GOD, GAIA & ARAVALLIS

It is ironic that a government and a system that seeks to reclaim the Indian ethos and the ancient Indian way of life is today working with models that are precisely the opposite

- Jagdish Rattanani

The debate on the ever-alive topic ‘Does God exist?” between the well-known poet and lyricist Javed Akhtar, an atheist, and the graduate of Islamic studies Mufti Shamail Nadwi, a believer, has drawn much interest and comment. Akhtar is the darling of those who stand with reason, logic and secularism, values that are under attack in India today.

He is the first Indian to win a little-known Richard Dawkins Award, which is presented annually to a “distinguished individual ... who publicly proclaims the values of secularism and rationalism, upholding scientific truth wherever it may lead.” But we may ask: Where exactly has modernity and value-free science led us? The sting lies in this counter question that found no place in the Akhtar-Nadwi television-style debate. The march of science and technology, fused into a compact called technoscience, has delivered remarkable progress on the one hand but on the other hand has brought exploitation ata scale so stunning that it has also delivered the unfolding climate crisis, brought humanity on the edge of an ecological disaster and landed us in the age of the Anthropocene.

There is progress at an immediate and material level for afew but regress ata long-term planetary scale, an essentially Western-style plunder and conquest of “mother nature” that is often traced right back to the 17th century and the dawn of the Age of Reason and the subsequent Enlightenment movement of the 18th century. This science also became areligion of sorts that prayed at the altar of objectivity, maxi-mised extraction and so-called efficiency and somewhere in the process dehumanised the project of humanity living in peace on a fragile planet.