Knowing God

His essence is all-sufficient and self-sufficient. He has no need of anything outside Himself. Read all the books of the experimental scientists; you will not find that experiment can test God or any of His attributes. For God is not a phenomenon of nature. No experiment can be set up to test a hypothesis about Him. If an experimental scientist utters all kinds of denials about God on the basis of his research, he has moved out of line even of the rules of his own science. He shows himself ignorant of the subjects and sphere of his occupation. The sciences have not even an A-B-C of the knowledge of God. So it is utterly illogical for a person who has sunk himself in the ocean of the experimental sciences to start denying God. 

George Lister in his book, Introduction to Philosophical Principles, writes: "To imagine something which occupies neither space nor time and is immune to alteration or change is impossible." 

Such a statement obviously reflects a mentality pivoted on nature and the tangible. Such a mind is bound to regard anything outside its sphere of action as impossible. The most an honest natural scientist can say is: "The metaphysical is outside my universe of discourse. So I keep silent about it. I neither affirm nor deny it." He dare not commit himself to anything beyond that. A person who confines himself to that realm in the world of being which permits tangible experiments may not deny that there can be realities outside his sphere of work. If he does make such a denial, he must recognise that it is merely an expression of his own choice, not the fruit of research, test, and proof by scientific experiment. 

For God-fearers, the sort of god a natural scientist might want – that is, one who establishes his existence and identity in terms of natural causes and effects – is no God at all.

Acceptance of Unseen Existence Involves Other Realities Besides God

The One God, Whom prophets and saints have led us to know, is absolute, imperceptible, eternal, transcendent, and omnipresent yet in no single place. He is imperceptible not only to the eyes but to all the sense-organs. 

The human mind naturally finds the concept of a Being beyond all sense, matter, material expression, scientific test, or ordinary observation, not easy to entertain. People tend to lightly discard what they find to be difficult to conceive. 

Atheists and humanists ask: "If God exists, why doesn't He show Himself?" 

The Sciences, when they cannot get at a truth or express a fact in the formulae and measures proper to their realm; cannot deny its existence or prove its non-existence, at least until a test is devised which will demonstrate its impossibility and unfeasibility; they must pro tempore put it in their "awaiting solution" tray. 

Do all the things which we accept, of whose existence we are convinced, owe our acknowledgement to our own existence or acquaintance or perception of them? Is it a proof of God's non-existence that He cannot be sensed physically and His qualities cannot be discerned corporeally? All materialists know that a great many of the teachings we hold firmly, derive their compulsion from judgement and facts that are neither perceptible by sense nor familiar. On the stage of being, there are innumerable invisible objects. Advances of modern science and knowledge have discovered myriads of such facts from infinite distances to infinitesimal hadrons and quarks. 

One problem which is preoccupying scientists today is the change of mass into energy and vice versa. All visible bodies transfer energy to each other with a change in their own appearance, like the burning of wood. There is a transfer of energy. But this energy, which is the pivot for the vast majority of actions and consequences in the orderliness of the universe - how are we to assess it by sight or by touch?