I recently watched a person choke on his words while reading Psalm 121. The text caught in his throat as if it had carried him his whole life and was now carrying him still. Had my child been in the same room, they may have only shrugged – what’s the big deal? That gap in reaction tells us something important. For earlier generations, sacred words bore immense weight because life itself was fragile. For today’s generation, the scaffolding that made those words essential has eroded.
Scarcity as the soil of awe
For centuries, life was defined by scarcity. Scarcity of food, of medicine, of safety. Scarcity of knowledge – why storms came, why plagues struck, why breath stopped in the night. Scarcity of words too, when scriptures were copied by hand, memorised, treasured.
Scarcity made awe possible. To hear I lift up mine eyes to the hills was not just to enjoy poetry; it was to find hope against hunger, danger, or despair. Sacred texts were lifelines.
The famine of not-knowing
Today, that soil has thinned. We live not in the age of ignorance but in the famine of not-knowing.
Questions that once generated gods are now answered by Google, mapped by MRI scans, explained in classrooms. Miracles that once broke people open are now folded into mechanism. Where once a saint’s touch healed, we now watch the body’s chemistry at work – and we can even see it on a screen.
The things that once split us open with awe have been steadily explained away. A rainbow was once the bow of Indra, or a post-apocalyptic promise; now it is light bent and broken through prismatic raindrops. Thunder was the hammer of Thor, the vajra of the storm god; now it is charge crackling through clouds. Eclipses were devourings of the sun and moon, Rahu and Ketu; now they are shadows in their appointed orbits. The shiver of the aurora was once ancestors dancing, now it is solar winds meeting Earth’s shield. Even the body was read as theatre for the divine – epilepsy and pox as possessions, plague as punishment, childbirth as miracle – until science folded each into chemistry, infection, and biology. Comets no longer foretell doom; they are frozen travellers. Stars are not ancestors, but spheres of fire burning out their lives. Step by step, the famine of not-knowing has expanded, and with it, the need for gods has thinned.
When awe is tied only to what we cannot explain, every scientific answer erodes its ground.
The worlds of Hawking, Lennox, and Dawkins
This is the backdrop against which three voices have defined our cultural conversation.
Stephen Hawking once wrote: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.” For him, ignorance was not a mystery but a temporary gap, destined to close.
John Lennox countered: laws describe, but they don’t do. Equations don’t create anything; they only chart what exists. For him, awe doesn’t vanish when gaps close – it belongs to the whole, not just the unexplained.
Richard Dawkins, meanwhile, dismissed God as an unnecessary hypothesis. For him, evolution and physics explain apparent design; no divine agent is needed.
Three positions, three ways of handling the famine of not-knowing:
- Hawking replaces God with laws.
- Lennox relocates God as the ground of being.
- Dawkins discards God altogether.
And my child’s imagined shrug? It belongs to Dawkins’ lineage: why invoke the sacred when explanation is enough?
Awe that migrates
But awe hasn’t disappeared – it has simply migrated. It hides in places knowledge cannot exhaust:
Art, which resists reduction. A song, a raga, a painting – they don’t explain, they reveal.
Love, which biology can describe but never fully capture.
Awe itself, which often deepens because of knowledge. The double helix or an image from the James Webb telescope can move us as deeply as any psalm.
Ignorance may wane, but Art, Love, and Awe remain scarce treasures – the last portals through which the unseen still breathes in an age that thinks it knows too much.
The Indian paradox
And yet, this is not the whole story. The shrug is not universal.
In India, the erosion of scarcity hasn’t dissolved the sacred. The Hanuman Chalisa still fills streets at dawn, the Gayatri Mantra still hums in countless homes, and some of the nation’s sharpest scientific and corporate minds remain open ambassadors for cultural and religious practice.
This is not contradiction. It reflects a different grammar of awe. Here, ritual is less about plugging gaps in knowledge and more about belonging. Chanting doesn’t explain the world; it locates us within it.
The Indian ego has an external locus – perhaps an Asian instinct more broadly. The self is porous, tethered to family, tradition, and cosmos. That means awe doesn’t shrink as explanations grow. Science and mantra stack, not clash.
The erosion of scarcity explains why a Psalm may move one person to tears and leave another unmoved. But the Indian paradox reminds us that awe doesn’t die when ignorance thins. It survives wherever we make space for it – in art, in love, in chant, in awe itself.
The famine of not-knowing may belong to our age. But the hunger for wonder endures. The question is not whether we still need gods, but whether we still know how to recognise mystery when it wears a different face.