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CONFLICT
BETWEEN RELIGION AND SCIENCE?
Seeing
religion and science or scientific
studies as two conflicting disciplines
is a product of the Western attitude
towards religion and science. In order
to understand the background of the
historical conflicts between science and
Christianity in the West, we should
first discuss the main reasons why
sciences have developed in the West in
recent centuries.
The
main reasons why sciences have developed
in the West in recent centuries
While
studying the reasons why sciences have
developed in the West in recent
centuries, we should not forget that the
main reason is the influence of the
Islamic civilization. Since this is a
known fact and has already been
mentioned above, in the lines to come,
we will concentrate upon three of the
other factors-namely, changing Western
way of thinking, Protestanism and
geogragphical discoveries and
colonialism.
Christianity
and changing Western way of thinking
When,
after years of struggle and the lives of
thousands of martyrs, Christianity
became the state religion of the Roman
Empire, it found itself in a climate
where Epicurean and naturalistic
attitudes prevailed and human knowledge
was sanctified.
The
teaching of Jesus, which would later be
called Christianity, won the victory in
its struggle with the Roman Empire but
unfortunately at the expense of losing
its original identity and purity.
Besides, deviating from being a middle
way as a God-revealed religion,
theoretically it restricted itself to
love and condemned nature as a veil
separating man from God. Also,
influenced by Near Eastern religions
like Mithraism and Manichaism, it tended
to become a completely mystical
religion. However, the earth or nature
is seen in Islam and, of course, in
God-revealed religions, as a realm where
God’s Most Beautiful Names are
manifested, a realm on which minds
should reflect in order to reach God
Almighty, and which is itself a
reflection of Paradise.
Certainly,
it was the Church which, having
announced itself as the body of Christ
enjoying his authority, shaped
Christianity in the mould explained
above and later campaigned to seize,
besides its spiritual, the worldly power
also. In the centuries during which the
West was under the dominion of the
Church, a magnificent civilization
flourished in the Muslim East. As a
result of the West’s contact with this
civilization through the Crusades and by
way of Andalusia, the West had also the
opportunity to learn about antiquity.
Greek philosophy, especially
Aristotelianism, Roman naturalism and
also Greek Epicurism and hedonism found
their way into Western thinking. When
this Western awakening to antiquity
through the translations from Arabic and
by way of the Muslim centers of learning
in Andalusia and Sicily, was united with
Western envy of the prosperity of the
Muslim East, the ground was prepared for
the Renaissance.
Western
ways of thinking changed greatly. The
‘iron wall’ between Western
attitudes and Islam which the Church had
built up over centuries, caused this
change to evolve against religion.
Having feared that it would lose its
worldly power, the Church severely
resisted this change. The corrupted
Bible was no longer able to answer the
questions that arose in inquiring minds
about creation and the order of the
universe. The Old Testament had been
lost long centuries before during the
Assyrian invasion of Jerusalem. The
texts to hand were written down by
Jewish scholars, who certainly had in
mind the problems of the Jewish
community at that time. None of the
Gospels, which had been chosen out of
hundreds and accepted as canonical, was
the original one which God sent to
Jesus, upon him be peace. Besides, none
of them was written by the apostles or
disciples of Jesus. So, the symbolical
language of Divine Scriptures-symbolical
because they addressed every level of
understanding at all times and in all
places-was lost. As a result, for
example, in the description of creation,
the Old Testament mentions seven days
like the days of the world. It says: ‘And
there was evening, and there was
morning-the first day.’ Whereas, the
conception of a day of morning and
evening belongs to us, who live on
earth. The Qur’an also mentions days
and that God created the universe in six
days. But it never mentions mornings and
evenings and presents ‘day’ as a
relative period whose measure is not
known to us. For example, in the verses:
The angels and spirit ascend to Him
in a day whereof the span is fifty
thousand years (70.4), and They
will bid you hasten on the Doom, and God
fails not His promise, but a day with
God is a thousand years of what you
reckon (22.47), and He directs
the affair from the heaven unto the
earth; then it ascends unto Him in a
Day, whereof the measure is a thousand
years of what you reckon (32.5).
The
failure of Christianity and the Bible to
answer the questions put by inquiring
Western minds caused the direction of
scientific developments to be opposed to
religion. However, the great scientists
such as Galileo or Bacon and others were
not irreligious at all. They favoured a
new interpretation of the Bible. Certain
scientists and theologians tried to do
that. For example, Roger Bacon was in
favour of experimental methods in
scientific investigations but he also
defended the notion that one could
attain knowledge of heavenly things
through spiritual experience. Thomas
Aquinas, whom some introduce as the
Christian counterpart of Imam Ghazzali
of the Muslim East, tried to reconcile
Christianity with Aristotelianism.
Another theologian, Nicolas de Cusa,
opposed the astronomy of Ptolemy but
emphasized the profound meaning of the
limitless universe whose center is
everywhere and peripheries nowhere.
Nevertheless, the efforts of such
theologians and scientists to reconcile
Christianity with science were not
enough to prevent science finally
breaking with religion. This was partly
due to the severe opposition of the
Church to scientific developments for
fear of losing its power, and partly
because of the Western awakening to a
material life.
Truly,
as Professor Tawney says, quoted Erich
Fromm in Escape from Freedom
(Turkish translation, 1982, pp. 70-1),
in the medieval period, people usually
aimed at eternal happiness through
economic activities and enterprises.
They feared economic motives that
appeared in the form of strong desires.
A man had the right to gain enough money
to lead a life according to his social
status but to try to gain more meant
greed for money and was a grave sin.
Wealth and property had to be obtained
through lawful ways and circulate among
as many people as possible. However, the
Renaissance changed social or even moral
standards prevalent in the Middle Ages,
or, we might say, changes in those
standards gave birth to the Renaissance.
Even a superficial glance at the arts of
the period suffices to reveal this
fundamental change from the moral and
spiritual to the material. For example,
sculpture-in the view of Sokorin, the
product of the desire to escape death
and the mental ‘disease’ of
representing mortals in the shape of
young, immortal deities-used the female
body to model passionate desires and
pleasures, deceit, sexuality and
physical beauty. In Renaissance art, the
Virgin Mary was no longer an image of
modesty and chastity, inspiring respect
and compassion; instead, she began to be
painted as a woman with physical charms.
The David of Michelangelo is a powerful,
muscular youth, an image representing
bodily perfection.
The
man of the Renaissance desired to be
like Odysseus, well-built, comely,
intelligent, powerful and skilful in
oratory. He was convinced that to become
like Odysseus was possible through
knowledge. Nevertheless, as will be seen
in the following verses, ‘God’ of
the Bible was jealous of man and had
forbidden him to eat of the fruit of
knowledge:
The
Lord God took the man and put him
in the Garden of Eden to work it
and take care of it. And the Lord
God commanded the man, ‘You are
free to eat from any tree in the
garden; but you must not eat from
the tree of the knowledge of good
and evil, for when you eat of it
you will surely die.’ (Genesis,
2.15-7)
And
the Lord God said, ‘[by eating
of the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil], the man has now
become like one of us, knowing
good and evil. He must not be
allowed to reach out his hand and
take also from the tree of life
and eat, and live for ever.’ So
the Lord God banished him from the
Garden of Eden to work the ground
from which he had been taken.
(Genesis, 3.22-3)
These
verses of the Bible would certainly be
antipathetic to the feelings of a
typical man of the Renaissance and
remind him of the Greek deities who
forbade man the sacred fire. Therefore,
what fired the imagination of the
Renaissance man was to become a
Prometheus, who rebelled against the
gods and stole the sacred fire from
them. This change of attitude towards
religion and life is one of the foremost
points to emphasize if we are to
understand the conflict between science
and religion in the West.
Protestanism
According
to Max Weber, the development of science
and technology in the West was not
independent of religion. He maintains
that Protestanism was one of the main
factors behind scientific developments
in the West. As everybody knows,
Protestanism developed against the
authority of the Catholic Church,
although it has not any radical
difference from Catholicism.
According
to Weber, Protestanism is fatalistic in
its attitude towards history and man’s
destiny. Everybody is born stained with
original sin and no one can be saved
from eternal condemnation by his own
acts. Both Luther and Calvin were of the
opinion that whatever man does, he
cannot be saved unless he is among those
whom God pre-determined to be chosen and
saved from eternal punishment. But the
sign of one’s being chosen and saved
is that one works tirelessly and is
continuously active to overcome one’s
feeling of weakness and helplesness. The
more one earns and the more successful,
the more he means to be loved by God.
Weber asserts that the grudge of the
middle classes against the rich and
aristocracy roused them to further and
further earning and accumulation of
wealth. Earning incited consumption,
consumption caused the rise of endless
needs and needs stimulated further work.
According to Weber, this never-ending
spiral played an important role in the
development of sciences and technology.
However, it is also behind the egotism,
individualism and self-centeredness of
modern Western man.
Geographical
discoveries and colonialism
United
with the authority of the Church, the
despotism of kings and feudal lords
suffocated people. Besides, the
continent no longer seemed to meet their
increasing needs and the seas
surrounding it invited them to overseas
adventures. Needs urge people to
investigate and learn new things, and
the abundance of natural ways of
transportation like rivers and seas as
against the smallness of the land enable
them to make frequent contact with both
surrounding and overseas areas. The
Europeans of the Renaissance period made
much use of this privilege they had to
increase their knowledge and reach
remote lands.
The
Europeans went in pursuit of gold in
remote parts of the world. Finding gold
only increased them in avarice which
made them cruel and opened the way to a
ruthless colonialism. The slave trade
and the eradication of the native
peoples in continents like America and
Australia became the trade mark of the
rising capitalism and colonialism. It
was only after the transportation of the
treasures of the newly invaded countries
to the West that the industrial
revolution became realized. All
historians are agreed that James Watt
invented the steamship after the coals
of Bengal in India were carried to
England after the Battle of Plassey. The
invention of steamship marked the start
of the industrial revolution.
Today,
the USA, whose population forms only 6
per cent of the world population,
consume 40 per cent of the paper pulp,
36 per cent of the coal, 25 per cent of
the steel, and 20 per cent of the
cotton, produced in the whole of the
world. The developed countries together
form only 16 per cent of the world
population but consume 80 per cent of
world resources.
In
sum, it should not be forgotten that a
ruthless colonialism and geographical
discoveries are two of the main factors
behind the scientific and technological
advances in Europe in recent centuries.
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