Challenge of Modern Knowledge
Summary
In this section, the author reflects on how modern atheistic thinkers dismiss religion as being unfounded, maintaining that it springs from man’s desire to find meaning in the universe. C.A. Coulson States, “Science has shown religion to be history’s cruelest and wickedest hoax.” (Science and Christian Belief, p. 4) According to them, the inadequacy of the knowledge of earlier generations led them to wrong conclusions about religious concepts like the existence of a God or gods, the notion that creation and destruction are acts of God, that man’s fate is of concern to God and that there is life after death. They claimed that in the light of advances in knowledge, man was now in a position to make a reappraisal of traditional ways of thinking and to rectify errors of interpretation, just as in secular matters he had exploded myths and overturned false hypotheses whenever facts and experience had forced the truth upon him. In our modern age, these claims influenced a large number of people who were led to reject religion.
Some arguments presented by atheistic thinkers are given in this chapter. The claim that religious truths are not founded on the scientific method is one argument that atheistic thinkers present in order to reject religion. Modern, advanced knowledge, they say, is that reality which alone can stand up to the tests of observation and experience, whereas religion, to them, is based on a concept of reality which cannot be subjected to this sort of analysis and scientific proof. It follows then, they say, that religion has no basis in actuality and that, like other things that were formerly attributed to supernatural forces, it is now wholly explainable in terms of natural causes. Atheistic thinking has it that the ‘discovery’ of God was a mere assumption that arose from ignorance, and that with the spread of knowledge, this belief will automatically disappear.
Atheistic thinkers present psychology as a second argument to reject religious truths. They claim that research carried out in the field of psychology has further strengthened their point of view, claiming that it has shown that religion is the creation of man’s subconscious mind, rather than the discovery or revelation of some external reality. Therefore, they say, religion is not based on fact.
Anti-religionists present history as a third argument against religious truths. They maintain that it was the particular historical circumstances in which man found himself that gave birth to religious concepts. Finding himself in an insecure position and in need of integrating society around a cohesive force, man, they claim, developed concepts of deities of some sort or the other that he believed fulfilled this need. He began to worship such gods as he considered superior to all human beings and whose favours he believed could be sought by people.
Some anti-religionists present Marxism as a fourth argument to reject religious truths. Marxist philosophy holds religion to be a historical hoax. Considering human history as a history of class struggles, it regards laws, morals, and religion as fraudulent innovations of the dominant classes under the cloak of which many of their vested interests are hidden.
The author has analysed these challenges to religious truths in this section of the book and has presented counter-arguments to them in the chapter that follows it.
With the splitting of the atom, all of man’s conceptions of matter have been drastically altered. In fact, the advance of science in the past century has culminated in a knowledge explosion, the like of which has never before been experienced in human history, and in the wake of which all ancient ideas about God and religion have had to be re-examined. This, as Julian Huxley puts it, is the challenge of modern knowledge. In the following pages, I propose to answer this challenge, for I am convinced that, far from having a damaging effect on religion, modern knowledge has served to clarify and consolidate its truths. Many modern discoveries support Islamic claims made 1400 years ago that what is laid down in the Quran is the ultimate truth, and that this will be borne out by all future knowledge.
Soon We will show them Our signs in all the regions of the earth and in their own souls, until they clearly see that this is the truth.1 (41:53)
Modern atheistic 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. They feel that, in the light of advanced learning, 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.
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 which, in philosophical terms, is known as Logical Positivism.
Logical Positivism
Scientific empiricism, or logical positivism, became a regular movement 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. A dictionary of philosophy published in New York gives the following definition of logical positivism:
All knowledge that is factual is connected with experiences; in such a way that verification or direct or indirect confirmation is possible (p. 285).
Anti-religionists feel, therefore, that man’s recent mental evolution is the very antithesis of religious thinking. Modern, advanced knowledge has it 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 proved: 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. This being so, the suppositions he made which hinged on religion were distinctly far-fetched and, at best, tangential. But, thanks to the universal law of evolution, 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 odd, 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 ‘cash-value’ 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’.2
All those things, which were formerly attributed to supernatural forces, are now wholly explainable in terms of natural causes, modern thinking having it that the “discovery” of God was a mere assumption arising from ignorance. With the spread of knowledge, this belief has automatically disappeared. Julian Huxley writes:
Newton showed that God did not control the movements of the planets. Laplace in a famous aphorism affirmed that astronomy had no need of the god hypothesis; Darwin and Pasteur between them did the same for biology; and in our own century, the rise of scientific psychology and the extension of historical knowledge have removed gods to a position where they are no longer of value in interpreting human behaviour and cannot be supposed to control human history or interfere with human affairs.3
Physics, psychology and history have proved conclusively that all those events which man explained in terms of the existence of a God or gods, or some abstract ‘Power’ had entirely different causes, but that man, steeped in ignorance, continued to speak of them in terms of religious mystery.
In the world of physics, Newton is the hero of this revolution. It was he who put forward the theory that the universe is bound by certain unchangeable principles, there being certain laws according to which, all celestial bodies revolve. Later, many other scholars carried this research forward to the point where all events on earth and in the heavens allegedly took place according to the immutable “Law of Nature.”
After this discovery, it was but natural that the concept of an active and omnipotent God as the power, which made things move appeared meaningless. At the most this discovery allowed for a God who had initially set the universe in motion. Therefore, Newton himself, along with other like-minded scientists, believed in God as the Prime Mover. Voltaire for his part, said that God had created the universe in just the same way as a watch-maker made a watch, assembling the parts, arranging them in a particular order, but afterwards having nothing to do with it. Hume subsequently, abolished this “inactive and worthless God” by advancing the argument that we had seen watches being made, but that since we had not seen the world in the process of creation, it was not possible for us to believe in God.
Atheists maintain that the progress of science and the expansion of knowledge had enabled man to observe that which was beyond his observation in the past. Being in the dark about chains of events, we had not been in a position to understand isolated events. Now, equipped with knowledge, we no longer stood in awe of natural phenomena. For instance, the rising and setting of the sun are now understood as matters of common knowledge. But, in early times, these events seemed inexplicable, and man supposed that there must be a God who was responsible for them. This led to the acceptance of there being a supernatural power: he described whatever was beyond man’s knowledge as a miracle wrought by that power. But now that we know the rising and setting of the sun is the result of the earth’s revolving upon its axis, where is the need to believe that there is a God who makes the sunrise and set? Similarly, the functioning of all other things, which had been attributed to some invisible power, purported, according to modern studies, to result from the action and interaction of the natural forces now known to us. That is, after the revelation of natural causes, the need to posit, and to believe in the existence of God, or a supernatural force, vanished of itself. If the rainbow is merely a reflection of sunlight in minute droplets of water in the air, it is not, in any way, a sign placed in the sky by God. If the plague is inevitably an outbreak of this disease, it can no longer be looked on as a sign of divine wrath. If animals and plants have slowly evolved over hundreds of millions of years, there is no room for a ‘Creator’ of animals and plants, except in a metaphorical sense–quite different from that in which the word was originally and is now normally used. If hysteria and insanity are external symptoms of disordered minds, there is no place left in them for possession by devils. Citing such events in support of his argument, Julian Huxley observes with great conviction: “If events are due to natural causes, they are not due to supernatural causes.”4
He holds that their ascription to Supernatural Beings is merely due to man’s ignorance combined with his passion for some sort of explanation. Subsequent research carried out in the field of psychology further strengthened this point of view, as it revealed that religion is the creation of man’s subconscious self rather than the discovery of some external reality. In the words of a western scholar: “God is nothing but a projection of man on a cosmic screen.” The concept of another world was nothing but “a beautiful idealisation of human wishes.” Divine inspiration and revelation were merely an “extraordinary expression of the childhood repressions.”
All these ideas are based on the premise that there is something called the subconscious. Modern research has revealed that the human mind is divided into two major parts, one being termed the conscious mind, the centre of those of our ideas, which take shape in a state of consciousness. The other part is the subconscious. In this part of the mind, ideas are not usually alive in the memory, but exist below the surface and find expression either in abnormal circumstances, or in sleep, in the form of dreams. Most human thoughts are buried in this subconscious cell, the conscious part of the mind being the smaller part. The subconscious is like the eight-ninths of the iceberg, which remain below water, while only one ninth, the conscious part, is visible.
After extensive research in psychology, Freud discovered that, during childhood, certain happenings and ideas are repressed in our unconscious minds, which can later result in the irrational behaviour of adults. The same applies to the religious concepts of the hereafter, heaven, hell, etc., which are but echoes of those very wishes which were born in the child’s mind but never fulfilled, circumstances being unfavourable, and consequently, repressed in the subconscious. Later, the subconscious, for its own satisfaction, supposed the existence of a dream world in which its unfulfilled wishes would be realized, just as, deep in sleep, one dreams of wishes coming miraculously true. When childhood fancies, which had been thoroughly repressed, suddenly burst through to the surface, producing a state of frenzy or hysteria, or other abnormal behaviour, people mistakenly attributed this to supernatural forces, which had found expression in human language. Similarly, the generation gap and the ‘Father complex’ in a family gave rise to the concept of God and slave. Thus what was simply a social malaise was carried to the cosmic scale in order to forge a theory. In the words of Ralph Linton:
The Hebrew picture of an all-powerful deity who could only be placated by complete submission and protestations of devotion, no matter how unjust his acts might appear, was a direct outgrowth of this general Semitic family situation. Another product of the exaggerated superego to which it gave rise was the elaborate system of taboos relating to every aspect of behaviour. One system of this sort has been recorded and confided in the Laws of Moses. All Semitic tribes had similar series of regulation differing only in content. Such codes provided those who kept them with a sense of security, comparable to that of the good child who is able to remember everything that his father ever told him not to do and carefully abstains from doing it. The Hebrew Yahveh was a portrait of the Semitic father with his patriarchal authoritarian qualities abstracted and exaggerated. Such a judicial concept which believes in God being a political authority has occupied a central place not only in Judaism, but is also incorporated in the religious concepts of Christianity and Islam as well.5
The third argument against the reality of religion is provided by history. Anti-religionists maintain that it was the particular historical circumstances in which man found himself which gave birth to religious concepts. In ancient times, before the discoveries of modern science, man had no means of saving himself from natural calamities, such as floods, storms and epidemics. Frequently finding himself in insecure positions, he pictured to himself extraordinary forces which could be invoked in times of need, which could be trusted to come to his rescue in the face of disaster and which would act as a panacea of all ills. In order that society might be well integrated and its members firmly focussed around one central point, a cohesive force was needed. Deities of one sort or the other fulfilled these needs and man then, began, to worship such gods as were considered superior to all human beings and whose favours had to be sought as a matter of religious duty by all individuals. The Encyclopaedia of Social Science has this to say:
Political and civic forces also permanently influence the development of religion. The attributes and the names bestowed upon the gods automatically change in accordance with the form of the State. The God as King is merely a transposition of the human as king, the divine kingdom merely a transposition of the earthly kingdom. Moreover, since the prince or king is supreme judge, the deity is likewise clothed with the judicial function and vested with the final decision as to human guilt or innocence (7, p.233).
Thus the condition of a particular historical period and the interaction of the human mind with prevailing circumstances have given birth to concepts which are collectively known as religion. Religion is a product of the human mind resulting from ignorance and a sense of helplessness in the face of external forces. Julian Huxley sums it up thus: “Religion is the product of a certain type of interaction between man and his environment.”6
Since that particular environment, which was responsible for bringing about this interaction has either disappeared or is disappearing; there is no further justification for the perpetuation of religion. To this Huxley adds:
The concept of God has reached the limits of its usefulness: it cannot evolve further. Man to carry the burden of religion created supernatural powers. From diffuse magic mana to personal spirits; from spirits to gods; from gods to God—so crudely speaking, the evolution has gone. The particular phase of that evolution which concerns us is that of God. In one period of our Western civilization the gods were necessary fictions, useful hypotheses by which to live.7
The Communist philosophy too holds religion to be a historical hoax. Since Communism studies history exclusively in the light of economics, to it, all historical factors were offshoots of the economic situation. It holds that it was the feudal and capitalistic systems, prevailing in the past, that had led to the birth of religion. Now that these outdated systems are dying a natural death, religions should also be treated as dead along with it. As Engels puts it, moral concepts, in the last analysis, are the product of contemporary economic conditions. Human history is the history of class wars, in which the ruling classes have been exploiting the backward classes, and religion and morals were invented to provide an ideological basis for safeguarding the interests of the ruling class. According to the Communist Manifesto, laws, morals, and religion—all are the fraudulent innovations of the Bourgeoisie under the cloak of which most of its vested interests are hidden.
Addressing the third All-Russia Congress (October, 1920) Lenin had said that: of course, they did not believe in God. They knew very well that the church authorities, landlords and bourgeois who spoke with reference to God, were simply interested in safeguarding their own interests as exploiters… They denied all such moral laws, as had been borrowed from a Super-human power, or were not based on the concept of class. They called this a hoax, an illusion, the befogging of the minds of farmers and labourers in order to serve the interests of landlords and capitalists. They asserted that their moral code was subject to the class struggle of the Proletariat alone, the source of their moral principle being the interest of the class-struggle of the Proletariat.8
This is the case put forward by the antagonists of religion, on the basis of which a large number of people, in our modern age have rejected religion. An American professor of psychology sums it up thus: “Science has shown religion to be history’s cruelest and wickedest hoax.”9
Notes
1. Quran, 41:53.
2. Religion and the Scientific Outlook, George Allen & Unwin Ltd.,
3. Religion without Revelation, New York, 1958,
4. Ibid,
5. Ralph Linton, The Tree of Culture, 1956,
6. Julian Huxley, Man in the Modern World
7. Ibid, Man in the Modern World,
8. Lenin, Selected Works, Moscow, 1947, Vol.II.
9. C.A. Coulson, Science and Christian Belief,
