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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Notes on Islam and Science6/27/2007 15:18:27The other day my office (the Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion at the AAAS, like a number of major universities and research institutions especially in Europe, received a copy of Atlas of Creation, a massive coffee-table reference book on the whole natural world and its glory by the Turkish creationist sect that operates under the pen-name of its leader, Harun Yahya. Yahya's doctrine is a pretty rare one in the west these days: old earth creationism with no evolution. The fossil record, he contends, shows that all the species we know are unchanged after millions of years. The fossil record, by his account, gives no evidence of intermediary forms. Most of the book is devoted, not to erecting a theory, but to dispatching Darwinism. There is a biting criticism of Darwinism (by name) on nearly every page. Yahya apparently has called ID demonic, and the Discovery Institute has been meeting with one of his slightly more liberal opponents in Turkey, and held a successful conference there. His financing is vast. These Atlases have been sent to major universities and research centers across Europe, where they seem to be laughed out of court. On the other hand, his work translated into Arabic and Urdu has been apparently influential with Muslim audiences. It is a little tough to turn up much information on Yahya's actual influence, skewed as a lot of it is by his own website specifically dedicated to charting his importance: harunyahyaimpact.com. Watch out: There seem to be some pretty nasty charges of sexual indiscretion and drug use attached to him. The whole Yahya escapade has got me thinking about Islam and science more broadly; I'm not sure that it is altogether different from how Christian and also Hindu literalists think. Before Darwin, biologists (like Paley) and geologists (like those mentioned in Gould's Time's Arrow) were very much interested in proving the Bible's accuracy. The main difference may be that we got into big problems early with evolution, a good theory that suddenly contradicted all the stuff we'd happend to get ourselves believing. But elements of evolution are not so foreign to Islam and actually quite resonant with the Vedas, so no big problem. But none of these traditions as of yet fully accounts for a scientific method. Members of each are trying, of course. The latest issue of Discover magazine has an article on science in Islam that is excellent. The sense, essentially, is that a lot of Muslim countries are trying to make inroads in science, generally geared at pragmatic technological purposes and preventing brain drain. Clearly there are Muslims who are highly skilled in scientific work, but there still appears to be very little interest in the society generally in theoretical research, not to mention the funds to provide for it. A talk I recently heard by Steven Weinberg also pointed out the importance of Al-Ghazzali (a medieval Sufi theologian) in Islam's turn away from science. Al-Ghazzali insisted on a doctrine of divine sovereignty so strong that it rules out any assertion that there is reliable regularity in nature. One final point: the question of unity. It has been suggested by some (e.g. Louis Dupre, Hans Blumenberg) that the critical moment for the origin of Western science was the late medieval doctrine of nominalism, which in turn had an impact on Luther. In theology, nominalism had the effect of divorcing the transendent autonomy of God (the universal) quite completely from the created world (in which there are no transcendent universals). The effect of this thinking, particularly in its expression through Luther, was the sense that the logic of the world was immanent within itself, and thereby could be studied apart from reference to God. This is actually a lot like what Weinberg attributes to Ghazzali, but the reaction is different: for Ghazzali, the total transcendent authority of God means that the natural world is unstudiable; for Christian nominalism, it means that God does not help one understand the natural world. (sorry this is getting so dense): In Islamic thought, there is a strong concept called tawhid - which means the unity of God and therefore the unity of knowledge. Religion, politics, and science are all part of the same divine system. In Christianity, medieval scholasticism tends toward this, as do some other strains. But nominalism and Luther, both attacks on scholasticism, took to heart Jesus's suggestion about giving to God what is God's and Ceasar's to Ceasar. That is: different spheres of life and authority are possible. Not to say that there aren't strains of both approaches in both (vast) religious traditions, but what mostly won out in each was unity in Islam and secular differentiation in Reformed and Counter-Reformed Christianity. |
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