MEGHNA MAITI
Mumbai
We still have not figured out whether the outcomes of life are essentially random or whether there is God. Yet, our lives embedded in the vast, complex nebula seem transient, almost hallucinatory. Their sparkly brightness is carried up and down in the vast emptiness as they morph under the influence of powerful outflows and intense radiation from the stars and star clusters around them. As a human race, we have adapted an identity that is generously enigmatic. The sheer evolution of humankind, including the recent discovery of Higgs particle to solve the puzzles of the universe would probably have even God clucking in disapproval. As the bleary-eyed physicists drink champagne and celebrate the key to understanding the cosmos and the elusive realities, the existence of God could well be on the line bordering science with religion.
Lost in the hullabaloo of the neo-atheists in modern life, the existence of God has taken complex almost romantic proportions. Sitting cosily at home with our family and friends, when we had finished our drinks, slowly getting high on the news on ‘god’s particle’ on television and we suddenly realise: something happening somewhere else is, at the moment, far more important than something happening here. More we perhaps get at the inner distractions, dispersals, symbolic disconnections, and networks of underlying disparate and decentering associations, the better we get at figuring out God’s existence in the current states of subjectivity and the conflicts they spark.
Physicists are especially excited with the idea that ‘Higgslike’ particle’ could point the way to new, deeper ideas, beyond the Standard Model of physics, about the nature of reality. Yet, such force of nature blurring the sense of reality and abstract, could give a concrete form to God. And the conflict starts therein as majority of the people are conditioned to believe in omniscience, invisible minds and immaterial souls. In that case, their religious sensibilities are often shaped around their blanket rejection of modernism and turning their backs on the life of their times and declaring that the world had gone to hell. Though their tastes are narrow, their devotion is real and fruitfulness is proven by their serenity.
“While it is true that scientific results are entirely independent from religious or moral considerations, those individuals to whom we owe the great creative achievements of science were all of them imbued with the truly religious conviction that this universe of ours is something perfect and susceptible to the rational striving for knowledge.” This quote by Albert Einstein perhaps sums up the timeless interdependence of religion and science.
Higgs Boson may be a manifestation of cosmic molasses that permeates space and imbues elementary particles with mass. Without Higgs, there might not be atoms or life. Yet no matter how much science explains, it seems, the real void that God fills is an emptiness of our spirit, a sort of yearning for the intangible. Moreover, God has to exist, irrespective of discoveries to satisfy that lust for the divine.
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