Peace with Science and Religion
Question 1. How do you know that God exists?
Answer 1. I do not know empirically if God exists as no one has seen him physically, but I know that His spirit lives. This is similar to the way we know that music exists. I am not talking about sound here but the dictionary definition of music “vocal or instrumental sounds (or both) combined in such a way as to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion.” In the beginning, music passed on from one generation to another through the people creating it in front of a live audience. Later on, it got recorded on media and distributed via selling the physical copy of the medium or in modern times electronically. This is how we know that music exists. If there is no one to create music and there is not a recorded copy of any music left, there would be no existence of music. The same way I know that God exists because since the recited history of humanity either in the form of cave paintings, legends or written documents humans have always believed in some God. It’s not only historical it’s present, and it’s continuously passed on to the future generations. Description about God can be found in almost all forms of communication be it written documents, songs, accounts of personal encounters, testimonies resulting from miracles, preachings in public gathering or one to one conversation. At this point, people might ask what about Sherlock Holmes people have talked about him for ages and there are books and movies written about him. Did he ever exist? I would say yes his spirit does live. Even though he is a fictional character the personality of Sherlock Holmes exist among people and many among us would not be hesitant to say that they know him as much as they know one of their friends. Having given Sherlock Holmes as an example, I am not implying that God is a fictional character instead emphasising that it is not necessary for something to exist to have empirical evidence.
Question 2. If God exists and he loves then why there is so much suffering in the world?
Answer 2. This is a common question that bogs almost everyone whether they believe in the existence of God or not. Whenever I ask this question to myself, I also like to ask if for a moment I do not accept the existence of God then why there is still so much suffering in the world? And almost every time the answer is that most of the human suffering in the world is because of humans themselves. Then the question arises if most of the human sufferings in the world are due to human then why do we want to blame God. We tend to blame God because it is told to us that God is good and He loves us, therefore, if God loves us and He is all powerful then why can’t He remove all the sufferings from this world? Well God did create us to live without suffering when he placed Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. We sinned and brought suffering upon us. God being loving God did take measures to save us from suffering, and that is why he sent His son Jesus Christ to protect us from the eternal suffering of hell. Our pain indeed continues in the physical world, but through His grace, in the midst, we have an assurance of comfort and peace.
Question 3. You are a scientist, and you believe in God. How can we trust your scientific findings?
Answer 3. One of the main reasons that I do science is that I don’t have to believe in anything while doing it. Science is not a function of belief. It doesn’t matter how much you believe in the content of your test tube if the ingredients are not right; the desired reaction is not going to take place. In my understanding in science you propose a theory and to test that theory you plan experiments, and from the outcome of your experiments, you either reject or accept your theory. Moreover, every scientific research is expected to be reproducible. Therefore if I am ever asked this question, my response is “I have peer-reviewed publications, and if you have doubts about the results that I have proposed then you can carry out the experiments yourself to reproduce my results, and if what I have done is meticulously scientific then you should get the same results.”
