ASK MAULANA

ASK MAULANA Your Questions Answered The remedy for ignorance is asking questions. (Prophet Muhammad) The spirit of enquiry is the hallmark of an open society and the above saying of the Prophet aptly illustrates this principle. A culture of curiosity and open-mindedness will foster development in any society by motivating its members to learn enthusiastically and enrich their knowledge. This is because awareness of one’s ignorance is half of knowledge, as it becomes a stepping-stone to seeking and finding answers. A questioning mind is like a flowing river that is replenished with fresh thoughts and ideas and continues on its journey. How do people reach Atheism? Becoming an atheist is more an outcome of being against theism than a self-discovery of the non-existence of God. Atheism was earlier backed on scientific validation, however, it has now lost its foundations and has become anachronistic in nature. For those who still claim scientific backing for atheism should know about what some of the authorities in science have said about the topic. When Einstein was asked if he was an atheist, he said that one may call him an agnostic. This means scientists are not in a position to say that there is no god, they can just take a skeptical stand on the existence of God. This is because the accepted base for belief in something in the intellectual world is scientific, but since there is no scientific discovery about the non-existence of God, this is still subject to interpretation. Towards the end of the 19th century, there was a strong wave of what was popularly called “scientific atheism”. The argument often offered to negate the existence of God was His being invisible. But new scientific investigations carried out at the beginning of the 20th century started turning the tide against the credibility of this position, it becoming accepted that there are many aspects of nature that are invisible yet they exist. One of the books written on this new world discovered by science is Science and the Unseen World by Sir Arthur Eddington. At the beginning of the 20th century Sir James Jeans declared that the universe which had been discovered by modern science was not compatible with the mechanical interpretation that had gained ground since past several decades.