Chats on the Charles

It was a typical North Indian winter night.  The mountain wind, freed from the valleys and fortified with fresh Himalayan snow, was running wild across the plains.  I found my seat on the rickety bus, unsuccessfully trying to close the rusted window.  The long, cold and wet ride back home seemed daunting.  Settling down for the six hour journey, I began leafing through my physics textbook, trying to get a head start on my holiday homework, but mainly hoping it would help me fall asleep.  Dozing off and on, I barely felt the shoulder touching me.

A man, perhaps a few decades older, settled into the seat next to me.  He was dressed in the clothes of an itinerant monk – a simple orange cloth on his body, red vermillion paste on his forehead, goose bumps on his exposed arms and prayer beads wrapped around his wrists.  Turning to me, he asked, “Son where do you study?”  Something about him seemed interesting.  We began talking, two strangers, randomly acquainted on a bus to Chandigarh, and yet as I found out, on two completely separate journeys.

He listened as I told him about my studies at IIT Delhi, a hyper-competitive science and engineering institution.  The unbridled enthusiasm of a cold and therefore animated 19-year old poured out.  I described my passion for science, my acceptance into an American university to complete my college, and my getting that ultimate prize, a visa to study in the United States.  Inevitably, our conversation turned to religion.

In the haze of 30-year old memories I don’t recall who started that discussion.  Most likely it was me.  Perhaps I was curious and asked him what he did.  He said he had studied science as well and gave it all up to pursue spirituality in the Himalayan mountains.  I learnt about an ancient order of Hindu monks who preach across India and then retire to the mountains to meditate and worship Shiva.  The questions were multiplying in my brain as I contemplated his repudiation of everything I was about to embark on.  And then he asked, “Do you believe in God?”

Relatively unscathed by the trials of time, those were my days of being a strident atheist.  My drift away from God had started early, a teenage rebellion against my Catholic school education and the stifling Hindu religiosity around me.  Rationality, logic and science were my guiding philosophies.  God was an inconvenient intrusion into a beautiful universe.  Unraveling the mystery of quantum physics was more interesting and remarkable than any epic or religious text I had read.  As I laid out my youthful disdain, the man listened patiently, a smile creasing the sides of his face.  Back and forth we went for a few hours.  Soon the bus pulled into a town that was the staging ground for many Himalayan journeys.  Above the usual din of tea vendors and trinket salesmen getting on and off the bus he remarked, “ I hope, for your sake, Planck’s Constant is a better guide through life than God.”  And then he got up and walked off into the darkness.

As the years have gone by, I keep coming back to that conversation.  Time has delivered its expected and unexpected share of triumphs, challenges and disappointments. Through all that, I have not needed to invoke a superior deity to cope with or enjoy life in all its richness and loss.  The marvel of quantum physics, the possibilities of infinite universes, the intricacy of an atom or a gene, the power of an earthquake or hurricane, the complexity of nature and the evolutionary randomness of my very existence are as spiritual and awe-inspiring as anything the human creators of religion have conjured up.

My stridency has progressed into a benign agnosticism.  Expanding my knowledge to the basic tenets of other faiths did not shed any new light on the monk’s statements.  There simply is no evidence I can come across that points to a divine being.  The adherents to faith keep asking for proof of the counterfactual – the non-existence of God.  I am incapable of providing that.  Hence my agnosticism.

My state of mind is best described in the words of Sam Harris, a philosopher, “I aspire for a level of intellectual honesty where I no longer pretend to be certain about things I am not certain about…and where personal convictions are scaled against evidence and where intellectual honesty is demanded equally in religious and non-religious views.”  In that framework the Gods of our religions enable lazy rationalizations, and are an elixir to explain the random.  They are unsatisfying in their relevance and uninspiring relative to the allure of science.  It is no wonder that the vast majority of scientists are atheists or agnostics.

Most people do not share my views.  They have a deep belief in their religion and its positive impact on their lives.  I am envious of the steadfastness of their certainties, and yet my pursuit of soothing sustenance in those certainties has proved futile.  Perhaps the joys and sadness yet to come will shake my convictions.

Recently I drove through the town where I last saw the monk.  The bus station is still there, somewhat larger and more modern, and still a beehive of activity.  Was he on to some truth that I have struggled to see?  Would my life be different if I had stepped off that bus with an acceptance of religion? I do not know.  Rationality dictates that I will remain open to the evidence of the existence of God.  Until then, to paraphrase the words of the saints of Liverpool, “When I find myself in times of trouble, Planck’s Constant comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be let it be.”  This version may not quite have the angelic beauty of Mother Mary, but it is comforting, nevertheless, in its truthfulness.