Friday 8 July 2016

Why I cannot accept religious scriptures like Veda, Quran or Bible


Religious scriptures were written at a time when science had not sufficiently developed. Most of them contain unscientific mumbo jumbo and hocus pocus, like saying God created the universe in six days ( this is said both in the Bible and in the Quran ), or that God created Adam and Eve ( Eve from Adam's ribs ), as said in the Bible, or that Allah created man from clots of blood, as said in the Quran, or that God came in the form of avatars to the earth, or that there is transmigration of the souls, as said by Hindu scriptures.

The Veda, Quran and the Bible claim to be the final word, and cannot be questioned or changed.

But the whole development of science has been by questioning everything, observation, experimentation and reasoning. Science does not accept anything as final. A theory accepted yesterday may be discarded today, if proved untrue. Thus, the Ptolemaic theory that the sun goes around the earth was proved to be false by Copernicus ( though Copernicus' theory was not accepted for a long time because it apparently contradicted the Bible, and Galileo narrowly escaped from the Inquisition for believing it, by recanting his view ).

Newton said in 1665 that light travelled as particles ( the corpuscular theory ), but in 1678 Huygens propounded his Fresnel Principle, saying that it travelled as waves. Then in 1900 Max Planck demonstrated by his Quantum Theory that light travelled as particles ( quanta ), and this theory was subsequently developed by Quantum Mechanics of De Broglie, Heisenberg and Schrodinger that particles can be construed of as waves, and vice versa.

Similarly, J.J. Thompson's 'plum pudding' model of the atom, according to which electrons were embedded on the surface of the atom ( like plum puddings ) was superseded by Rutherford's theory ( through his famous gold foil experiment which revealed scattering of alpha raya ) that electrons move in orbits outside the nucleus, like the planets orbiting the sun.

Newton's theory of gravity was modified by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.
So there is no final word in science. Everything can be questioned, on the basis of reason, observation and experimentation. Since religion does not permit that, I cannot accept it.

As regards the existence of God, I have already given my reasons why I cannot accept it in an earlier posst. Hence I am an atheist.

If India is to progress, we must give up religion and go over to science

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