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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Subodh Pandit

Theism, Atheism, and Science

India is a very diverse country, philosophy, religion, culture.

And growing up there gives you a perspective, and a perspective that really challenges you, challenged me.

1 of the questions I had was, in this pluralistic society where I grew up, how do you find your way through?

Would it make sense to be able to evaluate the different claims that come to you very strongly.

I searched for answers for more than 20 years.

Grew up as a Christian in a very anti-Christian environment.

I'm going to present to you this evening 1 topic of the struggle.

My first topic that really confronted me was how do I make a decision between Hinduism and Islam and Buddhism and Christianity and Judaism and the others, too, Jainism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, you name it.

Then as I grappled with that, I realized that there was an earlier question.

Because these claims tried to show that there was something supernatural.

But what if there was not anything supernatural?

Now, what's the use of looking for all the names?

So my first question had to be, How can a rational, thinking, scientific mind accept the existence of something beyond what we can see, beyond the natural?

So I'll just go ahead and tell you what there is on these slides.

The first question for any group like this is to recognize that this is a huge, complex question.

It is not what you would have for breakfast, either this cereal or that.

The question is, is there a God in existence?

You can't have 50% of this and 50% of that.

Our whole existence, including our Earth and all that we understand of the planetary systems of the galaxies, the universe.

Either there is a God in this universe or there is no God in this universe?

If you say that there is a God, you can't step on the other side and say, well, 50% is there too.

If you are a theist, a person who say there's a God, then you cannot be an atheist.

And if you are an atheist who said that there is no God, then you cannot be a theist.

The question is, If you are rational, which way would it go?

If you are a thinker, if you want to place it on a basis where your mind will be satisfied, How shall we deal with it?

Because it is so big, we must lay down certain ground rules.

We're going to take a few minutes tonight.

Not very, very long, but the ground rules are extremely important.

You and I have the freedom to choose whatever we want to believe as the truth of the matter.

You and I, I'm repeating, have the freedom to choose what we want to believe to be the truth of the matter, whether there is good evidence, Whether there is no evidence, and when there is even evidence to the contrary, you are free to choose.

And everybody uses that freedom to choose.

And you can choose when there's no evidence, you can choose when there's evidence to the contrary, that's yours, totally yours, because it's a personal thing, a belief is personal.

Once it is that personal, we have to ask ourselves, just because I believe it, does it make it the truth?

Because somebody else can believe something else exactly and diametrically opposite.

So it cannot be that my belief is the truth.

So when you come to a corporate body like us, a group, then we cannot say that my personal choice must hold sway.

I give it up and say let's do a corporate search, a community search, and in that community search we must lay ground rules.

The ground rules that we will set for this few minutes that we're going to spend tonight, We're going to look for things that have evidence, that are reasonable, logical.

Not mere opinion, not illogic, not absurdity.

Why do we have this setting of the ground rules?

It's because the debate has been going on for decades and generations and centuries.

There's people who always keep on saying, hey, there is a God, and there's equally a strong voice from the other side saying, no, there isn't.

So when there are these 2 forces going on for centuries, I asked, why is it going on for centuries?

Why can't we come to some kind of a consensus?

There are 4 reasons I found why this debate will always be inconclusive.

Number 1, we have not yet defined the terms.

Do you know that we have not yet defined what is the meaning of God to the satisfaction of both the sides?

Number 2, we have not decided what is the meaning of evidence.

What is the nature of evidence for or against this side or that side.

If you don't settle these 2 things, your debate must go on forever.

And I've asked so many, and I've been doing this for 8 years now.

My speeches are usually on secular university campuses.

So when I ask them, can you give me the nature of the evidence that you want to look for when you say, I'd like to have an evidence for the existence of God.

Nobody has yet, as far as I know, settled out what that evidence is or should be.

I have yet to meet somebody who is absolutely neutral and say, let's look at it in a neutral way.

You always find a person coming at it from either 1 angle or the other, either from theism or from atheism.

Nobody dares to stand in the middle because they are scared the other side will win.

The tendency to look for the evidences and to weigh the evidences out so that our pre-existing beliefs are settled.

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Theism, Atheism, and Science

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