Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth — Page 296
BELIEF IN THE UNSEEN remains unaltered. No intricate philosophical or scientific discussion is required any more to prove their validity. At the elementary level of water, fire, air and earth, their properties are better understood with the passage of time of course, but no change has ever occurred in the understanding of their fundamental nature. Fire still burns. as it always did, water still extinguishes as it has done in the past. They have become fundamental truths belonging to all times, hence no one in his senses can ever predict that water will one day begin to burn and will feed the flames of fire. Yet in the domain of Divine prophecies some predictions are made which are no less startling by virtue of their being so different from the well-established human knowledge. For instance, in the past ages it would take only a prophet to make a prediction so bizarre as to prophesy that a day would dawn when water would also be observed to burn in addition to its extinguishing properties. That would be some prophecy indeed! If later on the existence and the properties of sodium are discovered to exactly correspond to the prophecy, no one has a right to dismiss such a prophecy as a soothsayer's vain babble. Once discovered, however, this unusual behaviour of sodium will be counted among the unchangeable universal laws. No one can suspect that a day may dawn when water would cease to ignite sodium. Yet if man looks around with awareness he will be amazed to find how much of his knowledge has already come to stay as unchangeable realities. . The same is true of human sensory perceptions. Their scope may widen but their recognition of the sweet, the bitter, the savoury, the unsavoury, heat and cold, noise and silence, comfort and discomfort, pain and pleasure and a myriad of other similar sensory stimulators will not undergo any change. Stability of concepts such as these can be classified as the primary stage of certainty. A 288