ET Vedanta blog

https://blogs.economictimes.indiatimes.com/et-vedanta/

God of small minds

Mukul Sharma

Compared to a chimpanzee or dolphin, an ant’s brain is very minuscule. We could never imagine such a creature capable of, say, engineering. That, of course, is true for an individual ant; but put them together and eye-popping structural feats soon start emerging.

Army ants, for instance, don’t let gaps in their path stop them. If they’re on one tree and have to get to the next, they simply build a bridge using their own bodies. A small curtain of ants will hang from one tree and wait for the wind to waft it up till the ants at the lower edge can grab the other tree. The others then cross over. Similarly, when fire ants need to cross a body of water, they fashion a raft made with themselves that can not only float but carry up to a million of them on it. The interesting point is that no individual ant has any idea of what’s happening even though, jointly, the thing happens. It works through a process of self-organisation that is not controlled by any subsystem (read, individual ant) and gives rise to an emergent phenomenon that is of a higher order. The same thing can be said of our brains. Each neuron is relatively dumb, but if you take billions of them, they interact in a way that we have only scratched the surface of understanding.

Perhaps a much vaster group mind also emerges out of the joint actions of all our ‘smaller’ minds put together that we, like an ant, are incapable of understanding. Perhaps that’s what a lot of people call ‘God’. It’s important, however, to realise that such an emergent god is still a part of us — just like the bridge or raft is still a part of the ants.

Life is Adapted for the Universe, not the other way roun

Life is Adapted for the Universe, not the other way round . 

If gravity was fractionally stronger than what it is, the universe would long ago have stopped expanding and collapsed back before galaxies could form. If it was a tiny bit weaker, the universe would have expanded too rapidly to allow matter to clump into stars. 

Either way, we would not be here. Gravity seems to be exactly the right strength for humans to have arisen. It’s called the anthropic principle and it’s mouthwatering enough for anyone to give it a further spin especially people who believe in intelligent design. 

They see in this cosmic fine-tuning the hand of a creator who deliberately fashioned the physics in such a way as to one day be able to support us. The universe, they conclude, is adapted for life. 

Scientists who deny divinity have countered variously. They say that the principle only seems perfect for life as we know it whereas there could be so many other types which therefore cannot flourish. They say perhaps there  are multiple universes, each with different physical laws and this just happens to be the one in which we find ourselves. 

They say it’s backwards logic: are vacationers lucky that beaches are so near the sea? What both sides probably don’t see, however, is that a mottled frog which hides against a background of mottled leaves doesn’t do so because the background was pre-fine-tuned for it. 

Instead, those frogs which developed a mottled appearance managed to hide better and survive. A creator may or may not have had a hand in this but life, it seems, is adapted for the universe rather than the other way around 

Shooting from Agnostic Hip

Carl Sagan ( in Pale Blue Dot ) suddenly starts wondering why the God portrayed by several religions of the world seems not to possess any knowledge about the universe beyond what was known at the time the scriptures were written. 

For example, why not a commandment saying thou shalt not exceed the speed of light? After all, if He created that limiting velocity and knew it would be discovered by Einstein one day, wouldn't one expect a reference made to it perhaps at some point? 

Even coming from an intelligence of Sagan's calibre, this has got to be one of the daftest reasons ever expounded for arguing against the existence of God. For, if we were to take it seriously, then it should logically be expected that the various scriptures would have to make reference to each and every law of physics known to man till date. Not only that, it should also refer to laws that have not yet been discovered but may well be in the future. 

Or forget science; how come God never says a word about the use of perspective in art that only came to be wholly utilised in the 15th century? Why not something like thou shalt always use converging lines and foreshortening in thy paintings to render an illusion of 3D? Asking for proofs of omniscience is a standard weapon in the non-believer's arsenal. Problem is, shot without forethought, it often backfires.