The Innate Notion of Religion: Is God Truly Dead?
Originally, philosophy was a servant to religion. Later, Francis Bacon made philosophy a servant to material science. Bacon did not just reject transcendental truth, he also condemned Aristotle as corruptive.
In doing so, he replaced deductive reasoning with inductive reasoning, which helped in observing joyful knowledge of life through scientific thought. When humans began to believe that the entire universe could be interpreted through reason alone, the utility of God or religion in society began to decline.
But this did not only corrupt religion; it distanced us from ideals themselves. Sensory perception became the only truth—there was no truth beyond or above it. Even the real world merely approaches truth, but never aligns with the purity of truth itself. God, soul, or collective imagination exist only in abstract consciousness.
Human Nature, Society, and the Divine Principle
According to Hobbes' social contract theory, the formation of society or state was not a product of reason but of innate human nature. This portrayed humans as beings incapable of peace until they decipher all cosmic events.
From Thales to string theory, innumerable events have unfolded, astounding humankind. Yet, all of them search for the same essence—the divine principle, or in Kantian terms, the Pure I.
The Search for God Across Time
Have we found God in the past two thousand years?
In 1919, Theodor Kaluza proposed an unusual idea related to space-time, suggesting another dimension in the universe—something we could discover. This idea sparked a wave in physics, eventually leading to the development of string theory.
This is not a strange quest. All philosophers throughout history have devoted their lives to knowing this "supreme essence." According to Kant, this tendency toward completeness can be analyzed in three ways:
- To know oneself.
- To understand external phenomena.
- To comprehend what lies beyond them—something that expresses the idea of God.
The world's first modern philosopher, Descartes, tried to express this completeness with the famous phrase Cogito Ergo Sum. But Kant countered it, claiming Descartes had merely proved the existence of the logical self, not the "pure form."
This shows the impossibility of knowing that "pure form." Thus, the contradictory nature of wisdom and intellect gives birth to conflicting doctrines. According to Kant, such opposing doctrines, being contradictory, are inherently false. Yet, this contradiction intensifies our desire to transcend the boundaries of experience.
Physics and the Infinite
As physicists sought the infinite beyond the sensory world, they went beyond Democritus' atomos. Does this suggest a tendency toward intellectual dissolution?
To validate the supersensory world, physicists proposed various laws, which enabled the observation of phenomena like black holes and the Higgs boson.
July 4, 2012 is celebrated by physicists as Higgs-Dependent Day.
Democritus' dream of atomos was vindicated 2000 years later.
- John Dalton (1800) gave the atom its experimental foundation.
- J.J. Thomson (1897) discovered the electron.
- Ernest Rutherford (1911) revealed the proton.
- James Chadwick (1932) uncovered the neutron.
And yet, even with subatomic triumphs, the same question remains: What exactly are we chasing?
Ancient Intuitions and Universal Principles
Pythagoras once said that numbers are the final form of matter—and modern science confirms that atoms carry numbers. From the ancient dawn of time, humanity has been obsessed with discovering how the universe works.
On this basis, various divine entities were imagined. No society or civilization in history exists without some notion of God. Only the divine could fulfill the idea of the infinite.
From the Milesians to Heraclitus, elements like fire, water, air, and earth shaped thought. Socrates later added aether. The real reason behind all this speculation was to observe the hidden supersensory principle behind the sensory world.
The Higgs Boson and the Problem of God
In 1964, the Higgs boson theory was proposed. When Peter Higgs, an atheist, saw evidence of its existence in 2012, tears welled up. Precisely because he was an atheist, he disliked the term "God Particle."
The Higgs boson gives mass to particles—without it, no universe could form. If it did not exist, particles would move at the speed of light, making creation impossible.
Earlier, matter was thought indestructible. Then came Lemaître's Big Bang theory (1926), later expanded by Hubble, and mathematically refined by Hawking. The singularity was not within time and space—it was beyond.
Shared Civilizational Intuitions
From Babylon to Egypt, from the Indus Valley to Greece and the Mayans—civilizations independently imagined divine principles.
Perhaps he had in mind Wolfgang Pauli, who sought to link psyche and physics, atomic nuclei and soul. Along with Carl Jung, Pauli articulated a root philosophy—the primordial ideal present in all cultures.
The same charge from the Big Bang permeates every being. That may explain why distant civilizations converge on similar intuitions.
Philosophy, Fear, and the Decline of Beauty
Darwin's evolution weakened faith in God. Modern physics deepened that doubt. In the West, Aristotelian metaphysics long suppressed scientific progress; in the East, misinterpretations of the darshanas did the same. Religion became an obstacle to aesthetic creativity.
Nietzsche's Übermensch and the Gita's sthitaprajna both represent a being beyond good and evil—self-complete, whole, and beautiful.
Yet humanity prefers fear to beauty. Arjuna needed Krishna's terrifying Virat Rupa before acting. Religion, thus, veils beauty with fear.
Physicists today, with billions in funding, hunt particles that may embody the wisdom of sthitaprajna or Übermensch.
But Kant doubted that reason could ever comprehend the noumenal world. He called human knowledge discursive. Only pure reason may lead us closer to wisdom.
Fearism and Meta-Dephilosophy
The Sophists began skepticism by denying universal knowledge. If knowledge is unattainable, it leads to superstition, collapse, and fear.
Desh Subba's Fearism calls for dephilosophizing philosophy—not rejecting it, but transcending it.
Yet, even fearism fails to capture beauty. To bridge modernity and beauty, dephilosophy must evolve into meta-dephilosophy.
Closing Invocation
Now, I want to go to Sappho's village and sleep in her arms. I want to whisper to her—the idea of meta-dephilosophy.
