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To pray is to ask that the laws
of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner, says Ambrose
Bierce in The Devil's Dictionary. What is more, the petitioner is
"confessedly unworthy", Bierce adds. Does that mean prayer is futile? What
about prayers performed in accordance with the laws of the universe? Richard
Dawkins, the Oxford don famous for the bestselling Selfish Gene, Sneers at
such 'weak-mindedness' in his attack on religion, The God Delusion.
Evolution, he says, has removed the need for a God hypothesis to explain
life, and advances in physics may soon do the same for the universe.
Dawkins argues, albeit with unintended
circularity, that because there is no God, nothing that could count in God's
favour (such as answered prayers) can be accepted. He insists that we must
look for other, read 'simpler', explanations to exclude religion.
Yet by peremptorily equating all faith with
blind faith and all science with a noble and true enterprise free of
assumptions and cultural conditioning, Dawkins precludes such a possibility.
Buddhism, for example, is a faith that denies
the existence of God. Similarly, for all its outward diversity of gods,
Hinduism's core concept hides the deeply unsettling entity of the Nirguna
Brahman as a Supreme Negative. This denies every conceivable attribute or
epithet that one can ever think of. Thus, the 'stuff' that Adi
Shankaracharya's Vedanta famously defines with double negatives like Neti
Neti is what the great Nagarjuna's Madhyamika philosophy calls the
paradoxical state of Shunyata.
This is the Primeval Void that defies all you
attempts of making sense of it. How different are such concepts from the
'ineffable mystery' that supposedly lies outside the scientific framework of
the Big Bang or black holes, and their mind-boggling singularities? Nor
should we seek congruence between science and spirituality just because both
seem to hide in their centre 'an enigma wrapped up in a mystery sheathed in
conundrums'. This is best expressed by the Rigvedic composers of the
celebrated Nasadiya Sukta: "At first there was neither Being nor Non-being,"
it begins and ends with, "Who really knows? Who can presume to tell it? /
Whence was it born? Whence issued this creation? / Even the gods came after
its emergence (are you listening Mr Dawkins?)/ Then who can tell from whence
it came to be?" |
