
By Justice Markandey Katju–
(Justice Markandey Katju is a former Judge, Supreme Court of India, and former Chairman, Press Council of India. The views expressed are his own)
I recently saw this interview of Dr Aviral Vatsa, a medical practitioner in Scotland, by Valli Bindana, a filmmaker from California. Both are of Indian origin.
Dr Vatsa and Valli are both professed atheists. I am too. However, there are two kinds of atheists — scientific atheists and unscientific atheists. To my mind, Dr Vatsa and Valli both belong to the second category.
In other words, while they condemn religion, they have no scientific understanding about it, and the views they expressed in this interview are superficial, and lack depth.
My views about religion are in these articles: Religion and Science are diametrically opposed to each other and All religions are superstitions.
Let me elaborate.
The first question: How did religion come into existence? Dr Vatsa attributes it to fear and anxiety, and he rightly condemns ‘Babas’ who play on people’s anxieties and fears, and politicians who exploit religion for getting votes.
That is oversimplification, though. Fear and anxiety no doubt played a part, but religion arose initially as nature worship, and came into existence when humans evolved from lower creatures.
Animals do not have religion. What differentiates humans from animals is reasoning. Early humans were surrounded by forces of nature they could not understand. Hence they started believing they were supernatural beings. For instance, Surya, Indra, Agni, and the other Vedic gods. Nature gods existed in ancient Greece and Rome, and among native Americans.
These natural forces could benefit people, or harm them. Hence they had to be propitiated.
It is true that all religions are superstitious and unscientific, and obstruct critical thinking. But even today, despite all scientific advancements in the world, most people are still religious. Why? Let me explain.
Even today, poor people (who constitute more than three-fourths of the world’s underdeveloped population) need religion as a psychological support, as their lives are rife with misery. Religion is a clutch they can hold on to.
Most of the better-off people are also religious because ‘chance’ is still a powerful factor in their lives. They plan something, but very often something else happens.
In other words, we often cannot control our lives.
The chance factor is powerful because of the low scientific temperament even today. Scientific advancements will perhaps make the world a totally different place a hundred years from now. By then, hopefully, poverty will have been abolished, and we will able to largely control our lives, and then there will be no need of religion.
Dr Vatsa says that if one is religious he/she has a license to be immoral. I do not know how he has come to this conclusion. I know a large number of religious people who are also highly moral.
However, there are more fundamental objections to religion.
In his famous novel ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ the great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky asks (through one of his characters) “if there is a God, why do so many children in the word suffer?” To paraphrase him, “If there is a God who is all powerful, merciful and all good, then why do millions of children in the world suffer from hunger, cold, lack of shelter, disease, etc? Why does God, who is said to be merciful, not have mercy on them and give them food, clothes, shelter, medicines, etc?”
Why is there so much poverty, unemployment, malnourishment, sickness, etc in the world? If God is powerful and merciful, why does he not abolish these and give everyone a decent life?
When six million European Jews were being sent to gas chambers by the Nazis, why did God not save them? Religious people have no answer.
As regards the dispute between creationists and evolutionists, I have already dealt with it in my article above. Religion is based on faith and divine revelation, science is based on observation, experiment and reasoning.
Religion says there is a supernatural being called God, who is permanent and immortal. Science does not believe that there are any supernatural beings, and does not believe that anything is permanent.
Science believes that the only reality is matter (or rather matter-energy, as Einstein proved by his formula e=mc2 ), which is in different forms, and is in motion, in accordance with certain laws which can be discovered by scientific research.
If one asks where did matter come from, the answer is that matter came from matter, in other words it always existed.
If it is assumed that everything must have a Creator, then God too must have a Creator, i.e. a super God, and he too must have a Creator i.e. a super super God, and so on. This is known as the fallacy of infinite regress.
Religion will disappear when the social basis which gives rise to religion, i.e. poverty, ignorance and exploitation of man by man, disappears. But that is still a far way off.
Though a confirmed atheist, I read books like Mahabharat and Ramayan not as religious books but as sociological ones. For instance, Draupadi had 5 husbands (the Pandava brothers), which proves the existence of polyandry at that time.
Now Draupadi is a respected lady, but when her ‘cheerharan’ was taking place publicly in the durbar, Karna says there is nothing wrong in disrobing her since she is like a prostitute, having five husbands.
This shows that at that time society was passing through a transitional stage, since polyandry is a feature of matriarchal society, but is abolished in the subsequent patriarchal society, which has polygamy ( i.e. a man can have many wives, but a woman can have only one husband).
So when that portion of the Mahabharat was written (Mahabharat was evidently written over centuries by many persons, collectively known as Vyas, which only means a writer) remnants of matriarchal society still existed, though it was rapidly being transformed into patriarchal society.
Social values clashed (as they do today). I have also explained that Ram was a human, not a god, in the original Ramayan of Valmiki, but becomes a god 2000 years later in Tulsidas’ Ramcharitmanas.
Unfortunately, most people have not read the former, which is in Sanskrit, which most people do not know, and have only read the latter.
This shows how religion evolves according to people’s needs. To give another example, Indra was a war god, and was the most important god in the Rig Veda, which was written probably when the Aryans were entering India as warriors, and Indra was their chief. Later, he became a rain god, when Aryans had settled in India, and agriculture, not war, became their main activity. Indra then became a minor god, the more important being Ram, Krishna, Hanuman, Kali and Durga (in Bengal) and Murugan (in Tamil Nadu), none of whom find mention in the Rig Veda.
I conclude by showing how I am a confirmed atheist and yet a Hanuman bhakt.