English prose literature; Exposition (Rhetoric); Readers -- Science
The problem of religion--that is, of the relations of man with the
supernatural, with God and immortality, with the soul, our personality
or the ego, and its existence or nonexistence after death--is the
greatest and deepest which ever confronted mankind. In the present state
of human knowledge, science can give no definite and final conclusions
on these subjects, because of the limitations inherent in science.
We must realize that all our knowledge and information and the entire
structure of science are ultimately derived from the perceptions of our
senses and thereby limited in the same manner and to the same extent as
our sense perceptions and our intellect are limited. The success or
failure of scientific achievement largely depends on the extent to which
we can abstract--that is, make our observations and conclusions
independent of the limitations of the human mind. But there are
limitations inherent in the human mind beyond which our intellect cannot
reach, and therefore science does not and cannot show us the world as it
actually is, with its true facts and laws, but only as it appears to us
within the inherent limitations of the human mind.
The greatest limitation of the human mind is that all its perceptions
are finite, and our intellect cannot grasp the conception of infinity.
The same limitation therefore applies to the world as it appears to our
reasoning intellect, and in the world of science there is no infinity,
and conceptions such as God and the immortality of the ego are beyond
the realm of empirical science. Science deals only with finite events in
finite time and space, and the farther we pass onward in space or time,
the more uncertain becomes the scientific reasoning, until, in trying to
approach the infinite, we are lost in the fog of unreasonable
contradiction, "beyond science"--that is, "transcendental".
Thus, we may never know and understand the infinite, whether in nature,
in the ultimate deductions from the laws of nature in time and in space,
or beyond nature, on such transcendental conceptions as God and
immortality. But we may approach these subjects as far as the
limitations of our mind permit, reach the border line beyond which we
cannot go, and so derive some understanding of how far these subjects
may appear nonexisting or unreasonable, merely because they are beyond
the limitations of our intellect.
There appear to me two promising directions of approach--first, from the
complex of thought and research, which in physics has culminated in the
theory of relativity; and, second, in a study of the gaps found in the
structure of empirical science and what they may teach us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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