The integration of science and religion
is one of the major issues of our age. Some thinkers believe that their
integration is possible and necessary while others contend that the two
are inherently different. Much logic has been furnished by both sides but
very frequently the issue has been confounded on wrong premises where one
is reminded of Charles F. Kettering’s saying: ‘Beware of logic. It is an
organized way of going wrong with confidence’. The issue, nevertheless,
is so important and compelling that the disturbed minds of the sensitive
younger generation cry for an answer that could console their agitated
spirits. Whitehead has very rightly pointed out: ‘When we consider what
religion is for mankind and what science is, it is no exaggeration to say
that the future course of history depends upon the decision of this generation
as the relations between them’.
Only those ideas that integrate vitally
can
evolve into beliefs. Huxley, who regarded beliefs as important organs of
cultural evolution -- the only course of evolution open to man – believed
that they cannot be imposed by force but it is possible to encourage and
promote them by helping one belief with the aid of another. He also held
that there is a constant and necessary interaction between our beliefs
and our knowledge of facts. According to him, belief is a crystallization
or fusion of emotions and feelings and knowledge into
a system of ideas, which is ‘always to some degree operative or effective
and tends to issue in action of some sort’ thus ‘giving a directional set
to personality’ and determining an individual’s ‘general attitude or approach
to life’. So beliefs can live and grow only if intellectual, scientific,
artistic, practical and moral ideas are integrated biologically as
virtual parts of an organic whole. On the other hand, they degenerate if
one set of ideas constantly corrodes the other. It is, therefore, simply
impossible to have two types of beliefs at one and the same time. For example,
if Adam and Eve of science differ entirely from the Adam and Eve of religion,
the two types of concepts would give rise to a conflicting situation from
where there is no escape except to abandon either the clear teachings of
religion or the clear teachings of science. Today the young generation
finds itself in a similar dilemma, thrown at the crossroads, bewildered
and perplexed. Those who profess to accept this duality of thinking in
their adventure of practising scientific thought while still preserving
religious faith are in fact divided personalities with little prospects
of finding the right path, for, faith cannot take roots in a divided mind.
C.P. Snow complains: ‘The intellectual life of the whole western society
is being split into two polar groups, which had long ago ceased to speak
to each other but they had at least managed a kind of frozen smile across
the gulf. Now even that politeness is gone; they just make faces’. The
cultural disintegration of a society epitomized in ‘two cultures’ by C.P.
Snow is a cause of great concern for the great thinkers of the West. Renes
Dubos asserts: ‘Human culture, like organisms and societies, depends for
its survival on their internal integration, an integration which can be
achieved only to the extent that science remains meaningful to the living
experience of man’. No wonder therefore that scientists like Seabourg stress
the need of ‘integrating into our thinking and acting the full range of
human wisdom’, so that ‘the philosopher, the social scientist, the writer,
the natural scientist are all intellectual brethren under the skin’.
But in this age of ours ‘institutionalized
science’ has stood up against ‘institutionalized religion’ as a rival establishing
its own ‘sacred buildings, its monastries, its esoteric language, its priests
and acolytes, even its incantations and mummies’. Thus science has become
a ‘metaphysical mother’, a ‘superhuman thing’, and a ‘huge entity which
has an independent existence of its own’, in which modern man believes
in much the same way as his ancestors used to believed in religion. It
has gradually spread its roots in all what we do and think and all what
we feel and we cannot tear them out and if we do we would endanger our
civilization.
In a cultural milieu permeated through
and through with science, modern man has ‘developed habits of concrete
thought which renders him less capable of that type of inner experience
on which religious faith ultimately rests because he suspects it ‘liable
to illusion’. And ‘no one would hazard action on the basis of a doubtful
principle of conduct’. ‘Religion’, said Iqbal ‘stands in greater need of
a rational foundation of its ultimate principles than dogmas of science’.
In these circumstances, the demand for a scientific form of religious experience
is quite natural. It was the fulfillment of this need which prompted Iqbal
to reconstruct religious thought in Islam ‘with due regard to philosophical
traditions of Islam and latest developments in various domains of human
knowledge’. He set himself to evolve ‘a method physiologically less violent
and psychologically more suitable to a concrete type of mind’. He found
the Muslims of the twentieth century in an ‘extremely critical stage which
immediately demanded an attempt to reconcile religion with reason’. He
firmly believed that the day was not far off when ‘religion and science
may discover mutual harmonies’. His efforts at rationalization of faith
but at the same time not admitting superiority of philosophy over religion
made him undoubtedly the greatest of all the Muslims thinkers of the twentieth
century whose appeal to the younger generation is sure and certain.
One of the basic premises, gone very
deep into common religious thinking, which is responsible for the dichotomy
of religion and science is the popular notion of ‘blind faith’. It is said
that faith begins where reason ends and faith has nothing to do with reason.
According to this view, faith in the Unseen cannot but be ‘blind’.
The argument of ‘blind faith’ leads one to the conclusion that the name
of God has no relevance to the knowable and the known. This premise has
done incalculable harm and has provide strong grounds for scientists to
assume that faith is a white flag of surrender to the unknown or just another
name for man’s contentment with ignorance which inhibits the inquisitiveness
of the mind and spells doom to all scientific inquiry and endeavour. They
also argue that since revelation issues from a region which is wholly inaccessible
to man, the object of faith is something which is absurd to reason. Thus
human reason (science) and divine reason (religion) do not touch at any
point. Huxley’s assertion: ‘If events are due to natural causes
they are not due to supernatural causes’, is rooted in the same
reason. ‘The doctrine of a personal God’, says Albert Einstein, ‘can always
take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not been
able to set foot’. He calls this behaviour on the part of the representatives
of religion ‘not only unworthy but also fatal’, because ‘a doctrine which
is able to maintain itself not in clear light but only in dark will, of
necessity, lose its effect on mankind’. By enthroning God in the unknowable,
as if He abhorred the light of human knowledge, we assign Him an extremely
vulnerable position in the universe so that the ever-expanding frontiers
of scientific discoveries correspondingly push Him further and still further
back into the ever-retreating unexplored parts of nature. No wonder, therefore,
that the Russian space scientists on their first entry into space rejoicingly
declared that there is no God in the Universe. How may we hope to keep
the flame of faith aglow if faith were just a sort of refuge in the nescience
equating religion with darkness and ignorance.
Another wrong premise on which religion
seeks to establish its superiority and priority over science is through
its overemphasis on the limitations of science. The religious protagonists
are in a habit of making pronouncements that science will never be able
to achieve this or do that as these lie only within the competence of the
‘supernatural’, ie God. But as Randall points out: ‘What in the past, men
have called ‘supernatural’ might better be called ‘superhuman’ – that in
the world which man finds lies beyond man himself, which inspires man and
condemns his inadequacies’. But man is a changing phenomenon in the realm
of science. Ever-increasing additions in his knowledge give him more and
more power over nature thus making him more and more ‘supernatural’ day
by day. Science has been consistently breaking its limitations and eroding
the ground from underneath the superstitions, wrongly taken up as religious
beliefs. Even the strongest walls, built by men of religion for the protection
of their concept of God, -- narrowed by their own limited imaginations
– are being demolished one by one as science marches victoriously in her
achievements. Had the imagination of the religious people been continuously
broadened by new insights of science which it perpetually provides to man
through new discoveries, the idea of God would have been correspondingly
widened. The Qur’a#n points out:
And if all the trees in the earth were pens,
and the sea were ink, with seven seas more to replenish supply, the signs
of Allah could not be exhausted. Lo! Allah is Mighty Wise. (31:2)
The role of science in Islam is to help
cleanse religious imagination of the dross of Shirk (polytheism)
and gradually leading him to the pure Godhead (Tawhid) of the Qur’an:
We shall show them Our Signs in the expanses
of the universe and within themselves until it will dawn on them that it
is the truth. (41:53)
Had we allowed religion and science to
intercommunicate and interpenetrate, most of the conflicts between them
would have been solved long ago perhaps we would have arrived at different
scientific conclusions, hypotheses and theories; or perhaps our religious
beliefs had been rendered more scientific by new scientific insights into
the nature of truth, as envisaged in the aforementioned verses of the Holy
Qur’an.
The God of Islam is both the Manifest
or the Known and the Hidden or the Unknown in the vast expanse of the universe.
In the Holy Qur’an, God offers Himself to man as much within the
fold of His knowledge as beyond the range of his conceiving. In fact, God
would not be God if He could be fully known and God would not be God if
He could not be known at all. Now when the Holy Qur’an exhorts man
to toil ceaselessly to meet Him (84:6) and man in turn determines to reach
Him and be with Him (1:4), he prays to God to show him the right path (1:5)
ie; a path which passes straight through this concrete material world and
does not sidetrack it. Modern mind with its habits of concrete thinking
demands exactly such type of concrete living experience of God. While inviting
attention to some of the natural phenomena of the material world, the Holy
Qur’an
proclaims
in unambiguous words:
This is Allah! Where are ye then led astray?
(6:96).
According to the Holy Qur’an, all
natural phenomena are ‘Signs of God’ indicating the activity of His Mind.
In urging its readers to observe minutely and ponder deeply over these
phenomena, the intent of Holy Qur’an seems to be that by keeping
a close contact with the behavior of Reality, man will sharpen his inner
perception for a deeper vision of it. As Iqbal says: ‘It is the intellectual
capture of and power over the concrete that makes it possible for the intellect
of man to pass beyond the concrete’. Science – based on the observation
of sense data – is thus a necessary preparation for man to see God and
is thus a sort of prayer.
Numerous scientists have endorsed
this view of Iqbal that scientific activity is a sort of religious activity.
Iqbal prescribes prayer as ‘a necessary complement to the observer of nature’.
Says Edmund W. Sinnot ‘Beneath nature’s surface beauties, there is a deeper
beauty whose contemplation offers most profound satisfactions’. ‘Science’,
declares Max Wertheimer, ‘is rooted in the will to truth. With will
to truth it stands or falls. Lower the standard slightly and the science
becomes diseased at the core…The will to truth, pure and unadulterated,
is among the essential conditions of its existence’. Albert Einstein, too,
is of the opinion that ‘science can only be created by those who are thoroughly
imbued with aspiration towards truth and understanding. This source of
feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion’.
Another wrong premise on which some
religious thinkers see the separation of religion from science is the idea
that they come from and belong to different parts of the mind and are different
kinds of mental activities. They say that the facts of religion can be
comprehended only through intuition, love, wonder and appreciation while
facts of science are learnt through observation, sensory perception, intellectual
effort, reasoning and understanding. But human mind never works in such
severally-isolated compartments as if it were divided into separate departments
of thinking, feeling and willing. No type of mental activity can ever be
imprisoned into its own confines to the absolute exclusion of others; rather
they frequently walk into one another. Thus there is no such thing as pure
thought or pure feeling or pure intuition. The world cannot be divided
into classes like thinkers and feelers even though there are philosophers
and scientists and poets and mystics. There have been great scientists
like Galvani, Perkin, Roentgen and Fleming who made their great discoveries
under the flashes of intuition which came to them spontaneously; whereas
a number of scientists like Lecomte du Nuoy, Teilhard de Chardin, Edmund
W. Sinnot, Heisenberg caught glimpses of God during their thinking over
material problems. On the one hand, even great prophets having direct communion
with God would, at times, need ask Him ‘My Lord! Show me how You give life
to the dead’ (Abraham (sws)1,
or ‘My Lord! Show me Yourself so that I may gaze on Thee (Moses (sws)2,
or ‘My Lord! Give me the knowledge of things as indeed they really are
(Muhammad
(sws)3. On the other hand,
an ordinary human being, like the present writer’s father, relates that
when he was a student of physiology, he would often fly into rapt ecstasy
of a mystic while attending a lecture in the class or working in the laboratory
when he felt ‘as if they had a direct vision of God’. Thus the realms of
religion and science, though clearly marked off from one another outwardly,
have very strong reciprocal relationships and mutual dependencies inwardly,
admitting of no departmental isolations in the human mind. A noted scientist,
R.G.H. Sill, has gone to the extent of saying: ‘The sense-perception
is the preception of the Absolute’, it is ‘pure suchness and no knowledge
is possible unless symbolizing turns it either into (i) an intuition or
(ii) an item of rational knowledge ie science’. However a deep feeling
of no knowledge at the root of all knowledge makes one see God-in-the atom
which in the words of Einstein inculcates in man ‘that humble attitude
of mind towards the grandeur incarnate in existence, which in its profoundest
depths is inaccessible to man’. Iqbal hits the same point when he says:
These are all but the stages of the seeker of
truth
Honoured with the ‘knowledge of all the names’
The stage of meditation ‘scanning through time and space’
The stage of recitation: ‘All praise unto Thee, my Lord
the Highest’.
References
1. Dubos, R. Quoted in Science and Man’s Nature, p.191
2. Einstein, A. (1955), Pattern for Living, The MacMillan
Company, New York.
3. Huxley, J. (1959), New Bottles for New Wine, Chatto
& Windus, London.
4. Huxley, J. (1969), Religion without Revelation, Mentor
Books, New York.
5. Iqbal, M. (1965), Reconstruction of Religious Thoughts
in Islam, Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, Lahore.
6. Iqbal, M. (1961), Stray Reflections, Ed., Javed Iqbal;
Sh. Ghulam Ali & Sons.
7. Iqbal, M. (1963), Darb-i-Kalim, Sheikh Ghulam
Ali & Sons, Lahore.
8. Otto, M.C. (1945), The Human Enterprise Appleton century
Croft., New York.
9. Randel, J.H. (1962), Patterns of Faith in America
Today, Collier Books, New York.
10. Seabourg, G.T. (1963), Science – Meaning & Method,
New York University Press, New York.
11. Sill, R.G.H. (1964), Tao of Science, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology Press, Massachusetts.
12. Sinnot, E.W. (1963), Science – Meaning and Method,
New York University Press, New York.
13. Snow, C.P. (1963), Two Cultures & a Second Look,
Cambridge University press, New York.
14. Whitehed, A.N. (1925), Science & the Modern World,
A. MacMillan Press, New York.
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