Page 128 - The Vision of Islam

Modern Possibilities

experiments have been carried out with the materialistic way of
life, the impetus towards a return to religion is becoming stranger.
After the failure of man-made laws and worldly strategies for social
reform, the mentality of antagonism towards religion has perforce
softened.
Today, all over the world, a kind of religious reaction has set
in. The young generation of America, whose parents found their
creed in the theories of Darwin and Freud, are trying to find solace
in the Jesus Revolution and in Krishna consciousness. After having
reached the pinnacle of material progress, the Japanese have begun
to miss spiritual values and say that theirs is a merchant culture
which gives them nothing but merchant values. Religion is raising
its head even among the new generation of the U.S.S.R., even
although they have been brought up in a totally atheistic society. At
a meeting in Moscow of the anti-religion department of the Soviet
Union, one of its officers commented on the slowness of their
endeavours to stamp out religion. ‘Our movement against religion
is going along at the speed of a steam engine. A colleague capped
this with: ‘Steam engine? Even the wheel hasn’t been discovered
yet!’
All the theories advanced against religion in the nineteenth
century have become suspect in the light of later discoveries. The
theory of evolution, which at one time had come to be regarded as
an alternative to the theory of creation, appears to have lost the
support of logic. For instance, procedures have been discovered
by which the earth’s age can be accurately calculated. But its age,
reckoned by this method, falls incredibly short of what it would
have to be, for the life forms at present extant to have taken their
present shape through evolution. Two eminent micro-biologists
have presented a startling theory which runs counter to the
supposition of evolutionary existence. Nobel prize winners,
Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel, have in their joint research pointed
out causes which rule out taking life as an evolved form of earthly
matter. One of these is the particular role of molybdenum, which
is found in all organisms and on which most enzyme systems are
necessarily dependent for their activity. Even though molybdenum

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