ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books God and His Attributes Lesson 3: God and Empirical Logic Without doubt, social circumstances, historical and educational factors, and the various forms of human labor cannot be without influence on the practical expression of man's inward inclinations and his spiritual and emotional characteristics.

Although these various circumstances do not create any compulsion or necessity in man's choice of direction, they may bring into being a more suitable environment for a certain kind of choice, thus playing an important role in men's view of things. These circumstances may even sometimes display themselves in the guise of obstacles to man's freedom and ability to choose.

As a result of greater familiarity with scientific and empirical deduction, the human mind tends naturally to shy away somewhat from purely intellectual deduction, particularly if the matter under investigation is non-material and insensible. In general, man's mental faculties acquire strength and skill in the area to which they are most applied: matters lying outside that area appear to him unreal or unauthentic, or, at best, secondary or tangential to the matter in which he specializes.

Man, therefore, tends to judge everything in a particular way. One of the most destructive and misleading factors in thoughts concerning God is to restrict one's thought to the logic of the empirical sciences and to fail to recognize the limits and boundaries of that logic. Since the specialists in the empirical sciences devote all their mental energy to the sensory sciences, they are alien to matters that lie beyond sense perception.

This alienation, this distance from non-sensory matters, this extraordinary trust in the data yielded by the empirical sciences, reaches such a point that testing and experimentation form the whole mental structure and world view of such specialists. They regard experimentation as the only acceptable tool and means of cognition, as the sole criterion. They expect it to solve every problem.

The function of the sciences is to explain the relationships between phenomena; their aim is to establish the connection between events, not between God and events. In the experimental sciences, man is not at all concerned with God. One should not expect to be able to perceive supra-sensory realities by means of sensory criteria, or to see God in a laboratory.