Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth — Page 306
AL-BAYYINAH - A MANIFEST PRINCIPLE. AND AL-QAYYIMAH - AN EVERLASTING TEACHING which we must examine now purely from the secular angle. . Almost all the prominent thinkers belonging to the school of scientific socialism reject the absoluteness of ideas or values categorically. They only do so because of the incompatibility of absoluteness with the Marxist vision of dialectical materialism. But their encounter with the day-today realities of the surrounding material world leaves them no justification for their total rejection of the idea of absoluteness. . Night follows day and day follows night. Fire burns and water extinguishes. Our sense of heat and cold, of sorrow and pleasure, our awareness of appetite and satiation, our concept of thirst and its slaking and a myriad of other similar perceptions do not require a scientist to prove their validity. They simply exist without change, without question, requiring no advocate to prove their validity. All the same their absoluteness is inseparably linked with the quality of human perception. The concept of night and day requires the faculty of sight. But what of those whose vision is impaired? Their perception of things will be relatively different from that of those who are gifted with a better quality of sight. This raises the doubt that even what we categorize as elementary perceptions may only be relative in nature. There is a wide spectrum between the extreme edge of doubt and that of absolute certainty. Both may shift in any direction along the spectrum depending on the clarity of the observer's sight and that of the available light. But such doubts are raised only with reference to exceptional cases and situations. Compared to the universal human experience at large, they make only a very small and insignificant minority, which cannot alter the consensus of the universal human experience. . Again it is not just in relation to these elementary concepts that man has reached a stage of certainty; there are 297