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- This is a sub-article to Islamic science and Qur'an and miracles.
This article is about the relationship between Islam and Science.
Islam has its own worldview system including beliefs about "ultimate reality, epistemology, ontology, ethics, purpose, etc". Muslims believe that the Qur'an is the literal word and the final revelation of God for the guidance of humankind.
Science in the broadest sense refers to any system of knowledge attained by verifiable means. and in a narrower sense to a system of acquiring knowledge based on empiricism, experimentation, and methodological naturalism, as well as to the organized body of knowledge humans have gained by such research. Scientists maintain that scientific investigation must adhere to the scientific method, a process for evaluating empirical knowledge that explains observable events in nature as results of natural causes, rejecting supernatural notions.
Relation between modern science and religion
Great influence of Biblical worldview in development of science
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The biblical worldview (also shared by Muslims) has had a "great role" in development of Science: The science in west was constructed within the framework of a Christian (and also Quranic) worldview being largely influenced by the following Biblical (and also Qura'nic) conceptions:
- "The conception of an omniscient and omnipotent personal God, Who made everything in accordance with a rational plan and purpose, contributed to the notion of a rationally structured creation."
- "The notion of a transcendent God, Who exists separate from His creation, served to counter the notion that the physical world, or any part of it, is sacred. Since the entire physical world is a mere creation, it was thus a fit object of study and transformation."
- "Since man was made in the image of God (Gen.1:26), which included rationality and creativity, it was deemed possible that man could discern the rational structure of the physical universe that God had made."
- "The cultural mandate, which appointed man to be God's steward over creation (Gen1:28), provided the motivation for studying nature and for applying that study towards practical ends, at the same glorifying God for His wisdom and goodness."
Alleged conflict between science and religion
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Albert Einstein says:
I do not think that it is necessarily the case that science and religion are natural opposites. In fact, I think that there is a very close connection between the two. Further, I think that science without religion is lame and, conversely, that religion without science is blind. Both are important and should work hand-in-hand.
Prof. Mehdi Golshani believes that there is no conflict between science and religion:
Much of the perceived conflict between science and religion is due to the erroneous belief that science has no need of any metaphysical or epistemological assumptions. It is widely believed that science is factual, rational and objective, whereas religion is mythical, irrational and subjective. This myth of scientific neutrality fails to properly distinguish between observational facts and theoretical speculations. It overlooks the highly subjective aspects of science. We note, first, that the same data can be explained by many different theories. For example, galactic red-shifts can be explained in terms of the expansion of space, motion through space, gravitational red-shifts, "tired light", and so on. As noted by Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn and others, scientific theories are not simply derived from data. Rather, the construction of theories involves a large dose of creativity. Second, the same mathematical equations can often be interpreted in many different ways. Consider, for example, the various different interpretations of quantum mechanics (e.g., Bohr's positivism, Bohm's neo-realism, the many-worlds view, etc.). Third, assessing the veracity of competing theories involves the subjective application of subjective criteria for theory selection. We may prefer theories that are simple or beautiful but why should simple or beautiful theories be more likely to be true? Ultimately, we construct and choose theories that best reflect our basic beliefs about the nature of the world...In short, science is by no means worldview neutral. What is widely perceived as a conflict between science and religion is in actuality usually a clash between two opposing worldviews, generally naturalism versus theism."
Arrival of modern science in Muslim world
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, modern science arrived in the Muslim world but it wasn't the science itself that affected Muslim scholars. Rather, it "was the transfer of various philosophical currents entangled with science that had a profound effect on the minds of Muslim scientists and intellectuals. Schools like Positivism and Darwinism penetrated the Muslim world and dominated its academic circles and had a noticeable impact on some Islamic theological doctrines." There were different responses to this among the Muslim scholars: These reactions, in words of Professor Mehdi Golshani, was the following:
#Some rejected modern science as corrupt foreign thought, considering it incompatible with Islamic teachings, and in their view, the only remedy for the stagnancy of Islamic societies would be the strict following of Islamic teachings.
- Other thinkers in the Muslim world saw science as the only source of real enlightenment and advocated the complete adoption of modern science. In their view, the only remedy for the stagnation of Muslim societies would be the mastery of modern science and the replacement of the religious worldview by the scientific worldview.
- The majority of faithful Muslim scientists tried to adapt Islam to the findings of modern science; they can be categorized in the following subgroups: (a) Some Muslim thinkers attempted to justify modern science on religious grounds. Their motivation was to encourage Muslim societies to acquire modern knowledge and to safeguard their societies from the criticism of Orientalists and Muslim intellectuals. (b) Others tried to show that all important scientific discoveries had been predicted in the Qur'an and Islamic tradition and appealed to modern science to explain various aspects of faith. (c) Yet other scholars advocated a re-interpretation of Islam. In their view, one must try to construct a new theology that can establish a viable relation between Islam and modern science. The Indian scholar, Sayyid Ahmad Khan, sought a theology of nature through which one could re-interpret the basic principles of Islam in the light of modern science. (d) Then there were some Muslim scholars who believed that empirical science had reached the same conclusions that prophets had been advocating several thousand years ago. The revelation had only the privilege of prophecy.
- Finally, some Muslim philosophers separated the findings of modern science from its philosophical attachments. Thus, while they praised the attempts of Western scientists for the discovery of the secrets of nature, they warned against various empiricist and materialistic interpretations of scientific findings. Scientific knowledge can reveal certain aspects of the physical world, but it should not be identified with the alpha and omega of knowledge. Rather, it has to be integrated into a metaphysical framework—consistent with the Muslim worldview—in which higher levels of knowledge are recognized and the role of science in bringing us closer to God is fulfilled.
The view that scientific discoveries had been predicted in the Qur'an and traditions
Supporters for Quranic scientific claims
Researchers have written about the relationship between the contents of the Qur'an and the findings of science. Maurice Bucaille, the Frenchborn Saudi royal physician, claims in The Bible, the Qur'an and Science that this relationship "turns out to be one of harmony and not of discord", to the surprise of most scientists "bound up in materialist theories", and notes that Islam often encouraged scientific acquisition of knowledge.
Criticisms of Quranic scientific claims
Some skeptics, such as historian and philosopher Richard Carrier, counter that certain scientific facts which are said to be detailed in the Qur'an were known in the Middle East centuries before it was written, or were "predicted" also by other people with no claims of divine inspiration, or are found in passages that are clearly rephrasals of the Hebrew Bible. He also presents criticisms based on the translations and context of the verses presented as scientific facts Others, such as Turkish physicist and philosopher Taner Edis, also counter that the Qur'an offers "vague descriptions of natural phenomena" which are shown to be in agreement with modern science by using "stretched or arbitrary" interpretations. Further, Edis describes claims that the Quran refers to the expanding universe, parallel universes, and cosmic structural hierarchies as "blatantly wrong." However he goes on to write that "God does not stand or fall depending on whether our scriptures know their physics ... the God of most liberal religious people does not dictate inerrant scriptures; what we have are human records of encounters with divinity."
Specific science-related issues in the Quran and the Hadith
Fossils of ancient humans
Here are three basic verses in Qur'an which are related to human creation:
The similitude of Jesus before Allah is that of Adam. He created him from clay.
— Qur'an,
O mankind fear your Lord who created you from one person and created his mate from his kind and from these two scattered countless men and women.
— Qur'an,
He began the creation of man with clay; then made his progeny from the essence of an ordinary fluid; then he perfected him and breathed into him something of his spirit and gave you the faculties of hearing and sight and the heart.
— Qur'an,
According to the first two verses, Adam and Eve were directly created by God from clay. They did not descend from any other species as proposed by Darwin. The rest of mankind is the progeny of Adam and Eve. The third verse implies that there were three stages in their creation, and can be interpreted in two ways:
- First possibility:
- Adam and Eve were created from clay
- They subsequently developed the ability to reproduce at a later age
- Finally, after some more time elapsed, they entered the third phase in which they were perfected both physically and spiritually, and received the divine spirit from God.
- Second possibility: All these three phases did not pass on the first humans created, rather each of the phases lasted for many years during which many life forms were created from clay having the characteristic of their respective periods together with that of the previous one.
- Human forms were initially directly created from clay because they did not have the ability to reproduce. This first stage may have lasted for millions of years, and in it, the humans forms' physical forms after passing through various stages culminated in the homo sapiens of today. Millions of species may have been created from clay like this. Among them, many went extinct and the others lived to enter the second phase, the first of which were Adam and Eve.
- The human forms now had the ability to reproduce and direct creation was no longer required. Adam and Eve were the first directly created pair from clay which had this ability to reproduce. In the second phase, except Adam and Eve all other pairs who had the ability to reproduce pairs were not perfected and later died away.
- It was this very pair which entered the third phase and was perfected physically so that it could receive the divine spirit from the God and be blessed with the faculties of sense and reason as is specified by the last part of the verse.
Under the second interpretation, the fossils which we find today belong to the millions of people created from clay in the first and second phases.
Conception and inherited characteristics
The most prominent of the ancient Greek thinkers who wrote on medicine were Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen. Hippocrates and Galen, in contrast with Aristotle, wrote that the contribution of females to children is equal to that of males, and the vehicle for it is a substance similar to the semen of males. Basim Musallam writes that the ideas of these men were widespread through the pre-modern Middle East: "Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen were as much a part of Middle Eastern Arabic culture as anything else in it." The sayings in the Quran and those attributed to Muhammad in the Hadith influenced generations of Muslim scientists by siding with Galen and Hippocrates. Basim Musallam writes: "... the statements about parental contibution to generation in the hadith paralleled the Hippocratic writings, and the view of fetal development in the Quran agreed in detail with Galen's scientific writings." He reports that the highly influential medieval Hanbali scholar Ibn Qayyim, in his book Kitab al-tibyan fi aqsam al-qur'an, cites the following statement of the prophet from the Sahih Muslim:
The male semen is white and the female semen is yellowish. When the two meet and the male semen overpowers the female semen, it will be male; when the female semen overpowers the male semen, it will be female.
Ibn Qayyim also quotes a different hadith from the same collection, which is quoted by other Muslim authors as well. Having been asked the question "from what is man created," the Prophet replies:
He is created of both, the semen of the man and the semen of the woman. The man's semen is thick and forms the bones and the tendons. The woman's semen is fine and forms the flesh and blood.
Embryology
It is widely recognized that the Qur'an and hadith contain a number of verses pertaining to human reproduction and development. In his book A History of Embryology, Professor Joseph Needham dismisses some of the embryological passages in the Quran, verses (discussed below), , , , , , , and as "a seventh century echo of Aristotle and Ayurveda." According to Keith Moore, professor emeritus of Anatomy at the University of Toronto, the scientific meaning of certain surahs in the Quran has become clear only recently. An example cited by him is:
He created you (all) from a single person: then created, of like nature, his mate; and he sent down for you eight head of cattle in pairs: He makes you, in the wombs of your mothers, in stages, one after another, in three veils of darkness. such is Allah, your Lord and Cherisher: to Him belongs (all) dominion. There is no god but He: then how are ye turned away (from your true Centre)?
— Qur'an,
Moore suggests that the verse phrase may describe the following three physiological barriers:
- The anterior abdominal wall;
- The uterine wall; and
- The amniochorionic membrane.
Moore notes that there are other interpretations of this verse, but does not elaborate. Regarding this verse, Basim Musallam quotes the Damascene Hanbali scholar Ibn Qayyim (1291-1351), who reports a different interpretation: "Most commentators explain, it is the darkness of the belly, and the darkness of the womb, and the darkness of the placenta." The extent of human knowledge of embryology stretches back to the second century, when Greek doctor Galen described the placenta and fetal membranes. Basim Musallam writes that the scientific tradition of Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen "was native to the Middle East for centuries before Islam." He finds that "the Quran described the development of the foetus in the language of the biological sciences of the time. There was little difference between the language of the Quran and that of Galen on the stages of foetal development." Discussing the "stages" mentioned in this verse, Moore argues that it was probably known to the seventh century doctors that the human embryo developed within the uterus, though their knowing of human embryos developing in stages would have been unlikely. Moore claims that though Aristotle noted the developmental stages of a chick embryo during the fourth century, it was not until the fifteenth century that developmental stages of human embryo had been the subject of discourse. However, Musallam writes that this had been described long before Muhammad:
The stages of development which the Quran and hadith established for believers agreed perfectly with Galen's scientific account. In De Semine, for example, Galen spoke of four periods in the formation of the embryo: (1) as seminal matter; (2) as a bloody form (still without flesh, in which the primitive heart, liver, and brain are ill-defined); (3) the foetus acquires flesh and solidity (the heart, liver, and brain are well-defined, and the limbs begin formation); and finally (4) all the organs attain their full perfection and the foetus is quickened.
Further occurrences of verses pertaining to supposed embryological development are as follows:
Then We placed him as (a drop of) sperm in a place of rest, firmly fixed.
— Qur'an,
The word "nutufah" (Arabic: نطفة) here has been interpreted as the "sperm" or "spermatozoon", and the most respected Muslim translators (Yusuf Ali, Pickthall, and Shakir) all give some variant of this. The sura continues:
Then We made the sperm into a clot of congealed blood; then of that clot We made a (foetus) lump; then we made out of that lump bones and clothed the bones with flesh; then We developed out of it another creature. So blessed be Allah, the best to create!
— Qur'an,
Musallam quotes the hadith, where the Prophet gives a more detailed description:
The Prophet said: each of you is constituted in your mother's womb for forty days as a nutfa, then it becomes a 'alaqa for an equal period, then a mudgha for another equal period, then the angel is sent, and he breathes the soul into it.
Moore writes that a more meaningful rendering of the word "nutufah" would be "zygote", which divides to form a blastocyst before embedding itself in the uterus — possibly what is referred to in the verse as "a place of rest". This interpretation, he claims, is supported by a different verse in the Qur'an describing the human being as created from a "mixed drop", to which the zygote would correspond, being "the union of a mixture of the sperm and the ovum."
The word "alaqah" (Arabic: علقة), rendered by Yusuf Ali as a "clot of congealed blood", is translated as "a leech-like structure" by Abdul Majid Zendani, professor of Islamic studies at the King Abdulaziz University. Moore claims that the meaning of alaqah is "leech" or "bloodsucker", which he states is an appropriate description of the relationship between the embryo and the endometrium in which it is implanted, between days 7 and 24 of human embryological development. This is because the human embryo derives blood from the endometrium, in the same way a leech draws blood from its host. Morphologically, too, the embryo at this stage resembles that of a leech, he notes, unobservable by anyone in the seventh century without a microscope.
The next stage referred to is "mudhgah" (Arabic: مضغة), which Moore suggests means "chewed substance or chewed lump." This, he believes, corresponds to around the fourth week of development where the embryo resembles the appearance of a chewed lump, a key characteristic of which being indentations or "teeth-marks" signalling the beginnings of the somites, the precursor to the vertebral column. Continuing in his analysis of this verse, he states that the next stage (which mentions formation of bones and flesh) is also in accordance with the stages of embryological development, as first the bones form as cartilage models, after which muscles develop from the surrounding somatic mesoderm. The phrase "then We developed out of it another creature" may allude to the resemblance of a human figure by the end of the eighth week, by which time the embryo (now known as the fetus) has gained distinctive human characteristics and possesses the primordia of all external and internal organs.
Other perceived verses referring to human development cited by Moore include:
- "... And He gave you hearing and sight and feeling and understanding". This verse, he suggests, refers to the development of the special senses in the order of hearing, vision, and sensation. According to Moore, this is the correct order of development in the embryo: the primordia of the internal ears develop first, followed by the beginning of the eyes, with the differentiation of the brain (which he refers to as the "site of understanding") occurring last of these.
- "Then out of a piece of chewed flesh, partly formed and partly unformed." Moore states that this verse seems to indicate that the embryo is comprised of both differentiated and undifferentiated tissues. He cites the example of undifferentiated mesenchyme present around the differentiated cartilage bone models. This mesenchyme then differentiates to form the muscles and ligaments attached to the bone.
See also
- Bahá'í Faith and science
- Islamic astronomy
- Relationship between religion and science
- Criticism of the Qur'an
References
- ^ Mehdi Golshani, Can Science Dispense With Religion? Cite error: The named reference "Golshani" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
- See, e.g., the entry Science in the Oxford English Dictionary ISBN 0-19-522217-2
- Peter A. Bucky, et. al., The Private Albert Einstein (Kansas City, 1992), p. 85.
- Mehdi Golshani, Does science offer evidence of a transcendent reality and purpose?, June 2003
- Maurice Bucaille. The Qur'an and Modern Science.
- Richard Carrier (2001). Cosmology and the Koran: A Response to Muslim Fundamentalists.
- Richard Carrier (2004). Predicting Modern Science: Epicurus vs. Mohammed.
- Taner Edis. "Quran-science": Scientific miracles from the 7th century?
- ^ Taner Edis. Ghost in the Universe. Quotes from page 14. Prometheus Books.
- ^ Saleem, Shehzad (2000). "The Qur'anic View on Creation". Renaissance. 10 (5). ISSN 1606-9382. Retrieved 2006-10-11.
{{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter:|quotes=(help); Unknown parameter|month=ignored (help) - The Arabic word تُرَابٍ is usually translated as "dust" or "soil;" Saleem writes "clay."
- ^ Basim Musallam, Sex and Society in Islam. Cambridge University Press. Cite error: The named reference "musallam0" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
- Joseph Needham, A History of Embryology. Abelard-Schuman.
- ^ Moore, Keith L. (1986). "A scientist's interpretation of references to embryology in the Qur'an". Journal of the Islamic Medical Association,. 18: 15–16.
{{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter|month=ignored (help)CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link) - Qur'an
- Qur'an
External links
Some articles on the relationship between religion (Islam) and science by Professor Mehdi Golshani
- Can Science Dispense With Religion?
- Does science offer evidence of a transcendent reality and purpose?
- Some important questions concerning the relationship between science and religion