is just natural to open up and look up, reading those references and maps which take us through ever subtler levels of being connected to the mysterious transcendental reality. While the pendulum of our minds swing, deeper within we constantly urge to touch a more profound and truer reality. When we take practical steps to quench that thirst, all analytical thoughts and socioemotional insecurities dissolve into the very simple realization that it’s better to eat the fruit than to talk about it.

  4. gunamuktananda

    Wow! I can’t argue with that. Fabulous. Thank you for your input and insights.

  5. Praveen Jamwal

    Absolutely right Dada Gunamuktanandaji, I know divine exists as have felt that itself in my life during meditations, singing spiritual songs and doing any social welfare activity which gives a blissful peace. Precisely, those who have not touched that divine can never talk about that too. Simply if somebody has never tasted sugar then how would they conclude its taste.

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