Friends across faiths

Humra Quraishi

Last spring, I visited a gurudwara for the first time in my life. Why not earlier? I was apprehensive: Would a Muslim be welcome? Contrary to my fears, the experience turned out to be a happy one. It was so peaceful and tranquil in the gurudwara. I was there for an hour with Sikh friends. And then, it struck me how little we know of each other's faiths. What was holding us back? Most of us are happy to consume misleading myths of different faiths. Often I've been told that I don't 'look' like a Muslim. Asked to explain, they admit rather sheepishly that the general impression they have of Muslims is that of a woman covered by a veil, with a bunch of children in tow... At various stages in life, I've had to give explanations and counter-explanations to convince people that Muslims are no different than the rest.

In fact, Indian Muslims follow social customs which closely resemble Hindu ones; yet, stereotypical notions and myths continue to circulate, creating differences between communities. Right from childhood, suspicion and apprehension of other religions gets drilled into our little heads. It seems almost as though you would betray the religion you are born into if you entered places of worship of other faiths. Instead, visiting one another's temples, mosques and churches should be part of growing up — this will definitely broaden our perspective just as reading opens our minds and hearts to other horizons. The 13th century Sufi saint, Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, made it a point to routinely interact and hold spirited dialogues with the Brahmins. Little wonder, then, he could expound a beautiful philosophy that if the Almighty did not make demarcations between Hindus and Muslims, vis-a-vis the outreach of his bounty like sunshine, water, fruit and trees — then, who are we to create rigid barriers of caste and creed?

In God's eyes, all humans are equal. Differences and conflicts are entirely man-made. The best way to bridge gaps and clear doubts is by having more people-to-people contacts between different faiths. A Tamil friend confided that she had thought, all along, that Islam was a militant and aggressive religion, until she heard Maulana Wahiduddin Khan speak and explain that the word Islam means peace. If only religion was not made out to be such a formidable subject, we would be able to look upon God as a close friend and confidante, whether he lived in a guru- dwara, temple, church or mosque, or even if you prefer to see him in nature — in trees, flowers and mountains, for instance. God, the Creator, cannot obviously be confined to small spaces — he is everywhere. Kahlil Gibran said: "And if you would know God, be not therefore a solver of riddles/ Rather look about you and you shall see him playing with your children/ And look into space; you shall see Him walking in the clouds, outstretching His arms in the lightening and descending in the rain/ You shall see him smiling in flowers, then rising and waving His hands in trees...”

God's presence can be sensed everywhere: in the teachings of religions, and simply in every person you come across. Befriend those from different faiths and freely question each other about your respective faiths. This is the best way to clear doubts, most often sown by those who want to divide and misrule. I recently met a Jesuit priest who lives in Ahmedabad. He said to me: "In these days of communal strife make it a point to tell your neighbours and close friends that the essence of each religion of the world is to co-exist in total harmony.” To this, I'll add a few lines from a Bangladeshi friend who provides shelter to stray dogs and cats: "We have two stray dogs and four cats — but they have never fought with one another... they're better behaved than human beings." The Times of India October 26, 2002

Just one diya

More dash than cash: God, in fact, seems to like it simple
RENUKA NARAYANAN

This has to do with grand marble mandirs being considered so vital today. It’s great to strut our stuff as a community, lay up treasures on earth, get ourselves a meeting point that works as belief bazaar, cultural centre and free shrink, plus does brilliant free takeway in biodegradable donas (leaf cups). Even the distant glimpse of a great House of God is electrifying and our highways are lined with shrines that everyone bobs their heads to or halts at for a quick prayer. These visible symbols are important for reassurance, they light up the land with their presence, knit regions through the circuits of sacred geography and give us valid reasons to touch base with interior and outlying corners of the Motherland.

Some of the best stories from religious tradition are to do with temples. Nandanar the beloved Tamil saint pined so hard for a glimpse of Shiva at Chidambaram. Saal Beg, a Muslim devotee of Lord Jagannath at Puri yearned for darshan and wrote the moving song Ahi Neela saila. But with all this justification for buildings, God’s own wishes, if we are to understand our stories correctly, are very modest indeed. Saint Jnaneshwar of Maharashtra says that the Lord is best pleased when worshipped with the flowers of good deeds. Or let’s recall one of Shiva’s nicest names: Asutosh. It means ‘Easily pleased’.

A sprinkling of water, a bel leaf, a flower — these are enough to make the Great God happy, if offered sincerely. Once, when some rakshasas attacked him, he thought they were worshipping Him because they hit Him with branches of bel, and so He blessed them! Take the tale of Kanappa Nayanar, a hunter. He was filled with such love for Shiva that he felt impelled to make an offering as a formal expression of his feelings. In his innocence he spat water from his mouth on the Shivling, threw down flowers from his own hair and laid a fresh kill of deer at the altar. We’re reliably informed that the Lord just loved Kanappar to bits.

With Pitr Paksh going on now (the period of formal Hindu remembrance of ancestors, when no new contracts may be signed, houses or cars bought), it makes sense to remember our soul links. Rather than grand buildings, these stories our ancestors bequeathed us are our real treasure, because they give us a happy, purposeful code of living: It’s not what you’ve got but how you use it that matters! The Vedic people made no temples, only altars that they made and took apart after each yagnya. Let’s cherish our wonderful temples, let’s build new ones by all means. But let’s not forget that baggage-less vision either, or the minimalist chic of just one diya, or just one agarbatti near the tulsi. The Indian Express: Monday, September 30, 2002

Sob Story

Manjul Bajaj

While laughter has long and often been hailed as the best medicine, crying, the other uniquely human attribute has been given short shrift by society. Humans are the only animals who shed tears of emotion. Why do we cry? Are there any physical or health benefits from crying? Plenty, if some researchers are to be believed. Throughout history and in every culture people have cried. Weeping often occurs at precisely those times when we are least able to fully verbalise complex, overwhelming emotions. Scientists feel that weeping is probably necessary because no human behaviour has ever continuously evolved unless it somehow contributed to survival. There are three basic types of tears.

• In healthy eyes, the cornea is continually kept wet and nourished by basal tears.
• The second type of tears is reflex tears that attempt to wash out irritants that may have gotten into the eye.
• The third category, emotional tears, is increased lacrimation due to strong emotional stress or pain. Tears brought about by emotions have a different chemical make-up than those for lubrication.

According to a study by University of Minnesota biochemist William Frey, people report feeling better after a cry. Frey discovered the neurotransmitters leucine-enkephalin (an endorphin or natural opiate-like substance for pain relief) and prolactin (released from the pituitary in response to emotional stress) in emotional tears: The substances were not found in tears shed in response to sliced onions. Studies back the common observation that men and women cry differently. Men cry quietly and their eyes brim with tears. Women, on the other hand, make lots of crying noises as the tears stream down their cheeks. Testing revealed that men weep an average of 1.4 times a month while women cry about 5.3 times monthly. "Until the Industrial Revolution, crying in public was pretty normal, even for men", says Tom Lutz, PhD, "Heroic epics from Greek times through the Middle Ages are soggy with weeping of all sorts. Through most of history, tearless-ness has not been the standard of manliness". The industrial age needed diligent, not emotional, workers. Crying was then delegated to privacy, behind closed doors. People everywhere became more uncomfortable with public tears. Perhaps, it's time to reclaim our tears. A crying club, anyone? The Times of India October 6, 2005

A logic beyond science?

It’s time science and spirituality ended their eternal war.
GAUTAM CHIKERMANE

It couldn’t be without logic—this intricately balanced nature, its geography, its life forms, its civilisations, their interdependence. The laws of nature that physics is discovering existed long before man discovered science. Or defined it. But simply because science today defines itself in one way —it describes a large class of observations and makes definite predictions about future observations—doesn’t mean there’s no logic beyond this definition. Just like the movement, in science, to understanding that it wasn’t the earth but the sun around which planets revolved took two millennia and six scientists to be discovered, from Aristotle in 340 BC to Newton in 1687, maybe there’s some new logic waiting to be unearthed by science that stands beyond its reach today.

We’re on a planet that’s not only rotating on its axis and revolving around the sun, but one that’s constantly evolving, with the rest of us trying to keep pace even as we influence this evolution. Discovering ourselves, our physical and psychological drivers, our arts, sciences and everything in between. In the process, going beyond what we know, to what we don’t: mind and its multi-layered depths, soul and its vastness, consciousness and its timelessness, the all-encompassing spirit and its spacelessness. Concepts science can’t recognise as logical as they stand outside the logic of reason and within the logic of, say, intuition.

Education is partly to blame. We find that we have been trained to look only at the surface. Hence, the focus on one aspect of a much wider possibility. Ignoring the education of the body, for instance, by which death could be conquered. The education of the vital, through which we can understand that perhaps fear and courage are two halves of one whole. The education of the psychic, by which we touch the That lying within us. All of which have their own logics, that don’t necessarily conform to scientific definition. Silence as a stairway to reach these depths, for instance.

Not for a moment am I questioning scientific logic, just wondering whether those conforming to it have their minds open enough to accept the possibility of other paradigms, other logics. The existence of, say, a spiritual logic. Could it be that the scientific temper has seen merely religious seeking through irrational beliefs, and hence is discounting it—and along with it, its deeper, spiritual aspects? Could it also be that it concerns itself only with change and not the Source, the stuff from where it all began? The Indian Express Monday, November 14, 2005 Read comment[s]

Garibaldi and Nehru

Exactly a century ago, Pandit Nehru first walked into this elite public school that takes its name from its location, leaving two years later for Cambridge with the rudiments of an English gentleman's education and a head full of radical ideas that would bring the British Raj to its knees. For, in an accident of history, Harrow unwittingly presented tomorrow's freedom fighter with the ultimate reading list.

As a prize for excellence, the school fatefully selected for the 18-year-old Nehru the first volume of G M Trevelyan's historical trilogy on Giuseppe Garibaldi. It was to be a turning point in Nehru's life. The soldier played a central role in the 19th-century unification of Italy and the rise of Italian nationalism. Garibaldi's example prepared Nehru for the struggle he would have to wage with powerful words and persuasive ideas before the Empire would crumble. Later, Nehru was to record the impact that long-ago school prize had on him. Transfixed by Garibaldi's struggle, Nehru bought two further volumes on the gallant soldier and admitted it inspired in his young breast "visions of similar deeds in India...of a gallant fight for freedom, and in my mind, India and Italy got strangely mixed together."

On Monday, Harrow celebrated its ham-handedness in making that historically fateful gift to one of its greatest sons. Marking the centenary of Nehru's entry into the school with a respectful ceremony redolent of history, Harrow's headmaster Barnaby Lenon declared "Nehru was a role model for Harrovians." Indian High Commissioner Kamalesh Sharma added: "In some way, by presenting the book on Garibaldi, Harrow contributed to the strengthening of the desire for freedom for India that Nehru would later win." RASHMEE ROSHAN LALL [Wednesday, November 16, 2005, THE TIMES OF INDIA]

On Considering the Source

Sources are precious. Original ideas, even more so. The nature of design practice means that we will always, by necessity, need to reference existing information, but in our race to the finish, let's not forget that in the very process of translation — from idea to form, from one thing to many things — we are not obligated to imitate, replicate, and indeed — mediate. Posted by Jessica Helfand

A friend of mine, a painter, recently saw a group exhibition at PS1 in New York in which he was struck by the absence of primary source material. Although intentionally abstract works, these paintings all referenced extremely specific aspects of contemporary culture, most of them heavily filtered through the media. Put another way, these artists weren't abstracting simple forms — natural forms, geometric forms, simple and universally comprehensible forms — but were instead referencing ideas that had already been parsed by various media sources. While on one hand, this work could be said to be mirroring a particular generation of artists who have come of age in a heavily mediated world, my friend was conflicted: does our willlingness to accept the cultural and biographical bias of the maker mean we are also meant to forgive the absence of original ideas?

In the wake of last week's indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the question of where sources come from is on everyone's mind. And while it might be said that questions of national security are not likely to be compromised by a group of abstract painters, the question of source material is, I think, one that deserves a second look. Because it is by its nature tied to the exigencies of public communication, graphic design is perhaps less overtly prone to this type of critique: after all, in traditional practice, there are a series of external transactions — involving clients, budgets and a host of personal and public agendas — that frame the process, if not the actual product of the design itself. Art, on the other hand, does not invoke the same kinds of interpersonal complexities, although there is a long tradition of patronage, going back to the Medicis, that shows the artist does not create work in a vacuum. Yet beyond the obvious — the clients, the curators, the governing factors of economics and what the market will bear — the central question remains: when is an idea original, unmediated — and pure?

Clearly, there is nothing that suggests the notion of pure has any relationship to the world we live in. But at the same time, the idea of targeting original sources — and by conjecture, of seeking original ideas — seems like a goal we should, in all fairness, support. (There's a certain amount of semantic confusion here that easily leads to a kind of involuntary hypocrisy: we want to breathe clean air and drink pure water, but we don't want our art to reference "purity" because that wouldn't be a reflection of the world in which we live.) This is not to suggest that purer is better — but that the notion of a primary source, meaning unmediated and unmoored from a host of other complexities — has become something of an endangered species in our time. Designers, who might be said to embrace a slightly more pragmatic vision of making work and disseminating messages, feel the burden of communicating the complexities of an age in which "pure" resonates as utopian, sugar-coated, and false. (There is also the very real fact that "pure" in graphic design recalls the neutral, overly homogenized, and borderline fascist tone of the International style.) And it's tricky: it's all been done. How can anyone ever use Futura Bold Italic again and not evoke the purview of Barbara Kruger?

These sorts of assessments — of which visual metaphors, messages and meanings drive and are driven by people participating, as makers, in an ongoing repository of visual culture — lie at the cornerstone of a kind of ideological polemic about design versus art. Isn't it all subjective? Who is to say what is original? And how do we know if it is? And why, frankly, should we care?Let's return to the idea of sources. To the designer, "referencing" an earlier style or maker can be seen as a kind of post-modern pastiche. When done with irony, it can be deliriously enchanting — Paula Scher's open gesture to Herbert Matter in a series of posters for Swatch, in the early 1980s, come to mind. Sans irony, we're left with blatant plagiarism, and at the risk of really painting myself into a corner, I will refrain from giving examples. At the same time, we yearn for new visual languages to emerge: so scratchy handwriting replaces the clean alignments of mechanically-rendered type and we applaud ourselves for letting go. We photograph signage on our cell phones and upload images to share online: here, through digital concensus, we sanction our societal acceptance of this itinerant, manmade vernacular form, whereupon it becomes streamlined and secondary, no longer the stuff of impulse, the magic of outsider art.

There is one more piece to take into consideration — and that's the piece that involves reality. One has only to consider the popularity of Reality TV to understand why any of us with a healthy imagination would see the blurring of fact and fiction as material worthy of compelling inquiry. But beyond the seduction of the blur lies the deeper, more pressing question: what does the truth look like? Lately it is easy, too easy, to see reality as something distanced from the truth. Writing of the greater concerns over social displacement and substance abuse in yesterday's New York Times,, a psychiatrist warns that the growth of technology has cleaved us from a greater reality of self. "We say that we are "going" places on the Internet without ever leaving the room. Posted by Jessica Helfand on November 3, 2005 07:09 AM Jump to Most Recent Comment

Yehi Hai Right Size, Baby

Jayant V Narlikar

The Times of India , October 15, 2005

In the 1930s, biologist and geneticist J B S Haldane wrote an article 'On Being the Right Size', in which he discussed several living systems in the context of why they come in the particular sizes we find them in. For example, why can't we scale a rabbit to the size of an elephant? Haldane reminds us that the giants in the ancient mythologies, described as enormously larger than humans, would have perished under this mathematical law. Given the composition of a system, there is a natural size for it. Its overall balances are well maintained at that particular size. If you increase the size of the system, the controlling forces scale differently and lose their equilibrium. As sizes increase the volume-based forces grow faster than the surface-based ones, and vice versa. Which is why babies are in greater danger of exposure to cold than adults.

Even man-made systems are subject to influences that are size-dependent and there is a right size for each system. A famous magazine in the United States went out of circulation because its circulation increased. The decline of the Roman Empire began when it became too big. It became increasingly difficult for a central administration in Rome to control far-flung regions. Likewise, political parties in India find it increasingly difficult to have a national cohesive character. As they seek to expand their influence, they have to contend with local aspirations of regions removed from their central think tank. The result is the politics of coalition. The uncontrolled growth of metropolitan cities is another example. The larger the population the greater the infrastructural problems, which rise in greater proportion than the monetary contribution the larger population would bring.

The atomic nucleus contains neutrons and protons, bound by an attractive nuclear force. This force is basically stronger than the force of electrical repulsion between any two protons, but the force is effective only over a short range. We can build stable, bound nuclei by adding more and more particles, but only up to a limit. When we reach the nucleus of iron, we find that this is the limit. This nucleus has 56 particles. If we add more we start descending the stability ladder. The binding provided by the nuclear force loosens because of the large size — the same problem that brought down the Roman Empire. It is time we learnt from nature that 'right size is beautiful' is a good motto to adopt, especially when we are tempted to grow too big for comfort. The writer is an astrophysicist.

The Search and the Find

Sathesh, one visitor to this blog has requested me to share more about my search and what is it that I have found. He is quoting from what I have written in 'About Me' and asks what I exactly mean by the Truth.Well. It is a long story. But yet it is also a very short story. Here I go then with the long and short of it. By nature of being born to parents who had certain ideas of upbringing, I learnt carnatic music - vocal and instrumental and shlokas and chanting in Tamil and Sanskrit.

I took to reading the books of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother in the 1990s. As Sri Aurobindo has said, when the mind is travelling on a single plane of existence, force of circumstances gives a jolt in some form or another. This jolt came in the form of an auto accident on August 15, 2000, Sri Aurobindo's birthday. A woman seated just next to me suffered grievous injuries while I just scraped my elbow and knee. Getting back to work after four days of leave, for the first time, I had this thought: Why was I spared in this accident. What is the purpose of my existence? It was this question that took me on a path of what is popularly known today as Yoga, Meditation and Spirituality. But even then, I did not go in search of truth, but I was just answering some call and saw myself being taken to all the places and people who were providing me with the answers. When I dithered or just forgot, someone would come to remind me or tell me what to do.

Truth of Existence is a difficult thing to explain. But all the music, all the Sanskrit or anything that I learnt by heart, began unfolding the deeper meanings to me. I now see the same roads, same polluting MTC buses, the same people, the same poverty or prosperity, the same clean or unclean roads, the same everything. But earlier, they were all different and I was different. Now the Truth is - I and Them, I and It, I and Him, I and Her are all one. The person who asks the question is me. The person who replies is me. My answer for Who Am I? will now be - Well, Nothing. If you don't like this answer, I will say, Well, then Everything. It makes no difference. posted by Swahilya at Sunday, July 10, 2005

The Moment of Complexity

Emerging Network Culture by Mark C. Taylor "At pivotal moments throughout history, technological innovation triggers massive social and cultural transformation..." (more)

Editorial Reviews: Book Description
"The Moment of Complexity is a profoundly original work. In remarkable and insightful ways, Mark Taylor traces an entirely new way to view the evolution of our culture, detailing how information theory and the scientific concept of complexity can be used to understand recent developments in the arts and humanities. This book will ultimately be seen as a classic."-John L. Casti, Santa Fe Institute, author of Gödel: A Life of Logic, the Mind, and Mathematics

The science of complexity accounts for that inscrutable mix of chaos and order that governs our natural world. Complexity explains how networks emerge and function, how species organize into ecosystems, how stars form into galaxies, and how just a few sequences of DNA can account for so many different life forms. Recently, the idea of complexity has taken the worlds of business and politics by storm. The concept is used to account for phenomena as varied as the behavior of the stock market, the response of voting populations, and the effects of risk management. Even Disney has used complexity theory to manage crowd control at its theme parks.Given the startling development of new information technologies, we now live in a moment of unprecedented complexity, an era in which change occurs faster than our ability to comprehend it.

With The Moment of Complexity, Mark C. Taylor offers a timely map for this unfamiliar terrain opening in our midst, unfolding an original philosophy through a remarkable synthesis of science and culture. According to Taylor, complexity is not just a breakthrough scientific concept, but the defining quality of the post-Cold War era. The flux of digital currents swirling around us, he argues, has created a new network culture with its own distinctive logic and dynamic.Drawing on resources from information theory and evolutionary biology, Taylor explains the operation of complex adaptive systems in social and cultural processes and captures a whole new zeitgeist in the making. To appreciate the significance of our emerging network culture, he claims, we need not only to understand contemporary scientific and technological transformations, but also to explore the subtle influences of art, architecture, philosophy, religion, and higher education. The Moment of Complexity, then, is a remarkable work of cultural analysis on a scale rarely seen today. To follow its trajectory is to learn how we arrived at this critical moment in our culture, and to know where we might head in the twenty-first century.

Spotlight Reviews: Write an online review and share your thoughts

Theory of Everything, May 7, 2002 Reviewer: Steev Hise

Mark C. Taylor is among those very rare writers and thinkers who are able to take many disparate disciplines of knowledge and perform a synthesis which creates wisdom. With this book it's evident that Taylor has been thinking about certain heady concepts for at least all of his adult life. Indeed, I've also read an earlier work of his, "Hiding," that touches on some of the same ideas. But with Complexity he has honed his thinking and added even more contributing topics, all zeroing in to our current turbulent moment of history. Taylor's is personal and professional, and it's been developing since the 1960s. It includes a sometimes dizzying array of topics and references to other thinkers, including artificial life, chaos theory, information theory, evolution, semiotics, cultural studies, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Lamarck, the history of the modern university, cybernetics, emergent phenomena, fashion, intellectual property... and more!

Taylor somehow manages to weave a coherent and compelling tapestry out of all these threads, with results I can only describe as profound and inspirational. By looking at recent history and its social upheavals through a lens informed by the latest ideas in these fields, he arrives at a very convincing and intriguing picture of the fundamentally different sort of world we are seeing develop around us right now. Beside the wise observation and intelligent synthesis, though, he also does something else that's very rare with these sorts of projects: he attempts to explain his theory in practice.

Leaves of a Pipal Tree

India is a civilisation of many images, a culture of many visual feasts, a tradition where the visible and the palpable are as important as the oral and the occurrent, where our highest truths are embodied in our kathas and gathas, our songs and stories, where our temples are not only places of worship but equally a gallery of beautiful forms and figures, where myth is as important as doctrine, where ancient memories are full of cherished narratives, where mythic beings are real in many different ways and we enrich our lives by festivals which celebrate events from the lives of our mythic gods and goddesses, and where knowledge is gained as much from itinerant performers as it is from learned discourses and where, when the wind blows through the Pipal tree it is as if we hear the hymns of the Vedas. MLBD Newsletter October 2005

Towards the Black Void

This is the heading of one of the cantos of Sri Aurobindo's Savitri!!!. I just opened the book, saw this heading and named this as the title. However I am really awestruck by the meaning it conveys. According to the big-bang theory, our universe sprang into existence as "singularity" around 13.7 billion years ago. Singularities are zones which defy our current understanding of physics. They are thought to exist at the core of "black holes." Black holes are areas of intense gravitational pressure. The pressure is thought to be so intense that finite matter is actually squished into infinite density (a mathematical concept which truly boggles the mind). These zones of infinite density are called "singularities." So everything comes out of black voids and finally it gets sucked up and destroyed into the black voids. posted by withluvGanesh @ 11:19 AM

Divinity in a stone

Sudheendra Kulkarni
The Indian Express
Sunday, October 09, 2005

On a morning walk along a pot-holed road which was being re-laid, I saw a group of labourers who were about to begin their day’s work. It was obvious that they belonged to a migrant clan of stonebreakers, engaged by the construction contractor. It was also obvious that they were poor, very poor. Tented huts on the roadside, open-air kitchen with the barest of utensils, a baby cradled in a cloth-sling — it’s a common sight at construction sites in India.

What struck me was that before the team began the day’s work, a woman performed a small puja on the stone, smeared it with the auspicious yellow and red powder, broke it with a ceremonial strike and then everybody went about their respective tasks. I asked the woman why she did it. In her own earthy Marathi, she replied, "This is not a mere stone for us. There is divinity in it. This stone feeds us. It also makes your cars run smoothly on the road.

Game theory

ARUNAVA SEN
The Economic times
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2005

The Nobel Prize in economics for 2005 has been awarded to Robert J Aumann and Thomas C Schelling for their contributions to the theory of games. Game theory is the analysis of strategic choice. It concerns situations where a group of people (called players) take decisions which affect each other. Thus a player can paradoxically strengthen his position by voluntarily foreclosing some of his options. The Spanish general Cortez who colonised Mexico burnt his boats on arrival demoralising his adversaries because they knew that his army could not retreat.

While Aumann has been one of the builders of the formal structure of game theory, Schelling has been one of its inspirations as well as one of its leading exponents. His most important contribution is his 1960 book The Strategy of Conflict, a book rich in ideas anticipating many subsequent formal developments. In a sequence of models, he formulated the notions of “credible commitment” and “brinkmanship”. Schelling has applied game theory to a variety of situations ranging from arms control to environmental policy to racial segregation. Schelling also developed a formal theory of deterrence via the threat of retaliation and showed that it may be more effective if you deliberately leave your response uncertain. His ideas were influential during the Cold War and he even acted as a consultant in Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1964 film Dr Strangelove.

(The author is professor, Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi)

String theory

Dr Sandip Parimal Trivedi, TIFR
The Hindustan Times October 2, 2005

The new idea was to assume that the basic entity was a string, not a point particle. The string could virate in different ways, just like a sitar string does.The different resulting notes are the different kinds of particles, electrons, photons etc. There are six extra dimentions in string theory. These are believed to be curled up in small size, so that they have not been observed yet. A beatiful feature of string theory is that its differnt facets are closely tied together in tight logical consistency, so that progress in any area leads to ramifications for the whole subject.

Remote Viewers

The human body has no definite beginning or end. It is constantly creating itself, again and again, every day. This means that every minute is a kind of genesis and at the same time an ending in which we give up a bit of dust unto dust. If we are creating ourselves all the time, then it is never too late to begin creating the bodies we want instead of the ones we mistakenly assume we are stuck with.

Every breath you take is a creative act. The molecules in the air are random and chaotic. If they happen to enter into your body, they magically acquire a purpose and an identity. Could any act be more creative?

Consider what happens to a single oxygen atom as you breathe it in. within a few thousandths of a second it passes through the moist, nearly transparent membranes of the lungs. It immediately attaches itself to the haemoglobin inside one of your red blood cells. In an instant, a remarkable transformation occurs. The blood cell changes colour, from the dark blue-black of oxygen starved haemoglobin to the bright red of an oxygen rich haemoglobin, and a stray atom of air suddenly becomes YOU. It has crossed the invisible boundary dividing you from the rest of the universe.

Each of us is balanced between the infinite and the infinitesimal. The same protons found in the hearts of stars, which have lived at least 5 billion years, take up residence inside us. The neutrinos that streak through earth in a few billionths of a second are part of us for a brief instant, too…Remember that you are a flowing river of atoms and molecules collected from every corner of the cosmos. You are an outcropping of energy whose waves extend to the edges of the unified field.

Deepak Chopra

[ET-SQ; Tue-150205]

It might not be so incredible to declare that the compositions of all 6 billion human beings as well as the thousands of other species on Earth are, in fact, indistinguishably intertwined, making us soulmates in more ways than one.

Consider this: When a bacterium, weed, starfish, peacock, dog, cat or human dies, decomposition sets in. in the process, the atoms that constitute the body are released into the atmosphere, and they mingle freely, getting interspersed over wide geographical areas. Some might get reconstituted in a short period of time, becoming a part of another, or the same species. Other atoms continue to free float indefinitely, may be for years or even decades, before they submit to another composition. That makes us all parts of one indistinguishable whole, with each having at least some of the ingredients of the other.

Bill Bryson in A Short History of Everything talks about the pervasive nature of atoms:

Atoms are fantastically durable. Because they are so long-lived, atoms really get around. Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each atomically so numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of atoms – up to billion for each of us, it has been suggested – probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Ghenghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name… so we are all reincarnations – though short-lived ones. When we die, our atoms will disassemble and move off to find new uses elsewhere – as part of a leaf or other human beings or drop of dew. Atoms themselves, however, go on practically for ever.

Jahanavi Shandilya

[TOI-CTC; Mon-280205]

So how are we connected, one may ask, with say, the Andromeda Galaxy, which at a distance of 2.2.million light-years, is the most distant object that can be seen with the naked eye? Well, for starters, the fact is that at one time – about 13.7 billion years ago to be precise, when the Big Bang happened – all the stuff that was one day going to make up the Andromeda, along with all the other stuff that would one day make us, were exactly one and the same thing.

Not only that, they were also exactly in one and the same place – the initial singularity; the primordial atom. Nor could they have been anywhere else since there was no other time or place to be in. Then again, we’re connected in another way too. Consider the air we breathe. It’s just matter in a gaseous form consisting of 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, less than one per cent carbon dioxide, some water vapour, dust and pollutants and trace amounts of various elements.
In fact, nothing could be dissimilar to ourselves. Yet once this air enters our lungs it oxygenates the blood, which nourishes the tissues, and once it leaves the lungs it carries away all the carbon dioxide wastes taken from the tissues. It’s safe to say the air around us not only becomes part of us continuously but contains a part of us in it as well all the time. That’s how connected we are.

Mukul Sharma

[ET-SQ; Mon-140305]

Although in the everyday world energy is always unalterably fixed (the law of energy conservation is a cornerstone of classical physics), in the quantum micro-world, energy can appear and disappear out of nowhere in a spontaneous and unpredictable fashion. Or as Richard Morris and Paul Davies put it:

The uncertainty principle implies that particles can come into existence for short periods of time even when there is not enough energy to create them. In fact, they are created from uncertainties in energy. One could say that they briefly borrow the energy required for their creation, and then, a short time later, they pay the debt back and disappear again. Since these particles do not have a permanent existence they are called virtual particles. And even though we can’t see them, we know that these particles are really there in empty space because they leave a detectable trace of their activities that have been very accurately measured and described.

Mukul Sharma

[ET-SQ; Fri-250205]

That Famous Equation and You

By BRIAN GREENE
The New York Times
September 30, 2005

During the summer of 1905, while fulfilling his duties in the patent office in Bern, Switzerland, Albert Einstein was fiddling with a tantalizing outcome of the special theory of relativity he'd published in June. His new insight, at once simple and startling, led him to wonder whether "the Lord might be laughing ... and leading me around by the nose."

In the century since, E = mc² has become the most recognized icon of the modern scientific era. Yet for all its symbolic worth, the equation's intimate presence in everyday life goes largely unnoticed. There is nothing you can do, not a move you can make, not a thought you can have, that doesn't tap directly into E = mc². Einstein's equation is constantly at work, providing an unseen hand that shapes the world into its familiar form. It's an equation that tells of matter, energy and a remarkable bridge between them.

Before E = mc², scientists described matter using two distinct attributes: how much the matter weighed (its mass) and how much change the matter could exert on its environment (its energy). A 19th century physicist would say that a baseball resting on the ground has the same mass as a baseball speeding along at 100 miles per hour. The key difference between the two balls, the physicist would emphasize, is that the fast-moving baseball has more energy: if sent ricocheting through a china shop, for example, it would surely break more dishes than the ball at rest. And once the moving ball has done its damage and stopped, the 19th-century physicist would say that it has exhausted its capacity for exerting change and hence contains no energy.

Before 1905, the common view of energy and matter thus resembled a man carrying around his money in a box of solid gold. After the man spends his last dollar, he thinks he's broke. But then someone alerts him to his miscalculation; a substantial part of his wealth is not what's in the box, but the box itself. Similarly, until Einstein's insight, everyone was aware that matter, by virtue of its motion or position, could possess energy. What everyone missed is the enormous energetic wealth contained in mass itself.

As you read this text, E = mc² is at work. The processes in the eye and brain, underlying perception and thought, rely on chemical reactions that interchange mass and energy, once again in accord with Einstein's formula.

Brian Greene, a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia, is the author of "The Elegant Universe" and "The Fabric of the Cosmos."

The Anthropic Principle

Johnjoe McFadden

The Hindu

Wednesday, Sep 14, 2005

In The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the Deep Thought computer announced that the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything was 42. Contemporary physicists are finding themselves just as frustrated as the hyperintelligent race of beings who built Deep Thought after discovering that the ultimate answer to their questions turns out to be a set of meaningless numbers. Many scientists conclude that the answers are contingent on biology and the facts of life. Imagine if the values of one or two of nature's fundamental constants were slightly different, say the strengths of forces that hold atoms together. One consequence might be that the Earth's oceans would regularly freeze. Water — essential for life — is unique in being lighter as a solid than as a liquid. So ice sheets float and form an insulating layer that stops the deeper waters freezing. If water was more conventional then the primordial oceans would never have stayed liquid for long enough for life to evolve. But then of course we would not be here to ponder our good fortune.

This is the point of the anthropic principle, which starts from the fact of our existence and then argues backwards to claim that the precise properties of the universe that emerged from the big bang had to be those that made the eventual emergence of humans inevitable. The unique properties of water depend on an exquisite level of fine-tuning of the fundamental constants. So why are these constants just right? Because if they weren't we wouldn't be here. There are lots of other fine tunings. Carbon, also essential for life, is made in stars by the fusion of three helium atoms. It is only due to an extraordinary "coincidence" in the resonant energies of helium, beryllium, and carbon that stars make lots of carbon. Change the resonant energy by just 0.0001 per cent and no carbon. Proponents of the anthropic principle claim it is pointless looking for theoretical explanations for the precise values of the fundamental constants; they are what they are because if they weren't we wouldn't be here. Opponents claim that the principle betrays a lack of imagination for assuming that other forms of life wouldn't be possible. But this is harder to sustain when considering some of the more cosmic consequences of tweaking the constants. If the weak force that binds atomic nuclei had been just a bit weaker, all hydrogen would have turned to helium without making any of the heavier elements. If the strong force had been a bit stronger, the universe would not even have had any atoms.

New research is making even the sceptics grudgingly accept the anthropic principle. A paper by Mario Livio and Martin Rees, the astronomer royal, explores the value of the cosmological constant, a measure of how much energy is contained in empty space. Without this value being tweaked to an extraordinary level of precision, the universe would be filled only with huge black holes or entirely empty of stars. But who's doing the tweaking? Another reason scientists are wary is that it seems to reverse the Copernican revolution and place humankind at the centre of the universe. Even worse, it could allow creationists to bring the G word back into science: a God to tweak all those knobs to make life possible. But if God is needed to tweak the universe's knobs then who was there to tweak God's knobs? Physicists such as Martin Rees and Stephen Hawking prefer another scenario whereby an infinite number of universes exist, each with different values of the fundamental constants. In just a few of them the constants have taken on the right values for the creation of stars, life and evolution.

For a biologist like me the anthropic principle has a persuasive charm. Physicists have long claimed that biology reduces to chemistry and chemistry reduces to physics. But now physics reduces to biology! To explain the values of the fundamental constants physicists have to look not at their equations but at the structure of the eye or the brain or the building blocks of life. Who knows which fundamental constants take their value from the fact that fish had to propel themselves through water before evolving into intelligent tetrapods like us. Biology explains everything.

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
(The writer is a professor of molecular genetics at the University of Surrey and the author of Quantum Evolution.)

Incorrect reading of religious texts

Karen Armstrong

The Hindu:Friday, Aug 12, 2005

Human beings, in nearly all cultures, have long engaged in a rather strange activity. They have taken a literary text, given it special status and attempted to live according to its precepts. These texts are usually of considerable antiquity yet they are expected to throw light on situations that their authors could not have imagined. In times of crisis, people turn to their scriptures with renewed zest and, with much creative ingenuity, compel them to speak to their current predicament. We are seeing a great deal of scriptural activity at the moment. This is ironic, because the concept of scripture has become problematic in the modern period. The Scopes trial of 1925, when Christian fundamentalists in the United States tried to ban the teaching of evolution in the public schools, and the more recent affair of The Satanic Verses, both reveal deep-rooted anxiety about the nature of revelation and the integrity of sacred texts. People talk confidently about scripture, but it is not clear that even the most ardent religious practitioners really know what it is.

Protestant fundamentalists, for example, claim that they read the Bible in the same way as the early Christians, but their belief that it is literally true in every detail is a recent innovation, formulated for the first time in the late 19th century. Before the modern period, Jews, Christians, and Muslims all relished highly allegorical interpretations of scripture. The word of God was infinite and could not be tied down to a single interpretation. Preoccupation with literal truth is a product of the scientific revolution, when reason achieved such spectacular results that mythology was no longer regarded as a valid path to knowledge. We tend now to read our scriptures for accurate information, so that the Bible, for example, becomes a holy encyclopaedia, in which the faithful look up facts about God. Many assume that if the scriptures are not historically and scientifically correct, they cannot be true at all. But this was not how scripture was originally conceived. All the verses of the Qur'an, for example, are called "parables" (ayat); its images of paradise, hell, and the last judgment are also ayat, pointers to transcendent realities that we can only glimpse through signs and symbols. We distort our scriptures if we read them in an exclusively literal sense. There has recently been much discussion about the way Muslim terrorists interpret the Qur'an. Does the Qur'an really instruct Muslims to slay unbelievers wherever they find them? Does it promise the suicide bomber instant paradise and 70 virgins? If so, Islam is clearly chronically prone to terrorism. These debates have often been confused by an inadequate understanding of the way scripture works. People do not robotically obey every single edict of their sacred texts. If they did, the world would be full of Christians who love their enemies and turn the other cheek when attacked. There are political reasons why a tiny minority of Muslims are turning to terrorism, which have nothing to do with Islam. But because of the way people read their scriptures these days, once a terrorist has decided to blow up a London bus, he can probably find scriptural texts that seem to endorse his action.

Part of the problem is that we are now reading our scriptures instead of listening to them. When, for example, Christian fundamentalists argue about the Bible, they hurl texts back and forth competitively, citing chapter and verse in a kind of spiritual tennis match. But this detailed familiarity with the Bible was impossible before the modern invention of printing made it feasible for everybody to own a copy and before widespread literacy — an essentially modern phenomenon — enabled them to read it for themselves. Hitherto the scriptures had always been transmitted orally, in a ritual context that, like a great theatrical production, put them in a special frame of mind. Christians heard extracts of the Bible chanted during the mass; they could not pick and choose their favourite texts. In India, young Hindu men studied the Vedas for years with their guru, adopting a self-effacing and non-violent lifestyle that was meant to influence their understanding of the texts. In Judaism, the process of studying Torah and Talmud with a rabbi was itself a transformative experience that was just as important as the content. The last thing anyone should attempt is to read the Qur'an straight through from cover to cover, because it was designed to be recited aloud. Indeed, the word qur'an means "recitation." Much of the meaning is derived from sound patterns that link one passage with another, so that Muslims who hear extracts chanted aloud thousands of times in the course of a lifetime acquire a tacit understanding that one teaching is always qualified and supplemented by other texts, and cannot be seen in isolation. The words that they hear again and again are not "holy war," but "kindness," "courtesy," "peace," "justice," and "compassion."

Historians have noted that the shift from oral to written scripture often results in strident, misplaced certainty. Reading gives people the impression that they have an immediate grasp of their scripture; they are not compelled by a teacher to appreciate its complexity. Without the aesthetic and ethical disciplines of ritual, they can approach a text in a purely cerebral fashion, missing the emotive and therapeutic aspects of its stories and instructions. Solitary reading also enables people to read their scriptures too selectively, focussing on isolated texts that they read out of context, and ignoring others that do not chime with their own predilections. Religious militants who read their scriptures in this way often distort the tradition they are trying to defend. Christian fundamentalists concentrate on the aggressive Book of Revelation and pay no attention to the Sermon on the Mount, while Muslim extremists rely on the more belligerent passages of the Qur'an and overlook its oft-repeated instructions to leave vengeance to God and make peace with the enemy.

We cannot turn the clock back. Most of us are accustomed to acquiring information instantly at the click of a mouse, and have neither the talent nor the patience for the disciplines that characterised pre-modern interpretation. But we can counter the dangerous tendency to selective reading of sacred texts. The Qur'an insists that its teaching must be understood "in full" (20:114), an important principle that religious teachers must impart to the disaffected young. Muslim extremists have given the jihad (which they interpret reductively as "holy war") a centrality that it never had before and have thus redefined the meaning of Islam for many non-Muslims. But in this they are often unwittingly aided by the media, who also concentrate obsessively on the more aggressive verses of the Qur'an, without fully appreciating how these are qualified by the text as a whole. We must all — the religious and the sceptics alike — become aware that there is more to scripture than meets the cursory eye.

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
(Karen Armstrong is the author of The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism.)

Incompleteness & the Goedelian way

Edward Rothstein

New York Times/ The Hindu, Feb 15, 2005

Albert Einstein and Kurt Goedel objected to notions of relativism and incompleteness outside their work. They fled the politically absolute, but believed it its scientific possibility.

Relativity. Incompleteness. Uncertainty. Is there a more powerful modern Trinity? These reigning deities proclaim humanity's inability to thoroughly explain the world. They have been the touchstones of modernity, their presence an unwelcome burden at first, and later, in the name of post-modernism, welcome company. Their rule has also been affirmed by their once-sworn enemy: science. Three major discoveries in the 20th century even took on their names. Albert Einstein's famous Theory (Relativity), Kurt Goedel's famous Theorem (Incompleteness) and Werner Heisenberg's famous Principle (Uncertainty) declared that, henceforth, even science would be post-modern. Or so it has seemed. But as Rebecca Goldstein points out in her elegant new book, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Goedel (Atlas Books; Norton), of these three figures, only Heisenberg might have agreed with this characterisation. His uncertainty principle specified the inability to be too exact about small particles. "The idea of an objective real world whose smallest parts exist objectively," he wrote, "is impossible." Oddly, his allegiance to an absolute state, Nazi Germany, remained unquestioned even as his belief in absolute knowledge was quashed.

Einstein and Goedel had precisely the opposite perspective. Both fled the Nazis, both ended up in Princeton, New Jersey, at the Institute for Advanced Study, and both objected to notions of relativism and incompleteness outside their work. They fled the politically absolute, but believed in its scientific possibility. Einstein's convictions are fairly well known. He objected to quantum physics and its probabilistic clouds. God, he famously asserted, does not play dice. Also, he believed, not everything depends on the perspective of the observer. Relativity doesn't imply relativism. The conservative beliefs of an aging revolutionary? Perhaps, but Einstein really was a kind of Platonist: he paid tribute to science's liberating ability to understand what he called the "extra-personal world."

And Goedel? Most lay readers probably know of him from Douglas R. Hofstadter's playful best-seller, Goedel, Escher, Bach, a book that is more about the powers of self-referentiality than about the limits of knowledge. Goldstein's interpretation differs in some respects from that of another recent book about Goedel, A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Goedel and Einstein by Palle Yourgrau (Basic), which sees him as more of an iconoclastic visionary. But in both he is portrayed as someone widely misunderstood, with good reason perhaps, given his work's difficulty. Before Goedel's incompleteness theorem was published in 1931, it was believed that not only was everything proven by mathematics true, but also that within its conceptual universe everything true could be proven. Mathematics is thus complete: nothing true is beyond its reach. Goedel shattered that dream. He showed that there were true statements in certain mathematical systems that could not be proven. And he did this with astonishing sleight of hand, producing a mathematical assertion both true and unprovable.

The theorem has generally been understood negatively because it asserts that there are limits to mathematics' powers. It shows that certain formal systems cannot accomplish what their creators hoped. But what if the theorem is interpreted to reveal something positive: not proving a limitation but disclosing a possibility? Late in his life Goedel said of mathematics: "It is given to us in its entirety and does not change, unlike the Milky Way. That part of it of which we have a perfect view seems beautiful, suggesting harmony." That beauty, he proposed, would be mirrored by the world itself. These are not exactly the views of an acolyte devoted to Relativity, Incompleteness and Uncertainty. And Einstein was his fellow dissenter.

Religions as works of art

Dylan Evans

The Guardian/The Hindu, May 3, 2005

Not believing in God is no excuse for being virulently anti-religious or naively pro-science.

There are many species of atheism, just as there are many species of religion. But while many religions still thrive, most of the atheisms that have ever existed are now extinct. The non-religious person today is, therefore, rather like a person who wanders into a shop to buy a breakfast cereal and finds only one variety is for sale. Moreover, this variety is not very tasty, because the kind of atheism that flourishes today is old and tired. Today's prominent atheists — people such as Jonathan Miller and Richard Dawkins — hawk around a belief system that reeks of the 19th century, which is not surprising, for that is when it was born. Mr. Dawkins is virulently anti-religious, passionately pro-science and artistically illiterate — thus manifesting all three of the main characteristics of the old atheism in a particularly pure form. His attacks on religion are so vitriolic and bad-tempered that they alienate the sensitive reader and give atheism a bad name. As a friend of mine once commented, no other atheist has done more for the cause of religion than Richard Dawkins.

Isn't it about time that atheists tried to imagine what some other forms of atheism might look like? Not in the hope of replacing one orthodoxy with another, but simply in order to challenge other atheists to imagine still more ways of being non-religious — to encourage them to construct their own forms of atheism, rather than buying a ready-made version off the shelf. Atheism should be more like a set of Lego blocks than a pre-assembled toy. The challenge and the opportunity it offers is that of constructing one's own personal philosophy of life, a philosophy that is not put together according to any set of instructions handed down from on high. As a way of kicking off the debate, let me outline my own variety. It would be a travesty if I were to pretend that this is the only worthwhile kind. But I think it is more appropriate for the 21st century.

When I say that I value religion, I do not mean that I see any truth in the stories about gods, devils, souls and saviours. But I do think there is one respect in which religion is more truthful than science — in its depiction of the longing for transcendent meaning that lies in man's heart. No scientific theory has ever done justice to this longing, and in this respect religions paint more faithful pictures of the human mind. My atheism sees religions as presenting potent metaphors and images to represent human aspirations for transcendence. Here is a parable to explain what I mean: once upon a time, a talented artist painted a picture of a beautiful landscape on the wall of his house. People came from all around to see the picture. It was so beautiful that they would spend whole days staring at it.

Led on by wishful thinking, some people even began to forget that they were looking at a painting, and came to believe that the wall was a window. So the artist removed one of the bricks in the wall, allowing the illusory nature of the painting to become clear. Some of those who had mistaken the painting for reality were upset to have their illusion shattered. But the wise ones thanked the artist profusely. "By revealing the fictitious nature of this landscape," they said, "you have allowed us to appreciate the beauty of your art." I think the best way to think about religion is to see it like the painting in this parable. Religions are beautiful things, but their beauty can only be truly appreciated when they are seen as human creations — as works of art. Atheists who attack religions for painting a false picture of the world are as unsophisticated and immature as religious believers, who mistake the picture for reality. The only mature attitude to religion is to see it for what it is — a kind of art, which only a child could mistake for reality, and which only a child would reject for being false.

Finding Design in Nature

CHRISTOPH SCHÖNBORN New York Times: July 7, 2005 EVER since 1996, when Pope John Paul II said that evolution (a term he did not define) was "more than just a hypothesis," defenders of neo-Darwinian dogma have often invoked the supposed acceptance - or at least acquiescence - of the Roman Catholic Church when they defend their theory as somehow compatible with Christian faith. But this is not true. The Catholic Church, while leaving to science many details about the history of life on earth, proclaims that by the light of reason the human intellect can readily and clearly discern purpose and design in the natural world, including the world of living things. Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science. Consider the real teaching of our beloved John Paul. While his rather vague and unimportant 1996 letter about evolution is always and everywhere cited, we see no one discussing these comments from a 1985 general audience that represents his robust teaching on nature: "All the observations concerning the development of life lead to a similar conclusion. The evolution of living beings, of which science seeks to determine the stages and to discern the mechanism, presents an internal finality which arouses admiration. This finality which directs beings in a direction for which they are not responsible or in charge, obliges one to suppose a Mind which is its inventor, its creator." He went on: "To all these indications of the existence of God the Creator, some oppose the power of chance or of the proper mechanisms of matter. To speak of chance for a universe which presents such a complex organization in its elements and such marvelous finality in its life would be equivalent to giving up the search for an explanation of the world as it appears to us. In fact, this would be equivalent to admitting effects without a cause. It would be to abdicate human intelligence, which would thus refuse to think and to seek a solution for its problems." Note that in this quotation the word "finality" is a philosophical term synonymous with final cause, purpose or design. In comments at another general audience a year later, John Paul concludes, "It is clear that the truth of faith about creation is radically opposed to the theories of materialistic philosophy. These view the cosmos as the result of an evolution of matter reducible to pure chance and necessity." Naturally, the authoritative Catechism of the Catholic Church agrees: "Human intelligence is surely already capable of finding a response to the question of origins. The existence of God the Creator can be known with certainty through his works, by the light of human reason." It adds: "We believe that God created the world according to his wisdom. It is not the product of any necessity whatever, nor of blind fate or chance." In an unfortunate new twist on this old controversy, neo-Darwinists recently have sought to portray our new pope, Benedict XVI, as a satisfied evolutionist. They have quoted a sentence about common ancestry from a 2004 document of the International Theological Commission, pointed out that Benedict was at the time head of the commission, and concluded that the Catholic Church has no problem with the notion of "evolution" as used by mainstream biologists - that is, synonymous with neo-Darwinism. The commission's document, however, reaffirms the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church about the reality of design in nature. Commenting on the widespread abuse of John Paul's 1996 letter on evolution, the commission cautions that "the letter cannot be read as a blanket approbation of all theories of evolution, including those of a neo-Darwinian provenance which explicitly deny to divine providence any truly causal role in the development of life in the universe." Furthermore, according to the commission, "An unguided evolutionary process - one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence - simply cannot exist." Indeed, in the homily at his installation just a few weeks ago, Benedict proclaimed: "We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary." Throughout history the church has defended the truths of faith given by Jesus Christ. But in the modern era, the Catholic Church is in the odd position of standing in firm defense of reason as well. In the 19th century, the First Vatican Council taught a world newly enthralled by the "death of God" that by the use of reason alone mankind could come to know the reality of the Uncaused Cause, the First Mover, the God of the philosophers. Now at the beginning of the 21st century, faced with scientific claims like neo-Darwinism and the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science, the Catholic Church will again defend human reason by proclaiming that the immanent design evident in nature is real. Scientific theories that try to explain away the appearance of design as the result of "chance and necessity" are not scientific at all, but, as John Paul put it, an abdication of human intelligence. Christoph Schönborn, the Roman Catholic cardinal archbishop of Vienna, was the lead editor of the official 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Walking points

For some, the point of travel is its sheer pointlessness. It is the lack of a pre-determined purpose which makes the whole thing worthwhile. It is like the Australian lecturer in a Chennai college who spent the best part of his first summer vacations in india going to a place called Nabadwip dham in rural Bengal and getting back from there. Asked why Nabadwip dham, he said he had been leafing through an atlas and had liked the sound of the name. Asked whether he had any company for the journey, he indicated his flute. Asked what he had done when he finally got to Nabadwip dham, he said he had looked at the sunset and played a tune on his flute.

But, then, carrying a flute is far simpler than carrying a portable fridge and walking round ireland, which is what an Irishman did just to win a bet. He not only did it but also got a book out of it, with both him and the fridge beaming triumphantly from the cover. The Australian who went to Nabadwip dham and back only got a magazine article out of it. There are some who’d say you have to be reasonably fit to walk round Ireland carrying a fridge, even a portable one which presumably operates on batteries. There are others who’d say that Nabadwip dham could give the unsuspecting traveller from down under the Delhi belly. All that is besides the point. Remember the song about the bear who climbed the mountain:

“And what do you think he saw?

He saw another mountain?

And what do you think he did?

He climbed the other mountain”.

If a bear can bear the pointlessness of pointless travel, so can we, could be one response. Jerome K Jerome and two others took off one summer down the thames and wrote it up in a book called three men in a boat. Remember Jerome was the one who said, “it is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do”. And what better way to idle than to snooze in a boat in the company of two others who can take turns not to work. A few decades ago, American airliner panam ran an advertising campaign on the theme “getting away from it all”. That, alas, was just about the time Marshall Mcluhan predicted in the medium is the message that the communications revolution would make the world a global village. You can no longer get away from the mobile and the idiot box even at Nabadwip dham.

[ TOI.Ed 3: thursday, october 18, 2001 ]
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1566755718.cms