https://twitter.com/hinduacademy/status/1325686776334225411?s=20

Some thoughts on this tweet and the widespread fallacy that somehow religion is inferior to science [corollarily, religion has to be elevated to a science in order to be respectable]. For some reason, I see this a lot in Hs.

Thread --
1. Religion is based on beliefs. It could be that of an omnipotent god, or that of a pantheon. Greeks thinking that Olympus was the home of their gods was as valid a belief as any other major religion today. These beliefs were a product of their geography.

Benevolent and bountiful geographies gave rise to happier gods. Harsh geographies gave rise to jealous / angry gods. Even in Tamizh sangam literature, the goddess of Desert is கொற்றவை [kotRavai - KaaLi].

Religions / Gods impose rules on their people that are in line with lands.

Bountiful lands had a stronger culture of coexistence than the harsh lands. But, harsh lands would have seen stronger tribalism than the benevolent ones.

Irrespective of how they arose, religions played an important role: they allowed people to put down rules of life.

One can argue the fairness / unfairness of it all. But the truth is that there were rules. Rules make life predictable. One knew what to do with their life, and more importantly, these rules were critical in times of adversity. All religions have rules that survived 1000+ years.

These rules have passed the test of fire. Once the most fundamental questions of life - how to share food, how to take a mate, and how to deal with death, were sorted out predictably and a social support system was created, this freed up time and mind space for some to explore.

Amongst the lucky few who were born right, and were blessed with the temperament to be not lazy, there were few who were also intelligent enough to ponder the why. Thus was born epistemology: the how of seeking knowledge. This wouldn't have been possible without the religions.

Thus the rules of religion enabled certain stability in the society [thou shalt not covet your neighbor's wife]. This freed up some brains / minds to develop epistemology. People who followed along this path became the first philosophers.

What does this have to do with science? Everything! Science of today started off as a branch of Natural philosophy - an inquiry into the nature of, well nature. Most of the early scientists were well provided for. Needless to say, all of this still revolved on the foundation++

++ provided by religions. Slowly but surely, information trickled down, and then flooded everyone. Now, anyone who has an internet connection can become a scientist or a philosopher. In a society that runs on rules - they forget the importance of religion at the foundation.

Many societies think they have crossed the need to have a religion. This is a fallacy. For all its reasoning, science still doesn't provide closure to the bereaved. Humans are animals - we don't want logic. Can't tell someone that their dead parent is a biochemical dead end.

People like to hear that there was a reason to their life. Alas - science is tone-deaf to such requirements. As a Nobel Laureate quipped - "everything in Biology has a function; nothing has a purpose". Not the best words in a eulogy. This strong logic, is science's weakness.

All it takes to shatter the "age of reason" is a crisis. And life has no shortage of crises. When beset by crises, a religious society still has fundamental rules to fall back on. For better or worse, the respect for / fear of a supernatural being will keep the society civilized.

On the other hand, a society that has given up on religion, and has embraced reason entirely - will have a very difficult time tiding over a crisis. They have placed their trust in laws that assume the best behaviour from the citizen. The laws haven't seen crises.

Moreover, the laws of reason are progressive. As time passes, the modern laws tend to become milder. They tend to put a lot more emphasis on goodness of humans than addressing their nature. Religious laws don't have such compunctions. So, in a crisis, modern laws will break down.

This is why religions are likely to outlive modernity. This is one extreme case where Religions will survive while modernity won't. The fundamentality of religion is the reason why we shouldn't project religion as a science.

/Fin