As a primary school boy, I was sent to the Pilleyar (Ganesha) temple at examination times, although I topped my class by a large margin every term, except once. I also accompanied my parents at other times. We were ardent in our faith. My father, having overcome a serious illness at about 33, died suddenly at 47, when I was 18. Within 3 years I then lost the family’s savings through a spectacular academic failure. So much for faith and fervent prayer.
My future was thereby destroyed, as clearly forewarned after my father’s demise by a perambulating yogi, but unheeded by us. I doubt that my mother and I were competent to absorb such a warning. In any event, surely what had to happen had to work itself out. Late in life I realised that what the yogi had done was to turn my mother’s vision towards Australia, which was in a direction not normally taken by students from British Malaya seeking an overseas qualification. My folly (or was it my destiny?) led to my mother and my sisters being impoverished. So much for temple rituals and the priesthood. I gave away God, Hinduism and all religio-cultural rituals.
Then learning and logic took over! Studying the belief systems of the simpler societies at my university, and dipping into some anthropology, sociology, psychology, and the major religions, I realised that there has been, and is, an innate need in many, if not most, of us to understand what we humans are, and our place in the Cosmos.
I realised further that: the complexity and beauty, as well as the observable but inadequately explicable aspects of the experienced world; the exceedingly complex patterns of inter-linked cause and effect, action and reaction, and the inter-dependencies of the physical, chemical and electromagnetic forces affecting us; the uniformity, the invariability, the predictive capacity of the laws of nature; the ecological balance between mobile and fixed forms of life; the intuitive yearning by sensitive souls for communion with sublime or higher forces not clearly understood; and the inferred influence of the spirit world, all of which affect our lives, could not have occurred purely by chance. Instead, they might, I felt, reflect the mind and soul of a Creator. How else could all that have occurred? By chance? Is that another name for an inexplicable cause, akin to the gods of simpler people?
I did conclude, logically, that there had to be a Creator of all that exists. I then noted, with great interest, that an academic and confirmed atheist had reached the same conclusion after a lifetime of non-belief in a Creator, for exactly the same reasons. There has to be a Creator, he now accepts, thereby upsetting most severely his former fellow-believers in that causal mechanism named Chance. Like me, he doesn’t claim to know; only that a creator god makes (unverifiable) sense.
(This is an extract from my book ‘Musings at Death’s Door: an ancient bicultural Asian-Australian ponders about Australian society.’)
RAJA ARASA RATNAM 