God as the Final Variable!

I guess this kind of a post will be skipped by the experiences reader simply because of the millions of theories floating about. Almost all self respecting bloggers would have given their version of God/Religion/Mortality. I normally refrain from talking about religion and the “higher things in life”. The reason for that is two fold. Firstly, my own philosophy is that, there is no point worrying about the questions of higher powers, destiny, fate and related terms, at this age (meaning eighteen to thirty). My attitude can be summed up by Kahlil Gibran’s beautiful verse:

Yesterday is dead,
Tomorrow is unborn,
If Today be sweet,
Why fret?

The second reason is a basic question of how to think about abstract terms like “God” and those associated with it like soul, duty, heaven, hell and so on, without getting caught in a web of semantic confusion. In fact a simple cause of confusion could be the practice of capitalizing the “God” and “Him”. My view on such terms is this: If you cannot define a term properly, you MUST NOT use it.

(A digression: I am aware that this view follows from the so-called “Picture Theory” put forward by the great and equally enigmatic German philosopher Wittgenstein in his seminal work, Thr Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus . The problem is, after great effort, I did find a copy of the TLP, but unfortunately, I couldn’t make much sense of it. So I shall continue with the idea which captivated me though, I am not even sure if that is the “Picture Theory” that Wittgenstein intended.

Second Digression: Do Google about Wittgenstein. In my opinion, Wittgenstein, Von Neumann, “Che” Guevara, Camus are the most charismatic thinkers in recent times.)

The problem with much religious discourse is that the key terms used are value loaded i.e they immediately conjure up an impression/value associated with them even though the author may not imply it. Another problem is that in many cases, multiple meanings are attached to each word and therefore, there is just too much scope for interpretation and misinterpretation by followers.

It is for these reasons therefore, that writing about these topics is loaded with pitfalls. But I shall nevertheless put forward my interpretation.

One of the most striking features about Hindu Philosophy is the multitude of theories of God which exists in its framework. On the one hand, we have works like which seek to establish this “God / Ultimate Being”’s supremacy in terms of physical characteristics or some special powers. For example, the Purusha Suktham talks about the Purusha or the Ultimate Being having a thousand heads, a thousand eyes and his presence encompassing the Earth and so on. On the other extreme, we have philosophies like Advaita and Dvaita which are extremely sophisticated and abstract apparatuses to understand the “Supreme Power”. The beautiful thing is all these approaches to understanding God are equally relevant. It is this multitude of approaches which has led to me to come to my own view of God.

Essentially, as human beings, we strive to understand the world around us and our own existence. There are two reasons for this. One is utilitarian, in the sense that it is in our interests to understand how the world works from a mechanistic, “How and Why Things Work” point of view. This desire is to a great extent satisfied by Science. But at the deepest levels even Science finds itself entangled in often paradoxical philosophical questions.

The other reason is purely aesthetic. Understanding how the various aspects of life interact leads to a sense of confidence and fulfillment. Most of the philosophical nuances belong to this category. From a day to day point of view, nothing more than a rudimentary philosophical model is necessary. Indeed, a person can climb to the very top of the industrial world without any refined understanding of philosophy.

Often the quest for knowledge arises due to a combination of these compulsions. Having started on a line of thought due to various reasons, one cannot draw the line and say, we will address certain questions because they are of aesthetic value and avoid other questions.

Therefore, I think we have convincingly established that the two main motivations to understand the world are utilitarian and aesthetic.
Having established why we need to understand the world, the next question is How do we go about doing it? We have tools like Logic, Mathematics, Philosophy and Language is the “currency”, the means to express concepts. Let us call these the “Tools of Thought”. So in effect, we try to understand the world through our senses and some tools we have developed. However, these tools of thought keep on developing and at any point of time there are many phenomena which we cannot explain with our current level. In those cases, we have no recourse but to attribute those phenomena to something beyond our understanding, something “miraculous”. That Unknown Entity to which we attribute phenomena we cannot understand is called as “God”.

To give an analogy, consider Regression analysis. Say, there is a variable y which we think is to be modeled as a function of u,v,w. So typically we would write it as:

y = a1*u + b1*v + c1*w

What if unknown to us there is some other variable we have not taken into consideration? Also, the coefficients a1, b1, c1 obtained by fitting historical data cannot forecast future data perfectly. There will be a deviation. In Regression analysis, to account for this an error term is included in the expression.

So;
y = a1*u + b1*v + c1*w + ε

To come back to our initial point, the world is what we try to explain through the tools of thought and in that endeavour we need the concept of God to play the function of the ε variable; A variable to explain all that cannot be explained by the Tools of Thought at that given point of time.

Please do not take this analogy literally. The term “Error Variable” may seem to trivialize the concept. What I am essentially saying is this:

The conception of God we have at a given point of time, is a reflection of what cannot be explained by the prevailing “Tools of Thought” at that point of time.
A Corollary of this idea is that the functions or the powers attributed to God should reduce once the Tools of Thought become more sophisticated.

In this framework of God as the Unknown Variable, the question of creation has no been addressed. My argument is that God is a man made invention so creation is merely a set of one-in-a-million occurrences which happened to occur period. An important fallout of such a view is the realization that different views of God are acceptable as long as the user can navigate his/her life. As a human being goes through the journey of life, his/her priorities change. The knowledge sophistication also changes. Therefore, it is very natural, in fact, very necessary that one’s conception to God changes. More importantly ideas related to God like morality, duty among others will and should change.

The next useful conclusion is that any work of religion should be viewed as literature, even if exceedingly brilliant. The crucial difference between literature and divine books is that, in literature you can reject the author's viewpoints without any feelings of guilt, in fact, you are encouraged to do so. However, refuting divine works always brings an inescapable feeling of guilt. This should be removed.

Re-reading this article I feel I have done some of the common mistakes that I started to debunk. Aaah! Maybe we shouldn’t even attempt to talk of these questions. Maybe you just realize the truth but language is insufficient to express it. Maybe!

Scientific Thought vs. Unscientific Thought

(This is an article I wrote for a campus magazine. Was inspired by the book "The Fox and the Hedgehog" by Stephen Gould. The motivation is my concern that it is quite easy to become intolerant simply because one is comfortable with a certain point of view.)

A topic which has been pre-occupying me for the past few days is how logical is what we have been taught as logic? Is our approach to life strictly logical? Does anything like a strictly approach to life exits? Even if something like pure logic were to exist would it be in our interest to pursue it.

My contention is that we have been conditioned to regard certain approaches as “Scientific” and “Unscientific”. Human thought and its progress has been highly zig-zag. Reading the lives of many thinkers, I feel that there is a trend in the growth of “great ideas”. That is, the seeds of the most revolutionary ideas germinate many many decades before they see the light of the day. If the idea strikes at the hitherto accepted fundamentals of the subjects, then it does not catch the fancy immediately. Often, a charismatic intellectual is required to support and elaborate on the idea. Gradually, an acceptance emerges. In the meantime, some other development undermines/ supports this idea. If there is a development which necessitates the idea, then it explodes and the rest as they say is history. If not, it remains in the bylanes of scientific thought until another charismatic genius comes and re-interprets the idea. Often, the original context and concept of the idea may be very different from its final state. Therein lies a subtlety. Any work of thought has to be re-interpreted before making it fit for mass instruction. In the process, many “transmission losses” occur. One very subtle intellectual problem arises out of the common practice of giving examples. In my opinion, analogies are excellent tools in teaching but often create many, many misconceptions. Why does a teacher have to resort to give examples? There is clearly a communication problem somewhere. Either it is with the listener or the speaker. To get around the problem, an example is given. Therefore, we have only got around the communication problem and we have NOT solved it. Being aware of this limitation, I think students should take examples with a pich of salt, as a very restrictive illustration of a concept, borne out of the desperation for communication.

I have digressed. In the process of interpretation many inconsistencies which the original thinker did not intend creep in. Also, the original historical context is lost and the result is carried forward. Nothing wrong for this is the practical thing to do. But, the realization that knowledge is seamless is lost and in some cases this leads to needless pedantism.

Stephen Gould has written an interesting book titled “The Fox and the Hedgehog”. The title of the book is got from a Greek fable. The fox is portrayed as a cunning animal which has a number of strategies and can flexibly shift from strategy to strategy to achieve its goal. When pursued by enemies, the fox resorts to a combination of strategies to “outfox” the opponents. The Hedgehog on the other hand, curls up into a ball which has a hide of spines. The enemies come look at the ball, wait for it to uncoil. After some time they decide it would be worthier to walk away and find some other prey. The Hedgehog uncoils and walks away.

This brings to light two broad strategic approaches. One is that of the fox: Flexible, combination of many. The other is that of the hedgehog: steadfast, determined and proceeding on its path irrespective of its opponents approach.

The beauty is that we need a combination of both approaches to maximize our payoffs. Being too shallow across many fields does not pay but neither does pedantic steadfastness. There have been great minds like Von Neumann who forayed into a number of fields, setting the foundations for many while there were others like Schroedinger, Dirac who achieved great things in one field only. The contributions of both approaches are equally important.

A classic example is the debate over astrology. Astrology is dismissed immediately as a pseudoscience. What is the basis for doing so? Here we have to resort to a “definition of science”. Is repeatability the test of a science? By that argument many of the experiments we perform in the lab, never give the literature result. Does it render those experiments unscientific? Not at all. Repeatability is a feature of science not the test. Coming back to the case of astrology, what is its status with regards to science?

Now, the fundamental supposition of astrology viz. planets affect our lives, seems ridiculous. But that per se does not render astrology unscientific as commonly thought. For a theory, you can start of with any axiom, it is the results derivable from that which matter. The real problem with astrology is this: Given that a prediction is wrong there is no way to know which part of the “theory of astrology” failed. In other words, where was the conceptual flaw which rendered it to fail? The reason for this is that astrology has a number of empirical thumb rules as opposed to a well constructed theory.

But the same applies to psychology and some of the social sciences as well. Just because something does not conform to our definition of a science doesn’t render it less relevant and consequently we have many fields which are strictly not scientific but I think that indicates our inability to develop models to understand the world.

The kind of science we do is very effective when we can develop a qualitative relationship between the various variables which got making up a phenomenon. But there are many cases when that may not be possible. In such cases, one must not dismiss the problem as non-scientific but rather understand that our mathematical tools are inadequate. In such cases using heuristics and thumb rules is perfectly admissible and in fact that may be the “scientific approach”.