An American Journalist with Deep Personal Roots in India
- Faith and Atheism: A Friendship Beyond Belief
- Why Scientific Advancement Does Not Automatically End Religious Faith
- Childhood Conditioning and the Persistence of Belief
- Rousseau’s Warning on Religion and the Young Mind
- Ideology Learned in Childhood: Lessons from History
- Why Scientists Can Hold Unscientific Beliefs
Faith as Inheritance, Not Evidence
Justice Markandey Katju reflects on the religiosity of American journalist Bill Tammeus, exploring how childhood conditioning, not science, shapes belief in God. Drawing on philosophy, history, and personal experience, the essay examines why religious faith persists even among scientists and rational thinkers.
The religiosity of Bill Tammeus
By Justice Markandey Katju
Bill Tammeus is an American citizen, over 80 years old, who lives with his wife in Kansas City, Missouri, USA .
Bill came to Allahabad, India with his family in or about 1957. His father was an agricultural expert who came on deputation to Allahabad Agriculture Institute to teach modern agriculture to Indians.
Bill, then about 11, was admitted to the Boys High School, Allahabad and became my classmate there. After an year or so, he went back with his family to America, where he later became a journalist, working in the eminent newspaper The Kansas City Star ( where the famous American novelist Ernest Hemingway once worked ).
Bill retired many years back, and now is a part time preacher in his Presbyterian Church ( apart from doing other social work for the community ).
Ever since we were classmates Bill and I have been in touch with each other, which is for almost 70 years, quite a record !
Bill is a staunch believer in God, while I am a confirmed atheist, but we respect each other.
It may appear strange why a person like Bill who has lived almost his whole life in America, a country which is highly advanced in science, believes in God, which to my mind is a totally unscientific belief. To my mind all religions are superstitions, and the truth lies in science, which, unlike religion, is never final but constantly developing. It is nonsense to say that science and religion complement each other : in fact they are poles apart. This has been explained below :
On Religion: Justice Markandey Katju's Critical Analysis of Religion vs. Science
The Purpose of Religion: Insights by Justice Markandey Katju | A Debate on Faith and Science
Why does Bill believe in God ?
To my mind the explanation appears to be this : Bill's parents were evidently religious, and passed on their religious ideas to Bill when he was very young. The mind of a child is very impressionable, and ideas foisted on it by parents and other elders are later difficult to remove, even by rational arguments.
Bill's father was an agricultural scientist, but he too believed in God, though such belief is totally unscientific. Why ? Because his father too must have been a staunch believer in God, who foisted this idea in the mind of his son ( Bill's father ) when the latter was a child.
The great French political philosopher Rousseau wrote in his famous pedagogical work 'Emile' that before the age of 15 or 16 no one should be exposed to religious ideas. This view so shocked French authorities that they banned the book, and copies of it were burnt in 1762. But I agree with Rousseau. At a tender age a child's mind is very impressionable, and it is usually very difficult in later life to remove unscientific ideas and superstitions when foisted on it at a tender age.
To give an example, Klaus, Horst, and Dieter, 3 of the 4 elder sons of Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief architects of the Holocaust who had fled to Argentina but was captured and brought back to Israel where he was tried and hanged in 1962, never renounced their father's Nazi ideology and hatred of Jews, even though Nazi Germany had come to an end in 1945. This was obviously because such ideas were foisted on their impressionable minds in their childhood by their father, which in later life they could not remove. Only the youngest son, Ricardo, denounced his father, and that may be because he was a toddler when his father was captured and executed, and thus not exposed to Nazi ideas.
Several eminent scientists have believed in God, but that is because scientific and unscientific ideas can co-exist in the same mind, not because belief in God is scientific. The unscientific ideas were obviously foisted in the scientist's mind by his parents or elders when he was a child, and they were so deeply impressed and fixated that they could not later be removed.
So Bill should not get upset on reading this article. He is in fine company !
(Justice Markandey Katju is a former Judge of the Supreme Court of India, and former Chairman of the Press Council of India. The views expressed are his own.)
