American author Dan Brown decoded the connection between science and religion while giving a peep into his world of words. Karan Bhardwaj reports
He’s witty, makes bold statements and challenges every set idea. He calls his critics ‘nice’ and is also unfazed by the appreciation or say, the thunderous applause he received while delivering Penguin’s prestigious annual lecture. Dan Brown is an author with progressive ideas and compact ideology. In one and a half hour presence on stage, he left his audience in splits with his humorous comments and observations. He began the lecture by decoding the similarities and differences between science and religion, offering a peek- to his readers about what all goes into writing and thinking. Brown’s tryst with science and religion dates back to his childhood where his academician father showed him everything through the prism of mathematics and science and his mother taught him religion. He said he grew up with two cars in his garage wherein his father’s had a licence plate number with ‘Metric’ written over it. The other car, owned by his mother, had a license plate with ‘Query’ on it. Metric is a system of measurement while query denotes questions in the Bible. “So I had two parallel beliefs nurturing side by side,” he said.
As a kid, Brown was impressed with both the systems of belief. However, as he grew up, he realised that both the worlds were full of contradictions. While science could answer a few questions about our existence, we turn to God to fill in the gap in human experiences. “I asked one priest why is it that science talks about cosmic energies and we hear about Big Bang Theory while God created humans and we learn about the evolution in museums. He replied, ‘Nice boys don’t ask such questions!’ I was annoyed but my curiosity never ended,” he said.
The author referred to his book Angels and Demons where he described how science believed in our “lucky stars”. “Science says that we are truly lucky that everything happened at the right place and at the right time. Cosmic energies fell in place and gravitational forces made the earth what it is. There’s no third party involved in this creation. A slight change in the course of gravity would have thrown us into a dark universe of dust. Somehow science fails to see God’s hand in it. They think we simply got the right path in an infinite depth,” he said.
Brown has faith in Almighty and even vouched for it. “Each one of us has a private moment when we gaze at stars and ask how it all happened. In that moment, we believe in supreme energy which is not seen but felt,” he said. He asked why all religions are different if our spiritual experiences like that of love or holding a new-born baby are same. “The answer is they are not. The difference in religion arises when we start translating it in languages and relate to histories and architecture. While we argue over practices and faith, we miss out the obvious principles. All religions bet on love, kindness, creation over hate, cruelty and destruction,” he said.
He also brought up the main question behind his book The Da Vinci Code. “It simply asks what would it mean to Christianity if Jesus Christ was not literally the son of God but instead a mortal prophet. Not everyone thought it was a good question. After The Da Vinci Code was published, a priest walked up to me and said, ‘Mr Brown. I didn’t like your book one bit.’ Before I could respond, he said he had come to thank me. He told me his church had regular discussions on Bible and when they held a debate on my book, hundreds of people turned up. He was trying hard for years to get people interested in this topic. I think I sparked the dialogue which was my main duty,” he said. Brown said that writing a book is like a long battle and exhausting affair. “It takes you to an isolated world,” he said.
He ended his lecture by saying, “There’s nothing in our DNA that predetermines our beliefs. We are born into a culture and start worshipping our parents’ gods. The world that we know is getting smaller everyday. More than ever, there’s enormous danger that we are inflammable and what we think is absolute and correct and others who do not agree to our ideas are wrong. let’s have dialogue.”
photo Sanjeev Kumar