Each newborn child that comes to Earth takes birth in a particular familial, societal and geographical context, or what can be termed as its ‘birth-context’. Along with this, it comes into this world with a particular genetic inheritance. These two factors—the birth-context into which the child is born, and its genetic inheritance—go on to play a hugely important role in the child’s future life-chances and in shaping its life-trajectory in many crucial ways. These two factors also underlie social hierarchies and inequalities that are powerfully determined by the diverse birth-context and genetic make-up of individuals. Given this, it is useful to reflect on how different worldviews seek to explain what it is that causes a child to be born into a particular context and to come into the world with a particular genetic inheritance. In this article, we shall restrict our analysis to the principal religious worldviews that command the allegiance (in theory, at least) of the vast majority of humankind.
What are called ‘world religions’ can be categorized in several different ways, and one way to do so is on the basis of how they seek to explain each individual’s unique birth-context and genetic inheritance. On this basis, these religions can be divided into two broad ‘families’. One ‘family’ of religions consists of those religions that claim that a person’s birth-context and genetic inheritance are something over which they have no control whatsoever, with these being decided entirely by the Creator God. According to this thesis, God brings a person into being from out of nothing at some point in time and then sends them to Earth, there to spend some time, after which He will arrange for them to be placed in Heaven or to be cast into Hell, there to spend aeons, if not the rest of eternity. God, this thesis claims, decides, on the basis of His inscrutable will (which we mere mortals cannot fathom), who shall be born into what context and also what genetic inheritance they shall receive at birth. The creatures whom God causes to come into being and whom He places on Earth have no control at all over their birth-contexts and their genetic inheritances. It is all determined by God, and we just cannot understand on what basis God does so, try as hard as we might. This God would seem to be an all-powerful cosmic dictator who decides our birth-context and genetic inheritance just as He pleases, caring nothing at all for our views on the matter even though these decisions will exercise a huge role in how our lives will go on to unfold. The relationship between this God and humans (and all other beings) is akin to that between an omnipotent master and his slaves, which hardly resonates with the idea of the inherent dignity of humans (and other beings).
The second ‘family’ of religions offers a vastly different explanation of what determines people’s birth-contexts and genetic inheritances. According to these religions, we are eternal beings who have been taking birth, undergoing the death of the body and then being reborn into new bodies again and again since eternity past. Our successive rebirths are shaped by the stock of actions (mental, verbal and bodily), wholesome as well as unwholesome, that we have performed over our many previous lives. Our birth-context and our genetic inheritance are determined by this accumulated stock of actions that is carried over from our past lives. This means that it is not God but we ourselves who determine our own particular birth-context and our genetic inheritance.
Although neither of the above two explanations can be empirically proven beyond all doubt, the former explanation seems to me quite dubious, on ethical as well as logical grounds. For one thing, in making our birth-context and genetic inheritance to be entirely the result of God’s inscrutable will, it makes God out to be arbitrary, whimsical, unfair and unjust. According to this explanation, God simply decides—and we just can’t know why—that someone should be born the son of an emperor and someone else the daughter of a pauper, that somebody shall take birth in a prosperous, peaceful part of the world and somebody else in a land that is torn by war and ridden poverty, that one child will be born to well-educated and loving parents while someone else’s parents will be just the opposite, and that someone will inherit such genes as will make them dashingly handsome or stunningly beautiful as well as super-intelligent and that someone else’s genes will make them drab-looking or downright ugly and also an imbecile. It’s all God’s will, which not only can we not understand but which also we shouldn’t dare to question (because that would be a grave sin), proponents of this theory might say. If it is pointed out that all this makes their God out to be arbitrary, deciding such crucial matters as each person’s birth-context and genetic inheritance on mere whim, as it were, they might reply that God’s ways are not our ways and that we must simply believe that what God does is for the best, even though it might not seem to us to be so. If they are told that their explanation makes their God out to be immensely unfair and unjust by causing people, for no fault of their own, to be born in very unequal circumstances, very unequal starting-points in life, that will powerfully determine their life’s journeys, they might answer that God’s wisdom is far above human wisdom and that we ought not to judge God’s ways by human standards.
The explanation of what determines a person’s birth-context and genetic inheritance that is offered by the second ‘family’ of religions completely avoids having to posit the notion of a God who is arbitrary, whimsical and unfair in this manner. This it does by making our birth-context and genetic inheritance out to be something that we alone have ourselves determined, on the basis of our accumulated stock of actions from innumerable past lives, rather than these being the result of some supposed Divine decree. According to this view, each of us gets the birth-context and genetic inheritance that we have ourselves earned and thus fully deserve because of our accumulated stock of actions from previous lives, and God has nothing at all to do with it. Accordingly, we cannot blame God for a birth-context and genetic inheritance that we do not particularly like, and nor can we hold God responsible for the hierarchies and inequalities that are generated by the diversity of people’s birth-contexts and genetic inheritances. This is in contrast to the first set of religions, that claim that we have only one life and that this life begins on Earth with a birth-context and a genetic inheritance that are decided entirely by God and over which we have no control. In this way, the second family of religions provides full agency to humans over their birth-context and genetic inheritance, unlike the first family of religions, which deny completely any agency to people in determining these two factors that play a crucial role in shaping their life’s journey.
Which theory is more acceptable, on logical and ethical grounds—the theory that God decrees that a person be born out of nothing at a certain point in time and determines their birth-context and genetic inheritance, with them having no say in the matter, or the theory that we are eternal beings who ourselves determine our birth-context and genetic inheritance? I, for one, find the latter theory much more sensible and ethically sound, and also much more comforting and in consonance with the idea of human dignity. For these reasons, I think this theory might also be considerably more plausible.
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