Faith: A Scientific Curiosity

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna makes special mention of the soul. When the warrior Arjuna declines to fight and kill his relatives, Krishna says that he is not killing anybody, because the soul is immortal. Just as we abandon worn out clothes take new ones, the soul, likewise, abandons worn out bodies and takes new ones. It is the body that has birth and death. Soul does not come in the purview of the mundane laws governing birth and death. Soul is not cut by weapons. It is not consumed by fire. It is neither washed away by water nor blown away by the wind. Thus soul is not destructible by any state of matter or energy.

According to the Bhagavad Gita, the soul cannot be perceived by material means. In other words, one can not use tools that characterize matter. Eyes, ears, noses, hands and mouth which are common tools to probe matter, cannot probe the soul. The first step, indeed, is to deactivate these biological sensors. By controlling all sense organs, fixing the mind in the heart concentrating all energy in the head, reciting the one syllable AUM and engaging in firm yoga, one can probe the soul. (8:12). this prescription is completely spiritual and is beyond the reach of a common individual.

Prior to this, Krishna emphasized the role of knowledge in understanding the soul. (4:39). He who has faith can acquire the supreme knowledge about soul. The other requirement, as mentioned earlier, is the absolute control of senses. In this process knowledge gained would lead the knower to ultimate peace. In the next verse he says that those who doubt would perish.

Scientists are not comfortable with this idea of knowledge by faith and end by doubt. Science is not inclined to gaining knowledge by faith. Knowledge must be acquired by experimentation and should be free of all ambiguities. Doubts lead to further experimentation, which leads to the confirmation of the knowledge. Thus in the realm of science, faith is not acceptable but doubt ism in contrast to spirituality, where there is a reversal of roles that is, faith is the buzz word and doubt is the outcast.

This perspective apparently points to a disunity between science and spirituality. However, we cannot entirely rule out a unity in diversity. Spirituality is mostly intuitive while science is based on experimentation and reasoning. But many great scientific ideas initially came from the intuitions of their creators, which were later confirmed by both experiment and theory. There is of course a common ground. Both science and spirituality are not easily discernible to a lay person.

Of late scientists have taken interest beyond their domains. Social, economical and political domains are explored by considering them as statistical systems with some common unity. However, in the past these things did come under the purview of science, except of course in erstwhile Russia, where everything was considered as science, even religion. Thus a scientific approach to spirituality is also the need of the hour to porch to life. By doing so, we could put an end to the compartmentalization of knowledge and begin to see things from a holistic perspective.