God, religion and atheism

Sometime I feel that atheists love to hate religion, or so it seems. I won't say whether the love and hate is justified, but I do find it amusing when their views and points on religion are used as proof to show that God does not exist. I believe God (as per monotheism) and religion are two different topics although closely linked.

To take a popular quote and modify it for the purpose of this article, I would say

If a finger pointing to the Moon is crooked, it does not mean the Moon does not exist. It just means that the finger is crooked.

 And, then again, if a beautiful finger pointing to the Moon appears to be crooked, it does not mean the Moon does not exist. It just means that the beautiful finger seems to be crooked.

Any particular religious theology is like a finger pointing to God. It does not mean that the finger has to be perfect, nor does it mean that it is imperfect. Maybe it is perfect in theory, but less than perfect in practice. I do not know. Like a country's constitution might be perfect, but that will not mean that there are no crimes happening in the country. Apart from theology a religion may also have social or political rules/guidelines, which are unrelated to theological aspects but may be influenced by it. Any apparent or actual flaws in the non-theological aspects of a religion is no reason to reject its theological aspects as well, without proper consideration.

To illustrate how atheists use apparent flaws in practice of religion to discredit the idea of a monotheistic God we could check following famous books:

The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins - My copy of the book from Black Swan publishers has around 400+ pages, excluding Appendix, Index, Notes, etc. At page 189, the author states that the conclusion of the book till that point is that there is almost certainly no God. Maybe the book should have been called 'The Improbable God'. After page 189, the book discusses about possible roots of religion, morality, and apparent flaws in religious practice. To go back to the previous quote, the author finds it important to discuss the flaws of an apparently crooked finger, rather than discuss the possibility of existence of Moon, in more than half of the book. I do give credit to the author for devoting at least some part of the book to theology, but maybe it does not do justice to the title of the book. I am not saying that religion is impeccable, anything practiced by a 'group' of humans is hardly so and has its positive and negative side, be it religion, racism, nationalism, casteism, etc. Human passion for each of their respective group has had good as well as bad affect on society, and singling out religion may not be a correct approach. If anything needs to be singled out it would perhaps be human passion and inclination for unreasonable action, given a chance, a choice and a reason.

God is not Great, Christopher Hitchens - To be fair, I would admit that I could not complete this book, as this book has very less to say about God. The name of the book could have conveyed that the author will highlight the flaws of religion instead of the discuss the possibility of existence of God. A quick look at the table of contents of the book on Wikipedia would show that most chapters deal with highlighting the flaws of various religion, and not theology (there is some theology discussed here and there, but not much, but I would know better only if I completely read the book). Coming back to the initial quote, we could say that the author has presented an exhaustive critique of how ugly the fingers apparently look, instead of discussing the possibility and nature of Moon, that the fingers seem to point to.

My personal view is that if God exists, then existence of a monotheistic God would not be constrained by any definition of any particular religion. Maybe a particular religious theology has got some part correct. Maybe some religious theology has got a lot of parts correct, but we may not have understood it well enough. In fact, theology does insist that it is not possible to know and define God completely. This is not much different from a perspective that human knowledge about universe will always have missing parts, be it knowledge of space, ocean, or sub-atomic particles. There is always more to find out, and refine our understanding and theories.

Words explain some aspects, and are very important for transmission of knowledge, but never completely explain all the details, as the details could be endless. Consider the parable of the blind men who check out an elephant for the first time, without having any prior information about how it looks. Each touch a part of the elephant and describe it as per the part they have touched, and each give a different picture. This is not much different from human knowledge about God, where in a lifetime people have a chance to feel only certain aspects of reality and then describe it for posterity. It is hard to say what is true or false, but it is likely to be incomplete.

Atheists/rationalists do bring some value to society in going after charlatans who liberally populate the spiritual and religious landscape of society. But in matters concerning monotheistic theology their contribution has not been useful, in my opinion.

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