I The Method of Argument

I The Method of Argument I t might be said that metaphysicians of the past have done something comparable to writing a dud cheque without adequate funds in the bank. They have used words without proper ‘cash’ to back them; they have been unable to give their words ‘cash-value’ in terms of states of affairs. ‘The absolute is incapable of evolution and progress’ is a grammatically correct sentence; but the words are like a dud cheque and cannot be ‘cashed’. These statements, made by T.R. Miles in his book, Religion and the Scientific Outlook (p. 20), would appear to indicate that as religion belongs purely to the domain of faith, its claims are not based on valid arguments, and that if they are to be acceptable, they must be verifiable outside this domain. This implies that the intellectual processes by which scientific proofs are arrived at are in some way different from those, which lead to acceptance of religious phenomena. We shall see that this is true only in terms of observability, but not in terms of inferential procedures. For instance, if it is asserted that “the galaxies are not silver clouds, but a cluster of separate stars,” the acceptance of this statement may initially be a matter of faith, but when the claimant directs one’s gaze through a powerful telescope, what began as a belief becomes a reality which is observable by everyone. Similarly, disputes about whether it is correct or not to say that water contains microorganisms are effectively terminated by placing a drop of water under a microscope, when it will immediately be observed that the said microorganisms are legion.