While attempting to obtain a love for knowledge and willpower to think, one must not overlook reality or disregard past experiences. One must relate to the “sense of reality” under the watch of reason and control of conscience, and consider it on a par with one’s ability to taste, smell, and touch. Houses of knowledge, centers for research, and the symposiums that they hold must support and stimulate a love of knowledge. It is essential that we all support this cause.

The way of moderation is to do everything necessary in terms of causes and do it prudently and insistently; yet moderation is also full submission to God so much so that nothing can come between a person and their trust in Him. Cause-and-effect relationship must be observed at its best, yet without giving way to extreme determinism. I am not sure how much flexibility in this matter would be welcomed, but I think at the very most one can be open to a conditional, moderate type of determinism. At least this much of openness to causality and cause-and-effect relationship has existed among the circles of the faithful throughout the history, with certain varying interpretations.

If causal determinism is the name for the phenomena in which the same causes in the same circumstances bring out the same results, then it goes without saying that conditional determinism does have a place in our worldview. Cause-and-effect can be relevant to a certain extent in the social life, too, even if not as rigorous as in the physical world. This implies future consequences of our actions on the society today, and that we must have a plan according to which we can establish a social and individual life in harmony and order.

Indeed, if our society and administrations are going to exist in tomorrow’s world then we must start planning for them now. This is only possible through clear engagement with reality and when all possible alternatives and possibilities are weighed. Otherwise, unexpected internal and external events are inevitable.

We must review all the current institutions of our society and their essential dynamics according to conditions of today and tomorrow – schools and their curricula; universities and all higher education facilities; nursing homes and orphanages; congregations in houses of worship; soldiers in their barracks; police officers at police stations; public servants in government offices; workers in factories … Without a review done with a cause-and-effect analysis, it will be very difficult to guarantee a generation free from chaos, nor can we claim having raised well-rounded individuals or promise peace for the society. Under such circumstances, the place of worship fails to fulfill its mission, the school fails to reach the sanctity of a place of worship, the barracks fails to maintain its reputation, and masses will succumb to destitution.

We cannot sit and wait for surprises as though everything will be prepared in another world to be sent to our aid. The question is, are we taking an active part in life, or are we not?

There are certain thoughts that are dangerous for a society’s future. If people are only concerned with the present (like Omar Khayyam), or if they don’t believe in thinking deeply because it makes them crazy, or if they do believe in excessively indulging in material pleasures, then the society has lost its meaning and is already dead spiritually.

It is incumbent upon intellectuals and those in the administration to prevent such aberrations of thought and degradations of the soul by way of leading the society to high goals and enlightening people through knowledge. If we do not imbue people with a true love for knowledge and the spirit of thought, and choose to bemuse them with daily politics instead, we will have made society a source of daily conflict. Social problems cannot be solved by the suppression of thought, nor by a simple change in political power. Even if we solve these problems once, the changing circumstances and an ever-evolving world will constantly bring forth new problems. In the face of these obstacles waiting for us at every corner we have no other choice than to struggle against them with a love of truth, knowledge and understanding.

Existence is constantly developing; to be left on the outside of this development would mean isolation, which is no different than colliding with the wheels spinning and turning in the universe. Actually, without comprehending this dynamic of renewal and advancement throughout the universe, it will be impossible to understand existence as a whole, the mission of the human being, and the truth of humanity.

In this world, the inanimate is constantly running towards life; life travels towards consciousness and understanding. The alternation between dark and light is on a continuous cycle, and every single thing builds upon each other to form a profundity of knowledge. Yes, all the existence and events, too, run without cessation towards the infinite just as all rivers and streams flow onwards through rocks to reach the sea. Using our willpower and consciousness, we, too, must flow towards our future with diligence and effort that surpass our current power and durability. Otherwise, whilst creation and life are developing and perfecting, we will be like climbing an escalator in the opposite direction. Every attempt that fails to comply with the prevailing harmony in the universe is destined to be cast aside, and they will not be able to form, develop, and reach perfection.

While the Islamic world excelled in a blessed period of history, so did the Western world in terms of its own Renaissance. Both did so having benefited from the common knowledge accumulated along a few thousand years of human history.

Now, if we wish to once more achieve a similar development, we must evaluate the dynamics laid out above and apply them across our society.

Indeed, these essentials, and the spirit and meaning that they carry, must be infused into the soul of society, even in an unsubtle form. We must ensure that our traditions and customs turn green and take root in families, schools, and places of worship – not one single section of society should be left deprived of this spirit and meaning. The souls of children should be kneaded with this spirit and meaning. Beginning with elementary school, their souls should soar with these values, and in the periods to come, they should be nurtured with the same feelings and thoughts with gradual increase in the content.

If there is one thing that is more important than knowledge itself then that is the understanding of knowledge and the engraving of that understanding onto the souls of a society. Instilling youth with this love of knowledge is as important to their development as water is. This love and these principles of knowledge should, without a doubt, be instilled in every individual throughout a society, from age seven to seventy. This way, any friction that develops between differences of thought and philosophy can be resolved through dialogue and understanding instead of conflict and rivalry.

The ethical dimension of this matter calls for a separate analysis on its own; so, I am passing over it for now, leaving it to another piece.

Indeed, attaching a purpose to everything non-systematically is subjective and seems not to be compatible with the current scientific methodology. For this reason, some people tend to deny religious sources of knowledge, whereas other people tend to accept a dualist viewpoint where they separate the domains of religion and science. Such dualism pushes religion out of people’s lives and restrains it only to particular instances and environments, reframing religion with surrealist subjects.

The path to reviving religious spirituality in daily life, on the same objective domain with science, requires many approaches. One of them is to answer the following question: is it possible to find a systematic way of understanding the purpose of the phenomena that has been observed and discovered by scientific methodology?

Although scientific methodology has evolved throughout history, the common motive that fits all stages is exploring the causal relationship among phenomena and expressing causality with some set of laws and principles. If we traced back to the origins of the scientific approach, we would encounter Aristotle’s definitions. He stated in his book “Metaphysics” that there are four types of causes (Fine, G., 1987):

1. Material cause – i.e. the materials that something is composed of. For example, water, sunshine, soil etc. are necessary to plant a tree. Therefore, these are material causes for the tree that was planted.
2. Formal cause – in his original words, “the form or pattern; that is, the essential formula and the classes which contain it.” For instance, a drug can only be useful if its constituent chemicals are mixed in a certain ratio. Hence the specific ratio is the formal cause of the drug.
3. Efficient (or motive) cause – the prior conditions that lead to the resulting situation. This is what is usually considered as “the cause” in science, especially in physics. An example is the source of new cells, which was unknown until the 19^th century. It was François Raspail (1794–1878) who first stated Omnis cellula e cellula, meaning that every cell is derived from another cell which tells the efficient cause of cell (re)production. (http://www.ohio.edu/chastain/rz/raspail.htm)
4. Final cause – i.e. the purpose or the goal of something. This is also known as telos. In our daily language, we often mean the final cause or telos, when we talk about “whys.” For example, the telos for a seed to germinate is to become a tree.

Considering these different types of causes, which all together become a complete explanation, we can see that the current understanding of science is diverged from this point. These four categories of cause survived in science until the 17^th century. But then, by constraining science on the matter and its motion, as Francis Bacon stated in his Advancement of Learning (1605), only the material and efficient causes are taken into account as the major two subjects of science (Bacon 1605). During those days, Spinoza and Descartes deliberately rejected the final (teleological) cause and claimed that the efficient causes are necessary and sufficient to explain the universe. Thence, Newtonian physics was developed on the basis of the efficient cause. For example, the cause of acceleration is thought of as the force, in a sense that when a force F is applied to a mass m, the acceleration becomes a = F/m.

Causality in science is therefore reduced to the “efficient cause” and effect relationship. However, as we discussed, religions emphasize the purpose of events and accept God as the cause of causes. Therefore, religions use a different language, especially by underlining the telos, in terms of explaining phenomena. For instance, one of the amazing properties of water is that its least absorbing spectrum corresponds to the optical regime (Gedik, N. 2005). To explain this phenomenon, science asserts the efficient cause and searches for the relationship between the absorption spectrum and the natural oscillation frequency of the water molecule. However, disregarding the temporal order, this purpose-based approach says that because it is crucial and vital for living beings to receive sufficient light, and since the atmosphere largely consists of H₂O molecules, then water had to be transparent to the optical frequencies of light to allow creatures that have eyes and photosynthesis systems to get enough light.[1]

We should admit that the latter explanation does not sound strong enough to be generalized and be formulated. Therefore, we usually avoid using the adjective “scientific” for such explanations. But when our subjects or phenomena are chosen in the bio-world, we observe that the “standard” efficient causality does not give a satisfactory explanation, and the teleological causality is necessary. For example, the adaptation concept is teleological, which makes the usage of “final cause” indispensable in biology. Furthermore, in the early 19^th century, in his book The Origin of the Species, Charles Darwin deliberately employed the term “final cause,” as it was noticed by James Lennox (Lennox 1993). Although some people claim the opposite, by carefully investigating Darwin’s works, Asa Gray and James Lennox appreciate Darwin by stating that he is the first scientist who reconciled morphology and teleology. Simply put, every species are equipped with specialized organs so that they can maximally benefit from, or maximally defend against, their environment. The same idea is also valid from the religious point of view and does not necessarily deny natural selection.

We can find more examples of teleological causality in systems biology, which studies biological concepts in a holistic way and therefore utilizes a teleological language. For instance, during mitotic cell division, chromosomes are replicated only once and then separated into two new cells. But note that something, indeed a checkpoint, prevents the cell from replicating its DNA more than once. This situation appeals for attention and can be explained in two ways. First is the teleological, or what biologists sometimes call the “biological explanation.” DNA is replicated once because otherwise it is severely defective or even lethal for the cells. Such a teleological explanation is perfectly compatible with the mechanistic explanation (efficient cause) based on the chemical interactions of some related proteins, which can be modeled by thermodynamic equations. As the system is complex, it is often hard to fully fit into a model using thermodynamic formulations. However, system biology offers another way that mixes the language of teleological and efficient causes by considering the system as a signaling network, on which the signal (or information, as in the information theory) is carried out via specific protein phosphorylations or reactions. If we were to analyze the spectrum of the words used in systems biology, such as commitment, robustness, checkpoint, decision etc., we would see that its language is more similar to our purpose-based daily language. For such irreducibly complex systems, the employment of teleological concepts does not arise as metaphorical; rather, it is indispensable as the whole cannot be purely explained by its parts.

Other sciences also provide teleological examples. Beginning in the early 20^th century, quantum physics emerged, bringing along some very unintuitive experiments. For example, Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen offered a paradox called EPR. This states that measurements on two spatially separate but entangled particles can demonstrate correlations that cannot be simply explained by efficient causes. Later on, this phenomenon, called quantum entanglement, was empirically validated and can be explained by the final causes, introducing a retrocausal relationship.

Theoretical physicist Ken Wharton argues that the process known as frustrated spontaneous emission is naturally explained by such teleological causality. A light-emitting atom stops emitting light when the surrounding atoms are no longer able to absorb light. The decision of the atom whether to decay or not depends on the other atoms’ absorption, which has not happened yet. The idea that “the atom is probing the future” is not only counter intuitive, but also difficult to accept on the basis of the efficient causality, as Wharton states. (G. Musser, 2014).

Although teleological explanations are not always indispensable and can always be accompanied by efficient causality, the urge for the simplest explanation usually brings teleological language to science. Because science has been facing complex systems in various fields, teleological (purpose based) causality has become necessary since the beginning of the 20^th century. As a purpose-orientated understanding of existence is fundamental for almost all religions, it would not be strange to observe the engagement of science and religion in the near future.

Returning back to the initial question, of whether the purpose-oriented view can be reconciled with scientific research, we see that this is already widely evident in the scientific community. But there are still some people who think religions oppose science, owing to their purpose-oriented view. The judgment is left to the reader.

Yusuf Malik holds a PhD in physics. He is a freelance writer based in Boston, USA.

Reference

1. Fine, G.. 1987. “Forms as Causes: Plato and Aristotle,” in A. Graeser (ed.), Mathematics and Metaphysics in Aristotle, Bern: Haupt, pp. 69–112.
2. http://www.ohio.edu/chastain/rz/raspail.htm
3. Bacon, Francis. 1605. “Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Human.” en.wikisource.org.
4. Gedik, N. 2005. “The Miracles of Water,” The Fountain, Issue 49.
5. Lennox, James G. 1993. “Darwin Was a Teleologist.” Biology and Philosophy 8 (4).
6. George Musser. 2015. “The Quantum Mechanics of Fate,” Nautilus, February.

[1] The difference between this explanation and the anthropic principle may seem subtle here, but there is an enormous conceptual gap which extends beyond the scope of this article.  

Even though Kant has very original insights that opened new gateways in the history of philosophy, his so-called “critical philosophy” is not devoid of defects. This article aims to present Kant’s account of causation and critically evaluate it.

Kant’s famous remark about his awe for “the starry heavens above me, and the moral law within me,” which is written in his gravestone, shows his orientation in philosophy. While he was interested in explaining the features of the universe and the nature of our theoretical knowledge, he did not ignore the practical aspect of our life that concerns with how to act in the right way. That is to say, ethics and natural science were main disciplines Kant tried to understand. However, this paper examines his analysis of theoretical knowledge and the natural science by focusing on his account of causality.

An introduction to Kant’s “critical philosophy”

Before Kant, there were two important traditions in modern philosophy: rationalism and empiricism. On the one hand, the rationalists assumed that we could obtain knowledge of the world by trusting in the power of our minds. Kant considered them to be dogmatic in the sense that they dogmatically assumed this idea without examining the nature and limits of our minds so as to see whether we can really achieve this goal or not. On the other hand, the empiricists usually distrusted the power of the mind in its attempt to know the world, and in its most extreme case, in Hume, it led to skepticism. In response to these two approaches, Kant suggested to examine critically the nature and limits of the mind and see to what degree we can have knowledge at all. This is called “critical philosophy.”

For Kant, our minds are not passive receivers of representations like mirrors. A normal flat mirror reflects the image from an object as if it is the same except in a two-dimensional way. It was a common attitude among philosophers before Kant to treat the mind like a mirror. The mirror does not change the form of the object. Likewise, the mind does not affect or change the form of the objects, it just receives them. However, Kant changed the whole picture. He treated minds as active filters. Whatever is reflected on it is shaped in a certain way. On this view, the mind is like a concave or convex mirror, or colormatic glasses but it is not like a flat mirror.

According to Kant, the mind has three faculties with different functions. These faculties are sensibility, understanding and reason. Through sensibility we get the raw material of experience. This material is structured and shaped by space and time which are not outside the mind but are the pure forms of the faculty of sensibility. What we get through this faculty is called “intuition.”

The faculty of understanding provides us with concepts, especially with “the pure concepts,” or categories, of which there are twelve in total, and are used in organizing the intuition. In brief, what is reflected on the mind as coming from the world is structured by the a priori forms of intuiton (space and time) to which the twelve categories of mind are applied.

Kant’s postulation of the mind as an active factor in obtaining knowledge is considered to be “the copernican revolution” in philosophy. Kant has a formula which depicts his system very well: “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitons without concepts are blind.” In order to have understanding, we should both have intuition and concepts. These two conditions should be fulfilled for a genuine and reliable understanding. First, concepts without intuiton do not give us understanding; we can just think about them and never be sure whether they are something about real or not. According to Kant, concepts such as soul, God, and free will are ideas to which no intuition corresponds. Second, if there were no ordering role of the mind, all the information we got from the world would be chaotic. For instance, we would not be able to identify a certain individual as a human being, an animal of a different sort or even as an object, because we lacked an ability to order and classify the information. Therefore, according to Kant, the world appears to us differently from as it is in itself due to the ordering character of the mind.

Kant calls the world as it appears to us “phenomena” and the world in itself “noumena.” The latter is beyond the limits of the legitimate realm of theoretical knowledge. We cannot understand it, and we cannot theoretically know anything about it: we can only think about it. Ideas such as those of God and free will are directed toward the nounemal realm. They belong to the faculty of reason and have a regulative role in ordering and unifying our experience. However, they are empty according to Kant. That is to say, there is no corresponding intuition to them in our experience. Thus, we cannot decide whether they really exist or not by theoretical knowledge. This conclusion of Kant’s critical philosophy may suggest an agnostic position towards God, (actually it led many people to become agnostics) according to which human beings can neither affirm nor deny the existence of God. However, Kant thought that he found a reason for believing in God in another domain, namely in practical reason and knowledge. Nevertheless, Kant’s attempt to show the illegitemacy of theoretical knowledge regarding neumena undermines itself. This can be seen especially in his analysis of causality.

Synthetic a priori truths

Kant takes mathematical science and natural science for granted. He accepts them as successful sciences and tries to understand the conditions under which they are possible. His conclusion is that these sciences can be grounded only on “synthetic a priori judgments.” There are two important conceptual distinctions here: the analytic-synthetic and the a priori-a posteriori. The former is a semantic distinction, the latter is epistemological. A statement is analytic if its predicate-concept is included in the subject-concept, otherwise it is synthetic. The proposition that all black cats are black or that bachelors are unmarried is analytic. A black cat is black, the predicate is embedded in the subject here. And bachelors are by definition unmarried because a bachelor is a single male. However, the color of my cat is not included in its definition. A priori judgments are known independently of experience whereas a posteriori ones are known by appealing to experience as a justification. We know that everything is identical to itself without any experience. But we need some experiential evidence to affirm the statement that the Morning Star is identical with the Evening Star. It was a scientific discovery that those stars were actually the same, namely Venus.

For Kant, all analytic judgments are a priori. He also claims that there are synthetic a priori statements. This is a bit unusual because we normally know synthetic statements by experience. How can we know a statement a priori if its predicate is not included in the subject? Kant explains the possibility of such judgements by appealing to the mind’s role in shaping experience. According to him, by applying the categories to intuition, we put what is in our minds into our experiences. So, “we can cognize of things a priori only what we ourselves have put into them.” In other words, the categories shape the experience and we know that aspect of experience a priori since it belongs to us. The conceptual distinctions presented so far enable us to understand Kant’s account of causality better.

Causality

From a historical point of view, Kant’s account of causality was a response to Hume’s scepticism about causation. Let us first see what Hume said about this issue. Hume points out that we only observe correlated events in nature, and that there are some regular correlations and some irregular ones. For instance, we always observe that lightning precedes thunder. On the basis such regular correlations, we infer that the events in question are also causally related. That is to say, lightning causes thunder. However, according to Hume, we never observe causation between events. What is observed is just that two events are correlated in a regular manner. Causation is what our mind is inclined to infer when faced with such regularities. Causal links are produced by the human mind as subjective mental operations. So, there is no objective causality between events: it is our subjective interpretation of the regularity between them.

If we consider the fact that electrical charges are regarded as the common causal factor behind lightning and thunder by contemporary scientists, we can appreciate what Hume said. We do not observe causal links. Perhaps, sometime in the future, scientists will propose another physical factor as the cause for thunder, lightning and maybe for electical charges. Since we do not observe causal links, we can never be sure about what causes what. Hume extends this skepticism so far that nothing really causes anything else. There is no objective causation; there are just correlations in our experience. In other words, he also denies the objectivity of the universal causal principle, namely that every effect or event must have a cause.

As a response, Kant distinguishes two different levels in analysing causation. On the one hand, he tries to prove the objectivity of the universal principle of causality. Kant is aware of the difficulty of proving it on the basis of experience. Such a universal principle cannot be based on experience. Kant considers this univeral principle as a synthetic a priori truth. It is valid for anything we experience because all our experience is shaped by the category of causality. He formulates this principle in the following way: everything that happens presupposes that which it follows in accordance with a rule.

According to Kant, the phenomena consisting in irreversible sequences indicate the causal order. As an example of irreversible sequence, he mentions the sequence when we look at a ship moving down the river. In this case, what we apprehend is an objective process. And its order cannot be arranged otherwise than in this very succession. So, when we watch the ship’s departure, the order in which our visual states occur is not up to us. As a conclusion, Kant argues that in irrevesible cases, the apprehension of one perception which occurs necessarily succeeds that of the other which preceded according to a rule called “the law of the connection of cause and effect.”

On the other hand, Kant’s analysis of irreversible sequences does not suggest anything about particular causal relations. A particular sequence of irreversible representations does not enable us to identify the cause of the event in question: it only indicates that the event in question must have a cause (in the sense that some other event precedes it), even if we do not know what this cause is. Kant expresses this point by saying that “Everything in nature, as well in the inanimate as in the animated world, happens or is done according to rules, though we do not always know them….”

While there are some ambigious passages indicating as if Kant has identified some necessary causal links between particular events (such as that the sunshine caused the warmth of a stone), those passages should be interpreted under the light of this general statement here. The reason simply is that Kant aims to exemplify his view of causation in such contexts rather than identifying some particular causal links.

A fundamental problem with Kant’s analysis of causality

As we have seen, Kant treats the universal principle of causality as a synthetic a priori truth. In doing so, he limits causal ascriptions to the phenomenal realm because it is the phenomenal realm not the noumenal realm, which is shaped by our minds. So, according to Kant causal talk about noumena, things in themselves, is not legitimate and does not give us theoretical knowledge.

However, the question that should be answered in this regard is if the human mind interacts with noumena. If so, how does it interact? In some passages, Kant seems to consider noumena to be an empty and limiting concept. We cannot know anything about this realm (even whether or not noumenal objects such as free will, soul and God exist), therefore it is just a heuristic device indicating what is beyond our theoretical knowledge. Thus, we cannot say anything about the relationship between the mind and noumena, because noumena are beyond our understanding. Otherwise, anything we say can only be an illegitimate speculation.

Nevertheless, such passages do not represent Kant’s whole philosophical outlook. As a fundamental aspect of his critical philosophy, Kant assumes that our experience is shaped by us but not totally created by us. There is an external element to experience that is independent of us. He must accept that there are noumenal objects even though we do not know what they are. They are not just conceptual tools formulated to define the phenomenal realm. In fact, there are several passages in which Kant explicitly ascribes causal efficiency to the noumenal realm.

For instance, when Kant distances himself from the idealist philosophers who claim that everything we perceive is mind-dependent and there is no objective reality outside the mind, he claims that “there are bodies without us, that is, things which, though quite unknown to us as to what they are in themselves” and that we know them “by their representations which their influence on our sensibility procures us.”

As another example, this time regarding the free will of human beings, Kant thinks that human beings are free with respect to the noumenal realm but under causal determination with respect to phenomenal realm. When he tries to account for moral responsibility, he presents the free will as having its own causal power to be able to appropriate particular human actions. The following is an explicit remark: “The will is a kind of causality of living beings so far as they are rational.”

As it is clearly seen, Kant is forced to accept that the realm of things in themselves (noumena) causes the realm of appearances (phenomena) and this is exactly what undermines the very foundation of his critical project as limiting theoretical knowledge to phenomena.

Conclusion

Kant certainly has an insight in making a distinction between phenomena and noumena; however, his way of distinguishing these two realms undermines his own critical philosophy. There is a similar distinction made by Muslim theologians between dhahir (phenomena) and batin (noumena). In their case, categories of causality and existence for instance are legitimately applicable to noumenal realm, but they argue that we do not know how they are applicable. According to them, for instance, we know that God exists but we do not know how He exists. His existence is quite different from our existence. As Descartes says: “A finite mind cannot grasp [adequately] God, who is infinite. But that does not prevent [the finite thinker] having a perception of God, just as one can touch a mountain without being able to put one’s arms around it.” As a conclusion, Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena should be improved so that it enables us to ascribe existence and causality to the noumenal realm even in a minimal sense.

During the academic year of 1991-92, I had the opportunity to spend a sabbatical year in Paris. During that time, my wife Adele and I were surprised to notice intense activity, in the form of books, conferences, and symposia, on the theme of “Science and Faith,” with the purpose of bringing them together after a long time of separation and antagonism. Significantly, this attempt toward reconciliation was beginning in France, the country that so much contributed to the dichotomy between the two in the first place.

Three books figure prominently in my present discussion about science and faith. The first, the best-selling God and Science,¹ consists of a dialogue between J. Guitton, a highly respected Catholic philosopher and a well-known member of the French National Academy, and Grichka and Igor Bogdanov, young scientists whose fields of research are in astrophysics. In the dialogue between Guitton and the Bogdanov brothers, the scientists answer the questions posed by the philosopher about the laws governing the natural world. Intriguing questions are addressed: “Where the universe came from? What is real? What are the relationships between conscience and matter? Why does anything exist at all?” In every instance the philosopher, who is also a believer in God and in the Bible, finds that the answers he receives from science give him comfort and strength in his faith. He finds no contradiction between the two; on the contrary, everything he hears about science strengthens his faith.

A collection of essays edited by Jean Delumeau, Le Savant et la Foi,² presents a similar theme. It consists of nineteen contributions from scientists, some of them highly reputed, who explain, in often touching terms, how they reconcile their faith with their scientific research. One of the essays is the result of a collaboration among some twenty scientists affiliated with the University of Paris-Sud (Orsay, Gif, Saclay, etc.), who hold monthly meetings to discuss issues of science and faith in relationship to their research.

A third book that attests to this renewed interest in the relationship between science and faith is another collection of essays, Can Scientists Believe?,³ written by scientists from different religious traditions and edited by Sir Neville Mott, winner of the Nobel Prize for physics in 1977. In this book, Mott himself explains how he became a Christian at the age of fifty, when, as head of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, in England, he was invited by the vicar of the university church to join other leading scientists in contributing to a lecture series there about science and religion. Being agnostic, he felt a need to do some reading before discussing something about which he knew very little, and this was the beginning of his conversion.

In January 1992, the Catholic newspaper La Croix organized its second conference on “Science and Faith,” a day-long conference which took place in a theater in Paris and was widely attended. Among the participants were scientists, theologians, historians, and philosophers, representing all the major religious traditions, and it included atheists of good will, who were open to dialogue. Some of the participants were people of high professional standing, members of the French Academy. The opening addresses were delivered by Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, Archbishop of Paris, and Professor Hubert Curien, minister in the French government for scientific research.

The recurrent theme of all the contributions at the conference was “Scientism is dead.” In order to understand the significance of that pronouncement in the context of our discussion of spirituality and postmodernism, we must consider the historical development of science.

Modern science and Determinism

In the ancient and medieval worlds, science and religion were part of the same cultural heritage; one was unthinkable without the other. What happened later to cause the schism between them?

The story is well-known. Modern science developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), in the aftermath of a great period, the Italian Renaissance, during which attention shifted from God to humankind, from the supernatural to the natural.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, which saw such technological advances as electricity and the steam engine, which made such a deep impact in the life of the Western world, confidence in science was unlimited. There was a general feeling that science would ultimately solve all the problems of society and the human condition. Suffering, diseases, poverty-all these evils would sooner or later be eliminated by science and technology. There was no place for God. Human reason could reach the ultimate truth without the need of a supernatural power.

In philosophy these ideas culminated in schools of thought such as logical positivism, in which there was no room for a transcendent superior being. All these schools of thought are usually referred to under the general name of “scientism.” When, therefore, H. Curien, and the other participants in the 1992 conference in Paris, boldly declared the “death of scientism,” they marked the end of a whole historical development and celebrated the present, post-modern period in science.

The new science: causality and probability

In the beginning of the twenty-first century we are more ready to recognize humbly that science has its own limitations and cannot cure all the evils of our human condition. This altered perception of science has been fostered by the advent of the so-called new science, which developed during the third decade of the last century. Quantum Mechanics has revolutionized the way people think about the natural world. In the atomic and nuclear realm the deterministic model, advanced by Laplace in his System of the World, was no longer valid. Certainty had to be replaced by the notion of probability; the whole principle of causality had to be questioned and revised. For example, the notion of “orbit,” perfectly valid when describing the motion of the earth around the sun, became meaningless in the new theory, which was designed to describe the properties of a negative electron moving around a positive nucleus. A well-defined trajectory was replaced by a “probability cloud.”

As these examples indicate, our ability to grasp reality is limited. Waves and particles are different descriptions of the same reality, which we are not able to define in absolute terms, as was once claimed by the deterministic science of the nineteenth century. At this point we realize that we must give up the idea of grasping “the thing in itself.” All this does not mean that the old, deterministic science was wrong, but only that it was correct under certain approximations, which are not valid in the micro-world of atoms and nuclei.

The healthy effect of this great revolution, brought about by the advent of the new science and Quantum Mechanics, has been to shake the arrogance of those who believed that everything could be predicted, once the initial conditions of the system were known, and to introduce an element of chance. We might say, in different words, that there is a place for God in the new scheme of ideas.

Einstein’s unenthusiastic response to Quantum Mechanics shows that he clearly perceived the “place for God” at the very heart of things. In the early stage of development of the new physics, he wrote to Niels Bohr: “Quantum Mechanics is very impressive. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory produces a good deal, but hardly brings us close to the secret of the Old One. I am at all events convinced that He does not play dice.”⁴

Einstein’s letters and essays are famous for their many references to God. Although he did not have a religious affiliation and shunned all forms of organized religion, Einstein the scientist had a firm belief in God. Forty years before the 1992 conference in Paris declared the “death of scientism,” Einstein had come to this same conclusion, as shown in a letter to his dear friend Solovine⁵:

“You find it strange that I consider the comprehensibility of the world (to the extent that we are authorized to speak of such comprehensibility) as a miracle or as an eternal mystery. Well, a priori one should expect a chaotic world which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way… There lies the weakness of positivists and professional atheists who are elated because they feel that they have not only successfully rid the world of gods, but also “bared the miracles.” Oddly enough, we must be satisfied to acknowledge the “miracle” without there being any legitimate way for us to approach it.”

As an example of the “new scientist,” Einstein rejects a science without faith, without belief in the “miracle” that remains “unapproachable” and “mysterious.” Perhaps the best description of Einstein’s attitude toward religion appears on the back of the dedication page in a recent biography: “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind,”⁶ as Einstein once wrote to explain his personal creed.

Given the death of scientism, the discoveries of Quantum Mechanics, and the obvious connection between faith and science in the life and work of men like Einstein, it is now possible to write a revised history of western science based not on the split between religious belief and scientific research, but on their intimate connection. We can view science and religion as two approaches, different but complementary, to the same reality. In fact, there has never been a good reason for an opposition between science and religion; they are not incompatible in their views of the natural world.

Awe and excitement in science and religion

Many scientists, then, have been and are believers. The question then arises: what do science and religion have in common, so that realms previously thought to be mutually exclusive can now be seen as intimately linked? We may point to three elements common to both science and faith: the belief in things unseen, the awe and excitement of discovery, and the goal of service to others. First, the belief in things unseen. It is said of Einstein that he was a religious person… in the sense that he [had] no doubt of the significance of those super-personal goals which neither require nor are capable of rational foundation. His was not a life of prayer or worship. Yet he lived by a deep faith […] that there are laws of Nature to be discovered. His lifelong pursuit was to discover them. His realism and optimism are illuminated by his remark: “Subtle is the Lord, but malicious He is not.”⁷

One aspect that links science and religion, and characterizes a scientist’s spirituality, is the feeling of excitement, the thrill that both scientists and believers experience when confronted with a new facet of the truth that lies beyond the boundary presently accepted as the ultimate limit of their knowledge. As John Polkinghorne, a British professor of theoretical particle physics at Cambridge University and now an Anglican priest, one of the speakers at the 1992 conference, observes, “Part of the authentic experience of a scientist is the feeling of astonishment he or she experiences when contemplating the remarkable rational beauty of the physical world, as it unfolds in his/her research.”⁸

The eminent physicist, Isidor Isaac Rabi (1989-1991), who was honored with the Nobel Prize in 1944, bears witness to the religious dimension of this experience of astonishment: “When I discovered physics, I realized it transcended religion. It was the higher truth. It filled me with awe, put me in touch with a sense of original causes. Physics brought me close to God. That feeling stayed with me throughout my years in science. Whenever one of my students came to me with a scientific project, I asked only one question, “Will it bring you nearer to God?” They always understood what I meant.”⁹

At the time, Rabi himself had no particular religious affiliation, except for his background, which was strongly rooted in Orthodox Judaism. According to his own testimony, his upbringing in a household where the holy books of the Bible were familiar readings, gave him a definite spiritual formation that affected his attitude toward science: “To choose physics in the first place requires a certain direction of interest. In my case it was something that goes to my background, and that is religious in origin. Not religion in a secular way, but religion as the inspirer of a way of looking at things. Choosing physics means, in some way, you’re not going to choose trivialities. The whole idea of God, that’s real class… real drama. When you’re doing good physics, you are wrestling with the Champ. You have one life to do it, you don’t want to waste it.”¹⁰

Like Rabi, who moved “nearer to God” through scientific research and discovery, Xavier Le Pichon, a speaker in the 1992 conference and a professor of oceanography and geophysics at the prestigious Collège de France, speaks of his amazing encounters with the God of nature. A member of the French National Academy of Sciences, he has been exploring the bottom of the oceans for the past thirty years. Those underwater explorations have, as he says, awakened his “capacity for adoration”: “I have often experienced this capacity for adoration during my scientific explorations. I think in particular of my first descent in a submarine in the Rift Valley, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, at a depth of ten thousand feet… In our little boat, we are the first people to discover this scenery reminiscent of Genesis, the virgin crust, produced by the marriage between fire and earth. I had an appointment with the Earth so that I could make an offering to God.”¹¹

The same sentiments are expressed by another one of our speakers, Fr. George Coyne, Director of the Vatican Observatory in Castel Gandolfo and at the University of Arizona. I quote: “My scientific exploration and slow understanding of the universe is a prayer, and one that is drawing me into a deeper relationship with God. My understanding of the universe, with faith as a foundation of my life, is being drawn into the mystery of God. And this is why we’ll never fully understand our universe: while the scientific knowledge draws us on and on, the more we know, the less we know in many ways. The universe participates in the mystery of God.”¹²

Recently, in an article on the New York Times, the Dalai Lama, speaking about the convergence of science and spirituality, said, “Science could benefit from exploring issues usually left to the humanities. I believe that we must find a way to bear upon the direction of scientific development, especially in the life sciences. I am speaking of a secular ethics, which embraces compassion, tolerance, consideration of others, the responsible use of knowledge and power. These principles transcend the barriers between religious believers and non-believers: they belong not to one faith, but to all faiths.”

Those sentiments are echoed by Xavier Le Pichon, who said: “Science and technology are not only necessary, they are indeed the main tools needed to perfect the creation entrusted to humankind by God. To the extent we place the poor and the least ones at the center of our society, to the extent we ask them to inspire the civilization we are about to build, science and technology will appear as means offered in order to create a civilization of love.”¹³

So, perhaps, the “battle” between Science and Religious Faith is not so polarized as some of those at the extreme edges of the debate would have us to believe.

“In this modern era of cosmology, evolution, and the human genome, is there still the possibility of a richly satisfying harmony between the scientific and spiritual world views?”¹⁴

Dr. Francis Collins, author of the best selling book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, and Director of the National Genome Research Institute, responded with a resounding “Yes” to this question, in his public lecture on February 20, 2007, at Purdue University.14 To an enthusiastic crowd of more than 1,100 participants, Dr. Collins stated that “The newfound power to read our own instruction book is no obstacle to faith in the existence of God.” Dr. Collins called for a truce in the escalating war between science and spirit. “We need science if we are going to survive in a complicated world, and we need faith if we are going to keep ourselves in perspective. We must seek out the ways in which these world views can happily coexist, and the mind must find a way to embrace both realms, if we are really concerned about our own future in this world.” Everyone who questions how religious faith would be reconciled with scientific knowledge, and everyone interested in an open and sincere discussion of one of the most crucial issues of our time, will be greatly enlightened by Dr. Collins’ experience described in his book “The Language of God.”

Roberto Colella is a professor of physics at Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN.

Notes

1. Guitton, Jean, Grichka Bogdanov, and Igor Bogdanov. Dieu et la Science, Grasset. 1991.

2. Delumeau, Jean (edited by). Le Savant el La Foi, Champs-Flammarion, Paris 1989; p. 230 (translated from French by Roberto Colella).

3. Molt, Sir Nevill (edited by). Can Scientists Believe? James and James, London, 1991, p. 71.

4. Pais, Abraham. Niels Bohr’s Times, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991, p. 318.

5. Einstein, Albert. Letters to Solovine, New York Philosophical Library, 1987, p. 131.

6. Einstein, Albert. “Science, Philosophy and Religion: A Symposium.” 1941.

7. Pais, Abraham. Subtle is the Lord… The Science and Life of Albert Einstein, Clarendon Press, Oxford, New York, 1982, p. vi.

8. Lecture on “Science and Religious Faith,” Purdue University, February 27, 1997.

9. Ridgen, John S.. Rabi, Scientist and Citizen, Basic Books Publishers, New York, 1987, p. 82.

10. See Ref. 8, p.p. 73-79.

11. See Ref. 2, p. 166.

12. Public Lecture at Purdue University, April 2, 1998.

13. See Delumeau 1989, p. 168.

14. Collins, Francis, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, Free Press, New York, London, 2006.

The universe is not passive. It is not neutral. We cannot interpret it as we wish. There is only one correct way of looking at the world, one universal world-view which is common to all humanity. This view is taught to us in the Qur’an as well as in the book of the universe by our Creator.

This does not mean that the Qur’anic world-view does not recognize that the perception of the world differs from one person to another. It allows for plurality within unity so that a universal dialogue is possible. In this world-view there is no fragmentation and no conflict. There is only harmony, assistance, peace and compassion.

The materialist scientific world-view is based on radical fragmentation. Materialist science takes nature to mean a mechanism with no inherent value and meaning. It isolates an object by cutting off its connections with the rest of the world and studies it within its immediate environment.

Whereas our perception of ourselves tells us that we are meaningful and part of the whole universe, and everything must have a meaning and must be part of the whole universe, materialist science has left the subject. i.e. man, out of the universe, and insofar as this science is taking over, people feel that they have no place in this world. They are isolated from other people. Their lives have no meaning, except in a very limited, egoistic sense. Man is alienated from his environment and from himself.

In the light of modern physics, the mechanistic view is an incoherent description of nature. The developments of modem physics call for a radical revision in our concept of reality. They shattered all the principal concepts of classical physics.

Many concepts, like the causal nature of physical phenomena and the ideal of an objective description of nature, changed with the advent of the new theories of modern science, quantum, relativity and, more recently, chaos theory.

However, these changes have not been matched by parallel changes in the world-view of science. The modifications took place only on a mathematical level. Because all that counts for scientists is the development of mathematical formulations of the behaviour of physical phenomena. Such a goal is not regarded merely for its technical utility; rather most scientists believe that prediction of this kind is all that knowledge is about.

They claim that our concept of reality is of little or no importance. However, it is clear that our concept of reality has a tremendous effect on how we behave in relation to nature and to other people, and also on the meaning life has for us as individuals. We cannot dispense with a world-view.

This attitude of the scientists is in contradiction with modern science. Classically it was thought that science could describe and explain everything in the world ‘objectively’ i.e. as it actually is in reality and that the ‘observer’ i.e. the scientist himself, could describe the world by means of mathematical models which were independent of his judgement. The discoveries of modern physics, however, point towards the unity of all things, an unbroken wholeness which denies the classical fragmentation of the world into separate and independent parts. In the quantum theory, every particle is linked to the rest of the universe and cannot be isolated from it. This oneness of the universe includes human beings as well. The quantum theory, together with abolishing the notion of fundamentally separate objects, has introduced the concept of ‘participator’ to replace that of the neutral observer. Modern science therefore restores man to his central position. It puts an end to the notion of neutral, objective description of nature and thus to impartial objective science.

Up to the present, materialist science has been based on a deterministic, causal view of the world. Although the latest theories like the quantum and chaos theories are leading to a world-view where there is no room for fragmentation and determinism, materialist scientists still insist on following the fragmented and causal approach. They have to be reductionist because they believe in causality. At the same time they do realize that their materialist world-view is collapsing. Theoretically they understand that, in order to explain one thing, they need to know its connections to all other things. This is obviously impossible because these connections extend in time and in space beyond human capacities; they are infinite and cannot be embraced by human beings who are also parts of those connections.

The materialist scientists understand that the unity of the universe points to an Absolute Creator. For the things we study do not bear meanings limited to themselves but testify to the Absoluteness of their Creator. But in order to be able to claim that their scientific studies produce knowledge, the scientists insist on denying the Absolute Creator. And because their scientific method is based on causality which cannot accommodate the unity of the universe, they ignore that unity and compartmentalize the universe so that they can study each compartment as the product of a limited number of causes. In this way, they can pretend the universe has no Creator and its meaning is limited to what they tell us about it. They thus claim their science to be the source of knowledge.

There have been many controversies over the conceptual foundations of modem physics. The mechanistic model of reality is not appropriate to modern science. Scientists avoid this issue by adopting the attitude that the paradoxes and contradictions of their science are inherent in nature, thus implying that those paradoxes and contradictions have nothing to do with the inadequacy of their world-view.

But how one can apply the reductionist scientific reasoning to the inseparable universe? It has been widely discussed by scientists and philosophers, but what hasn’t yet been realized is that the nature of the materialistic approach to scientific reasoning is incompatible with the unity of the universe. Therefore, either that approach to scientific reasoning or the concept of the unity of the universe has to be reconsidered.

That the universe is an inseparable whole is not in dispute. Indeed, the unity observed in the totality of the universe including man is so manifest that no one can deny it.

Therefore the materialistic approach to the scientific method has to be reconsidered. This method is reductionist. It reduces every thing to fragments then attributes each fragment to causes. However, in reality, all things are interconnected and interdependent. For this reason it is impossible to attribute anything, however small it is, to causes which are themselves transient and contingent. Because whatever is responsible for one thing must be responsible for everything. We cannot have one thing without the whole.

Why can we ascribe a thing to its antecedents in time, but not to its neighbour in space? Why should a thing be able to produce another thing just because it happened before? All modern scientists know that space and time are fully equivalent. They are unified into a four-dimensional continuum in which ‘here’ and ‘there’ ‘before’ and ‘after’ are relative. In this four-dimensional space the temporal sequence is converted into a simultaneous co-existence, the side by side existence of all things. Thus causality appears to be an idea which is limited to a prejudiced experience of the world.

Causality leads to the vicious chain of cause and effect. For each cause is also an effect. Also the effect is totally different from the cause. Things and effects are usually so full of art and beneficial purposes that let alone their simple immediate causes, even if all causes gathered they would be unable to produce one single thing.

In short, in order for a cause to produce an effect it has to be able to produce the whole universe in which that effect takes place, for that effect cannot exist without the whole universe. They cannot exist separately. Causality is therefore the antitheses of ‘There is no god but God,’ the core of the Qur’anic world-view. Materialist scientists imagine powerless, dependent and ignorant causes to be responsible for the existence of beings and things and thus fancy them to possess absolute qualities. In this way they are implying (tacitly believing) that each of those causes possesses qualities which can only be attributed to God.

However, the latest discoveries of modern science, like the unity of the universe and the inseparability of its parts, exclude the possibility of all the explanations put forward by materialistic science. They demonstrate that all entities, whether in nature or in the laws and causes attributed to them, are all devoid of power and knowledge. They are contingent, transient and dependent beings. But the properties attributed to any of such entities need infinite qualities like absolute power and knowledge.

This shows that causality is by no means necessarily to be linked with ‘objective’ study, ‘neutral’ scientific investigation. It is no more than a personal opinion. Moreover, it is an opinion that is irrational, a non-sense. Nevertheless, there is still a widespread conviction that science can do without a Creator. This seemed possible in classical physics, but in quantum mechanics the situation is untenable.

Physics is full of examples of ingenuity and subtlety that exclude the causal interpretation and make known the All-Powerful, All-Knowing One. A few illustrations will, I hope, suffice to convince us that the universe with all that is within it is His product.

The idea that the universe began with a Big Bang is something of a paradox. Of the four forces of nature, only gravity acts systematically on a cosmic scale, and in our experience gravity is attractive, a pulling force. But the explosion which marked the creation of the universe required a very powerful pushing force to set the cosmos on its still continuing path of expansion. It is puzzling that the expanding universe is dominated by the force of gravity which is contracting, not expanding. Careful measurements show that the rate of expansion has been ‘very fine-tuned’ to fall on this narrow line between two catastrophes: a little slower, and the cosmos would collapse, a little faster and the cosmic material would have long ago completely dispersed. The materialist scientists can see that such a precisely calculated explosion requires infinite power and knowledge, and yet deny the act of creation. Therefore they are compelled to say, ‘It just happened; it must be accepted as a special initial condition’

The initial condition, however, had to be very special indeed. And the rate of expansion is only one of countless cosmic miracles. But in their misguidance, they fancy those miracles of Absolute Power to be ‘remarkable’ coincidences, and imply that the universe is a random accident.

So, strikingly, the most fundamental theory of recent modern science is totally compatible with the notion of the Absolute Creator. Moreover, it is not compatible with causality. Thus, the need for God, the Causer of causes, enters science in a fundamental way.

Classically, it is believed that a measurement performed in one place cannot instantaneously affect a particle in another, very distant place. The basis for this belief is that interactions between systems tend to decline with distance. For according to causality a cause has to be in the immediate vicinity of its effect. Otherwise how can particles several metres, let alone light years apart, influence each other’s position and motion?

Quantum mechanics, by contrast, predicts a greater degree of correlation, as though the two particles are co-operating by telepathy. This forces us to ask how it is possible to explain this remarkable degree of co-operation between different parts of the universe that have never been in communication with each other without mentioning their Creator. How can they achieve this miracle? Divine Unity is obviously the only reasonable, consistent and acceptable, to the point of being necessary, explanation of this miracle and indeed of the universe and all that is in it, including man.

To the materialists this situation is a paradox because it cannot be explained with causality. But to the believer in God, this is a beautiful aspect of His Unity. It envisions a universal coherence and points to all-encompassing principles that run throughout the cosmos.

When we break the vicious chain of cause and effect, the meaningless world of materialism gives way to a world illumined with meaning and purpose. The universe becomes like a vast book addressing man and making known its Author so that its readers take lessons and constantly increase in knowledge of their Maker and strengthen their belief and certainty in the fundamentals of faith.

In short, everything is full of art and is being constantly renewed, and, like the effect, the cause of each thing is also created. For each thing to exist there is need for infinite power and knowledge. Thus there must exist a Possessor of Absolute Power and Knowledge who directly creates the cause and the effect together, which together demonstrate the attributes of their Maker. They are proclaiming the Divine Power and perfection through their own powerlessness and deficiency. They are all announcing. ‘There is no god but God.’

Just as the universe points to this truth of Divine Unity so does the Owner of the universe teach us this truth in the sacred books He has revealed. The phrase ‘There is no god but God’ is the fundamental of revelation and it is confirmed by the testimony of beings. It is the key to the Qur’an. A key that makes it possible to know the riddle of the creation of the universe, a riddle that has reduced materialist science and philosophy to impotence. The path of Unity is the path of Revelation. It is the only path that shows man his Master and Owner, and causes him to recognize his True Object of Worship who possesses an absolute power that will guarantee all his needs.

The Qur’an is the only source that teaches us that the universe and the beings within it do not bear a meaning limited to themselves but testify to their Maker’s Unity. It teaches what the universe is and what duties it is performing.

For this reason, every Muslim should study the universe and see that all beings, through their order, mutual relationship and duties, utterly refute the false claims of materialist and atheistic reasoning. They affirm that they are nothing but the property and creatures of a Single Creator. Each rejects the false notions of chance and causality. Each ascribes all other beings to its own Creator. Each is a proof that the Creator has no partners. Indeed, when the Creator’s Unity is known and understood correctly, it becomes clear that there is nothing to necessitate that causes should possess any power. So, they cannot be partners to the Creator. It is impossible for them to be so. Then the Muslim scientist will say through his investigations and discoveries, ‘There is no god but God, alone and without partner.’

The universe is a document to be used by the believers. Believing in God is, as the Qur’an informs us, to assent with one’s heart to the Creator with all His attributes supported by the testimony of the whole universe. The true affirmation of God’s Unity is a judgement, a confirmation, an assent and acceptance that can find its Owner present with all things. It sees in all things a path leading to its Owner. It does not regard anything as an obstacle to His presence. For, otherwise, it would be necessary to tear and cast aside the universe in order to find Him. and that is impossible for us.

The universe is not the property of materialistic science which has used the universe in a destructive way precisely because it has been unable to find the meaning of the universe.

There is no dichotomy between true science and revelation. Rather true progress and happiness for mankind can only be achieved in the way of the Qur’an. All scientific and technological advances are merely the uncovering of the way the universe is created. When the universe is seen to be a vast and meaningful unified book describing its Author and the beings in it as signs of their Creator, all these discoveries and advances reinforce belief rather than causing doubt and bewilderment.

The most serious disease afflicting modern man in his search for happiness and the meaning of life is to regard science, the study of the created world, as separate and irreconcilable with revelation, the word of the Creator. But as man learns to heed the universe and his senses, rather than the materialist scientists, he will wake up to the contradictions of their scientific reasoning. More and more people are beginning to realize that their scientific reasoning is no longer valid. Faced with beauty, awesomeness and purpose, attempts to explain creation with causality are becoming increasingly untenable. Then they will feel the need and importance for true science and knowledge which yield knowledge and belief in God.