Spirit of Islam, Jan 2015

ATHEIST thinkers dismiss religion as being unfounded in fact. They maintain that it springs from man’s desire to find meaning in the universe. While the urge to find an explanation is not in itself wrong, they hold that the inadequacy of our predecessors’ knowledge led them to wrong conclusions; namely, the existence of a God or gods; the notions that creation and destruction were a function of the godhead; that man’s fate was of concern to God; that there was a life after death in heaven or hell, as warranted by the morality of man’s life on earth, and that all thinking on these matters must necessarily be regulated by religion. Here we examine the arguments against God or religion based on physical sciences. Arguments against God and religion based on Physical Sciences Atheist thinkers feel that in light of the scientific revolution, man is now in a position to make a re-appraisal of traditional ways of thinking and to rectify errors of interpretation, just as in secular matters he has already exploded myths and overturned false hypotheses whenever facts and experience have forced the truth upon him. If events are due to natural causes, they are not due to supernatural causes.—Julian Huxley According to Auguste Comte, a well-known French philosopher of the first half of the nineteenth century, the history of man’s intellectual development can be divided into three stages—the theological stage, when events of the universe are explained in terms of divine powers; the metaphysical stage, in which we find no mention of specific gods (although external factors are still referred to in order to explain events); and the stage of positivism, where events are explained in terms of common laws deduced from observation and calculation without having recourse to spirit, God or absolute power. We are now passing through the third intellectual stage that in philosophical terms, is known as Logical Positivism. Scientific empiricism, or logical positivism, became a regular movement ARGUMENTS AGAINST GOD AND RELIGION — Part I From Physical Sciences