The Method for the Discovery of God

God, there will be a secular person who will provide initial direction. I have been thinking on this subject since a very long time. I have arrived at the conclusion that the “secular person” mentioned in the above tradition of the Prophet is perhaps the Italian astronomer Galileo who was born four hundred years ago. In this matter, Galileo’s role was not a direct one, but an indirect one. That is, his discoveries indirectly helped in finding an answer to the question of what method one should adopt to discover God. In the time of Galileo, a very important incident occurred, which was the discovery of the telescope. Like Newton’s ‘apple shock’, we can call this ‘tele-shock’. Einstein has written that Galileo was the father of modern science. It is indeed true that with Galileo science entered a new age. The telescope had already been invented in Holland, but Galileo came up with an improved version of the available telescope and could for the first time observe parts of the solar system. In 1610, for several nights Galileo observed Jupiter and three objects near this large planet. By closely monitoring their motion over the course of a number of days he concluded that these objects near Jupiter were Jupiter’s satellites which were in orbit around it. Galileo’s findings of Jupiter’s satellites caused a revolution in astronomy: a planet with smaller planets orbiting it did not conform to the principles of Aristotelian cosmology, which held that all heavenly bodies should circle the Earth. Aristotle’s conception of the universe is also called Ptolemy’s geocentric model, according to which the earth is at the centre of the universe with the sun, planets and stars orbiting it. But Galileo’s discovery in 1610 and his subsequent observations of the planet Venus later that year further made the Ptolemaic geocentric model untenable. The new theory of the sun at the centre in the solar system with other planets including the earth revolving around it is called the heliocentric theory.