By Sushil Kutty
“There is no God,” says physicist Stephen Hawking in his final book “Brief Answers to the Big questions” published posthumously. Coming at a time when a part of India known as ‘God’s Own Country’ is battling over whether women of all ages have the right to worship at the temple of a particular God, Hawking’s blanket declaration, if thrown into the Sabarimala mix, might take the discussion into blind alleys.
Hawking died in March this year and his book, given the final touches by his family, also propounds that there is “alien life out there; so, mind what you’re talking of, and don’t talk too soon because alien life could be much smarter than we.” If so, could it be that God is an alien life form – powerful and omnipotent, the Creator? However, that will be a negation of Hawking’s assertion that “there is no God!”
Stephen Hawking is not the only man who has said there is no God. Others have voiced doubts. But Albert Einstein, when queried, chose to answer in the affirmative, saying, probably with a sweep of his arms, “Who did you think created all this?” That must have made the day for believers who make big about “everything cannot come out of nothing, somebody must have created everything” – a God.
That’s a view contested by atheist Richard Dawkin, who held that the earth and everything on it was created from “nothing”, which then triggered the thought “who” made “nothing”, and “who” made the “one who made nothing?” In fact, in the wake of the Sabarimala verdict, some people have been questioning the status of Swami Ayyappa, questioning the “Chaitanya” in Ayyappa, “virajmaan” in the idol at the Sabarimala shrine.
“How do you know the statue has chaitanya, did it talk to you, can a statue talk?”, a #RightToWorship protagonist questioned a #ReadyToWait Ayyappa devotee in a TV debate, insisting that she had the Constitution-given right to pray at the shrine. It did not strike the #ReadyToWait devotee to return the favour with a question of her own: “How’s it that the idol will hear your prayers if it does not have Chaitanya and if a statue cannot hear or talk?” Stephen Hawking, if he were alive, would have loved to weigh in.
But Hawking is dead though Hawking had, in an earlier book, ‘A brief history of Time’, made the observation that travelling back in time will be difficult because to do that one will have to die first! Time, according to Stephen Hawking, has only one trajectory, forward. In his posthumous book, he relents and says that it will become possible in time for people to time-travel, and in a 100 years no place in the solar system will be out of bounds for man.
“There is no God. No one directs the Universe,” Hawking writes in his posthumous book. “For centuries, it was believed that disabled people like me were living under a curse that was inflicted by God. I preferred to think that everything can be explained another way, by the laws of Nature.” Ayyappa devotees and those who claim to be Ayyappa devotees, but want to run roughshod over temple traditions, will have issues with Hawking’s belief.
Hawking’s book and his beliefs will not change the people’s ingrained and entrenched faith in God. And though Ayyappa is on a different footing from God, more an avatar of God, a deity with specific rights and privileges, the turmoil in Sabarimala is proof that not everybody has the time and leisure to mull on whether God’s exists or not. God is a bone of contention and the very idea of God divides people.
As a matter of fact, in a religiously-charged country like India, God has everybody tied in knots and Hawking must have known that it’s impossible to move large sections of people to accept that there is no God. Unless, Hawking comes back from the land of the dead and announces from the Sannidhanam of Sabarimala that there is no God and Swami Ayyappa is but a figment of man’s fertile imagination.
If that were indeed possible, for Hawking to return from the dead, the late physicist would be disappointed to find that people of all hues and frame of mind are out in numbers in Sabarimala to prove him wrong – fighting, squabbling, protesting, peacefully and violently, firm in the belief that there’s God and nothing on earth can come in the way of that belief. Since morning October 17, Sabarimala is home to a battle royale and conceit, vanity, anger and other emotions are driving people crazy.
Hawking in his book says the world is on the brink of “vast transformative change” and that transformation is what is behind the chaos in Sabarimala. Advising people not to go into the future blindly, he adds, “How good is the track record of the human race in using advances in technology for the good of ordinary people?” His greatest concern, however, was “how divided we’ve become” and “how we have lost the ability to look outward, we’re increasingly looking inward.” To the question ‘how do we shape the future?’ he answers, “Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet.”
In Sabarimala, nobody is looking at the stars; too many things are happening on the ground as every media is sending female reporters and are being directed by celeb anchors, shouting their lungs out in TV studios in Mumbai and Delhi, to “make history” by being the “first woman to enter the abode of this God.” It is all about making history not about right to pray or gender justice. The frail vanities of man are on full display. Last, if it’s of any consolation, the Constitution of India, like Stephen Hawking, does not believe in God.(IPA Service)
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