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Iqbal makes the scientific case for the timeliness of his question by tracing how every culture's naturalism ends in some form of atomism, and how modern atomism — uniquely — has used its own mathematics and physics to smash the gods of its own temple. Citing Eddington, he argues that science itself now acknowledges that its entities form only a partial aspect of reality, leaving feelings, purpose, and values pointing somewhere beyond space and time.
Section 2 established the philosophical foundation of the lecture: the reversal of Kant, the argument that the normal level of experience may not be the only knowledge-yielding level, and the primacy of deed over concept as a mode of engaging Reality. Having established the legitimacy of the question 'Is religion possible?', Section 3 now begins a new phase of the argument: the case for the question's timeliness. Why must it be raised 'at the present moment of the history of modern culture'?
The section is brief but structurally important. It advances a single argument: that modern science itself — through its own internal development — has arrived at a point where it recognises the partiality of its own picture of reality. Iqbal traces a comparative history of atomism across four civilisations (Indian, Greek, Muslim, and Modern), identifies modern atomism as uniquely self-undermining (its mathematics and physics have 'smashed some of the old gods of its own temple'), and concludes with a quotation from Arthur Eddington acknowledging that the entities of physics 'can from their very nature form only a partial aspect of the reality.' The question then becomes unavoidable: how are we to deal with the rest — the elements of consciousness (feelings, purpose, values) that 'lead not into a world of space and time, but surely somewhere'?
Section 3 thus serves as the first of three reasons for the timeliness of the question. Section 4 will supply the second (the existential crisis of modernity — evolution without hope), and Section 5 the third (the failure of medieval mysticism as a substitute). Together, Sections 3–5 form a triptych arguing that the question 'Is religion possible?' is demanded by the condition of modern civilisation itself — by science, by culture, and by the exhaustion of pre-modern spiritual resources.