India's Unending Journey

by Mark Tully

  Similarly, instead of encouraging the growth of a genuinely secular society in which everyone’s faith or lack of faith is respected, the National Secular Society of Britain promotes hostility to religion. It claims that secularism should be supported by those who want to be ‘on the side of all humanity, the side of intelligence, rationality, and decency’. The Society is certainly ‘vigorous in its opposition to the forces of superstition, obscurantism, and illiberalism’. However, the view that any cause that is not secular is illiberal, seems to me to be illiberal itself.

  There are many in India who speak of the form of secularism established by Nehru as if it involved being opposed to religion. But although Nehru himself was not religious, he had a great respect for Indian culture and understood that the new nation must provide space for its ancient tradition of religious pluralism. He had many opponents who believed there were only two alternatives – a secular state that did not have any time for religion, or a theocratic state. Yet Nehru was quite clear that there was a middle way, that secularism should and could involve respect for religion. He said, ‘When we talk about a secular state, this does not mean simply some negative idea, but a positive approach on the basis of equality of opportunity for everyone, man or woman, of any religion or caste.’

  Purshottam Das Tandon, who mounted a serious challenge to Nehru in the early days of independence by putting himself forward as a candidate in the election for the President of the Congress party, called on Indian Muslims to adopt ‘Hindu culture’. In reply to this, Nehru said scathingly, ‘It is only those who lack all understanding of culture who talk so much about it.’ It often seems to be the case that it is those who talk most about secularism that understand it the least; and the same goes for those who talk most about religion. In India, it’s certainly true that those who chant secularism like a mantra fail to understand that secularism does not imply hostility to religion. It is equally true those Hindus who talk most about Hinduism often fail to understand the pluralism of their religion. The Hindu politician Dr Praveen Togadia (whom we met in Chapter 3) speaks incessantly about religion, but many Hindus would venture to say that he knows little about his own faith.

  As for the Indian secular fundamentalists, they regard anyone who speaks about religion at all as being a religious fundamentalist. Some years ago a secularist organisation asked me to be one of the judges of a competition for students who had been asked to draw posters advocating secularism. The one chosen as the winner depicted a Muslim cleric, a Hindu priest and a Christian clergyman, with a slogan underneath that ran, ‘Would you trust any of these?’ The obvious implication was that all religious teachers were dangerous fundamentalists.

  In 2003 I made a film about Mahatma Gandhi’s view on the place of religion in India which I mentioned in Chapter 1. I interviewed Gurcharan Das, the former head of a multinational’s Indian operation. To illustrate an Indian secularist attitude to religion, he told me about a friend who had asked him how he was spending his retirement. Gurcharan Das said, ‘Looking at the Vedas among other things.’

  His friend replied, ‘Oh, so you have become one of them!’ By ‘them’, he meant the followers of Hindu extremists such as Togadia.

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  Those scientists who oppose religion on the grounds that it is not scientific, and who claim that science disproves the existence of God, form my third contributing factor to illiberal secularism. Of course, it would be illiberally religious to deny that there are many arguments that can be made against the existence of God. In India as well as in the West, atheist and materialist schools of thought have enquired profoundly into many of the same questions about the meaning of life that religions have tackled. Some would argue that by accepting that death is final, in which case life might be held to be meaningless, atheists show more courage than theologians. But scientists who argue that God doesn’t exist because his existence can’t be proved scientifically are often fundamentalists in that they believe that science alone holds the answers to every question.

  That said, it’s hardly surprising that many people do put their faith in science and technology. The achievements of both are amazing and their progress apparently never-ending. Science and technology are forever unveiling new discoveries about our world. Through them, we are able to travel into space, improve our chances of longevity and invent more and more ways of communicating with each other.

  There have been tremendous advances in my own lifetime. When I was a child, we had to travel to and from India by ship, as air transport was still in its infancy. When my uncle was sent to India to become a tea planter in the plains below Darjeeling, he was only granted his first home leave after seven years, whereas now I am able to fly back to Britain at least twice a year.

  When I first came to India, we still often sent despatches by telegram. When we did try to send them in voice, we had to go through an incredibly cumbersome process that involved sitting in a studio while engineers pushed leads into sockets and pulled them out again, shouting, ‘Can you hear me, can you hear me?!’ It took a long time for the answer ‘yes’ to come back from the London end of the line. Even when we had progressed to using telephones, after three or four attempts at getting my despatch across in good quality sound, the traffic manager receiving my call would all too often complain, ‘I’m awfully sorry, Mark, but it’s still not broadcastable.’ Then I would wake up the next day and switch on the radio to hear the deathly words after my report: ‘That despatch was read in the studio.’ So much for my attempts to phone it through. Nowadays reporters can easily send top-quality despatches and pictures from any part of the world by using a satellite telephone.

  However, no comparable scientific progress has been made towards making our communications with God clearer, so perhaps it’s natural that many people – especially those seduced by the success of science – believe that therefore God cannot exist. These same individuals then become contemptuous of religion. But, as Ravi Ravindra, Professor Emeritus of Canada’s Dalhousie University (where he held the Chair of Comparative Religion and was also Professor of Physics), has said: ‘The relationship between science and religion is best understood as one of constructive dialogue rather than the popular idea of a conflict that science is winning.’ And the Indian thinker Ananda K. Coomeraswamy comments: ‘A real conflict between science and religion is impossible: the actual conflicts are always of certain scientists ignorant of spiritual philosophy with fundamentalists who maintain that the truth of their myth is historical.’

  Those scientists are the high priests of scientism, a creed that upholds the primacy of science over all other interpretations of life and regards reason and empirical experiments as the only valid source for truthfully addressing questions about the world. This is an unbalanced creed because it allows little or no validity to other means of perception. Ravi Ravindra warns:

  The search for truth – when it becomes more and more mental and divorced from deeper and higher feelings such as compassion, a sense of the oneness and the like – leads to feelings of isolation and accompanying anxiety … Then one wants to control others and conquer nature. Much of our predicament arises from this very dedication to truth in an exclusively mental manner.

  The Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins is, in my view, one of the most pugnacious and best known preachers of scientism. He is as zealous in his attempts to root out religion as were the Christian missionaries who preached the gospel and tried to eradicate beliefs they classified as pagan. For him, religious believers appear to be like the heathen described by the second Bishop of Kolkata, Reginald Heber, in his hymn ‘From Greenland’s Icy Mountains to India’s Coral Strand’. Heber’s heathen ‘bow down to stick and stone’ and need ‘to be delivered from error’s chain’.

  Dawkins once asked: ‘What has theology ever said that is of the smallest use to anyone? When has theology ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious?’ He misses no opportunity to challenge religious people. His latest book has the confront
ational title The God Delusion. In it he asks questions I need to ask myself, and reminds me that atheism is not just credible but honourable too. Discussing God’s role in consoling us in the face of death and offering us an alternative to the prospect of annihilation, Dawkins quotes Bertrand Russell’s declaration in his essay of 1925:

  I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is none the less true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting. Many a man has born himself proudly on the scaffold; surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about man’s place in the world. Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own.

  Reading this, I have to wonder how much my religion is a hangover from cosy beliefs that comforted me as a child.

  However, it’s not the validity of Dawkins’ arguments that I would question so much as the absolute way that he puts them across. I was surprised to find that, according to his book, Dawkins doesn’t ‘by nature thrive on confrontation’ and doesn’t think that ‘the adversarial format is well designed to get at the truth’. Be that as it may, to my mind, one of the main problems with his arguments lies in the antagonistic format he adopts and his intention to confront religious believers.

  Dawkins doesn’t appear to be particularly open to dialogue and discussion when, on the first page of his book, he writes: ‘Imagine, with John Lennon, a world with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition …’ and the discussion continues in that vein. Isn’t this opening gambit a misleading over-simplification of those tragic events, designed to confront religious believers? And doesn’t it imply that if there were no religion there would be no persecution, no terrorism and no war? Then, in a chapter called ‘Childhood, Abuse and the Escape from Religion’, Dawkins provocatively relates an incident in Dublin when, after a lecture, he was asked about sexual abuse by the Catholic clergy. To which he replied that ‘horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up a Catholic in the first place.’

  Dawkins maintains that biology has shown that natural selection explains the development of the universe and this means there cannot be an intelligent creator. He also says that the concept of a creator is so improbable that it can’t be accepted as a solution. Keith Ward’s book God, Chance and Necessity rebuts Dawkins’ arguments. He points out: ‘Any assertion that the hypothesis of natural selection can account for all the facts is a remarkably bold claim, when so many facts still remain unaccounted for, even in the realm of evolutionary biology.’ In other words, Dawkins takes his theory too far. Ward also argues that Dawkins constructs his own God in order easily to knock that image down. According to him, Dawkins’ God is a ‘naively imagined, anthropomorphic God, who is unreasonably, irrationally, and blindly flattered and obeyed’. Atheists might well argue that this description tallies with the God of some religious people, and indeed this version of God may also emerge from an over-literal reading of scriptures. But this is not the concept of God embodied in the Christian God of Love, nor Allah the All-Merciful of Islam, nor the Ultimate Reality of Hinduism.

  I suppose we all make our own God to some extent. I know that, over the years, I have adapted the image of God that I was taught to believe in when young into a far more tolerant deity, and that this is probably because I don’t want to be as obsessed by sin as I used to be. Maybe I should be less lax about sin and revere a less tolerant God. On the other hand, Dawkins seems to replace God with an image that reduces us to nothing more than machines. He has said that we are ‘survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes’. He would, I am sure, hate to believe that his non-God and his barren mechanical human beings are his own creations. He believes that his version is scientific. But surely his rejection of God is influenced by his enthusiasm and his talent for science? Some have also suggested that Dawkins is influenced by the prevalent competitive capitalist, dog-eat-dog culture of Western secularism. That suggestion certainly fits with his interpretation of the evolutionary theory of the survival of the fittest.

  However, scientists such as Dawkins do raise the difficult and crucial question of evil. He himself has made a television series called the Root of All Evil, referring inevitably to religion. Later he admitted that he regretted the title because ‘no one thing is the root of all anything’. But he certainly didn’t appear to regret attributing a great deal of evil to religion.

  I realise that the issue of evil presents an insurmountable obstacle for many of those people who would otherwise be prepared to keep an open mind about religion. Religious leaders have to accept that God does not only appear malign to committed atheists such as Richard Dawkins. They also have to tread carefully when speaking of an omnipotent and loving God from the security of their pulpits when television brings into the homes of their congregations pictures of every natural disaster and the voices of survivors who have lost everything.

  Discussion of the problem of evil becomes obscured when we fail to differentiate between man-made and natural disasters. I happened to be in London in September 2004, the day after the appalling tragedy at the Russian school in Beslan, North Ossetia. There, more than 340 people were killed when commandos stormed the building to release children held hostage by Chechnyan militants. To my mind, this was clearly an example of moral evil at work; and, when I heard one of the presenters of the BBC’s combative breakfast show, Today, open his interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury by asking, ‘So where was God yesterday?’, I thought to myself, ‘Where was humanity?’ We humans were responsible for that terrible event. We can’t take pride in our achievements, rejoice in our free will and then not accept responsibility for our failures.

  Many disasters that are classified as natural have been caused or compounded by our human failures. In the aftermath of Bangladeshi cyclones, I have flown over uprooted villages and flooded fields littered with bodies – some floating in the water, some lying twisted in grotesque shapes, naked, their scant clothing torn away by the sea and the wind. And I’ve wondered about the economic system that forces people to scratch a living from islands that are below sea level. Can we really blame God for that economic system? Do we humans have no responsibility for it at all?

  Diseases are often cited as proof that there can’t be an omnipotent loving God. But God can’t be blamed for all diseases. A few years ago I drove from the capital of the central Indian state of Chattisgarh to a hospital in a remote area run by a volunteer team of some of the country’s best doctors. On the way we passed a government granary, which was so full that sacks stuffed with grain were piled in mountains outside as well as in. However, the doctors at the hospital told me that half of the patients they treated would not be ill if they had an adequate, balanced diet. Leprosy was one of the diseases that continued to afflict those weakened by malnutrition.

  It would nevertheless be inhuman to deny that there are many disasters and diseases that are entirely beyond human agency. Although some cancer patients may have contributed to their illness by smoking and there are human-created environmental factors for some cancers, the majority of sufferers have done nothing to make themselves ill. Similarly, neither children nor their parents can be blamed for congenital illnesses. And, even if it was our economic system that put those Bangladeshi farmers at risk, why should there be a cyclone at all? Why should there be earthquakes? Why should there be droughts? Do they not prove that God is not all powerful – or, worse, that God is malign?

  According to the Buddha, the world is suffering but we can end our suffering if we eliminate our des
ire. Some Hindu teachers maintain that suffering creates the longing to seek the realisation of God. Some Christians see the cross as a symbol of the need to suffer. They talk of ‘redemptive suffering’, meaning that suffering can lead us to reassess our lives and to realise that we need to find a deeper meaning than materialism alone can provide. It seems to have been almost obligatory for the great Christian mystics to suffer those long dark nights of the soul in which they were separated from God. But then why should a loving God make it necessary for us to suffer?

  I can’t pretend to have the answers to these profound questions, but I do know from personal experience that a belief in God and in the grace of God can provide comfort, hope and meaning in times of suffering. To explain suffering I have to fall back on the mysterious nature of God and on the realisation that He, and the suffering he apparently tolerates and perhaps even creates, cannot be entirely understood through reason alone. I am aware that those who think that the problem of suffering means we can dismiss God rationally would regard my views as a cop-out. But do they have a better explanation for suffering? Perhaps they would argue that we just have to accept its existence as a fact, and grin and bear it when there is nothing that can be done to alleviate or eliminate it.

  In the modern classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, there is a sound warning to all scientists, philosophers and theologians who claim too much certainty for their answers to the great questions about life. In The Guide, two philosophers threaten to call a strike of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and Other Thinking Persons because scientists have asked a ‘stupendous, super computer’ the answer to ‘life, the universe and everything’. The philosophers realise that if the computer comes up with the answer they will be out of a job. However, when the computer is asked how long it will take to find the answer, it replies, ‘Seven and a half million years’, and it goes on to tell the philosophers that running a programme to answer the great question is bound to generate huge public interest, and therefore they’ll be much in demand on the media. The scientists abandon all thoughts of a strike and walk out of the room ‘into a lifestyle beyond their wildest dreams’ …