Does God Exist?

Here I recall an incident which took place in 1965, when I was living in Lucknow. I happened to meet a gentleman, who was a Doctor of Philosophy and a great admirer of Bertrand Russell. Of course, he was an atheist. During our conversation about God he asked: “What criterion do you have to prove the existence of God?” I replied: “The same criterion which you have for proving the existence of anything else.” The dialogue ended there. There was no question and no answer after this. Why did this learned man fall silent? The reason is very simple and well known. My answer was to him a kind of reminder. I reminded him of the fact that we are living in a world where inferential argument is as applicable to the concept of God as to any other concept. In our modern times scientific knowledge has increased to an unbelievable extent. But, according to the Encyclopaedia of Ignorance, “increase in knowledge has only increased our ignorance.” One scientist has rightly said: “We know more and more about less and less.” Now it is an established fact that science gives us but a partial knowledge of reality. Human knowledge has two different phases – the pre-Einstein period and the post-Einstein period. In the pre-Einstein period, knowledge was confined to the macro or material world, which was observable and measurable. So, it was generally held that everything, which has a real existence, should also be observable. Anything which could not be observed had no real existence. This meant that only the seen world was real and what was unseen was unreal, or some kind of fiction. This concept created the theory which is generally called logical positivism. It means that the only valid logical argument is one