FEBRUARY 24 The Return to Religion

1. Science and scientific resources had vastly expanded human knowledge. It not only gave man microscopes and telescopes to observe things which had till then remained unseen, but it also opened up innumerable new ways and means of making it possible to add greatly to information in every field. All this gave man the self-confidence to feel certain that he could arrive at the final reality through science alone. But the only thing that the increase in knowledge has told man is that he has how entered into a new phase of ignorance. In the words of a scientist: “We know more and more about less and less.” By the end of the 19th century scientists believed that with the increase in knowledge they had been heading towards the final reality. But new research by the end of the first half of the 20th century proved that man cannot reach the ultimate reality unaided. His limitations are decisively obstacles in his path. It is now an accepted fact among the scientific community that science gives us but a partial knowledge of reality. 2. With the emergence of modern science it had become fashionable among intellectuals to hold that the universe could be explained without God. Therefore, every fact that came to light was explained in a way that would prove that there was no mind or consciousness behind the universe. But this bid to explain the universe atheistically failed. The Indian scientist, Dr Subramaniam Chandra Shekhar, who won the Nobel prize in Physics (jointly) in 1983, is a self-avowed atheist. He has briefly stated the present position of science on this subject: There are aspects, which are extremely difficult to understand. A famous remark of Einstein—and other people have said similar things, Schrodinger in particular—that the most incomprehensible thing about nature is that it is comprehensible. How is it that the human mind, extremely small compared to the universe and living over a time span microscopic in terms of astronomical time, comprehends reality in ideas, which spring from the human mind? This question has puzzled many people from Kepler on. Why should mathematical description be accurate? Mathematical description is something the human mind has evolved. Why should it fit external nature? We don’t have answers to these questions. One is not saying the world is orderly and therefore must be ordered. But why should we understand the world in terms of