God: Imagination or Reality

This question has been asked since time immemorial, people ask proofs for existence of God and the soul or proofs for what is said in Bhagwat-Gita or the Vedas, is correct or not?

So, before we come to that, since proof is necessary to have faith, the first question arises:

What is our qualification and what kind of proof are we seeking to develop faith in scriptures?

Is it something that our senses will understand, and be able to accommodate the criterion for proof, is it that the proof must be something that fits into my common sense or sensory understanding of the world to be accepted by me as a faith? This is why people want to see god before they can believe it.

So, many people’s conception of proof is that it must be visible to the senses, they must see it.

So, seeing is believing, that’s the dictum that many people follow, but by that criterion so many things are invisible to us.

Our eyes are deceptive, we see the Sun as a small globe, whereas actually it’s a huge entity. We see so many different kind of optical illusions, they deceive us, so our sight limited.

If all the lights in a room were to be switched off, we would not perhaps even be able to see our hands infront of our eyes.

So, what is the capacity of our eyes to see?

The capacity is indeed very limited, not only do the eyes deceive us, but they also have a very limited range.

While discussing with others on this particular topic, I asked them: have you seen an electron or proton, or have you seen these things which you swear by that they exist, mostly the answer is no, I haven’t seen it? Why do you believe in it?

Because the whole system is inculcating this or hammering this into our mind in such a way that we tend to think that this, and only this is the absolute reality.

We don’t say that a proton or electron doesn’t exist, but what we say is that these are different ways or understandings of reality that come about by the way we think and analyze this world based on our senses.

So, our senses are actually very, very defective instruments to give us a complete and perfect understanding of the truth.

It is very hard to come to a perfect understanding simply through our senses.

We can’t even understand this world ourselves without a reference to some other source of knowledge, so this is called “Prāktasya pramāna” or the proof through our senses to see, touch or hear something then we believe in it,

But we understand that this is an inadequate prerequisite or condition.

Then people may say as well, there’s inference, we infer something. That is called an “Anumāna pramāṇa”

But even that is limited because we may infer wrongly or we may arrive at wrong conclusions, even Darwin and his origin of the species accepts it was speculation.

Of course, they say that we evolved, but that’s just an excuse for insufficient and imperfect understanding. They rationalize or justify, they’re constantly changing understanding of the world by saying this is our striving for perfection in this world.

But perfection cannot be attained by sensory efforts alone.

The reality is not necessarily always within the grasp of our senses, we have faith that the universe can be understood. Merely by our senses, we have faith that knowledge can be accommodated simply by our intellect and our brains, we have faith in these things.

People don’t think like this, they don’t realize the underlying assumptions of life that we have. This study is called Epistemology, the study of the branch of how we acquire knowledge in life.

People don’t generally think deep about this.

What are the underlying assumptions, based on what we take for granted in life, in this world? We just assume so many things, or take them for granted and think that this is true, and then we place our faith in them.

So, we realize that we need some authority to place our faith on

Like the child at school, places his faith on the teacher’s words on the textbooks, or on the parents and believe so many things in this world.

We also have faith in the authority of the government, that they’ve checked a particular airline company, and have confirmed that yes, they’re ok, to operate the aircraft and they’ve got their systems in order.

So we place faith in authorities, because it makes life easier, it saves us time, it saves us inconvenience.

It’s just common sense, that when we want to acquire knowledge, we place faith on the authorities of different branches of knowledge.

Could we have acquired even ordinary mundane knowledge without this principle?

No, so when we rely so much upon authority for procuring ordinary mundane knowledge of this world, how much more would it be necessary when we want to acquire knowledge of something that is beyond this world?

Isn’t it logical, therefore, we also place our faith in something else, some other authorities, so, how do we know that what those authorities are saying are true?

By actually following it in our life first, by reasonably understanding it with our intelligence, and then actually practically putting it in practice in our life and when we see that what the scriptures say are actually working in our lives, we develop a little faith.

The Vedic scriptures also give us a lot of information that would otherwise have been impossible for a mundane person to actually give.

It gives us such accurate information about embryology, for example, how the foetus grows in the womb of the mother, what limbs of the child of the foetus grow at what time,

and this is something that was written thousands of years ago and the details of this were verified by modern science only recently when we had all the instruments and equipment.

This is only about a hundred years old, maybe less than that, but this information was accurately obtained and given to us thousands of years ago,

there are predictions about the future that are also very true predictions about people like Chanakya, about historical dynasties yet to come, there are conceptions that are also very, very deep.

There was a time in the medieval ages about 500 to 600 years ago, there used to be a whole debate on whether the Earth was flat or round and therefore many sailors would be afraid to sail because they would go over the edge and fall.

And then people like Kepler, Copernicus in the Western world.

They told the Western world, look, no, The Earth is actually round.

But of course, the Vedic scriptures have been declaring this since time immemorial.

We have the Bhoogol, the shape of the earth, the shape of the planetary systems.

Things have been described with so much accuracy,

if you look at the level of advancement of the science as given in the Vedic scriptures, like mathematics or chemistry, metallurgy and so on

It’s mind-boggling.

How did they know these things thousands and thousands of years ago?

So, these things give us faith that, yes, now what the scriptures say is not something whimsical,

it is not something imaginary, there’s some prime basis for us to at least consider it seriously.

Even if we don’t have staunch faith at this moment and then we start studying it, we understand it, and we start understanding a higher logic, and that’s how our faith develops.