ESPECÍFICOS:

This question is one that falls under the ontological question of being and our approach in tackling it will be from the point of view of “force” too. It is a truism that force though the same one entity has a scientific perspective as well as an African perspective. Going by the modern scientific conception of force in strictu sensu, there is no place for a Supreme Being that exists outside space and time. Mario Bunge gave ten of what he called the credo of the innocent physicists. The first five should capture the major rules of thumb of the physicists (scientists) and they area:

i. Observation is the source and the concern of physical knowledge ii. Nothing is real unless it can become part of human experience.

The whole of physics concerns experience rather than an independent reality. Whence physical reality is a sector of human experience

iii. The hypotheses and theories of physics are but condensed experience i.e., inductive syntheses of experiential items.

iv. Physical theories are not created but discovered: they can be discerned in sets of empirical data, such as laboratory tables.

Speculation and invention play hardly any role in physics.

v. The goal of hypothesizing and theorizing is to systematize a part of the growing fund of human experience and to forecast possible new experiences. In no case should one try to explain reality.

Least of all should we attempt to grasp essentials.²⁵

The scientific method is one that places a high premium on observable phenomena in nature alongside experimentation but do not stop to examine the rudiments of its own method.

Like Bunge would assert, nothing is real in science unless it can be apprehended by the senses.

But things are known by observation when light rays hit the retina of the eyes. So if there is a hypothesis of a Supreme Being, science would ask: by what procedure can such a being be known empirically aside recourse to belief/faith? However priced this scientific method is, it has been observed that it is the human creation of the mind (thought system) in ordering facts of nature thus it is not a certain way of arriving at indubitable knowledge but a probable one. It also calls for wonder how this is so when we can out rightly see the marvels of science and technology all around. The apparent success of science notwithstanding, Christian argues that:

146 We often deceive ourselves by thinking that we have observed the

rules, whereas the fact is that we created them to account for consistencies that we remembered while watching matter-in-motion. We never observe the “law of gravity” or the “inverse-square law” which describes the propagation of light, or the “laws”

of mass energy transformation. All the “laws” of physics are created in our minds; and all this information we call empirical knowledge.²⁶

The above claim exposes the limitation of science to know the transcendental because the senses are not designed to apprehend realty of the supernatural. The irony here is that, science as an attitude values observation as one of the canon of its method but affirm the reality of certain other phenomena without a direct observation like force, dark energy and blackhole. This affirmation of non-observational reality as being out there follows the scientific method of induction. Hume had asked on what grounds we come to our beliefs about the unobserved on the basis of inductive inference. He further introduced the problem of induction as part of an analysis of the notions of cause and effect. On the grounds of this, he challenged the rational basis of any such inference believing that “induction presupposes belief in the uniformity of nature. And this belief had no defense in reason, and merely reflected habit or custom of the mind”.²⁷

The difficulty in inductive reasoning or causality has challenged the scientific method as a truth yielding enterprise. If all knowledge arrived in science is probabilistic, how can we entrust our lives to this method seeing the future may never resemble the past? Were the logical positivists aware of this limitation when they disparaged metaphysical knowledge, embracing only positive knowledge of science? David Hume who influenced the Logical Positivists of Vienna Circle greatly declares that books on metaphysics, sophistry and religion should be committed to the flames because they do not represent concrete physical reality. The principal purpose of the Vienna Circle then was to bring about a unification of the special sciences and of all knowledge accessible to men. Furthermore:

147 The method to be employed was logical analysis and this was to be

used negatively, on the one hand, to eliminate metaphysical statements from the natural sciences, mathematics, and human knowledge generally; and positively, on the other hand, to

“clarify” the concepts and methods of the sciences, and to show that all human knowledge is constructed from the data of experience.²⁸

This hard stance of the methods and attitudes of modern science on other fields of inquiry and their commitments have been frowned at and opposed by scholars who have argued that the scientific-method is just one mode of knowing, and knowing only the materially observed in part. The method cannot penetrate the core of reality not given in sense experience. It is on the ground of this strict positivism that the reality of the Supreme Being is dismissed as impossible or untenable because such a Being has no physical reference frame. Thus, the universe is now held to be some sort of a god (Pantheism) because it seems to be the force behind the motion of objects since it contains force fields. It is also held as a causally self-contained system. Bertrand Russell writes that:

A universe once in motion will remain in motion forever, unless stopped by a miracle. Aristotle had thought that the planets needed god to push them around their orbits, and that movement on earth could be spontaneously initiated by animals. The motions of matter, on this view, could only be accounted for by taking account of non-material causes. The law of inertia changed this, and made it possible to calculate the motions of matter by means of the laws of dynamics alone.²⁹

From the African worldview, the reality of the Supreme Being is not in doubt at all as it is well established. Because African worldview is fundamentally metaphysical, Africans believes in a Supreme Being that is transcendental and immanent at the same time. This is why force as a concept makes meaning from the perspective of the Supreme Being who is force Himself and gives it to all of His creation. Africans holds the belief that God is not a term to be defined, but a “person” to be known. This knowledge is to be sought for on God‟s nature, character and attributes from man‟s intellect and confirmed by experience of the reality around him. For instance, besides energy, matter and form, is there a personality in the universe? The

148 answer is simply that man is a personal being and since personal cannot come from impersonal, then that which is personal must have created man. Also, because God is a personal being, the possibility of feelings and communication between the two is a reality.

Africans further believe that the Supreme Being is a personal infinite God who created and sustains the universe which reflects His unity in diversity. God is the power that organizes and integrates man and the world beyond appearances. Since the self is inseparable from the experienced reality, and since the African does not know the other by detaching himself but by sympathetically embracing the other, he lives in God and God lives in him. K. C. Anyanwu avers that:

Living in a community, the African believes that there are mysterious forces surrounding him. He is in communion with these forces (his fellow men, nature, the whole universe, animate inanimate forces). He personalizes these forces because, as we have now realized, reality is based on the self and inseparable from the self. His consciousness of the world teaches him that the world also has its own consciousness to some degree. From this awareness of something divine in the experience of reality arises his feeling of divinity.³⁰

Because man has this anthropomorphic outlook about reality, man looks at nature and God from the point of his relationship with them. Thus in African worldview, there are many expressions which attributes human nature to God but that can easily be understood since he is anthropocentric. The importance of this anthropomorphism is to aid in the conceptualization of God whom they have not seen. Many African societies visualizes God as father, while few others sees God as a mother by virtue of the former being the universal creator and provider while the latter is because of the idea of cherishing and nursing. Mbiti notes that “some of this anthropomorphism may be literal but most of them seem metaphysical, poetical and liturgical…

It is to be noted also that ultimately everything we say about God is in one way or another anthropomorphic since it is expressed in human terms and human thought forms”. ³¹

149 From the exposition so far, it becomes glaring why traditional African thought system provide a platform for the believe in the existence of a Supreme Being while the scientific method does not with the explanation contained in the rationale of how each interprets the world by its internal logic and systems.