Defending God in the Modern Age

DEFENDING

GOD

IN THE MODERN AGE

An Honest Integration of Spirituality, Religion, Philosophy, Psychology, Atheism and Science

_______

Krishna Bhaavin

Second edition November 2023

Published by

Shreem Brzee Academy

[email protected]

Design and layout by Liya Design Studio

© 2023 Bhaavin Shah

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher. In the event that you use any of the information in this book for yourself, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Full proceeds from the sale of this book go towards charitable activities of Tripura Foundation (www.tripurafoundation.org).

For purchasing online, please visit: www.krishnabhaavin.me

Dedication

Dedicated to my beloved Guru

Dr. Baskaran Pillai (Dattatreya Siva Baba)

who emphatically opened me up to God

Contents

Dedication

Chapter 1: Who is God?

Chapter 2: God of Spirituality vs God of Religion

Chapter 3: The Paradoxical God of East

Chapter 4: The Linear God of West

Chapter 5: The Multi-Dimensional God of Pagans

Chapter 6: The Rational God of Philosophy

Chapter 7: The Archetypal God of Psychology

Chapter 8: Stalemate between Science and God

Chapter 9: Quantum Physics Unveils the Mind of God

Chapter 10: Western Science Meets Eastern Spirituality

Chapter 11: An Atheist's Case against God

Chapter 12: Relevance of Religion

Chapter 13: Religions of the Upcoming Golden Age

Chapter 1: Who is God?

My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right.

Abraham Lincoln

At an impressionable age of 18, I began my formal spiritual journey under the guidance of my first master Guruji Rishi Prabhakar, the enlightened founder of the powerful Siddha Samadhi Yoga (SSY) self-development programme and the torch-bearer of Rishi culture in the modern world.

Amongst other teachings, Guruji would exhort us to live in the spirit of what (in Sanskrit) is called ‘Paraspara Devo Bhava’ — ‘Be a God unto each other’.

Every time we were guided to see God in another being, a certain image would funnily emerge on my mind’s eye. That of a blue-bodied Shank-Chakra-Gadadhari deity — a mythological figure who wields a conch, a flying discuss and a mace amongst other weapons. And I would chuckle knowing that this is definitely not what my master expects me to see in others. Since it can’t be this, what must it be, when the master inspires us to see God in others?

With that was laid the seed of a question that life came together to answer over approximately the next two and half decades. But some backstory first.

AN ALL-POWERFUL BUT TYRANNICAL GOD

I was lucky to be born in a religious Jain family. It gave me exposure to spirituality from a very early age. Jainism is a rare religion involving single-minded commitment to enlightenment ensured through a clear-cut spiritual path. It however also involved a strong emphasis on rules and regulations expected to be stringently followed, which I wasn’t wired to honour.

While Jainism is inherently atheistic, it involves veneration of superhumans (tirthankaras who became God-like). At that tender age, I didn’t know this theological detail that tirthankaras were technically not Gods but superhumans. I equated them to Gods as most Jains do even now. This kickstarted  what was to later become a lifelong tryst with God.

While Jainism laid a great childhood base for my connection with God, I was also quite tired of this version of God who came across more as a rule-making and compliance-demanding tyrant to the tender boy that I was then. Even though my current path is different, now I realise that strict rules are essential in some traditions. However as a child I couldn’t appreciate it at all.

The God of Jainism I later realised was similar in some ways to the God of the Old Testament who laid out crystal-clear commandments to follow.

GOD AS EXISTENCE

Come mid-teens and getting introduced to the work of Osho was the perfect redeemer for me and for my conception of God. Osho referring to God as ‘Existence’ or ‘All there is’ was quite relieving. God was no longer the celestial nanny prying on my life but the very substratum of all that is, good or bad.

Osho’s God lived in every slice of existence. Every wave being actually the moving ocean, there is no independent wave as such. Taking that concept forward, there is no ocean but moving water and no water but moving molecules, down the way to the quarks and ultimately the subtlest stuff of all, which we can choose to call ‘God’.

GOD AS PROJECTION

Somewhere along the way owing to reading Osho, I was also exposed to the father of psychology Sigmund Freud and his thoughts around God. To Freud, God was a matter of fantasy, fantasy of a dominant father figure who helped us keep our socially unacceptable emotions and tendencies in check. This conception of God also made sense to me in the interim. Until I read the work of another psychologist (and a student of Freud), Carl Jung who countered this thesis of Freud.

GOD AS ORDER

As my introspection went deeper, I started believing in God as the infinite intelligence behind the cosmos. I later fell upon the realisation that this God of order is the same as the God of Einstein’s conception. Though we consider Einstein to be a scientist first, like Newton, Einstein too had a strong philosophical side. Einstein had in turn declared his alignment with the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza quoting I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind

Einstein’s or Spinoza’s God looked more like the super-intelligence behind the cosmos — one who inspired awe owing to the sheer vastness, complexity and harmony behind the cosmos. Einstein’s God seemed to have more to do with the design of the universe than the stuff of the universe unlike Osho’s God. Michio Kaku — the legendary current-day scientist and co-founder of String Theory — also believes in Einstein’s God. Einstein incidentally also believed in a point of beginning of the universe and almost out of necessity in a creator God. But he didn’t believe in a God who interferes with the affairs of men and the world.

GOD IS MORE THAN ORDER

As I went further in my contemplations around the idea of God, I realised that both these definitions of God — Osho’s and Einstein’s — were freeing for me until one point but also limiting when the utility and scope reached its ceiling.

Both in some ways apparently identified God with nature or order thus depriving Him of His Supreme Transcendent stature, that part of Him which was beyond the perceptible human realm.

Reducing God to the orderly material universe felt like an oversimplification, similar to what the altruists tend to do in a different way though.  Many altruists have a reductive concept that a divine life is only about compassion, thereby doing injustice to the relevance of divine attributes like joy or bliss or unlimited power all of which are equally valid attributes of the Godhead which the altruist pays no attention to.

Also both Osho and Einstein seemed to have a life-long disbelief in or indifference to a personal God. That was a red flag for me. While being with my first Guru, I had incidentally fallen upon (and am still a beloved initiate of) one more spiritual guide Shri Amit Mishra who is a great devotee of Ma Kamakhya (a folk Goddess from East India) and prefers to live like a self-effacing householder. On one hand he stresses upon confident personal sovereignty rather than any emotional dependence upon a deity, but on the other hand he does believe in a daily loving communion with the Mother from a place of equality with the Mother. Association with him over the years had opened me up to the idea of a personal God.

GOD AS PERSON

Osho’s God or Einstein’s God didn’t make enough room for the Bhakti that the anthropomorphic form of God allowed for. Owing to my Jain upbringing, I had developed a disliking for the stringent rule-compliance that the concept of God demanded, but I had also developed a certain love and fascination with the idol or the image. I had tasted something of the other dimension in the three-dimensionalisation of the divine being. The spirit behind every idol is actually rooted beyond time and space though the presence of the idol before us makes us assume that the deity is just like us, an entity within