Wednesday, June 25, 2014

God is in ultraviolet

No, I am not saying that because most of our  Hindu gods are depicted as bluish. The reason is also not because he is right there, you know he is there  but you cant see him.

Until we discovered ultraviolet rays some of the things were unexplainable. The only way we could explain our way out of it was to attribute it to a mysterious higher force which has the ability to do things us lowly humans cant. This is not true just for ultraviolet. Till electricity was discovered fish which identified its prey based on electrical signals sent by the prey would seem to have been guided by divine instinct. 
In a lot of cases we invoke the divine when our quiver of scientific ideas is inadequate to explain something fully. 

I  mention ultraviolet because it is one of our more recent discoveries which has managed to explain hitherto mysterious things. The conventional belief is that what is mysterious must definitely be magical. But the more practical belief should be that what is mysterious is .. just mysterious. At every point we make this arrogant mistake of thinking that whatever can be invented has been invented, we are at the forefront of technology and our understanding of nature and sciences is so great that it cant really progress beyond this.  

We will be proved wrong. By the next generation. 

They will definitely discover newer things and look at the world with a much better vision. They will dispel some of the ignorance of our generation and wonder how primitive  a life we must have led to not have known <some funky thing> the same way we look at the older generation with pity for not having known the usefulness of Google. They will push back the boundary of the divine just a little bit. 

Because, God can only exist beyond the realms of  understandable science.

(I am of course not taking the poetic argument of those who see God in the beauty of science. They see God in the greatness of evolution and natural selection. They equate beauty and truth with God. And of course some who believe that science can explain everything, but God oversees that. I could get on board with such a god but if that were so, there is no clear reason why God should be so human-centric. There are more bugs than humans, we are definitely outnumbered in terms of the volumes.  )

update: Some article I was reading seemed to hint that astrology is such a science. That we dont know its workings, therefore cant trivialise it. I am on board with it theoretically and do accept taht there is a chance that it works in ways we cant understand at this point, but my heart still finds it silly to think that Jupiter which is a million miles away is influencing how short-tempered I am. 

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