Al-Risala (English) · Search for Truth

Search for Truth

Al-Risala (English), March-April 2001, p. 7

By Maulana Wahiduddin Khan

Maulana Wahiduddin Khan is named as the default author of the periodical; a piece that carries another writer’s byline is credited to that writer.

world functions and not why it functions. For instance, the chemistry of a flower may be chemically analyzed, but not its odour. Chemistry can describe how water may be turned into steam power, but not why a miraculous life-giving element such as water came to exist in our world. Similarly, while science is concerned with the biological aspect of man, it is not the aim of science to try to discover the secret of the strange phenomena commonly known as the mind and spirit. Science has never claimed that its objective is to discover the total truth or absolute reality. The concerns of science are basically descriptive, and not teleological. Although science has failed to give a satisfactory answer to the quest for truth, it is not to be disparaged, for this has never been its motivation. Many people had pinned their hopes on science providing them with the superior life they had sought for so long. But after more than two hundred years, it has dawned upon recent generations that science has fallen very far short of fulfilling man’s hopes and aspirations, even in the material sense. Now it has been generally acknowledged that, although science has many plus points for human betterment, it has many minus points as well. Science gave us machines, but along with them it also gave us a new kind of social problem: unemployment. Science gave us comfortable motor cars but at the same time it polluted the air, making it difficult for human beings to inhale fresh air, just as with the rise of modern industry, there came the pollution of life-giving water. Production may have been speeded up, but at the cost of adversely affecting our whole social structure.

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