The cosmic mono-act

By VARGHESE V. DEVASIA

Recently I attended a seminar organized by the Physicists Association in honour of the Nobel laureate Prof. Peter Higgs. All speakers lauded Higgs for his path breaking discovery of the God particle that gives mass to the self created Universe. Paradoxically, the discovery of the Higgs boson refutes its own notion that God is an afterthought. Now the questions being asked are: Why Higgs boson? What is its origin? Why did the Universe, as we observe it, come to exist 13.7 billion years ago in a Big Bang? It logically follows that the Universe is an infinitesimal dot beyond time, shape and space. It is neither big nor small. The only statement that we can make about the Universe is that it is. We are absolutely ignorant of what the Universe looks like from outside as it has no exterior, but only an
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interior and the Big Bang is not the originator of the Universe; but only the creator of time, shape and space within the Universe as we experience them. In Ayyankunnu, my village in Malabar, there was a grand old man and everyone called him respectfully Moopen meaning the eldest among the oldest. He belonged to the Paniya tribe and his knowledge on land, rivers, forest animals and birds was extraordinary. We are the Earth, we are the sky and we are the heaven. God is what we see around us. Nothing is born, nothing will die; we are forever, he used to sing for children who gathered around him often to listen to his stories. In 1933, as a young man, he helped the British to construct the Iritty Iron Bridge besides discovering the shortest route for the IrittyVirajpet highway through the undulating Sahya Parvatam. The Collector of Malabar, so pleased with his services, presented to him a replica of the bridge and said that he was as intelligent and capable as any professor of physics at Oxford. But Moopen never claimed that the Universe came into being from nothing. Physics has an inherent inability to contain the idea of God, says cosmologist Paul Davies. But Sam Harris, a neurologist, defines God as belief without evidence. For him Science is based on empirical verifiability principle where as God has no place in such framework. In his The End of Faith, which was published immediately after 9/11, Harris argues that the only way to rid our world of terrorism is to abolish faith in God and further asserts that science can expunge the idea of God from human consciousness. Change is the result of chance, says Nobel laureate Jacques Monod in his Change and Necessity; hence, there is an absence of purpose and design in the Universe. It presupposes that humans originated by accident. Supporting Monod, Richard Dawkins asserts that the absence of God is a pre-requisite to human evolution. One who believes in reasons and logic cannot accept God, thought Carl Sagan.
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John Caputo in his The Power of the Powerless writes that we need to confront the God who appears when God who disappears in the anxiety of doubt. The Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, thought that God died in Auschwitz. How we account for the evil we see in the world supposedly created by God, Wiesel asks. For some postmodern thinkers, reality is construed by the mind and that all human knowledge is therefore interpretation rather than the acquisition of accurate objective facts. Therefore, God is the desire beyond desire, a memory and promise that is, of its very nature. When Nietzsche, Kafka, Camus, Sartre, Hawking and Krauss deny even the notion of God, the postmodern thinkers consider that whatever you say God is God is more. When I was a freshman in the College, I staged a mono-act, written and designed by me, titled God on Trial on the College Day. There were four characters, God, a Judge, a Priest and the Jailor. The story went like this: In a remote hamlet, where the population was on the decline, within a span of one month, all children died due to unknown illness. God could have prevented the deaths, but He did not and thus commit murder. The Judge condemned God to death; the Priest heard his confession; the Jailor tied His hands and legs and hanged Him on the gallows. While God was hanging from the rope, there was the tintinnabulation of the church bell announcing the time for prayers and suddenly the priest, the judge and the jailor knelt down to recite the Our Father in Heaven. The idea conveyed was: God is an inseparable part of the human psyche, which can never be deleted. Even if God is dead, He continues to live in us as the Self and the vitality of the Universe. His existence is indeed a cosmic mono-act. (vvdngp@gmail.com)