Arguments of Opponents of Religion

FROM DENIAL TO BELIEF IN GOD knowledge, it has become possible that instead of clinging to baseless religious beliefs, man can find out the reality of things through purely experimental and observational methods. And so, it is claimed that all those previously believed to be the result of supernatural causes can now be explained entirely through natural causes. Modern methods of research, it is argued, have informed us that to believe in the existence of God was not the result of any discovery by man but that, instead, it was simply speculation from the days of ignorance which, after the spread of the light of scientific knowledge, has been proven to be false. Thus, for instance, British writer Julian Huxley (d. 1975), who was possibly a hardened atheist, writes: “Newton showed that God did not control the movements of the planets. Laplace, in a famous aphorism, affirmed that astronomy did not need the god hypothesis; Darwin and Pasteur did the same for biology, and in our century, the rise of scientific psychology and the extension of historical knowledge have removed gods to a position where they are no longer of value in interpreting human behaviour and cannot be supposed to control human history or interfere with human affairs.” (Julian Huxley, Religion Without Revelation, 1958). In the physical world, the ‘hero’ of this revolution was Newton, who presented the theory that specific unchangeable laws bind the universe. There are some laws by which all astronomical bodies are in motion. Later, innumerable people further advanced this research, so much so that all phenomena on Earth and in the skies began