FAITH AND REASON

About five hundred years ago, with the emergence of science, this state of affairs did not change. All the scientists in the wake of the Renaissance believed that matter, in fact the entire material world was something solid which could be observed. Newton had even formed a theory that light consisted of tiny corpuscles. As such, it was possible to apply direct argument as an explanation for material things. Similarly, even after the emergence of modern science, this state of affairs prevailed. It continued to be believed that the kind of argument which is applied to apparently tangible things could not be applied in the case of religion. But by the early twentieth century, specifically after the first World War, this mental climate changed completely. The ancient Greek philosophers believed that matter, in the last analysis, was composed of atoms. And the atom, though very tiny, was a piece of solid matter. But with the breaking of the atom in the twentieth century, all the popular scientific concepts underwent a sea change. The theories about faith and reason seemed irrelevant only while science was confined to the macrocosmic level. Later, when science advanced to the microcosmic level, it underwent a revolution, and along with it, the method of argument also changed. So far, science had been based on the proposition that all the things it believed in, like the atom, could be directly explained. But when the atom, the smallest part of an element, was smashed, it was revealed that it was not a material entity, but just another name for unobservable waves of electrons. This discovery demonstrated how a scientist could only see the effect of a thing and not the thing itself. For instance, the atom, after being split, produces energy which can be converted into electricity. Electricity runs along a wire in the form of a current, yet this event is not observable even by a scientist. But when such an event produces an effect, for instance, lighting up a bulb or setting a motor in motion, this effect comes under a scientist’s observation. Similarly, the waves from an X-ray machine, are not observable by a scientist, but when they produce the image of a human body on a plate, then it becomes observable. Now the question arose as to what stand a scientist must take? Should he believe only in a tangible effect or the intangible thing as well, which produced that effect. Since the scientist was bound to believe in the tangible effect, he had no choice but to believe in its intangible cause. In view of the recent advancement in scientific reasoning, a true faith has proved to be as rational as any other scientific theory.