Rameshwar Singh Jamwal
Sage Kapila started the debate about the existence of God when he enunciated the concept of “Purusa” (Soul) and “Prakriti” (Nature) thousands of years ago. Since then, there is a perennial debate going on in many literary sections, especially in the Western world about the existence of God. In almost all religions, the belief and the proposition that there is a supreme supernatural that is the creator, the sustainer, the ruler of the universe and may be, millions of more Universes, and all things in them, including human beings, exists in majority of followers of these religions. In many religions if any question is raised about the existence of God, it is considered blasphemous and as unpardonable sin as the God is also conceived as perfect and unfathomable by humans, as all-powerful and all-knowing (omnipotent and omniscient), and as the source and ultimate quest of man and of grounds of morality.
Belief in the existence of God (or gods) is definitional of theism and characteristic of many (though not all) religious traditions. But there are many who question the existence of God, primarily amongst those believing in Marxism and atheists, whose number is substantial. We in India are not aloof from such a bug and have a growing section, as shown by some politicians in the South, who have raised their fingers about such beliefs, especially amongst Hindu region, which is considered to be soft target, as no other religion would tolerate such a comment. But countering such arguments requires scientific explanations, which of course are very limited and hence the necessity to counter such tendencies through a thorough explanation but firstly we will have to find out as to what this scientific world is trying to find and how.
India, like many other nations in the world has established an Indian Astronomical Observatory in Hanle Ladakh, to make endeavor in search of exoplanets, star formations, stellar evolution, galaxies observation and much more. Scientists and many Nations are also in search of God’s particle, the elusive search which is going on for decades and which has consumed Trillions. The Hadron Collider at CERN, Switzerland was established for researching fundamental particles that makeup matter and despite years of painstaking efforts, we have not been able to find out the exact basic elements constituting matter and what we call as Dark Energy or Dark matter, which constitutes more than 95% of the mass and energy of this Universe. These scientific endeavors are a must for our material and scientific progress and man’s quest for finding the ultimate truth about this Universe will continue. But there can be other view points to look into all these aspects as well. Majority of Physicists and Cosmologists start with the assumption that there is no God and God is creation of man and not vice a versa and it is only nature, which is all pervading, without giving the exact definition of nature and what led to the formation of this nature, which decides so many things happening around us, from the creation of life to Galaxy and Star formations to the annihilation of atoms and their decay. In order to justify their such belief, they have come up with all types of concepts like Big Bang Theory, the String Theory, the Black Holes, the Dark Energy and Dark matter concept, the evolution of man from Chimpanzees and Gorillas and many other theories and concepts, which get rejected by the same community of scientists at later stages, who then offer some other strange concept or theory. There are stall vast mysteries, unexplained or which defy all scientific explanations; as to what is life, how life came on earth, is there life in other parts of this Universe?, whether our planets and Sun had the same mass, dimensions and speed at the start?, what happens to the life energy after death, why humans have only an average life span of 100 years, why not 500 or 1000 years, and why each species has got its own life span?, How life was generated and what lead to its multiplication?, If life got extinguished after each catastrophic even like when asteroids hit earth or the great ice age spanning up to more than two million years started and ended, did the life start afresh or our progress started from where it had ended?, Why there is life cycle of all creatures and at what stage it is decided and what type of programme is fed in the genes or cells which dictates the decline of our body functions and ultimately leads to death? What is death? What happens to the life experiences retained in it? Is mind the repository of all our actions and memories or is it there in the brain? What about the speed of mind, can we travel with the speed of mind? What is the difference between mind and brain? What is intelligence and what is intelligent life? Does it depend upon the number of brain cells, called neurons or their processing capacity or the size of the brain? Why some people are more intelligent than others? Is intelligence also inherited from our parents or it has a different source? How the neurons take decisions; to form a particular type of protein and how much protein is to be constructed? How genes act, how they switch on and off and regulate the amount of protein to be constructed? What is soul and how many souls are there in our Universe? Is there any super soul or God? How souls come into being? How they move? What is the force or energy which moves and regulates them? How they enter different types of bodies?
Our concepts of time and space may be fundamental to our approach for the view of universe but our ideas about the evolution of universe, its expansion or its possible contraction and re-collapse have also changed many times and it is quite possible that in near future, some more radical concepts may also spring surprises but the fact also remains that we have not been able to find a unified theory of relativity and quantum physics, which many of us perceive as holding the key to revelation of the remaining part of the mysteries of cosmos. we have been able to calculate that the universe came into existence more than 13.8 billion years ago, after an explosion in small primeval ball of immense mass, which has been termed as big-bang, we are still not ready to calculate or judge the time or the time duration of existence of that firewall or a mass of energy which could produce such a gigantic Universe, whose boundaries we have not able to find. We still have no idea as to what made that firewall to explode, what was its size and what it contained, and whether universe can again contract to the same position if all the four known forces; gravity, electro-magnetic force, weak nuclear force and strong nuclear force, holding the balance of galaxies, stars, atoms and sub atomic particles, lose the equilibrium and balance. We are also at a loss to say with certainty as to whether we would be able to physically travel beyond our own galaxy, the Milky Way in next few thousand years and do real time examination of the possibility of any life or intelligent life in other galaxies. There are hundreds of such unexplained mysteries and if one treads on philosophical path shown by own great philosophers in ancient six philosophical thoughts of India in Sankhya, Yoga, Mimansa, Nayaya, Vaisesika and Vedanta, we get inkling about all the myriad mysteries confounding us. Physics can help us to find the structures and compositions of non living things of nature, at macro and micro levels but is of not much use when we have to find out the source of life, its millions of types and their behaviors in response to myriad of situations, the evolution of smallest bacteria to the giant whales and elephants to the smart and intelligent humans. There are millions of species of life, trillions and trillions of individual entities in the known universe, some of which we have been able to investigate till today and without complete knowledge about all these factors, our quest to find the ultimate will always remain incomplete.
Division and inheritance of mental faculties is a puzzle, still unresolved. It may be mentioned during birth of twins, to form identical or monozygotic twins, one fertilized egg (ovum) splits and develops into two babies with exactly the same genetic information while to form fraternal or dizygotic twins, two eggs (ova) are fertilized by two sperms and produce two genetically unique children. The possibilities in spontaneous triplets, quadruplets and quintuplets will make it a nightmare for those investigating the division of mental faculties as a single egg cell is fertilized by one sperm cell and splits into, three, four or five identical embryos – this will result in three, four or five identical babies- same gender, same DNA but what about intelligence and mental faculties. The process for biological journey would be identical in all cases, but there could be possibilities of a few being physically weak.
A set of just two cell embryo would get rolling, producing four, then eight then sixteen, then thirty two cells to form placenta. The self organizing cells, with help from genes, would have complexity beyond description and the mass of cells would continue to increase by divisions called Mitosis and Meiosis, which would then flatten to form embryonic disc of initial two discs, the future ectoderm and future entoderm.
The ectoderm will continue to lead to the formation of our nervous system, the part of body, from where all the intelligent persons the world has ever produced, have given us the great ideas and concepts. But again the same paradox haunts us. How intelligence gets infused in this entire process, in the single offspring, in twins, in triplets, quadruplets and quintuplets. Is it contained in the genes inherited from the parents and how much percentage is being contributed by which parent and to which one of them? By these yardsticks, our parents should have been more intelligent than us; the grand parents should have been more intelligent than the parents and so on, since we are inheriting only a part of their mind and intelligence. Then let us analyze the contributions of the parents and grandparents of all those great personalities, scientists, intellectuals, whose ideas, theories, concepts and brain power changed the fate of this world. If they had contributed even 50% of the contributions of the illustrious sons and daughters, they too would have been known to the world at large, but hardly anyone knows their names or their contributions. This means that intelligence is not inherited from parents. Intelligence is also not something which depends upon the size of the brain or processing power of the neurons, then from where we get it; from the nature, we will come to that point later on. But both the physical and mental aspects have lot of relations, there can’t be any intelligence without a physical complex brain and despite so much progress in science, we have not been able to decipher much of the functioning of our brain. The neuroglia, neural crest, spinal cord, the fore brain, brain wall, cerebral neo cortex, (which is the most sophisticated part of neural structure and wherein lie the intellectual powers, and the brilliance of the human is hidden) and most of the other parts of the brain develop in the womb itself, and the insertion of some of the software, the basic stuff also takes place in this period before birth. For example, a pup, if taken away on the day of its birth from its mother will still have those traits of urinating on the trunks of trees and tyres of the cars parked on the roads in the colony, a trait to mark territory, which trait he has not learnt from its mother or father as it had been segregated from them on the day of birth itself. Similarly, the trait of sharpening the claws, after passing of stool, by a special type of brisk backward movement of its legs is also such trait which came at the time of birth itself, along with the trait of crying at being hit, the eating of food, fondness for meat, swinging of tail on seeing family members and so many other traits including the life cycle of just around fifteen years, typical to dogs; the original software coming along with the hardware. But still, after birth also, the pup or the human child has to learn many things, the secondary uploading of software, which goes on throughout life, which too is a complicated process, as the retention of lot of it is required to cope up with situations which can emerge anytime during life. Where this entire data is to be stored, and how to utilize it in a split second is the incredible functioning of this three pound collection of mass of protoplasm, consisting of billions of cells and trillions of interconnections. He has to offload and discard millions of bits of data, being bombarded daily and retain only those parts, which can be useful in life and if during development in the womb, some parts do not develop fully due to scarcity of some trace minerals and other nutrients, there can be lot of problems for the person, who will grow up with physical and mental disabilities due to those deprivations. He will have many psychological and mental handicaps, the behavior deficits or behavior excesses, which can be troublesome for many people, his own family and the society, which was part of my study to learn about criminal behaviors and which led me to this path; of trying to investigate the origins and functioning of universe as well.
We also need to know the force working for generation and cessation of life, the migration of life energy and the inheritance patterns, both of biological and psychological factors. Matter, which we have investigated till today cannot infuse life and consciousness in the creatures which we term as having life, as it does not have the potentiality to do so and no amount of external or internal energies, which the science has discovered till today, the weak or the strong nuclear forces or the electro-magnetic force, can succeed in putting life in even a single bacteria, what to talk of human beings. So, for coming to a better understanding of the whole idea of life and the reasons of formation of this Universe, or may be many more Universes, called Multiverses, we will have to shed our opposition to the existence of the God, the only force that controls everything, by whatever name you may address it and his both types of energies, the ‘Para’ and ‘Apara’, as defined and explained by Lord Krishna in ‘Bhagwad Gita’, which will clear all our doubts forever.
(The author is a practicing Advocate of J&K High Court and author of the three Books, including, “The Sixth Force in Cosmos”).
