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TWO
DIFFERENT FIELDS
FOR
SCIENCE AND RELIGION?
Christianity
did not develop as a comprehensive
religion encompassing all fields of life
but as a set of spiritual and moral
values which put direct bearing on the
‘worldly’ aspects of life. This has
had serious consequences for subsequent
Western history. For example,
Christianity condemned war and, although
war is a reality of human history,
neglected to lay down rules for it.
However, as this attitude never sufficed
to end wars, the lack of ‘religious’
rules and regulations about war has
caused great brutalities in the wars
which have taken place in the West and
ruthless massacres by the Western powers
throughout the world. Similarly,
Christianity’s condemnation of the ‘world’
and nature as a veil separating man from
God has been a major factor in
encouraging the modern sciences to
reject religious authority as
irrelevant. Also, the sharp separation
of this world and the Hereafter,
religion and sciences, spirituality and
physicality, led the thinkers and
philosophers who tried to find a space
for religion beside science to assign
different fields to religion and
science, reason and revelation, this
world and the Hereafter.
Cartesian
dualism
The
name of Descartes, the French
mathematician and philosopher
(1596-1650), is most famously associated
with this dualism in Western culture.
His ideas contributed to the almost
complete separation of intellectual and
scientific activities from religion and,
in later centuries, to the
Enlightenment, the mechanistic view of
life, positivism and materialism.
Cartesianism provided a shelter for
those who searched for religion in life
beside science; it also gave rise to
many misconceptions about the
relationship between life, religion and
science. The intellectuals or
philosophers who did not want to forsake
either religion or scientific reasoning
appealed to Cartesian dualism to justify
their position. This manner of defending
religion against scientific materialism
still prevails among certain Muslim
intellectuals. According to them, there
is a world of qualities separate from a
world of quantities. Science has the
authority in the world of quantities and
uses observation, measurement and
experiment, while in the world of
qualities, where observation, experiment
and measurement do not apply, religion
has the right to speak. So, being
religious can never be contradictory to
being scientific, but then religion and
science have nothing to do with each
other.
Cartesian
dualism gives science superiority
over religion
Although
intended to defend religion against
science, Cartesian dualism gives science
superiority over religion and primacy in
practical life and thought, restricting
religion to a set of blindly held
beliefs not subject to research,
verification and reasoning and
practically irrelevant to the world and
‘worldly life’. This attitude
misrepresents religion as only a matter
of believing or unbelieving, with the
consequence that there is not much
difference between accepting a ‘true’
religion and believing in any religion
whatever, even in myths and
superstitions. It is this dualism which
lies behind modern trends that see
religion-without making any
discrimination between God-revealed and
man-made ones-as a set of dogmas
inaccessible to reason, and quite cut
off from science and the perceptible
world.
However,
religion, especially Islam as the last
and perfected form of the God-revealed
religions, demands, rather than
believing blindly, both rational and
spiritual conviction based on thinking,
reasoning, searching and verification.
Although it is acceptable to enter
religion through the gate of imitation,
it is never advisable to remain content
with belief coming from imitating
others. The verses in the Qur’an
related to legal issues do not exceed
300, while there are more than 700
verses urging people to study ‘natural’
phenomena, to think, reason, search,
observe, take lessons, reflect and
verify. The verses concluding with Will
you not use your reason; will you not
think; will you not reflect; will you
not take lessons; take lessons, O men of
insight, and so on, and the Qur’anic
condemnation of unbelievers as people
having no intellects with which to think
and reflect, no eyes with which to see
and no ears with which to hear, are
serious warnings for those who see
religion as a set of blindly held
beliefs and who are unable to discern
the essential and unbreakable connection
between religion and life, nature,
reason and scientific activities.
Modern
science takes the natural world as its
field of study. The restriction of
science by Cartesian dualism to the
material, observable realm of existence,
disallowing it to admit that there may
be other realms of existence and fields
of study, may well be regarded as a way
of keeping scientific inquiry ‘factual’
and ‘objective’. However, this
attitude frequently leads to the view
that study of the realms or subjects
beyond the material, and the conclusions
drawn from that study, are ‘unscientific’
and therefore require neither research
nor verification but only belief. It
also carries many into agnosticism, to
either deny or not affirm the more
profound and broader dimensions of
existence beyond the material. Whereas
what a truly objective science should do
is either to accept that there may be
many other truths and realms the
existence of which it is unable to
discover by its present methods or
change its tactics and techniques and
equip itself with the methods necessary
to discover those realms. As long as
science persists with its rigidly
empirical approach and methods, it will
never be able to comprehend the full
reality of existence. It is quite
unfortunate for science that it reduces
man, as it does the universe, to his
physical existence and tries to explain
all his intellectual and spiritual
activities in wholly physical terms.
Modern
science deals with nature as structured
but aimless or meaningless concurrence
of material things. Basically, there is
not much difference between this
attitude toward nature and Christianity’s
condemning it as veil separating man
from God. By contrast, Islam introduces
natural phenomena, not the supra-natural
ones the existence and reality of which
science either rejects or regards as
unknowable by ‘scientific’ methods,
as evidences of its truth or reality and
calls people to study and reflect on
them and thereby collect the nectar of
belief. Nature, according to Islam, is
the realm where God’s Beautiful Names
are manifested and therefore a set of
‘ladders of light’ by which to reach
God. Having originated from God’s
Attributes of Will and Power, nature is
the ‘created’ counterpart of the Qur’an,
which originated in the Divine Attribute
of Speech. So, nature is a book like the
Qur’an, or it may be regarded as a
city or palace, with the Qur’an being
a sacred pamphlet explaining its meaning
and how to dwell in and benefit from it.
Man is the third counterpart of these
two books, equipped with consciousness
and will. This is why many Muslim
scientists such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna),
Zahrawi, Ibrahim Haqqi, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi
and Ak Shamsaddin were practicing Sufis
and well-versed in religious sciences.
Nature
is an exhibition of evidences of Divine
Unity
As
nature has a sanctity on account of its
being the result of the manifestations
of the Divine Beautiful Names and a
collection of mirrors reflecting the
Divine Names and Attributes, the order
and constancy in it are two significant
proofs of Divine Unity. It is this order
and constancy to which science owes its
existence. The perfect order observed in
the universe is the result of the fact
that with all its parts and minutest
particles, the whole of the universe is
the work of a Single Creator. This is
why there is an interrelatedness,
co-operation or mutual helping and
solidarity among all the parts of the
universe and the creatures in it. For
example, in order for a single fruit, an
apple, for example, to come into
existence, earth, air, water, the sun
and the properties of the seed of the
apple-tree and the tree itself such as
germination, growth, photosynthesis and
bearing fruit, must all co-operate. This
means that the existence of a single
fruit depends on the co-operation of the
whole universe. The order and constancy
in whatever takes place in the universe
is the origin of what science calls ‘natural
laws’. That is, natural laws that is
the name science gives to the elements
or properties of the order and constancy
in the universe on which science is
based, have only nominal existence. What
science calls laws may well be the works
or activities of God through the agency
of angels-through the agency of angels
because the Dignity and Grandeur of
Divinity requires the agency of some
beings like angels or of causes in order
that people do not attribute directly to
God what is disagreeable to them and
accuse the Almighty thereof. Because of
its obdurate refusal not to make space
for religion in its procedures, science
attributes the miraculous, purposeful
creation and existence and the order,
harmony and constancy prevailing
therein, which manifestly require the
existence of an absolute, eternal
knowledge, power and will, either to
blind, unconscious, ignorant and
inanimate ‘laws’ with only nominal,
not real, existence, or to nature
itself, which is actually a passive and
recipient, not an active agent, an
object not a subject, and devoid of
consciousness, knowledge and will. Or it
attempts to explain existence and life
with notions such as chance and
necessity. The reason for this compound
ignorance of science is that it regards
religion as a set of dogmas requiring
blind belief and therefore unscientific
or irreconcilable with itself. This
unforgivable attitude of science and its
denial of the existence of the
supra-natural dimension of creation or
its agnosticism are the result of
separating science and religion.
Science
separated from religion
When
separated from religion, science loses
its real identity and aim. The aim of
science is or must be, studying
existence in the light of Divine
guidance to understand it, to use the
universe as a collection of ladders to
reach the ‘heaven’ of belief and,
disposing things in accordance with that
belief, improve the world, thereby
helping man fulfill his function of
Divine vicegerency on the earth. This is
what the Qur’an teaches.
As
we read in the Qur’an (2.30-31), when
God told angels that He would appoint a
vicegerent on the earth, since
vicegerency requires will, knowledge and
power, the angels inferred that he would
be do corruption, cause sedition and
shed blood, and responded: ‘We glorify
You with Your praise and proclaim Your
Holiness.’ The Almighty answered them:
‘I know what you know not’. He
instructed man in the ‘names’, that
is, the names and reality of things and
therefore the keys of knowledge and the
ways of mastery over things. As He made
man superior to angels through knowledge
of things, He regarded ‘scientific’
studies to understand creation and
fulfil the role of vicegerent as equal
to the glorification and praise of
angels. This means that scientific
studies done for the sake of
understanding creation and thereby
recognizing the Creator and improving
the world, establishing peace and
justice there, are acts of worship. So,
Islam gives to science and scientific
studies a sacred meaning and religious
dimension.
Also,
the revelation of the Qur’an began
with the command ‘Read!’. Having
come at a time when there was yet
nothing written to read, this command is
significant. This order continues, ‘in
the name of the Lord Who creates’ (al-’Alaq,
96.1), which means that man should study
creation and do that in the name of the
Lord. The original of the word
translated as the Lord is Rabb,
which means One Who brings up, educates,
trains, sustains and raises. This
signifies that creation is under the ‘Lordship’
of God and man should study it with all
its aspects of coming into existence,
growing and functioning. This is what
science does.
The
second, important connotation of the
first revelation is that, as mentioned
above, man should study creation in the
name of God, that is, to please Him and
in accordance with the rules He has
established. This means that any
scientific study should not be contrary
to the religious and moral injunctions,
and therefore not be made in a way to
harm people, change creation and the
order of the universe. When made to
discover the Divine ‘laws’ in nature
and dispose it within the limits of
Divine permission, any scientific study
will not cause the environmental
pollution, the death of millions of
people and destruction of cities and, in
short, corruption on the earth. Islam
never prevents scientific studies; what
it does is to appoint for science moral
aims and put moral restrictions on it.
It aims to urge scientific studies to be
for the benefit of mankind as well as
other creatures and, by ordering them to
be made in the name of God, it raises
them to the rank of acts of worship.
When
science is separated from religion,
although it has brought wealth and
material well-being to a very small
minority in the world, as especially the
last two centuries have witnessed, it
can cause, besides world-wide
insecurity, unhappiness and unease
brought about by scientific materialism,
a brutal oppression and colonialism,
wide rifts between the poor and wealthy,
unending global or regional wars during
which millions die or are left homeless
or orphans or widows, merciless rivalry
among the classes of people and
dangerous levels of environmental
pollution. The separation of science and
religion has brought to mankind nothing
but great disasters.
Prophets
were also masters and forerunners
with
respect to scientific discoveries
and progress
It
is another evidence of the
inseparability of science and religion
that-even if secular science does not
admit it-as an historical fact, Prophets
were forerunners with respect to
scientific discoveries and mankind’s
material progress. For example, some
interpreters of the Qur’an infer from
the verse When Our command was issued
and the oven boiled... (11.40), that
the Ark the Prophet Noah constructed
through God’s guidance was a
steamship. Sailors regard the Prophet
Noah, upon him be peace, as their first
teacher or patron. Similarly, the
Prophet Joseph was the first to make a
clock and therefore was considered as
the first teacher of clock-makers, and
the Prophet Enoch as that of tailors.
However,
secular or materialistic science does
not regard Divine Revelation as a source
of knowledge or revealed knowledge as
scientific. It considers, for example,
the Flood, mentioned in all the Divine
Scriptures and oral (unrecorded)
histories of all peoples, as a myth. If
this event cannot be established through
‘scientific’ methods, it will not be
scientific and those who regard the
methods of science as the only, reliable
methods to arrive at truth will continue
to approach the Divine Scriptures with
doubts. This amounts to the denial of
Divine Revelation and God-revealed
religions. Also, this will also cause
many historical facts and events to
remain veiled. Furthermore, it is
impossible to study and teach correctly
the history of, especially, the Middle
East-Arabia, Egypt, Palestine, Syria,
Iraq and Iran, etc.-without considering
the life-histories of the Prophets
mentioned in the Qur’an. Despite this,
by not admitting the ‘scientific’
reliability of Divine Revelation,
secular or materialistic science causes
many truths to be taught as though they
were falsehoods and many falsehoods to
be presented as truths, and many
realities to remain veiled. For example,
the Assyrians who lived in Iraq are
presented as having been a pagan people.
Whereas we read in the Qur’an (And
We sent him to a hundred thousand or
more-37.147) that more than one
hundred thousand people believed in the
Prophet Jonah, who, according to the
account of the Bible, lived in Nineveh,
the capital of the Assyrians.
The
separation of science and religion and
assigning to each a different realm of
competence or relevance is responsible
for religion being seen as a set of
myths and dogmas-blind beliefs-and
science remaining in the darkness of
materialism. So, as it is absolutely
necessary to ‘wed’ and harmonize
mind and heart or the intellect and
spirit, it is also of vital importance
to harmonize science and religion.
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