ARGUMENTS AGAINST GOD AND RELIGION — Part I From Physical Sciences

in the second quarter of the 20th century, but as a trend of thought, it had already—long before—taken hold of people’s minds. From Hume and Mill up to the time of Bertrand Russell, many philosophers have been its proponents, and it has now become the most important contemporary trend of thought, buttressed as it is by numerous centres of research and propagation all over the world. Logical positivism is defined as: The philosophy of science (and knowledge) that holds that only statements that can be verified through logic or empirical data are true and meaningful. Atheists feel, therefore, that man’s recent mental evolution is the antithesis of religious thinking. Modern, advanced knowledge claims that reality is only that which can stand up to the tests of observation and experience, whereas religion is based on a concept of reality which cannot, in this way, be subjected to analysis and scientifically proven: it follows then that it has no basis in actuality. In other words, religion gives an unrealistic account of real events. Since man’s knowledge was limited in ancient times, the correct explanations of natural phenomena were bound to elude him. Nature is a fact, not an explanation. This being so, the suppositions he made which hinged on religion were distinctly far-fetched and, at best, tangential. However, man has at last emerged from the darkness in which he was engulfed, and now, in the light of modern knowledge, it is possible for him to discard old, conjectural beliefs and arrive at the true nature of things by purely empirical methods. T.R. Miles writes: It might be said that metaphysicians of the past have done something comparable to writing a cheque without adequate funds in the bank. They have used words without proper ‘cash’ to back them; they have been unable to give their words ‘cashvalue’ in terms of states of affairs. ‘The Absolute is incapable of evolution and progress’ is a grammatically correct sentence; but the words are like a dud cheque, and cannot be ‘cashed’. All those phenomena, which were formerly attributed to supernatural forces, are now wholly explainable in terms of natural causes; modern thinking asserting that the 'discovery' of God was a mere assumption