Corona, science and God
As the corona pandemic is taking a heavy toll on us, Facebookers are scathingly debating over who is greater, God or science. One group is saying it’s the Creator who will eventually get rid of this ‘curse’, while the other group is betting on science.
Knowledge is a holistic idea. Piecemeal knowledge is not knowledge as such. Piecemeal knowledge is incomplete knowledge. The knowledge only which is tested in all branches of scholarship, which is proven rational in all branches of knowledge or which make sense in all branches of scholarship, like philosophy, sociology, biology, psychology, anthropology and mathematics, is knowledge per se.
Whether or not there is a Creator, is not an issue of science. It is an issue of social science. Social science, not science, is an overarching scholarship of human knowledge whereas science is only a discipline, mostly technical knowledge. Any discipline or any scholarship of knowledge or any knowledge connecting with humans or human society belongs to social science. All of the branches/disciplines of human knowledge together comprise social science. Social science is interdisciplinary knowledge while science is a single disciplinary knowledge.
Again, there is a vast range of scholarship beyond science. Science comprises only a part, (max 10 to 20 to 30 per cent) of human knowledge (social knowledge). Science is ‘empirical knowledge’. There is a large volume of scholarship based on ‘inferred knowledge’ in social science, which is beyond the reach of science.
Had the existence of the Creator [the Creator who has created you (if at all)] been proved in ‘empirical knowledge’, and had the Creator been so visible/so present in human life, then humans would have been under direct supervision of their Creator (who would be the absolute autocrat). Human civilisation would have been totally different from what it is today. Human communication would have been totally different.
Science could not unravel hundreds of mysteries of the universe as yet. In science, the ‘work’ is calculated by multiplying ‘force’ by the ‘amount of movement’ of an object (W = FX D). For instance, if a group of people push a heavy rock for a whole day and if the rock is not moved, the science says that there has been no work done there. But the social science would for sure recognise that there has been some work, albeit no outcome. At the same time, the social science would also say that the effort ‘with apparently zero outcome’ has an outcome at the end of the day. The effort or the work will tell us as to why the rock was not moved. It would guide us to take next course of action.
Humans will never be able to find their Creator with ‘empirical knowledge’ [i.e. science]. Had the existence of the Creator [the Creator who has created you (if at all)] been proved in ‘empirical knowledge’, and had the Creator been so visible/so present in human life, then humans would have been under direct supervision of their Creator (who would be the absolute autocrat). Human civilisation would have been totally different from what it is today. Human communication would have been totally different. So, if you would like to find the Creator, you will have to find Him through ‘inferred knowledge’, not in ‘empirical knowledge’, i.e. science. So, science alone would never be able to talk about the Creator.
You, however, may get some signs in science which would give you some clues, at best. So, it’s not science’s business to say whether there is a Creator and what is a Creator and who is the Creator.
* Abu Taib Ahmed is a graduate teaching assistant (media writing) of journalism, advertising and media studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA.