RELIGION AND SCIENTIFIC REASONING

According to Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher and logician, there are two forms of knowledge — knowledge of things and knowledge of truths. Only ‘things’ can be directly observed, ‘truths’ can only be understood by indirect observation, or, in other words, inference. The existence of light, gravity, magnetism and nuclear energy in the universe is an undisputed fact, but man cannot directly observe these things. He knows them only by their effects. Man discovers certain ‘things’ from which he infers the existence of ‘truths’. This change in the concept of knowledge, which occurred in the twentieth century, changed the whole situation radically. Man was forced to accept the existence of things which he could not directly see and only indirectly experience. With this intellectual revolution the difference between seen and unseen reality disappeared. Invisible objects became as important as visible objects. Man was compelled to accept that indirect, or inferential argument, was academically and intellectually as sound as direct argument. This change in the concept of knowledge has, in the present age, made divine reasoning truly scientific. For instance, the greatest argument for religion is what philosophers call the argument from design. Nineteenth century scholars, in their zeal, did not accept this reasoning. To them it was an inferential argument which could not be accepted academically. But in the present age this objection has been invalidated. Nowadays man is compelled to infer the existence of a designer of the universe from the existence of design in the universe, just as he accepts the theory of the flow of electrons from the movement of a wheel. Bertrand Russell throws some light on this matter. In the preface to his book ‘Why I Am Not A Christian’, he writes: “I think all the great religions of the world — Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam and Communism — are both untrue and harmful. It is evident as a matter of logic that, since they disagree, not more than one of them can be true. With very few exceptions, the religion which a man accepts is that of the community in which he lives, which makes it obvious that the influence of environment is what has led him to accept Only ‘things’ can be directly observed; ‘truths’ can only be understood by inference.