Empiricism

Scientific knowledge is based on sensation. For as we are bound to sense, the truths we are capable of knowing are all contingent or 'positive' : strictly speaking, we can neither see nor hope to see why they are what they are. And that is to say that science cannot explain the world but only describe it. To put it very simply: Science cannot explain why things happen but only how. To the mathematical mind the problems of perception and of the external world leads most of them to study closely the physical sciences, and they tend to regard these as being the only reliable source of knowledge and throwing out other main fields of human achievement, the arts, history, religion, and morality. Interest in God is far from these people. It is a reach out of the natural realm to the metaphysical: the pretended science of what lies beyond sensible appearance. To them it is the denial of reality, just imagination.