Critical to have dialogues with different ideologies:Dan Brown

Survival in an increasing shrinking world depends on ability to ask difficult questions and engage in dialogue with people having ideas different to one's own, according to celebrated US author Dan Brown.
"The world is getting smaller everyday and now more than ever there is enormous danger in believing that we are infallible. That our version of truth is absolute and that everyone who does not think like we do is wrong and therefore our enemy," said the "The Da Vinci Code" author.
Brown, whose widely read novels interrogate the relation between science and religion, was here to deliver the eighth Penguin Annual Lecture today on codes, science and religion.

Brown, who had visited India 30 years ago as a 19-year-old, said he received a "welcome that was warm" and he was waiting for "the right excuse to come back".
"For one's own survival, it is critical that we live without malice that we educate ourselves and that we ask difficult questions and above all we engage in dialogue especially with those whose ideas are not own own," he said.
Calling the present times as "a very exciting era," Brown said, "Right now in the first time in history the line between science and religion has started to blur."

Science and religion, for him are simply partners, two different languages attempting to tell the same story.

"Both are manifestations of man's quest to understand the divine. While science dwells on answers, religion savors the questions," said the author of "Angels & Demons", "The Lost Symbol", "Inferno", "Digital Fortress" and "Deception Point".
Science and religion have for time immemorial battling to be provide answers to man's questions, he said.
While tackling complex questions, scientists use phrases like "uncertainty principle" and "theory of relativity," and physics becomes metaphysics and numbers become imaginary.
At the same time there are a part of scientists who have religious experiences.
"Hindu sanyasis are reading physics books and learning about the experiments which they believe in their hearts for centuries but unable to quantify."

Brown also talked about the evolution of religion and the "God of Gaps".
From infertility to earthquakes, diseases even love there was a god to explain everything which later was filled by explanations by science.