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Crisis of Faith - By- Gopinath Raina Shri Gopinath Raina retired from Indian Information Service (I.I.S.) in 1983 after completing 35 years as a distinguished editor, correspondent, commentator and administrator; Editor, AICC Journal, Varnika, (Jan.'84-Dec.'90); Editor-in-Chief, Koshur Samachar (March'91-Oct.-'95; Presently Editor, Sanatana Sandesh, an official publication of South Florida Hindu Temple, Miami.

The recent terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington D.C., killing thousands of innocent lives, set many a religious-minded people reflect on the role of the supposedly all-merciful God. Many were overtaken by a crisis of faith, of conviction, one could say.

Distraught at what happened on September 11, it was but natural for many a doubting Thomas's as well as believers to have been bothered by the question as to where was God at that time, how could a kind, omniscient and omnipresent God; if there is one, allow such a terrible thing to happen? Is it that God allowed the planes to be hijacked and the people to die because He was helpless and didn't have the power to stop it.

What an irony! The belief in a merciful God cuts both ways: it can be a source of love, compassion and solace for the suffering humanity or it could prove to be a weapon of war, as it actually did with the terrorists and the radical fanatics. After all, the men who wrought disaster on September 11 thought they were acting at the behest of Allah!

We just don't know

This poser stared in the face of every man, woman and child, who thronged the churches, the temples, the synagogues and the mosques to light the candles of vigil and to pray for the dead and for those who lost their loved ones. Faith tends to be shaken and God put in question in times of crisis like this, natural or man-made, and during even worse catastrophes in history like the much-maligned holocaust in the forties that claimed millions of Jewish lives. But God finds any number of spokespersons among the priests, the rabbis and the mullahs who seek to divine the divine and claim to know the mind and the motivations of the Creator. And they try to portray and interpret God in accordance with their preconceived notions, their biases and pre-dispositions. Little do they realize that the God they talk of is the one created by them in their own image! And, on top of it, they forget that mortals that we are cannot fathom the immortal, the eternal, that our limited vision and finite minds are not in a position to comprehend the endless and the limitless.

Why can't they simply utter the four simple words: "We just don't know". To be true to ourselves, we just do not know why there is so much of suffering in the world, why innocent people die of cruelty while the cruel people prosper, and why does the so-called God allow so much of evil?

Good Versus Evil

Evil thrives on the apathy of goodness, said Edmund Burke long ago. So true! The concept presupposes a great conflict between the forces of God and of good, on the one hand, and those of evil, led by Satan, on the other, as the New Testament would have us believe. The New Bible Dictionary defines Satan "as a malignant reality which is always hostile to God and to God's people." Our Hindu scriptures, too, are galore with stories of perennial conflict between the 'devatas' (gods) and the 'asuras' (demoniac forces).

There is little doubt that the problem of evil and of good has intrigued the human mind since man set its foot on the pilgrimage to the shrine of truth. Generally, two extreme views are held in this regard-the Hindu view and the western view. The Hindu thinkers stipulate that evil is unreal, it does not exist at all and that it is the product of our ignorance. Once we do away with ignorance, evil disappears like the bubble on the lotus petal. The Upanishads have put the last seal on the reality about non-existence of evil as such by saying that the "seer sees not death nor disease nor sorrow but sees all and attains all in its entirety." Thus, according to the Hindus, the solution to overcome the so-called evil lies in the attainment of right knowledge.

The second view that has found favor in the west is that evil is a permanent feature in the world and it is as real as good. Both, according to this theory, co-exist. However, good is regarded as the higher reality. But then, if we hold this view, we are beset with insurmountable difficulties which cannot be better described than Anatole France who, in one of his famous works, throws a hearty fling at God.

He says: "Either God would prevent evil if he could, but could not, or he could but would not, or he neither could nor would. If he would and could not, He is impotent; if he could and would not, He is perverse; if he neither could nor would, He is at once impotent and perverse; if he both could and would, why on earth does He not do it?" Anatole France is right, for how can God, the Omnipotent, the Omniscient and the Benevolent, permit evil that is quite opposite to His very nature, i.e., the good. If He is the author of evil, His Benevolence is gone; if He is incapable of stopping evil, His Omnipotence is mutilated and if He created world with the best of intentions and could not foresee evil, His Omniscience is flouted. And if good and evil are regarded as equally true, it would only mean a perpetual, purposeless moral struggle without any hope of redemption.

Problem Explained

The Hindu philosophers have tried to explain away the problem in a more rational manner. The very question whether God is the creator of pain and suffering is vitiated by the fact that we mistakenly treat god as something completely outside the world. The Hindus are not acquainted with Anatole France's conception of an Impotent and Dictatorial God. They believe with the Upanishads that God is immanent in the universe. His being outside the world is beside the point. Evil is real inasmuch as it appears at a particular stage in the evolution of life. It is created by our egocentric mind and its reactions.

It is the contact of material objects with the vital mind, the concealed psyche that produces the sense of good and evil. Fire, for instance, both burns and gives warmth. By itself, fire is neither good nor bad. Its value, however, is determined only by a conscious being. The evil, therefore, is not absolute, and it disappears automatically in the onward march in the evolutionary process.

Until we connect again....

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