For the last two hundred years, humanity has been riding on a path of enormous material progress. Our lives are much simpler today, thanks to all the technological developments that flood the market with gadgets and apps that are supposed to make our lives easier and better. But at what cost are we enjoying these luxuries? The planet on which we live is being exploited for resources, and the ecological balance that took millions of years to build up is shattered. But still, even after such progress and comfort that our forefathers could never dream of, our minds are not at peace. The prosperous and peaceful utopia that had been promised to us still remains as illusive as it was two hundred years ago.
Where did we go wrong? In this nimble volume titled The Religion of Wonder, writer Narendra Murty explores the history of religions and explains how science turned itself into another religious entity. He proposes a new religious thought that can bring back the concept of an enchanted world, something that we lost on our way when we decided that we were apart from nature and that nature was just dead matter, a storehouse of resources that was meant to be used up for our progress.
Primitive humans always considered themselves part of nature. They were not aware of its secrets and believed that natural phenomena were governed by supernatural entities who were to be pleased by worship and offerings. Thus, the world was considered enchanted and to be worshipped in order to survive. Slowly, organised religions came into being. They established a supreme authority over nature and human beings called God. God sat somewhere in another dimension and controlled the entire universe. Organised religions curbed free thought, and as a protest against this tendency, the Renaissance occurred. Free will and individuality were established as higher virtues than blind belief. Science became the ultimate authority.
This development caused a fundamental shift in how we see nature. Science considers nature to be a resource. Instead of a holistic view of the universe, science established reductionism. Components of nature were dismantled and studied separately, resulting in our loss of sight of the universe as a wholesome unit and not bits and pieces of dead matter. This caused ecological and environmental degradation on our planet, and it turned into a disenchanted world. The purported peaceful utopia, where all are equal, that was to be established through scientific progress, crumbled.
But at the beginning of the twentieth century, science itself provided a way out. Quantum mechanics proved that the universe is as mysterious to us as to the primitive human being. The predictive quality of Newtonian science gave way to probabilistic calculations. For every new breakthrough, new doors of uncertainty opened. Narendra Murty proposes that these new doors are not new disappointments but new avenues to be explored, rekindling our lost wonder at the secrets of the universe. This development should make us aware that life isn't as absurd or meaningless as we imagined during the bitter years of alienation and existential angst, but that it is a magic show encoded with mathematical theories written by the Ultimate Mathematician, whose creations should leave us as awe-stuck followers of the Religion of Wonder. This is our path to re-enchant our world.
This is the third book of Narendra Murty that I am reading, and it's always a joy to read him. As in his previous attempts, this book also never disseminates any new information. Every bit of fact, figure, and quote you find in this book is already recorded elsewhere. But what The Religion of Wonder does is establish connections between these pieces of information. In our information-rich world, where we can get any data with a click, it is more important to possess the skills to connect the dots between them and arrive at novel conclusions. The book demonstrates this analytical skill to its readers, and I believe it is something that is essential in today's world.
The cover of the book offers a gist of its philosophy. You find the silhouette of a person standing on a hill, using a torchlight to light up the dark sky. In the sky, embedded with stars, we find that the light illuminates minor portions of mathematical equations and geometric shapes. A huge part of them is still hidden in darkness, and the torchlight is too weak to fully light up the entire sky. But with the wonder that they have in their soul to uncover the remaining secrets of the sky, we hope they should lead the way forward for humanity.
Very recently, there was a phase where I read many books of popular science, especially the ones about cosmology, quantum physics, the concept of time, and string theory. Reading them, one cannot help but get dumbstruck at all the secrets that the world still withholds from us. The Religion of Wonder is all the more special for me because it is able to provide a perspective that ties in several concepts, like nature, religion, and science, that we imagine as being separate. It asserts the importance of preserving the mysticism within us, even when it is science and mathematics that can take us deeper into the religion of wonder, and they aren't antonymous. It is by this union alone that we can regain 'the chant of life that has lost its divine note' (Sri Aurobindo).
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