God is not a delusion

The intelligent have been trying to find out whether God exists or not. The wise know that it does not matter.

For the intelligent, the question about God's existence is a tool to satisfy their curiosity. It is a mental exercise. They are obsessed with unanswered questions, and this is the most challenging of all puzzles. It will remain so for the analytical, intelligent populace, because the answer cannot be found mathematically. You can find an answer to creation perhaps, maybe to the enigma of death as well, but not to God. Scientists have spent over 40 years to find the Higgs Boson, the 'God particle'. They would spend another forty to analyse how does it fit in their model of understanding the universe, but this search is endless, bound to go on forever. The answer does not lie in science. It can be had only from total surrender, which is a method they will not try. You have to believe first to find, and not vice versa. Even if the intelligent get a glimpse of the divine, they are likely to attribute it to a psychotropic substances.

The best that an intelligent man can do perhaps is to reach as close as Einstein, who in his later stage was trying to prove God's existence. Einstein died before he could find the answer, but even if he had lived for another fifty years, his efforts would have been in vain. That is simply not the path.

The pursuit of the intelligent to find God is born from curiosity, and not out of the quest to find the meaning of existence. Now, curiosity is a survival tool, in-built in our genes, being most pronounced during the early formative years. However, the problem starts when we grow up, and hard-to-answer questions are difficult to find. You have to feed curiosity to keep it alive, which seems such an important thing to do. After all, curiosity has sustained you for so many years, you just cannot let it wither away. So, man turns to varied sources - How much does my neighbour earn? Who is Shahid Kapur going around with? The answers are no longer crucial to survival, but should be asked just to keep the faculty alive.

The man who believes himself to be higher on the intellectual plane goes for the big ones. These questions are too shallow, requiring no application of mind, just good contacts or access to the right databases. The bigger one are those that can be argued, discussed ad infinitum - who created the universe, or whether God exists or not? Over a period of time, the question becomes an aid in never trying to search for God at all. You can find an argument in favour of God's existence, and another against it, and as long as you are not sure, what's the point in surrendering to a vague concept? There is no point in looking for a needle in a haystack if you are not even certain whether it is there in the first place.

For the saint, the question does not exist. He has surrendered himself - he has acted before believing. An area for madmen to tread upon, but the most effective in the search of the divine. Then, there are people like Gautam Buddha, the wise, who never tell you the answer. It is immaterial. If you want to believe, you can find the answer in anything.

One of the arguments in favour is the 'argument of beauty'. A simpler way of putting it would be in the words of the noted Urdu poet Josh Malihabadi - "Had God not sent His messengers and His books, the beauty of the morning would have been enough to be proof of His existence". I shall talk more about it later.