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 (غيب) 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’ān 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 (Tawhīd) of the Qur’ān:
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’ān.
The God of Islam is both the Manifest (ظاهر)
or the Known and the Hidden (باطن) or the Unknown in
the vast expanse of the universe. In the Holy Qur’ān, 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’ān 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’ān proclaims in
unambiguous words:
This is Allah! Where are ye then led astray? (6:96).
According to the Holy Qur’ān, 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’ān 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), or ‘My Lord! Show me Yourself so that I may gaze on Thee (Moses (sws), or ‘My Lord! Give me the knowledge of things as indeed they really are
(Muhammad (sws). 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-Kalīm, 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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