aran
5th June 2005, 11:48 PM
existence of god is extremely impossible.
Recently I had the opportunity to hear the lecture of Vilayatoor Ramachandran, a brilliant professor who is breaking new grounds in our understanding about human brain. These studies are going to have profound impact on human society. Now it is understood that all the prophets were mentally sick people. Various religious texts were analyzed to understand the mental condition of these prophets, and the conclusion is that human society is taken for a ride by mad fellows.
In these days of religious terrorism, it is time that the scientists should come forward to retrieve the sanity of humans from primitive beliefs. Religion should be stripped off its exclusiveness , and should be adopted as a tool for meditation and social interaction. Kerala can become a model for merger of all castes as a first step, and merger of all religions as a second step. Recent survey among members of US National Academy of Sciences, revealed that only 7% believed in the concept of God.
Now the scientists are convinced as per the recent reports that the concept of God, is hardwired in to our brain, and that we are created by pure evolution and not by any divine intervention. The earliest humans thought that stones are coming down from a hill due to spirits. What cannot be understood is attributed to some power, they called it, Spirit, or God. Gradually over generations this concept got hardwired in to our brain. This is like that of the bees whose brain is hardwired to make hexagonal hives. Scientists have even identified it as the left hemispherical temporal lobe and it is now called 'the God part of brain'. This hardwiring has occurred to avoid those things that represent a threat to our existence. When humans became aware of the mortality, the spirituality is an evolutionary adaptation that compels our species to believe that though our physical body will one day perish, our spirits or souls will persist for eternity. Only with this false perception that something more is out there, we were able to survive our debilitating awareness of death in those primitive times. Here lies the origin of the God part of the brain. Before the awareness of logic, reason etc, the earlier human beings resembled the modern day schizophrenics, as the ancient people heard voices, summed up visions. Mentally disturbed and epileptic persons have intense religious experience when they have such attacks. It is not a charitable thought that most of the persons who professed for God were actually mentally sick persons. Epilepsy have long been noted to be associated with a heightened sense of religiosity. After having one of the epileptic attack, patients may actually speak of having had a "religious experience. the brain activity of ancient people are same as present day schizophrenics. The oldest temporal lobe epilepsy case was that of Ezekiel, whose visions are recorded in a book of the old testament which is about 2600 years back. Other symptoms are aggression,delusions and pedantic speech. The Times, in UK, dated 21-12-01 reported that a church of Ireland minister claims that Jesus was a mentally unstable prophet of doom who wrongly thought that the world was about to end. These persons have what is called 'hypergraphia' or compulsory writing habit. Mohammed even though illiterate dictated his thoughts to create Quran. A study on 900 persons, when their left temporal lobes were tickled, using computer generated electromagnetic pulses their mind generated a sensed presence of Gods their cultures have trained them to use. By varying this EM pulses from 0 to 255 range, all types of feelings that we experience was generated by a scientist in Canada.
Also the praying in loud voices, that is common with the concept of God, is due to the fact that this high frequency above 90 dB, will induce a pleasure similar to sex, in the brain, as it makes the sacculus in inner ear which we inherited from our fishy ancestors, get a pleasurable buzz. Brain is a biological computer consuming 25 watts and with a raw computational power or 1013 to 1016 operations per second uses 10 watts for computation. Religious/mystical experience is strictly neurochemical in nature and as per neurophysiologists, it is only an illusion or 'Maya' as we call it. With Darwin's 'origin of species' and today's genetic and scientific knowledge, it is time to move forward from the concept of God. The latest theory of the origin of Universe says that there is never an initial singularity, that is a point where the curvature of space time become infinite and so there was no first moment to time for a God create the Universe. For thousands of years people believed that the sun and the stars rotate around mankind. Pope and Professors alike, thought that they were sitting motionless inside this crystal ball, but now we are breaking out of these ideas. Earth was formed about 4.5 billion years ago and recently probing a tiny grain of zircon, scientists have evidence that about 4.4 billion years ago, i.e., just after 100 million years later the earth was formed, the temperature had cooled to about 100 degree C range, creating conditions for the formation of life.
Dr. George Cody's team of Geophysicists,from Washington, have found that the reaction that occur in the vicinity of deep ocean hydro-thermal vents, when iron sulphide is subjected to extreme temperature and pressure, formed organomettallic compounds, similar to those present in the active centers of certain metabolic enzymes of living organisms, as well as pyruvic acid which is an energetic three carbon molecule that is critical to central metabolism in all life.There is nothing special about biology. Life may arise from the same set of organising principles that determine the arrangement of atoms or electrons in materials with unusual properties. This is called the world of 'Complex Adaptive Matter'. We know very little about how organisation and assembly arises in nature. Unexpected properties emerge from biological system, for e.g., the way cell membrane form, but nobody knows where such self organisation comes from. Objects ranging from a few nanometer to a tenth of a micrometer show special properties, that do not occur on microscopic or macroscopic scales. At this size threshold, adding more particle make the material not just bigger, but entirely different. Groups of hundred to thousands of particles-dumb, inanimate matter, - suddenly begin to organize themselves in to patterns, that make them capable of responding to their surroundings. This self organisation will be the thrust of science in the 21st century. This self organisation eventually leads to the emergence of life itself as per the Nobel prize winning Physicist 'Robert Laughlin' of Stanford University, California. They have even laid down some of the assembly principle that seems to apply to both living and inanimate matter and the first principle is called 'frustration'
Life could be there is as many as a million places per galaxy. The biochemical process of life form are incredibly complex and the argument that it is so complex that god has created that complexity is the argument put forward by all. God by definition is a conscious being, the consciousness itself is an incredibly complex phenomenon. Consciousness requires the ability to store, access information, that is linked together in many intricate ways as well as the ability to process the information and to reason. For an omniscient being, even a super super super computer will not be sufficient to process the information. For a god that is fundamentally complex, if it is evolved from other simple being we would conclude that it was not god, but an alien life form. God if he exists must be radiation resistant and able to withstand the vacuum of the space as he is not living on earth, and would be extremely complex, that this implies the the existence of god is extremely impossible.
Recently I had the opportunity to hear the lecture of Vilayatoor Ramachandran, a brilliant professor who is breaking new grounds in our understanding about human brain. These studies are going to have profound impact on human society. Now it is understood that all the prophets were mentally sick people. Various religious texts were analyzed to understand the mental condition of these prophets, and the conclusion is that human society is taken for a ride by mad fellows.
In these days of religious terrorism, it is time that the scientists should come forward to retrieve the sanity of humans from primitive beliefs. Religion should be stripped off its exclusiveness , and should be adopted as a tool for meditation and social interaction. Kerala can become a model for merger of all castes as a first step, and merger of all religions as a second step. Recent survey among members of US National Academy of Sciences, revealed that only 7% believed in the concept of God.
Now the scientists are convinced as per the recent reports that the concept of God, is hardwired in to our brain, and that we are created by pure evolution and not by any divine intervention. The earliest humans thought that stones are coming down from a hill due to spirits. What cannot be understood is attributed to some power, they called it, Spirit, or God. Gradually over generations this concept got hardwired in to our brain. This is like that of the bees whose brain is hardwired to make hexagonal hives. Scientists have even identified it as the left hemispherical temporal lobe and it is now called 'the God part of brain'. This hardwiring has occurred to avoid those things that represent a threat to our existence. When humans became aware of the mortality, the spirituality is an evolutionary adaptation that compels our species to believe that though our physical body will one day perish, our spirits or souls will persist for eternity. Only with this false perception that something more is out there, we were able to survive our debilitating awareness of death in those primitive times. Here lies the origin of the God part of the brain. Before the awareness of logic, reason etc, the earlier human beings resembled the modern day schizophrenics, as the ancient people heard voices, summed up visions. Mentally disturbed and epileptic persons have intense religious experience when they have such attacks. It is not a charitable thought that most of the persons who professed for God were actually mentally sick persons. Epilepsy have long been noted to be associated with a heightened sense of religiosity. After having one of the epileptic attack, patients may actually speak of having had a "religious experience. the brain activity of ancient people are same as present day schizophrenics. The oldest temporal lobe epilepsy case was that of Ezekiel, whose visions are recorded in a book of the old testament which is about 2600 years back. Other symptoms are aggression,delusions and pedantic speech. The Times, in UK, dated 21-12-01 reported that a church of Ireland minister claims that Jesus was a mentally unstable prophet of doom who wrongly thought that the world was about to end. These persons have what is called 'hypergraphia' or compulsory writing habit. Mohammed even though illiterate dictated his thoughts to create Quran. A study on 900 persons, when their left temporal lobes were tickled, using computer generated electromagnetic pulses their mind generated a sensed presence of Gods their cultures have trained them to use. By varying this EM pulses from 0 to 255 range, all types of feelings that we experience was generated by a scientist in Canada.
Also the praying in loud voices, that is common with the concept of God, is due to the fact that this high frequency above 90 dB, will induce a pleasure similar to sex, in the brain, as it makes the sacculus in inner ear which we inherited from our fishy ancestors, get a pleasurable buzz. Brain is a biological computer consuming 25 watts and with a raw computational power or 1013 to 1016 operations per second uses 10 watts for computation. Religious/mystical experience is strictly neurochemical in nature and as per neurophysiologists, it is only an illusion or 'Maya' as we call it. With Darwin's 'origin of species' and today's genetic and scientific knowledge, it is time to move forward from the concept of God. The latest theory of the origin of Universe says that there is never an initial singularity, that is a point where the curvature of space time become infinite and so there was no first moment to time for a God create the Universe. For thousands of years people believed that the sun and the stars rotate around mankind. Pope and Professors alike, thought that they were sitting motionless inside this crystal ball, but now we are breaking out of these ideas. Earth was formed about 4.5 billion years ago and recently probing a tiny grain of zircon, scientists have evidence that about 4.4 billion years ago, i.e., just after 100 million years later the earth was formed, the temperature had cooled to about 100 degree C range, creating conditions for the formation of life.
Dr. George Cody's team of Geophysicists,from Washington, have found that the reaction that occur in the vicinity of deep ocean hydro-thermal vents, when iron sulphide is subjected to extreme temperature and pressure, formed organomettallic compounds, similar to those present in the active centers of certain metabolic enzymes of living organisms, as well as pyruvic acid which is an energetic three carbon molecule that is critical to central metabolism in all life.There is nothing special about biology. Life may arise from the same set of organising principles that determine the arrangement of atoms or electrons in materials with unusual properties. This is called the world of 'Complex Adaptive Matter'. We know very little about how organisation and assembly arises in nature. Unexpected properties emerge from biological system, for e.g., the way cell membrane form, but nobody knows where such self organisation comes from. Objects ranging from a few nanometer to a tenth of a micrometer show special properties, that do not occur on microscopic or macroscopic scales. At this size threshold, adding more particle make the material not just bigger, but entirely different. Groups of hundred to thousands of particles-dumb, inanimate matter, - suddenly begin to organize themselves in to patterns, that make them capable of responding to their surroundings. This self organisation will be the thrust of science in the 21st century. This self organisation eventually leads to the emergence of life itself as per the Nobel prize winning Physicist 'Robert Laughlin' of Stanford University, California. They have even laid down some of the assembly principle that seems to apply to both living and inanimate matter and the first principle is called 'frustration'
Life could be there is as many as a million places per galaxy. The biochemical process of life form are incredibly complex and the argument that it is so complex that god has created that complexity is the argument put forward by all. God by definition is a conscious being, the consciousness itself is an incredibly complex phenomenon. Consciousness requires the ability to store, access information, that is linked together in many intricate ways as well as the ability to process the information and to reason. For an omniscient being, even a super super super computer will not be sufficient to process the information. For a god that is fundamentally complex, if it is evolved from other simple being we would conclude that it was not god, but an alien life form. God if he exists must be radiation resistant and able to withstand the vacuum of the space as he is not living on earth, and would be extremely complex, that this implies the the existence of god is extremely impossible.