Page 31 - Seekers Guide Book
P. 31
The Seeker’s Guide
religious indoctrination received in youth.
(Sept. 28, 1949 letter to Guy Raner Jr.)
This means scientists are not in a position to say that
there is no God, they can just take a sceptical 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. The age of quantum mechanics has established
that nothing is fully observable. Contrary to previous
belief, it was not the atom that was the last fundamental
particle that constituted matter, rather there were
unobservable subatomic particles that served as the
building blocks of atoms. In a book published in 1988,
entitled A Brief History of Time, Stephen W. Hawking
(one of the foremost physicists of present times) explains
30