Features: Magazine | Literary Review | Life | Metro Plus | Open Page | Education Plus | Book Review | Business | SciTech | NXg | Friday Review | Cinema Plus | Young World | Property Plus | Quest | Folio |

Whichever group we fall into, it is likely that very few of us would venture to grasp all these questions together and try to achieve a holistic understanding. It is even less likely that we would seek to approach these questions from different and often competing perspectives, in particular those of science, religion and philosophy, all at once.

This is what makes this particular book so special, and such a remarkable achievement. In taking up the most basic and central questions of existence, and seeking to find plausible answers that are compatible with both the current state of scientific knowledge, and different religious and philosophical insights, Ashvin Desai certainly does rush in where angels fear to tread. But he does it with such clarity of thought and language, such systematic marshalling of evidence and textual references, such apparently effortless combining of scientific fact, literary quotations and mystical allusions, that the result is a book at once challenging and convincing.

Desai sets the tone in the introduction, with the quotation from Immanuel Kant: “Sapere aude: have the courage to know,” and then plunges directly into an exposition of the state of scientific knowledge on where we are and what we are. He notes that the content of the universe, and therefore also its destiny, are still unresolved issues: “Our universe, according to the most favoured construct, appeared out of nothing as a quantum fluctuation of energy which grew into its present immensity balancing on the knife-edge of forces and constants that happened to be ‘just right’.” This was fortuitous and not inevitable: the universe need not have formed at all, or it could have formed in a different way that prohibits life.

Similarly, life itself — “the arising of a self-organising faculty whereby vitality is kept going in a chemical structure for orderly existence, growth and reproduction” — generates a central mystery, of how (and indeed why) previously inanimate matter comes together to become alive for a time. Desai notes that sheer chance as a basis for the origin of life, and the religious view that life was divinely created, are both improbable extremes, but neither can be completely rejected.

This then leads Desai into the slightly more specific question of humanity, the nature of man. A brief excursus into biology and history leads him to conclude that “the human species is the outcome of an innumerable series of events, some contingent like the evolutionary process of mutation and selection, and some fortuitous such as climatic swings and cosmic impacts.” This is not a reflection of superior status, since there is no evidence of evolution necessarily moving towards more exalted forms.

With this knowledge, what is the forgiveness that religion, mysticism and spirituality can provide? Desai probes various religious and spiritual traditions, from strands of Hinduism to Judaism and Christianity to Buddhism to Islam, to search for the reasonable bases for belief in an occult dimension to understand human existence, the arguments for a transcendent reality. Remarkably, he manages to provide some of the flavour of the profundity, complexity and yet simplicity of the insights of these traditions in a relatively short and manageable way.

Obviously, a book like this cannot have clear conclusions. All we know is what we do not know, and so much remains “presently outside human intelligibility and possibly destined to remain forever open to speculation.” Even so, choices of understanding and perception remain for each human life, for all of us, and fleeting visions and insights such as provided by this book, must surely contribute to the richness of such choices.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail