Author: P V Indiresan (former director of
IIT, Chennai)
Publication: Haindava Keralam
Date: September 24, 2007
URL: http://www.haindavakeralam.org/PageModule.aspx?PageID=4462&SKIN=B
A week is a long time in politics and the
Ram Setu controversy may soon die down. But even as it fades away politically,
it may linger intellectually.
Everyone is agreed that the battle is between
scientific attitude and faith. As Francis Bacon argued nearly 500 years ago,
the scientific spirit requires that we accept nothing as true unless it can
be verified by experiment. Karl Popper goes on to say that the purpose of
scientific enquiry is to disprove a hypothesis, not buttress it. As Thomas
Kuhn has explained, science re-writes its textbooks all the time.
In stark contrast, religious texts are sacred;
they are unalterable. Science holds a hypothesis untrue if it does not satisfy
even one out a hundred conditions. For the faithful, belief is sanctified
even if it comes true only once in a thousand times.
In modern times, the proposition that science
will replace faith has become an attractive one. Much that was a mystery earlier
has now been rationalised through scientific discoveries. Inevitably, many
more mysteries of the present will also get explained in years to come. But
science has its limitations. For example, it can theorise how the universe
began with a Big Bang, but not explain what agency caused it. Scientific theories
are also fickle. Five years ago, hormone replacement therapy was the cure-all
idea for older women. Now, it is anathema. Science propagates knowledge; it
does not necessarily confirm wisdom. That is why stories about mad scientists
remain a recurrent theme in cinema!
There is no scientific proof that God exists;
neither is there any proof that God does not exist. The same holds good in
the case of Ram too; there is no proof that he existed; neither is there any
scientific proof that he did not exist. That is where ¡¥rational¡¦
scientists drift outside the scientific path. They make assertions about matters
of faith, forgetting their own principles. They can say, at the most, there
is no proof that Ram was a real person. They cannot proceed further and assert
that Ram was not a real person.
The reality is that many people believe in
God. The reality is ideas of God are many and lead to fierce fights, including
mass murder. Admittedly, there is, at any one time, far greater unanimity
about scientific ¡¥truths¡¦, but all those truths are
merely hypotheses liable to be superseded in the future. Rationalists are
right in condemning superstition as dangerous and harmful. They overstep when
they assert science has all the answers. As of today it does not. Nothing
becomes a scientist more than humility.
But why not tolerate the dogma of scientists
when no objections are raised about religious dogma? In the Indian context,
rationalists become dangerous, because they attack selectively. All religions
survive on myths. Rationalists would have been on more solid ground if they
had attacked myths of all religions. Unfortunately, Indian rationalists attack
only Hindu myths. This is politically dangerous. This has, in turn, led to
a worrisome development. The attacks have only induced orthodox Hindus to
become more irrational, rather than more rational. Tolerance of diversity
has been the hallmark of Hindu culture. What rationalists are doing is to
take advantage of that tolerance of diversity to destroy the base of that
tolerance.
Hindu myths are liable to suffer more than
those of other religions because there are so many more of them. Nevertheless,
isolating Hindu myths alone is not rational. One suspects that Indian rationalists
have confined themselves to attacks on Hindu myths because Hindus are soft
targets; others are not. If that is true, rationalists are cowards. A cowardly
soldier is a danger to the army; he can lose battles. Cowardly intellectuals
are even more dangerous; they can destroy an entire society.
Since the days of Jawaharlal Nehru, there
has been no respite from the attacks on Hindu beliefs. That itself would not
have mattered if Hinduism alone had not been isolated for such treatment.
As a result of this bias, orthodox Hindus feel more and more threatened. In
their fear, they are becoming less logical; they are giving up their culture
of tolerance. The long-term risk of all this is not being adequately understood
even by well-meaning intellectuals and media persons. The real issue is not
Ram vs rationality; it is rationality vs selective rationality.
