Faith - 2, Reason - 0

Today I must report on a match in which I was beaten thoroughly. I felt like an ant trying to break a huge block of granite.

Yesterday I visited a distant cousin, who dropped out of school five decades ago and became a full-time farmer in the western ghats of Kerala. Let’s call him Abraham. He’s pretty prosperous now but his education has been patchy.

While my wife gossiped with the women folk of the house, somehow the topic of the discussion with my cousin turned to the recent Japanese Tsunami. Abraham announced that this was clearly a divine punishment. I should have just smiled and moved on to some other topic. But I felt that I couldn’t let it go unchallenged. I also sensed an opportunity to hammer some sense into a country bumpkin.

I said that there was no reason why any natural phenomenon should be treated as divine punishment. Who was being punished when the Tsunami raged? The ones who got killed? The ones who had been injured? The ones who were not injured, but lost all their possessions? Those who survived? Or was it the country that was punished? But what is a country without its people? Why should a whole country or population be punished? For what crime?

This in any case was not the first disaster. There is some disaster or another in some part or another of the earth every now and then. When something goes wrong in one part of the world, it often gives another part of the world an opportunity to profit from it. I argued that it was unreasonable to treat such disasters as supernatural interventions in human affairs to punish the guilty and reward the virtuous.

He was not in the least shaken by any argument that I put forward. Instead, he moved on to another claim delivered with equal conviction: The world is about to end. It has been prophesied in the Bible, he added as conclusive proof, that when the end of the world approaches, there will be not just big calamities, but wars. Look at Egypt. At Libya. At Lebanon. At Yemen. At Afghanistan. There are wars everywhere. This is a clear sign that the prophesies are being fulfilled.

I tried to remind him of the first and second World Wars. Those wars, I told him, were Tsunamis while these ‘wars’ in the African continent are mere ripples. My feeble attempts to persuade him to look at these uprisings differently did not meet with any success either.

As I reflect on this little conversational episode, I marvel at the power of faith over reason. Perhaps we all have some strong beliefs that effortlessly frustrate any arguments that reason might put forward. Perhaps we never question some of our assumptions and beliefs. We just reject any counter evidence or give it an interpretation that is aligned to our beliefs. Reason stands no chance when pitted against faith.