SCIENTIFIC REASONING AND
EVIDENCE FOR GOD’S EXISTENCE

In the 19th century, when the method of scientific observation came to be widely established, a new perspective emerged among scientists. According to it, only that thing is real, which is directly observable or verifiable by known scientific methods. Different schools of thought appeared in line with this thinking—for example, the Positivism of the French philosopher Auguste Comte (d. 1857) and the Logical Positivism of the German philosopher Rudolf Carnap (d. 1970).

For around a century, these thinkers and philosophers tried to convince the minds of the whole world that something that could not be observed or verified directly by any of our five senses was unreal, including God. According to their theories, the concept of God had been proven to be baseless because it could not be ‘scientifically’ verified using the direct argument. However, discussions were still going on in intellectual circles when science proved this claim of the validity of only the direct argument to be unfounded. This change in the attitude toward science occurred in the wake of the discovery of the reality of what is called Quantum Mechanics. One result of this scientific theory was that sub-atomic particles began to be considered waves. This scientific discovery negated the ancient Newtonian mechanics at the intellectual level of the macro-world in which only directly observable objects were real, showing it worthy of rejection. The river of knowledge now, passing through the macro-world, entered the micro-world—in which, besides things that can be seen, things that cannot be seen were considered real and became the subject of scientific study.

This far-reaching intellectual revolution occurred in the first half of the 20th century. The theoretical transformations brought about a change in the principles of scientific reasoning. Before this intellectual revolution, it was believed that the only valid argument was based on direct observation and experimentation. However, now, the inferential argument has come to be regarded as an equally valid argument. When subatomic particles, despite being unobservable, came to be accepted as a scientific fact based on an inferential argument, it necessarily also meant that the inferential argument for the existence of God was a valid scientific argument.