Reflections On Two Recent Debates

Recently the Lallantop channel on YouTube hosted a debate between Javed Akhtar, an atheist, and a Mufti on the topic of Existence of God.  Some time back a similar debate had taken place between Zakir Naik and Dhruv Rathee.

This post is inspired by some reflections after watching the two debates.

Physics started out with what is now known as Classical Physics which dealt mostly with terrestrial objects in a, more or less, uniform gravitational field, close to each other in space and time and moving at speeds that are negligible compared to speed of light - that great constant in all frames of reference.  This is our immediate world that we experience with our senses directly and incessantly.

In this immediate world, Classical Physics came out with laws that seemed immutable and provided us with a sense of certainty, where given the initial state a later state could be figured out with compoete certainty.  This sense of certainty and absolute knowledge got shaken when Physics was required to accommodate the fact that the speed of light was an absolute constant in all frames of reference even though they may be moving relative to each other.  This gave rise to Special Theory of Relativity which was soon followed by the General Theory of Relativity where space, time and even mass all got mixed up.  

The turbulence got intensified as physics widened its ambit to subatomic particles on one hand and the immense vastness of universe on the other.  Some fairly bizarre phenomenon came to our notice for which the classical physics failed to be the correct model.  The sense of certainty vanished as probability took centre stage prompting Einstein to famously protest that God didn't play dice with us.  As Quantum and Astro Physics progressed, strange things emerged when developing models for the observable world on the very small scale on one hand, and very vast on the other.  Quantum physicists found that time disappeared altogether in their advanced equations!   Further, Quantum phenomenon, mostly probabilistic, seemed to crystallise into certainty in the presence of an "observer" - called collapse of the probabilistic wave function!  And to top it all, entanglement of particles in this strange Quantum world enables information to travel instantaneously, faster than light!

The world at the quantum level is far from mundane, it is mystical.  So mystical that many religious philosophies like Vedanta seek and claim to find a parallel for their tenets here.

While quantum physics concerned itself with very small, another branch, Astrophysics, found itself in an universe where Classical Physics faltered again.  In an attempt to model it,  Astrophysics came up with a Big Bang origin of the universe.  Again, time, which vanishes in the quantum world, is said to be non-existent before the Big Bang:  Space too.  It also had to accept existence of dark matter and dark energy to explain some of the observed phenomenon.  In a debate between the Islamic evangelist Zakir Naik and Dhru Rathee, Naik claimed that a certain aayat in Quran talks about Big Bang and this makes Islam the most scientific religion!  He probably forgot that science treats Big Bang as a theory, a model that is open to peer review and revision, or even abandonment, if alternate models can better predict the observed facts.  In fact, in science everything is open to review and being challenged if any experiments so suggest.

Even as physics was making these strides, and technologists were starting to find ways of putting to use the weird quantum phenomenon,  Information Technology too made rapid strides and achieved the most fascinating neural network and Artificial Intelligence.  The machines have finally passed the Turing Test proposed by Alan Turing in 1950, much earlier than what was thought possible!  This has added fuel to the debate around the hard question of "consciousness."  This has become a free-for-all activity where religion tries to find a turf where it hopes to have an edge over science.

Ultimately what distinguishes science from non-science is what Javed Akhtar said in the recent debate.  It was to the effect that religion asserts definitive answers to every question and those answers must be taken as final, whereas science has the humility to accept what it still doesn't comprehend fully.  And then again, because science is open to being questioned and contradicted if observed phenomenon don't agree with the model in vogue, there is only one science all over the world.  Religions are numerous and the reason is obvious.