A matter of faith

I was brought up as a Hindu. I would still identify as a practicing Hindu. I work in the field of Biochemistry. The question then is, how do I reconcile a religious worldview with my education in science and indeed, my day job?

The answer is not trivial. I understand that much of the canonical textual content behind Hinduism is a series of life-lessons wrapped up in an epic-adventure-poem format. To that extent, two of the principal holy texts (the Ramayan and the Mahabharath) can be interpreted as a guideline to live by. It is worth mentioning that these texts take a much more evolved, sophisticated view of life and society than is enshrined in, say the Ten Commandments. The Commandments, I would say are suitable for preserving the peace in small, village sized, perhaps tribal communities where loyalty is placed uppermost. The Hindu texts, on the other hand do not really itemize rules in such an easy to understand fashion. The lessons which people extract from these texts can only be fully understood by reading the entire text. Simple parables, these are not. And these texts encompass the whole of human behaviour - from the personal level, touching on filial responsibility, to the public and professional level, again touching on various trades and contrasting what is to be considered virtuous behaviour in a physician, as opposed to a soldier. And finally, they run all the way up to casting light on statecraft and kingship. Things are not ever as cut and dried as the parables in the Abrahamic religions tend to be.

The important thing here is that I do not take the religious texts literally. That would be potentially dangerous. Which leads us to the matter of faith. It appears for many people, that faith removes the necessity for asking questions. Let me note that I am not one of those who say that there are no stupid questions, ask away! Sure, there are stupid questions. Asking a complicated question without first bothering to look up the background is lazy. Asking a deceptively simple question, which does not have a trivial answer, or has an answer which frankly lies at the limit of our understanding - that is just plain malicious. Case in point, one of the more famous FauxNews personalities asking- "Who put the moon there?"

But these questions frequently originate from baiters and trolls. There is no answer to a question like "why do opposite charges attract?" I mean, sure, we can quantify and measure it. We can predict it. But 'why'? Sorry, don't know that. And there lies the heart of the debate - we certainly do not know all the answers. But it does not matter! We can keep pushing, keep asking the right type of questions and keep thinking up interesting experiments to get enough data so that we can build a framework to understand the universe.

Anyone who tells me that they have an answer to questions like "why" - is someone to be wary of. Such a person is either trying to take you for a ride, or much worse, has swallowed their own pitch whole. If their answers can be understood by first putting in a few years of study and hard work, then there might be something to it. Case in point: most areas of high energy physics. I don't get it. But I get enough to understand the outlines. If the instructor is kind enough to dumb it down somewhat. On the other hand, if the answers will only be revealed if you just pray hard enough, or make a sufficiently generous donation to their cause - then *ding ding ding*, you have most of organized religion.

So wrapping my little rant up - I have just one more thing to say. There may or may not be someone watching over us (the most bored graduate student in the heavens..?). The Universe might be created or not. But either way, it is interesting, and it is a mighty shame to not explore it. So, yes, the way forward is through asking questions and not accepting things just because.