There is a remarkable superstition in todays world - Only that which I can see, which I can perceive, only that really exists, only that is true. And yes this notion is certainly a superstitious belief. Why? 1. The senses themselves are limited and imperfect. For eg. - What we perceive cannot be what really is at the moment we perceive it, since it takes time for perception to occur (for instance, if sunlight takes eight minutes to reach the earth, we only see the sun as it was eight minutes before). 2. Second, we easily become illusioned. For eg. If our hand has been warmed sufficiently, warm water will feel cool. If the hand has been cooled, cool water will feel warm. This phenomenon leads to situations in which we can perceive the same water as simultaneously cool and warm! 3. Third, we make mistakes. Dr. Gregory (the brain specialist from Bristol) says, Science, with all its dramatic successes, has from its beginnings also generated wildly incorrect accounts: stars as pinpricks in a crystal globe, electricity and heat as fluids, the brain as an organ to cool the blood. . . . These are dramatic deviations from what we now see as truth; and when invented they were deviations from what then appeared true. 4. Many of the objects studied in modern physics are not perceivable at all: electrons, mesons, neutrinos, hadrons, to name a few. Moreover, in some cases, this non-perceivability is not just a practical limitation imposed by insufficiently sophisticated instruments. Quarks, for example, are non-perceivable even in principle; they are so tightly bound inside the protons and neutron that nothing can make them break out on their own. Yet all these particles are treated as scientifically factual, and their existence and behavior is given as a scientific explanation for many direct physical observations. 5. And fifth, we have a tendency to cheat, to claim possession of the truth when the foundations of our knowledge are shaky. Moreover even scientific research is based on the implicit faith that nature behaves according to laws that can be uncovered by human intelligence. Even science requires faith, and so does religion, in fact science requires it even more. Because this implicit faith is just an assumption without any actual proof or without even any theoretical possibility of proof. In fact, the behavior of many of the fundamental particles in atomic physics defies description by any scientific laws. Nonetheless, physicists toil on hoping to find out some such laws in the future. To hope for the existence of unseen and unproven things: isn’t that what faith is all about? So the next time someone regards concepts such as God, soul, rebirth etc. as unscientific, blind faith or superstitious, correct them immediately. An honest warning by US President Theodore Roosevelt: “There is superstition in science quite as much as there is superstition in theology, and it is all the more dangerous because those suffering from it are profoundly convinced that they are freeing themselves from all superstition. No grotesque repulsiveness of medieval superstition, even as it survived into nineteenth-century Spain and Naples, could be much more intolerant, much more destructive of all that is fine in morality, in the spiritual sense, and indeed in civilization itself, than that hard dogmatic materialism of today which often not merely calls itself scientific but arrogates to itself the sole right to use the term. If these pretensions affected only scientific men themselves, it would be a matter of small moment, but unfortunately they tend gradually to affect the whole people, and to establish a very dangerous standard of private and public conduct in the public mind.” Thank you, May we all endeavor for enlightening knowledge. :)
Posted on: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 15:23:46 +0000
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