Electromagnetic

Where there is radical disagreement over fundamentals, argument, in the commonly accepted sense of the term, brings confusion rather than clarity. What do the opponent of science and scientist–or, to come to essentials, believer and unbeliever–have to say to each other?

Not that dialogue is impossible. One can envisage a debate, held in quietness and intimate privacy (with no possibility of playing to the gallery), in which a believer and unbeliever explore one another’s minds over a long period and, inspired by a common desire to understand, achieve communication. Confined to thirty minutes in a television studio, such debate can only be farcical. Time and patience are of the essence, not to mention divine grace, love and a kind of stillness deeply infused with the longing for truth. Those who stand poles apart should never attempt hasty dialogue, unless they confine themselves to discussing the weather. ‘Haste is from the devil,’ say the Muslims, ‘and slowness is from God’; and the clocks must be stopped if these two men are to understand each other.

But time is too valuable (when awareness of the timeless has been lost) for clocks to be stopped, love is at best a bit-player in this drama, and stillness is incompatible with controversy. All that such hasty debates between believer and unbeliever offer us is a battle of wits and a contest in verbal skills; and, since the former is out of tune with the spirit of his age, the rules of the game and the weapons are never of his choosing.

But perhaps there is no battle to be fought or won, for in most cases these antagonists have only the illusion of meeting and there is simply the spectacle–familiar in farce–of two men shadowboxing on opposite sides of the stage, unaware that their blows never make contact. They are in different places. It is not enough to share a common language if there are no common assumptions to provide the basis for argument. Without any such basis each participant feels that the other is ‘missing the point’, as indeed he is since the ‘point’ is the truth as seen from the place at which he has taken his stand and these men are too far apart to share the same view. Heirs of a fairly unified culture, we still take a certain uniformity of viewpoint for granted, but in the modern age it is quite possible for people living side-by-side in the same society to inhabit entirely different worlds.

Gai Eaton, King of the Castle: Choice and Responsibility in the Modern World. Cambridge, UK: Islamic Texts Society, 1990, p. 152-53.