THE AGE OF SCIENCE & RELIGION—PART I

While the miracle made the contemporaries of the prophets experience their helplessness, they had no rational proof for the divine religion based on established human knowledge of the time. With progress in knowledge, arguments put forward with supporting proofs from established scientific knowledge found universal acceptance. Gradually it was easier for people to understand the message of the Prophet and verify it in the light of its own established principles. The benefit was the increasing numbers of those who believed in it. Common to ancient miracles and arguments based on scientific evidence is that they both provide arguments for religious belief only at the level of inference. When a prophet performed a miracle, it did not mean that this was a mirror in which one could observe the actual claim of the prophet. One could infer that by performing such miracles which other mortals could not, the miracle worker had received divine succour. The same is true of scientific proof. The evidence provided by science is not a direct demonstrative proof of any actual claim. It is only through inference that the claim of divine religion becomes understandable and convincing. This difference is the result of modern nuclear science. But science has made extraordinary progress in the 20th and 21st centuries in the nuclear field. It has given access to the micro world, whereas earlier knowledge had been limited to the macro world. It was believed that every rational thing had a physical body which could be weighed and measured, but the discovery of the micro world has brought about a sea change in scientific knowledge. The level of analysis has progressed to so ‘micro’ a level that now things can only be called waves of probability. New discoveries have revolutionized scientific knowledge, changing the very criterion of scientific argument. With the discoveries in the micro world, it is now believed that inferential argument is as valid as non-inferential or direct argument. Direct argument has become insufficient to explain all the facts. It has now become necessary to recognise the validity of inferential argument so that laws governing the micro world could be formulated. It has become possible for religious beliefs to be established at exactly the same level at which other things of this material world are established.