Scientific Dogma & the Negation of Religion

Truth is what we look for. We may differ in the way we think of it, but it is still that existential concern that will bring us together one day. However, what stifles the project of such a civilizational dialogue and abort any attempt to get near the other and share concerns with him is that scientific tendency, which often imprisons our mind and slams the door of knowledge and enlightenment against it. Religious beliefs are, without doubt, the major shapers of our wills and conceptions. Owing to the central position it holds, religion should be rethought to find out its points of intersection with the current scientific knowledge. By this, one does not intend to say that the fault is in religion, but it is rather in people’s thinking and understanding.

Many atheists, who gossip in the name of science and rational thinking, never stop excluding the unseen off the scientific dispute. The unseen, being the second half of the whole existence, is always judged by the materialists to be a world of ghosts and superstitions rather than a world that deserves respect and consideration. One asks: till when those allegations will continue to negate religion as a rational source of scientific knowledge? Are religion and science contradictory or rather complementary?

Such questions really provokes any believer’s feelings and thought and push him to argue against such a scientific dogma, which puts science and religion in two opposite extremes and deceives the weak believers to apply for a science-religion dialogue as if there is actually a real controversy among them.

“Seeing” is not always “believing”. “Seeing” is “perhaps” and “maybe” and many other phrases that express the very relativity of human recognition; however, “believing” is the highest degree at which human recognition changes into faith. By this one means that it is not reasonable for me to dogmatically deny a truth simply because my power of recognition is not enough to perceive it or because the device used for that recognition does not go with the nature of that truth. The Unseen is Unknown for the eye, but it may be known by the ear or by any other system of recognition. Being unseen, the sound waves (S.W.), for example require an auditory system to be perceived. Regardless of whether that system is natural or artificial, each truth or knowledge has its own nature as well as its appropriate system of recognition.

In looking at the forgoing evidences, scientists in terms of physicists and naturalists have no right to disprove the Unseen because their studies and researches are concerned with the field of physics rather than with that of metaphysics. Hence if the materialistic tendency in thinking and judging makes one’s point of view superficial and incapable to recognize the spiritual dimension of knowledge, then what one cannot prove at once, he should not disprove it at all.

To sum up, science and religion remain two wings of the same bird. Such a conclusion does not only correct human conception about the world and truth, but it also bridges the gap between the “I” and “the other” and makes the horizons of Civilizational Dialogue more and more spacious.