Limitation in science to research on God?
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Is there a limit in the application of science to understand God?
I have always been doctrinated that "God" is outside of his creation, which suggest obviously that he is ouside the laws of physics. Is this a valid assumption? What is the view regarding this in the Quran? Is there indeed a boundry that science cannot cross?
Thanks for your contributions.
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Easy bmbmm.Well,there are limits on our present knowledge,but in a few years time who knows what we will discover???
Doesnt the quran,science and common sense say to ponder the universe?
Its too easy to say understanding god has its limits,that we cant understand and comprehend god (if he exists even.)...Christians say the same thing when you try to understand the three in one trinity doctrine... -
Perhaps by understanding the creation you may get a better understanding of the Creator; however there are those who are presented with the signs of God in His creation clearly yet they still disbelieve in His very existence, we are indeed lost without His guidance.
Peace
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peace bmbmm,
science does have limitations. The whole idea of science is to prove or disprove ideas through objective evidence. Some say that there is no objective evidence of "God." That God is a subjective experience.
Science cannot prove that you love your family. It can only make a very educated guess. And we need to make that educated guess about God as well. -
There is nothing that may be called Absolute Science. Science, and even mathematics, is anthropomorphic ? our science and our mathematics should be called human science, human mathematics. It depends on the structure of human consciousness, the nature of presentation of phenomenon to the human consciousness, on human memory, human logic, and instinctive human beliefs.
Man reaches to the idea of God by intuition that emerges from his all-out nature. Subhanallah, Alhamdulillah, Allahuakbar is probably the culmination of human knowledge of God, and probably by nothing else he can say anything about God in positive way.
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Is there a limit in the application of science to understand God?
I have always been doctrinated that "God" is outside of his creation, which suggest obviously that he is ouside the laws of physics. Is this a valid assumption? What is the view regarding this in the Quran? Is there indeed a boundry that science cannot cross?
Thanks for your contributions.As salamu alaykum wr wb.
Respectfully.I always say that The God lives His Own Eternal Life outside Time, Time does not affect Him, right?
First we must understand what Time is - Time is a space between point A and point B, right? Now, we live from A to B and we see that, we feel it, right, we get old.The God already sees what will happen at the point B but He tells us only what we need to know. The God already sees those in Hell, in Paradise, He sees those living in the year 2047, The God knows who will be next one in space, next to be born, next one to die and so on, so on, ..... correct?
The God knows best.
May The God helps us all.
As salamu alaykum wr wb. -
Perhaps this parable shall help us in understanding this topic,
peace.
2273 O men! Here is a parable set forth! listen to it! Those on whom, besides Allah, ye call, cannot create (even) a fly, if they all met together for the purpose! and if the fly should snatch away anything from them, they would have no power to release it from the fly. Feeble are those who petition and those whom they petition!
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There's another ayat, which i think provide clearer answer, 1674 Invent not similitudes for Allah. for Allah knoweth, and ye know not.
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Peace be upon you ,
Science is the ONLY way to know the God. Anything other than that is a belief and beliefs always have an element of doubt. You only say you believe something when you cant prove it.
The problem is that many people have a preconcieved idea of the concept "God" and try to use science to prove that. Just take science to its conclusion and leave it at that. )
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Hi Idolfree1,
What about 'Feeling' god?
Science wasn't around at the time of Abraham, The Founder, to take an example, so how did he reach god?
I do agree that science has to play the role of a 'touchstone', but that it should be the main platform that we walk on? Don't know.
We aren't limited to science, it's limited to us.
And is science 'doubtless'?
Nadeem
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God is the creator and designer of the laws of physics. Laws of phsics could be different. In fact, some scientists are envisioning multiple universes with different physical laws.
However, I cannot think of God outside of rules of logic, since logic is part of God's eternal essense. It is the logic that makes it possible for us to communicate with God and vise versa.
Peace,
Edip -
Science is the ONLY way to know the God. Anything other than that is a belief and beliefs always have an element of doubt. You only say you believe something when you cant prove it.
The problem is that many people have a preconcieved idea of the concept "God" and try to use science to prove that. Just take science to its conclusion and leave it at that.
Agree.
I hate people who talk about scientific miracles in the Quran (big bang!), but if scientists come up with something that goes against their beliefs, science becomes evil and dogmatic (evolution!!)
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Peace,
Bmmbmmm, i researched the same ideas, here is an article i wrote on the subject
http//19.org/index.php?id=91,418,0,0,1,0
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Peace be upon you Nadeem,
What about 'Feeling' god?
Feeling God? What is that? Anything to do with "feelings" deals with your lower animalistic being which is symbolized as the "devil","Iblis" etc. Our job is to transcend that part of being so we can see with CLARITY. It is that word "Feeling" that has the christians and many other groups trapped in confusion.
Science wasn't around at the time of Abraham, The Founder, to take an example, so how did he reach god?
What do you mean science wasn't around? ;D Of course it was, how did people in ancient times build homes, make tools, carve thier statues? I do not take Abraham as a literal historical figure but as a potential of all humans, so I dont know what time period most attribute to him, but I do know that he oldest recordded history of civilization was that of khemet(egypt). If you were not aware, they gave us the solar calendar. Do you realize the level of mathematics involved in that process? As well as the level of science involved in creating the Giza Pyramid? Those are two of MANY MANY MANY highly scientific processes that they gave the world besides the science of agriculture and others.
Do not fall into the racist ideology that ancient people were pagans and had to be saved and educated by the European Christian Missionaries, who brought racist ideas such as people coming from monkeys, etc.
I do agree that science has to play the role of a 'touchstone', but that it should be the main platform that we walk on? Don't know.
Science is ABSOLUTELY the foundation, how else can one provide proof? How else can one be responsible for hearing,eyesight, and intellect? This is the metaphor of building a home on solid foundation of sandy cliff.
We aren't limited to science, it's limited to us.
And is science 'doubtless'?
Yes, science comes from the word "scire" meaning "to know". Science allows us to PROVE what we say, belief implies that we cannot prove what we say.
In conclusion, do you expect others to provide proof for what they say but we dont have to? Is that fair?
(2111)....Say "Produce your proof if you are truthful".
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Science stands on some a priori principles which are mere beliefs.
What is the demonstrative proof for law of induction?
What are the demonstrative proofs for the three fundamental principles of deductive logic?
What is the proof for what I see is what is there in-itself?
What is the proof that our memory is dependable?
What is the scientific proof for God?s existence? -
Peace be upon you,
Late talk in everyday laymans terms, you put water in the freezer you get ice, everytime.
We build our lives around LAW, if we could not observe and verify them then we would have to wake up each day trying to figure out how to cook food, clean our bodies, etc etc.
In regards to induction, deduction, etc, I recommend the book "not out of Greece" by Ra Un Nefer Amen which discusses these concepts. I am not qualified to discuss those concepts yet.
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Peace all,
Took me some time to decide to put this long(but nice) article here! It is a good foundation before any further discussion.I. Six Different Ways of Knowing
Logic and analysis involve conceptualizations of sense perception. This is outer knowledge, but conceptualizing sense data is already moving inward. Success in logic depends on inner reflection, the noticing of thoughts, in order to discriminate fallacious thought movements from valid inferences. Intellectual discrimination moves still further inward, taking positions, often practical ones, on the basis of information after deductive and inductive logic have reached their limits. The rightness of logic is thus a subset of intellectual rightness and wholeness, including intuitive rightness. Intuition of underlying spiritual reality brings wholeness to disparate fields. Freedom is such a reality, unifying market economics, democratic politics, pluralistic cultures, and much more. These ways of knowing need to find a place in education.
A. A Healthy Rational Mind Includes Logic and Analysis
We can achieve a lot with logic. When we don't immediately see the truth of a situation, we may be able to start from another situation we do see the truth of, and reason by logical steps from there to the first one. Or if we have some confusion, we can use analysis to get rid of it. Here's an example
The idea that justice is whatever you think is just, or whatever any culture regards as just, involves a confusion we can eliminate through analysis. This confusion is about disagreement as much as it's about justice. To get rid of the confusion we analyze what disagreement involves. People not only disagree about justice but also about how many subatomic particles there are, and what the rate of inflation is. That doesn't mean there's no rate of inflation, or no definite number of different subatomic particles--however hard these things are to determine. Disagreement can't prove that. It doesn't mean there's no correct or real object being disagreed about. Prolonged investigation often reveals that object.
The analytical mind is a great help if it's trained to distinguish fallacies from valid inferences. We can then clear fallacies from our mind as soon as we see what they are. And we can direct our thoughts so they don't move from true to false positions. But of course both these things--dismissing fallacies and making valid inferences--depend on being able to see thought sequences in the first place--and seeing thoughts is an ability beyond analysis. That's reflection--consciousness that notices thoughts occurring in our own mind.
So critical thinking doesn't mean just criticizing our favorite opponents. It means noticing and then evaluating our own thoughts. Noticing them comes first. We have to see what's really there, in our own mind. Then analysis is the mental act of breaking this inner thought process down into complete propositions, down even further into the component concepts of propositions, and then seeing whether the movement from one proposition to the next is justified.
This seeing of the connection between one step and the next step is intuition. Intuition is the basis of logic. If a is greater than b, and b is greater than c, it's intuition that seesthat then a is greater than c.
So analysis depends on reflection and intuition. It's not the most basic, let alone the only, way of knowing. It's not even the most interesting way of knowing. It's far from being the best way of knowing. And there are situations where we're forced to use another way.
C. Discrimination--Judging the Best Thing to Do
We're constantly faced with situations where analysis can't indicate good conclusions, or determine good choices. In getting married, when we've considered all our own assets and liabilities, the age, habits, personality, income, and health of our possible partner or partners, analysis is not going to tell us which relationship, if any, will bring the most happiness and growth. Where analysis falls short, it's a moment of decision. That doesn't mean it's irrational or arbitrary what conclusion we draw. There's still a right and wrong decision or conclusion. And we may still be able to know what it is. But that takes a different kind of knowledge than logic and analysis. It takes intellectual discrimination. That's the heart cooperating with the mind.
When analysis is working, it's like walking on the solid ground of information--the "grounds" of our thought. Logic moves in secure, steady, little "steps" along this ground--"steps of reasoning." But these steps may stop short of a conclusion. Then we've run out of land--and arrived at a river. The land of the past may be walked by reason. Before us now is the river of the future, and walking is no use--we have to be able to swim. We can do that. Swimming is discrimination, the mind cooperating with the heart.
Discrimination is old, but it's neglected. It's not taught in schools, but it's important; it's as important as logic. The mind cooperating with the heart has several forms. There's aesthetic judgment, when we discriminate the beautiful from the ugly. There's intuitive knowing, when we discriminate the real from the unreal, the subtle truth from the dominant falseness. There's creative imagination, and there's the sense of wholeness and "rightness". Hunches, gut feelings, and insights may also be counted as discrimination--if they spring up from an opened unconscious, rather than from conditioned habits.
D. Creative Imagination
Let's look first at creative imagination. This means intentional construction of mental images. Intentional imagination can be either masculine and directed--in which case you know exactly what you're going to visualize beforehand; or it can be feminine and inviting--in which case you turn your attention in a general direction, wait, welcome, and allow whatever images form on their own.
Creative imagination is stimulated by contemplating the beautiful and thinking about the good--love and kindness. Beauty, love, and kindness open up the mind. Beauty and love bear cognitive and social fruit. It's not just that gazing at a beautiful picture or flower or mandala before doing these exercises makes them easier. Contemplating beauty touches the unconscious. Contemplating love opens the heart. Thinking about kindness calms and deepens the mind. We help our mental functioning--and our deeper ways of knowing--as much when we contemplate beauty and love as when we collect and process information.
E. Wholeness and Rightness
The sense of wholeness or rightness is another form of real knowledge. It comes into play when we intuit a spiritual reality running through a variety of physical or psychological or social manifestations. Then a single idea will explain all these varied data. That's wholeness and rightness. The vision of the underlying spiritual reality--the power of the unifying idea, the elegance of weaving diversity into unity--makes everything whole, resolves everything, creates a harmony of logic and reason--a recognition of the rightness of that idea.
Logic links the idea theoretically to the diverse areas the idea explains, but this linkage doesn't happen without a prior insight into reality that goes beyond logic--because reality is already a universe, a harmony of interrelationship. Somebody has to be in touch with that unified reality first--then come the idea and the logic. Once the idea is set out intellectually, however, it can lead others toward insights. Logical analysis can't discover or create anything, beyond its tissue of harmonious theory, but if a unifying idea is developed logically, that can nudge us toward insight, and it can communicate at least a few clues and pieces to our fellow humans.
F. Inner Knowledge of the Outer- Inner and Outer. Solving problems by referring them to freedom comes from an internal sense of things, rather than depending on what we've been taught. Discrimination involves an internal presence, a presence that also connects us to "outer" people and things, because it runs through everything. Life runs through the entire population, but as long as our attention is monopolized by the external, we may think our own life is the only one we can feel. It isn't. But to feel others' life or reality, we have to open up inwardly.
Inwardness or introspection is potential in every human being. It's already there. Yet it has to be acknowledged; it has to be cultivated. We have to open to it. Our tendency is to ignore it. Attention rides outward on our desires. It flows away from our center. Then inwardness doesn't get a chance to reveal underlying reality. We have to practice reversing the outward flow intentionally. Introspection deserves a program in our lives. It's easy. It's relaxing. It's very pleasant. And that's just the beginning.
There's a lot of literature available on meditation, and there are more and more meditation groups and sects. But the basic instruction for inwardness is so simple you don't necessarily have to depend on a group or an instructor. You sit still, close your eyes, you can put in earplugs--turn your attention away from the outside--turn toward the inside, toward your breathing, your heartbeat, your bodily sensations, posture, the ringing in your ears, the scintillating visual field in front of your closed eyes, your thoughts; and even more inward than that, the consciousness that's present when there are no thoughts. Well, would you believe me if I told you there's still more there? There is! And the intrinsic nature of this inwardness is knowingness.
The different types of discrimination--wholeness and rightness, creative imagination, and so on--all draw on this internal well-spring of knowledge. Conceptual and logical knowledge is pretty good, but really it's only one expression, one form knowingness takes. If you're really interested in knowledge, why don't you go the source of it all, and take it all? Well, there's a little problem here, that you might as well hear about now if you haven't already. It's that you can't take all knowingness. The more knowingness is there, the less you are there.
That may seem like a problem now. But see how it feels when you dissolve in it!
Inwardness reaches toward the source of creativity. We need creativity if we're to transform our own experience, or understand human history. - Creativity and Education. Inwardness reaches to the source of creativity. We need creativity if we're to transform our own experience, or understand human history. One way to move there is to direct attention to the beautiful. If we're mindful of beauty we can find things to make our actions and surroundings more beautiful. We can keep our buildings and rooms clean and beautiful. Another way is to think about love, kindness, and goodness--to think about the desirable. These thoughts soothe and open the mind. They soften and open the unconscious. Spontaneous insights and solutions are more likely in a milieu of beauty, compassion, quiet, and peace. How cruel it is, in order to pass an examination, that a student's mind should be forced to hold an idea it is not ready to understand (rote memorization), because it is alien to their experience or culture. This is the epitome of alienation in education.
The fact that discrimination is internal doesn't mean it's irrational, arbitrary, or random. It's an expression of knowledge, as reason and analysis are an expression of knowledge. The two are not opposed; they're related. When we express internal knowledge in logical terms, we can then confirm it on that level. We can test it at the level of sense perception. We can develop discrimination through practice, and confirm it through sense experience, and through comparison with the conclusions of other discriminating observers. We can confirm it through logic and analysis. In mathematics, J. H. Hardy has written that great mathematical proofs are discovered through "imaginative leaps" (A Mathematician's Apology). Having seen what is true, one then goes back and develops the logical proofs which communicate the validity of that which one has already realized.
Inner experience is the basis and context of education. This is a truism, but how many schools use centering exercises and exploration of feelings? Even in classically objective subjects like physics and history, centering exercises help. In the humanities dream-journals, story-telling, and imaging open up inner understanding. Creativity is a mark of inner opening, so it is not neglected but nourished by encouraging guessing and divergent thinking. In cooperative education mistakes are remarked but not punished--like a mother teaching her two-year-old to speak. Fear of mistakes defeats learning. Fear to guess blocks creativity.
In cooperative education left-brain rationality is combined with holistic, nonlinear, and intuitive strategies. This is cooperation between yin and yang consciousness. Theoretical and abstract knowledge is complemented by experiment and experience inside and outside the classroom--field trips, apprenticeships, demonstrations, visiting experts. Approaching consciousness from all these modalities deepens understanding. Creative imagination--flowing from the depths of inwardness--is stimulated by contemplating the beautiful and thinking about the good.
Inwardness enables us to harmonize our different ways of knowing, to make them cooperative, to set up inner cooperation in our own mind. This inner cooperation and harmony makes our mind more peaceful even when it is active. The place of reflection, the place of pure knowingness of inner and outer, is always at peace.
III. The Two Deepest Ways of Knowing
Inspiration and transformation--union of knower, known, and knowing--are the deepest ways of knowing.
A. Inspiration
Now another level down, another level inward. Now we move to deeper knowledge than discrimination. Discrimination has to do with choosing alternatives that are already there. Discrimination allows us to discern the best conclusion from a menu of alternatives. We evaluate an idea or program presented by somebody else and sometimes simply feel "it doesn't make sense" (this seems to be the increasing feeling about many political programs). Or we discriminate the ugly from the beautiful when we encounter paintings, buildings, or gardens.
But how do we gain access to new ideas, new insights, new wisdom to which discrimination and analysis may subsequently be applied? One way is inspiration.
Inspiration is the reverse of discrimination. Discrimination focuses our internal consciousness on the concept, the painting, the problem, or the decision at hand. Or it takes all the choices and data that are there, and then goes inward with them for an underlying insight. Beauty is an underlying insight, an underlying reality. It's not the grams of paint, the cm width, the degree of curvature of the capstone, and so on. Discrimination collects and marshals all these inputs together, and holds them in inwardness, until the insight occurs.
Inspiration is the reverse of this. There's still inwardness, but the contents of the mind are eliminated. If we want new ideas, creativity, if we want inspiration, we must empty ourselves internally. New ideas can't arise if the mind is constantly occupied by the usual crowd of habits, desires, and fixations--constant internal dialogue. We have to evacuate our minds! We create a mental vacuum into which the new can come. This is a vacuum of ideas, not of consciousness. Ideas are gone, but consciousness is there. Since ideas use up some consciousness, we actually find a little more consciousness there when we've got rid of the ideas.
I'm sure by this time I don't need to tell you that emptying the mind doesn't mean we become stupid. It doesn't mean despising or rejecting analysis or discrimination. What it means is we learn when to use logic, when to use discrimination--when to fill the mind and make it active working on its contents--and on the other hand when to suspend judgment, empty the mind, stop analyzing and evaluating, and make ourselves open to the unexpected. We learn to surrender to the grace of the moment.
Through a balance of analysis, discrimination, and inspiration, we can become wise, truly "knowing" human beings. Knowledge can be gained in different but complementary ways--by rational and logical analysis, by reflection, intuitive insight, creative imagination, and also as a gift without any precondition--inspiration.
But there's an even deeper knowledge. We really can't be satisfied without it. All the ways of knowing so far are knowing about something, and it's ultimately unsatisfying to merely know about something. The only really satisfying and 100% real knowledge is to become the reality.
- Inner and Outer. Solving problems by referring them to freedom comes from an internal sense of things, rather than depending on what we've been taught. Discrimination involves an internal presence, a presence that also connects us to "outer" people and things, because it runs through everything. Life runs through the entire population, but as long as our attention is monopolized by the external, we may think our own life is the only one we can feel. It isn't. But to feel others' life or reality, we have to open up inwardly.
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Is there a limit in the application of science to understand God?
The word God is a figurative entity and is not well-defined by theologians. It is only a religious "truth" (a mystical one), not a scientific one. There seem to be no limitations in the application of science towards physical entities of nature.
Some theologians imply that everything is part of God and thus everything as a "whole" is God. Science demonstrates that everything is composed of "energy" and thus everything as a whole is Energy. Does that mean God is Energy?
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Peace bmbmm,
You asked
Is there a limit in the application of science to understand God?
Yes. In my opinion, it is foolish to think that the boundaries of science would equate to the boundaries of understanding God. This, to me, is like saying, the musical notes on a scale define Mozart - not that I equate Mozart with God, of course. More importantly, however, I don't believe any expressive means can capture one's "understanding" of God, simply because the only understanding available to us is via deep inner reflection. What words describe is not God, but God's effects on us.
I have always been doctrinated that "God" is outside of his creation, which suggest obviously that he is ouside the laws of physics. Is this a valid assumption?
Personally, I prefer the term "beyond" as opposed to "outside", implying a greater level as opposed to a separate existence.
In summary, science is a tool for the tangible/measurable, and that's it.
Peace,
Tay