It is extremely ironic, not to say embarrassing, that the Muslim people, who led the world for a millennium in every scientific discipline, developed the scientific method itself and taught it to the west, are still in a state of chaos over a relatively simple matter of science and religion, ie the lunar calendar.

A millennium ago, the Persian scientist and philosopher al-Biruni calculated the circumference of the earth with over 99% accuracy. Even earlier, the astronomers of the caliph at Baghdad had first measured the tilt of the earth’s axis as being 23.5 degrees. Most of the major stars in the sky still carry Arabic names, for the Muslim civilisation took the Greco-Roman constellations and added invididual star names as part of their development of the knowledge of the ancient world before transmitting it to the modern one. Ptolemy’s great works of astronomy, like the philosophical ones of Plato and Aristotle, largely reached Europe through Arabic translations.

There are many factors contributing to this confusion. Apart from religious and political disunity, perhaps the biggest reasons are the gulf between science and shariah and the simplistic, literalist approach to shariah that characterises much of Muslim religious discourse and ignores the magnificent theory of maqasid al-shariah, or the higher objectives and spirit of the sacred law of Islam.

Muslim scientists and experts in law (shariah) need to understand each other’s disciplines, and we need more individuals who are well-versed in both areas, as we had for centuries. For example, the 14th-century theologian Ibn Taymiyyah was an expert in the astronomy of his age, effortlessly discussing difficult and technical astronomical terms such as conjunction, the “arc of light” and the “arc of vision” as well as factors affecting the visibility of the new moon such as the angles between moon and sun, moon and earth and even factors such as atmospheric humidity. All this, of course, in addition to his renowned expertise in the traditional Islamic sciences.

This great scholar, writing seven centuries ago, correctly concluded that astronomical calculations could not be used to replace naked-eye sighting of the moon because, during his lifetime, no one could calculate the visibility of the new moon accurately. However, 700 years later, many traditionalists erroneously and anachronistically cling to the view of this great authority, or that of earlier expert astronomer-jurists, whilst ignoring the fact that science has progressed exponentially since then and that we are now able to confidently predict the visibility of the new moon with great precision.

Experts in the maqasid al-shariah, the theory of the holistic intent of Islamic law, agree that calculations can obviously be used to replace and confirm naked-eye sightings of the new moon, and to reject impossible claimed sightings. One leading Islamic scholar, Ahmad Shakir, argued this as far back as 1939, except that he advocated using conjunction (the birth of the moon) instead of crescent-visibility as the starting-point of the new lunar month: visibility calculations were not accurate enough in his time, and have only become extremely precise over the last few decades.

Contemporary experts in progressive interpretations of shariah agree that calculations of crescent-visibility can now be used to replace naked-eye sightings of the new moon. Those who disagree with this are unfortunately stuck in literalist approaches to shariah and the classical schools of Islamic law, arguing over individual texts from the Qur’an, Hadith and mediaeval books of Islamic law while forgetting the bigger picture, the holistic approach to the subject embodied in Maqasid theory and developed by the great scholars such as Ghazzali, Ibn Taymiyyah and Shatibi.

The problem may be illustrated with the the Prophet’s teaching (peace be upon him), “Begin fasting when you see the new moon, and end fasting when you see the new moon.” The opponents of calculation rigidly stick to a literalist interpretation of this instruction, insisting on physical sighting even when official declarations of moon-sighting are known to be flawed in many Muslim countries and when calculations give us a much more precise answer. They also forget that their mode of reasoning could equally be applied to the verse of the Qur’an (The Cow, 2:187) about fasting: “Eat and drink until the white thread of dawn becomes apparent to you from the black thread [of night].” Clearly, dawn only “becomes apparent” to us by physical sighting and therefore it could be argued that one cannot use calculations to determine prayer-times. Amazingly, it is not uncommon to see people going by clocks and timetables for prayers all year round, yet becoming extremely animated about rejecting calculations for the dates of Ramadan.

Although it is true that physically seeing the dawn, sunset, new moon and other astronomical phenomena helps to keep us connected to the signs of God in nature, insisting upon this for everyone is not realistic in the modern world and does not offer practical, pragmatic solutions for modern societies dominated by clocks and calendars. The literal meaning of the above-mentioned prophetic teaching would still apply to people wishing to remain as connected as possible to natural cycles, while its interpretation from a maqasid viewpoint in modern society, especially for governments and religious authorities, would be, “Base your worldwide, calculated lunar calendar on the visibility of the new moon.”

Bringing shariah into line with modernity and science using intrinsic Islamic principles of interpretation is an urgent need of our times. From human rights, especially those of workers and women in the Muslim world, to the place of faith and religion in modern societies, much progress can be made if we move away from literalist interpretations that fail to understand the nature of the modern world. As a symbol of Islam, the crescent moon is probably apt at the moment: it inspires chaos and disunity. But the good news is that moves to harmonise religion and reason, the sacred and the secular, are gaining momentum in the Muslim world. We can only hope that the clouds of confusion continue to clear and that the crescent moon will once again symbolise, not chaos and fragmentation, but enlightened Islamic contributions to humanity.

Ibn Sina believed that there exists a single set of principles that can explain the nature of the physical universe, the reason for its creation, and the relationship between mind and body, and he made it his life’s work to find connections between these apparently different fields, and ultimately to discover a theory of everything. This was an ambitious scheme, but then Ibn Sina, according to Yahya Michot of the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, was always supremely confident of his abilities, and believed that God had deliberately made him brighter than the average individual.

So, according to Ibn Sina, miracles must have a physical explanation. To take one example: most Muslims believe that the world will end one day and that when this happens, every member of the human race will return from the dead in a physical form, ready to be judged by God for their conduct during their lifetime. But Ibn Sina held that such bodily resurrection defies the laws of nature, and he thought that the day of judgement might take a different form to that traditionally taught in religion. He also doubted the traditional view of heaven and hell, in part because of his belief that matter cannot be everlasting – no fire can burn forever. And he thought that heaven and hell might take the form of a state of mind, instead of a physical space. The example he gave to support his theory was that of pain. He postulated that if it is possible to feel pain without experiencing pain in the physical sense – such as during a bad dream – it ought to be similarly possible to experience heaven or hell without physically travelling to a different place.

By Ehsan Masood.

Excerpt from Science & Islam: A History, book by Ehsan Masood, p. 106-107, slightly edited.

Question: Why is it so difficult for scientists to believe in a higher power?

Francis Collins: Science is about trying to get rigorous answers to questions about how nature works. And it’s a very important process that’s actually quite reliable if carried out correctly with generation of hypotheses and testing of those by accumulation of data and then drawing conclusions that are continually revisited to be sure they are right. So if you want to answer questions about how nature works, how biology works, for instance, science is the way to get there. Scientists believe in that they are very troubled by a suggestion that other kinds of approaches can be taken to derive truth about nature. And some I think have seen faith as therefore a threat to the scientific method and therefore it to be resisted. But faith in its perspective is really asking a different set of questions. And that’s why I don’t think there needs to be a conflict here. The kinds of questions that faith can help one address are more in the philosophical realm. Why are we all here? Why is there something instead of nothing? Is there a God? Isn’t it clear that those aren’t scientific questions and that science doesn’t have much to say about them? But you either have to say, well those are inappropriate questions and we can’t discuss them or you have to say, we need something besides science to pursue some of the things that humans are curious about. For me, that makes perfect sense. But I think for many scientists, particularly for those who have seen the shrill pronouncements from extreme views that threaten what they’re doing scientifically and feel therefore they can’t really include those thoughts into their own worldview, faith can be seen as an enemy. And similarly, on the other side, some of my scientific colleagues who are of an atheist persuasion are sometimes using science as a club over the head of believers basically suggesting that anything that can’t be reduced to a scientific question isn’t important and just represents superstition that should be gotten rid of. Part of the problem is, I think the extremists have occupied the stage. Those voices are the ones we hear. I think most people are actually kind of comfortable with the idea that science is a reliable way to learn about nature, but it’s not the whole story and there’s a place also for religion, for faith, for theology, for philosophy. But that harmony perspective does not get as much attention, nobody’s as interested in harmony as they are in conflict, I’m afraid.

Question: How has your study of genetics influenced your faith?

Francis Collins: My study of genetics certainly tells me, incontrovertibly that Darwin was right about the nature of how living things have arrived on the scene, by descent from a common ancestor under the influence of natural selection over very long periods of time. Darwin was amazingly insightful given how limited the molecular information he had was; essentially it didn’t exist. And now with the digital code of the DNA, we have the best possible proof of Darwin’s theory that he could have imagined. So that certainly tells me something about the nature of living things. But it actually adds to my sense that this is an answer to a “how?” question and it leaves the “why?” question still hanging in the air. Other aspects of our universe I think also for me as for Einstein raised questions about the possibility of intelligence behind all of this. Why is it that, for instance, that the constance that determines the behavior of matter and energy, like the gravitational constant, for instance, have precisely the value that they have to in order for there to be any complexity at all in the Universe. That is fairly breathtaking in its lack of probability of ever having happened. And it does make you think that a mind might have been involved in setting the stage. At the same time that does not imply necessarily that that mind is controlling the specific manipulations of things that are going on in the natural world. In fact, I would very much resist that idea. I think the laws of nature potentially could be the product of a mind. I think that’s a defensible perspective. But once those laws are in place, then I think nature goes on and science has the chance to be able to perceive how that works and what its consequences are.

Interviewed by David Hirschman.

The modal ontological argument purports to establish the astounding thesis that the mere possibility of the existence of God entails its actuality. That is, the argument says, once we agree that God can in principle exist we can’t but accept that God does actually exist. There are many distinct versions of the modal ontological argument but one of the most straightforward can be presented as follows.

According to ‘perfect being theism’, a form of theism most widely accepted among Judaeo-Christian-Islamic theists, God is a being that exists necessarily. Such a being is distinct from contingent beings like tables, cars, planets and people, which exist merely by chance. If God exists at all, there is no possible situation in which he fails to exist. Proponents of perfect being theism also typically say that God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and morally perfect because he is perfect in all respects. This observation suggests that the thesis ‘it is possible that God exists’ is equivalent to ‘it is possible that, necessarily, an all-powerful, all-knowing and morally perfect being exists.’ At this point the modal ontological argument appeals to a principle in modal logic that is widely accepted by logicians: If it is ‘possible’ that something is ‘necessary’, then that thing is simply ‘necessary.’ In other words, if we have the sentence ‘it is possible that something is necessary’ we can drop the phrase ‘it is possible that’ without changing the meaning. If we apply this logical principle to what we have derived so far, namely, the thesis ‘it is possible that, necessarily, an all-powerful, all-knowing and morally perfect being exists’, we can derive the thesis ‘it is necessary that an all-powerful, all-knowing and morally perfect being exists.’ This is equivalent to saying that God exists necessarily. If God exists necessarily, then God actually exists. Hence, the mere possibility of the existence of God logically entails its actuality.

Theists’ attempts to demonstrate the possibility of God involve some of the most creative ideas in philosophy. Clement Dore and Alexander Pruss, for example, try to establish the possibility that God exists by appealing to the fact that many people have encountered God in religious experiences. Dore and Pruss do not assume that these religious experiences are veridical – they are willing to accept that some (or even all) of them are hallucinations. However, according to them, if the existence of God is impossible then God cannot even appear in hallucinations. The fact that people encounter God in religious experiences suggests that, even if they are hallucinations, the existence of God is at least possible.

To take another example, Carl Kordig tries to establish the possibility that God exists by appealing to the so-called ‘ought implies can’ principle. If we ought to rescue a drowning child we can rescue that child. Conversely, if we cannot for some reason rescue a drowning child, then it is not the case that we ought to rescue that child. Kordig says that God ought to exist because he is a perfect being. And given that God ought to exist we can infer with the ‘ought implies can’ principle that he can exist as well. Hence, it is possible that God exists.

How does Gödel try to show that God’s existence is possible? He argues that it is possible because God has only positive properties. If God were to have both positive and negative properties simultaneously it would seem impossible for him to exist because they would contradict each other. For example, it would seem impossible for God to exist if he were to have the property of being all knowing (a positive property) and the property of being ignorant (a negative property) simultaneously. Therefore God, as the greatest possible being, has only positive properties, such as the properties of being all knowing, all powerful and morally perfect, which, according to Gödel, do not contradict each other.

Whether the abovementioned arguments for the possibility of God succeed is disputed. Yet the modal ontological argument is important because it seems to reduce the burden of proof on theists dramatically. They no longer need to rely on traditional arguments for the actuality of the existence of God, which appeal to the origin of the universe, the source of morality, the apparent design in nature, testimonies of miracles, and so on. All they need to do is show that the existence of God is at least possible. If we can show that, we can simply plug it into the modal ontological argument and derive, as a matter of logic, that the existence of God is actual. Hence, the modal ontological argument places us only a half-step away from a definitive proof of the existence of God.

By Yujin Nagasawa, published in OUPblog, November 8th 2017.

Yujin Nagasawa is Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director of the John Hick Centre for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Birmingham. His books include God and Phenomenal Consciousness: A Novel Approach to Knowledge Arguments (CUP, 2008), The Existence of God: A Philosophical Introduction (Routledge, 2011) and Miracles: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2017). He is currently President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Religion Editor of Philosophy Compass, and a member of the editorial board of Religious Studies, the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and the European Journal for Philosophy of Religion. He is also the author of Maximal God: A New Defence of Perfect Being Theism (OUP, 2017).

Not only has secularism failed to continue its steady global march but countries as varied as Iran, India, Israel, Algeria and Turkey have either had their secular governments replaced by religious ones, or have seen the rise of influential religious nationalist movements. Secularisation, as predicted by the social sciences, has failed.

To be sure, this failure is not unqualified. Many Western countries continue to witness decline in religious belief and practice. The most recent census data released in Australia, for example, shows that 30 per cent of the population identify as having ‘no religion’, and that this percentage is increasing. International surveys confirm comparatively low levels of religious commitment in western Europe and Australasia. Even the United States, a long-time source of embarrassment for the secularisation thesis, has seen a rise in unbelief. The percentage of atheists in the US now sits at an all-time high (if ‘high’ is the right word) of around 3 per cent. Yet, for all that, globally, the total number of people who consider themselves to be religious remains high, and demographic trends suggest that the overall pattern for the immediate future will be one of religious growth. But this isn’t the only failure of the secularisation thesis.

Scientists, intellectuals and social scientists expected that the spread of modern science would drive secularisation – that science would be a secularising force. But that simply hasn’t been the case. If we look at those societies where religion remains vibrant, their key common features are less to do with science, and more to do with feelings of existential security and protection from some of the basic uncertainties of life in the form of public goods. A social safety net might be correlated with scientific advances but only loosely, and again the case of the US is instructive. The US is arguably the most scientifically and technologically advanced society in the world, and yet at the same time the most religious of Western societies. As the British sociologist David Martin concluded in The Future of Christianity (2011): ‘There is no consistent relation between the degree of scientific advance and a reduced profile of religious influence, belief and practice.’

The story of science and secularisation becomes even more intriguing when we consider those societies that have witnessed significant reactions against secularist agendas. India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru championed secular and scientific ideals, and enlisted scientific education in the project of modernisation. Nehru was confident that Hindu visions of a Vedic past and Muslim dreams of an Islamic theocracy would both succumb to the inexorable historical march of secularisation. ‘There is only one-way traffic in Time,’ he declared. But as the subsequent rise of Hindu and Islamic fundamentalism adequately attests, Nehru was wrong. Moreover, the association of science with a secularising agenda has backfired, with science becoming a collateral casualty of resistance to secularism.

Turkey provides an even more revealing case. Like most pioneering nationalists, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish republic, was a committed secularist. Atatürk believed that science was destined to displace religion. In order to make sure that Turkey was on the right side of history, he gave science, in particular evolutionary biology, a central place in the state education system of the fledgling Turkish republic. As a result, evolution came to be associated with Atatürk’s entire political programme, including secularism. Islamist parties in Turkey, seeking to counter the secularist ideals of the nation’s founders, have also attacked the teaching of evolution. For them, evolution is associated with secular materialism. This sentiment culminated in the decision this June to remove the teaching of evolution from the high-school classroom. Again, science has become a victim of guilt by association.

The US represents a different cultural context, where it might seem that the key issue is a conflict between literal readings of Genesis and key features of evolutionary history. But in fact, much of the creationist discourse centres on moral values. In the US case too, we see anti-evolutionism motivated at least in part by the assumption that evolutionary theory is a stalking horse for secular materialism and its attendant moral commitments. As in India and Turkey, secularism is actually hurting science.

In brief, global secularisation is not inevitable and, when it does happen, it is not caused by science. Further, when the attempt is made to use science to advance secularism, the results can damage science. The thesis that ‘science causes secularisation’ simply fails the empirical test, and enlisting science as an instrument of secularisation turns out to be poor strategy. The science and secularism pairing is so awkward that it raises the question: why did anyone think otherwise?

Historically, two related sources advanced the idea that science would displace religion. First, 19th-century progressivist conceptions of history, particularly associated with the French philosopher Auguste Comte, held to a theory of history in which societies pass through three stages – religious, metaphysical and scientific (or ‘positive’). Comte coined the term ‘sociology’ and he wanted to diminish the social influence of religion and replace it with a new science of society. Comte’s influence extended to the ‘young Turks’ and Atatürk.

The 19th century also witnessed the inception of the ‘conflict model’ of science and religion. This was the view that history can be understood in terms of a ‘conflict between two epochs in the evolution of human thought – the theological and the scientific’. This description comes from Andrew Dickson White’s influential A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), the title of which nicely encapsulates its author’s general theory. White’s work, as well as John William Draper’s earlier History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874), firmly established the conflict thesis as the default way of thinking about the historical relations between science and religion. Both works were translated into multiple languages. Draper’s History went through more than 50 printings in the US alone, was translated into 20 languages and, notably, became a bestseller in the late Ottoman empire, where it informed Atatürk’s understanding that progress meant science superseding religion.

Today, people are less confident that history moves through a series of set stages toward a single destination. Nor, despite its popular persistence, do most historians of science support the idea of an enduring conflict between science and religion. Renowned collisions, such as the Galileo affair, turned on politics and personalities, not just science and religion. Darwin had significant religious supporters and scientific detractors, as well as vice versa. Many other alleged instances of science-religion conflict have now been exposed as pure inventions. In fact, contrary to conflict, the historical norm has more often been one of mutual support between science and religion. In its formative years in the 17th century, modern science relied on religious legitimation. During the 18th and 19th centuries, natural theology helped to popularise science.

The conflict model of science and religion offered a mistaken view of the past and, when combined with expectations of secularisation, led to a flawed vision of the future. Secularisation theory failed at both description and prediction. The real question is why we continue to encounter proponents of science-religion conflict. Many are prominent scientists. It would be superfluous to rehearse Richard Dawkins’s musings on this topic, but he is by no means a solitary voice. Stephen Hawking thinks that ‘science will win because it works’; Sam Harris has declared that ‘science must destroy religion’; Stephen Weinberg thinks that science has weakened religious certitude; Colin Blakemore predicts that science will eventually make religion unnecessary. Historical evidence simply does not support such contentions. Indeed, it suggests that they are misguided.

So why do they persist? The answers are political. Leaving aside any lingering fondness for quaint 19th-century understandings of history, we must look to the fear of Islamic fundamentalism, exasperation with creationism, an aversion to alliances between the religious Right and climate-change denial, and worries about the erosion of scientific authority. While we might be sympathetic to these concerns, there is no disguising the fact that they arise out of an unhelpful intrusion of normative commitments into the discussion. Wishful thinking – hoping that science will vanquish religion – is no substitute for a sober assessment of present realities. Continuing with this advocacy is likely to have an effect opposite to that intended.

Religion is not going away any time soon, and science will not destroy it. If anything, it is science that is subject to increasing threats to its authority and social legitimacy. Given this, science needs all the friends it can get. Its advocates would be well advised to stop fabricating an enemy out of religion, or insisting that the only path to a secure future lies in a marriage of science and secularism.

By Peter Harrison, published in Aeon, September 7th 2017.

Peter Harrison is an Australian Laureate Fellow and director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland. He is the author of The Territories of Science and Religion (2015), and the editor of Narratives of Secularization (2017).

Photo Credit

Ahmed Mater’s Magnetism.

By “we” let us mean the typical, ordinary human in typical, ordinary human environments. For the sake of discussion, take “born believers” to mean “born with such propensities that under ordinary developmental conditions—biological, social, and cultural—belief will typically arise.” This use of “born” parallels the colloquial way in which we may talk about someone as a “born musician” or “born athlete”—not actually coming out of the birth canal performing music or doing sports but having strong natural propensities to attain mastery in a particular area. Let us take “God” to mean an intentional being or agent with mental states and a will, who can and does act in the natural world. Let us also understand “God” to designate such an agent who has played some role in designing or ordering the natural world, has superhuman access to information about what is the case in the world, and is immortal. With these definitions in mind, then, the big question is: Are typical humans born with such propensities that, under ordinary developmental conditions, belief will likely arise in the existence of at least one God (i.e., an intentional agent who has played some role in ordering the natural world, has superhuman access to information about the world, and is immortal)? If that is our question, then we have reason to think the answer is yes.

To reach such a conclusion one must understand that children’s minds are not generic, all-purpose learning devices that treat all information the same. Selective pressures appear to have led to a mind that has natural dispositions to attend to some information over other and process information in particular ways to solve specific problems in navigating the world in which we live. To take one example, studies by Andrew Meltzoff and M. Keith Moore show that newborns—less than 24 hours old—can already pick out human faces in their environment and imitate facial expressions. Human minds have evolved in such a way as to render this task automatic and easy for newborns, perhaps because of how important it is for a hyper-social species such as ours to “read” each other’s attention, intentions, desires, and feelings from each others’ faces. Face detection, recognition, and imitation is only one example of the many subsystems of the human mind that appear to develop as a normal part of human maturation—what philosopher Robert McCauley has termed ‘maturationally natural’ cognition. Because these maturationally natural subsystems are a product of biological predispositions and environmental regularities, these systems are largely constant within and across cultures. These subsystems structure human interactions with their environment and subsequent learning and conceptual development. Consequently, they serve to inform and constrain cultural expression, including religious beliefs.

These maturationally natural cognitive subsystems encourage belief in at least one God, by creating a conceptual space that is most readily filled by such a God concept. That is, rather than the idea of a God being hard-wired into our cognitive systems, we are naturally inclined to reason about the world in such a way that a God concept fits like a key in a lock: God sits well with many of our natural intuitions such that belief in a God makes sense of how we conceive of the world and many events in our lives. I do not mean that we reflectively, rationally consider aspects of the world (such as its mere existence, apparent design or purposefulness, apparent coherence, etc.) and conclude that the existence of a God best accounts for these observations, though some people do. Rather, our naturally developing, untutored, conceptual equipment leads us to find the existence of at least one God intuitively attractive even absent any argumentation on the matter.

The primary culprits for our natural receptivity to believe in God appear to be the cognitive subsystems that we use to understand intentional agents, minds, and features of the natural world. From the first few months of life babies distinguish between those objects that move themselves in goal directed ways from all other objects. Before long they begin attributing rudimentary mental states such as goals and desires. On this foundation they build sophisticated understandings of how percepts inform beliefs, which guide the agent to act on desires leading to positive or negative emotional states. These ‘mindreading’ abilities are unparalleled by any other species. Importantly, the system that picks out intentional agents from other objects and things does not require a human body or even a three-dimensional form to be activated. Indeed, even three- and four-year-olds commonly have invisible companions with which they interact and converse, a demonstration of how facile humans are with agent and mind-based reasoning even without the aid of physical bodies, facial expressions, and other material data from which to work. Gods, then, pose no special problems.

Further, and more importantly, when children reason about agents (seen or unseen), they appear to err on the side of over-attributing access to information or knowledge in many situations. That is, preschool-aged children tend to think others know what is true of the world (at least as the child knows it), can perceive what is really there (even under conditions of darkness or occlusion), and can remember things that the child cannot remember.  Indeed, research by Bradley Wigger and Nicola Knight suggests that these attributions of superhuman information access may be especially true of unseen agents, including gods and invisible companions. Further, research by Emily Burdett and others shows that the idea of a being that lives forever appears to be acquired earlier by children than the idea that humans will eventually die. The idea of a being that is god-like on these dimensions appears to be easier for preschoolers to reason about than a human being.

These observations speak to the readiness for children to conceptualize a God, but not the motivation for them to do so. Some of the most intriguing research concerning explanatory motivation comes from Deborah Kelemen’s research team. Kelemen has shown that children naturally interpret features of the natural world as having purpose. Animals, plants, and even rocks and rivers are the way they are for a function external to themselves, and that is why they are here. Kelemen has also shown that this perception of purpose or function is closely related to supposing that the natural thing in question was created by someone. Preschoolers know that function is best explained by an intentional being bringing it about. This link between perceived functionality and intentionality creates a conceptual space for a designer or creator: who did it? Contrary to what Jean Piaget argued in the early 20^th century, children do not assume that humans account for the design they perceive. They recognize the need for someone(s) mightier. Enter a God.

Other scholars such as Scott Atran, Jesse Bering, Pascal Boyer, Stewart Guthrie, Robert McCauley, and Ilkka Pyysiainen have identified additional factors that may make belief in some kind of God relatively natural. Further, Ara Norenzayan and Dominic Johnson have each argued that belief in some kind of morally interested, watching deity may also be part of an adaptive gene-culture complex that then is selectively reinforced. Belief in a super observant moral police may make us more trustworthy and generous community members, leading to better fitness. Note that none of these scholars argue for the naturalness of theistic belief from any theological conviction. They recognize that the growing body of research in this area points to the typical human being naturally drawn to belief in something like a God by virtue of the way their minds develop in early childhood.

By Justin L. Barrett, published in Big Questions Online, March 5th 2013.

This definition, however, does not mention, at least not explicitly, what in my view is the fundamental characteristic of modern science namely the principle of “methodological naturalism”. This insists that science only admit explanations of natural phenomena that rely solely on natural causes and leave out entirely any appeal to supernatural agents, be they spirits, angels, demons, or God Himself. It is important to stress right away that Modern Science does not reject the concept of God or anyone’s belief in Him or other supernatural agents; it only insists that scientific explanations of natural phenomena be based on natural causes. This is simply a pragmatic, neutral, and constructive stance: first, scientists note that we have made much greater progress when we looked for natural explanations of phenomena (from lightning and earthquakes to epilepsy and schizophrenia) than when we assumed they were produced by God or demons. Secondly, with the diversity of cultures in the world, the only things we can agree on are the facts of nature we all observe in the same way. If we were to admit other non-scientific assumptions/explanations then each of us might have his/her biased cultural beliefs and “explanations” for this or that phenomenon.

This framework of Modern Science has posed a challenge to at least some Islamic conceptions of the world and nature, as often Muslims claim and insist that God acts physically and directly in the world, in cases of miracles or in everyday events, either at large scales (earthquakes, floods, etc.) or small, individual, personal scales (in responses to prayers, in particular). However, one must recall that this issue had been raised and debated by Muslim theologians in the past, with discussions of “secondary causes”. Indeed, God being the primary cause for everything, the debate between philosophers and theologians (Mu`tazilites and Ash`aris) was whether phenomena in nature followed laws and “secondary causes” or whether God had to be invoked in each and every instant for every atom, cell and ray or light.

Illustrious Muslim scientists of the golden age, particularly Ibn Al-Haytham (965-1040) and Al-Biruni (973-1048), insisted on natural explanations for the phenomena they were attempting to explain. The Mu`tazilites, chiefly represented by the great theologian Qadi `Abd al-Jabbar (d. ca. 1024) held the view that God operates according to rational laws. [2] The Ash`aris, however, who to this day are the largely dominant theological school in the Muslim world, insist that God holds every process, small or large, and acts at every instant. Muslims who are more in line with the modern scientific approach see no contradiction in believing that God “sustains” the world through the laws that he has put in nature, and that natural causes are indirectly God-allowed causes.

By Nidhal Guessoum, The Young Muslim’s Guide to Modern Science, Beacon Books, 2018.

Excerpt from chapter 3: What is Modern Science? And Why Do Some Thinkers Criticise It?/The Definition and Characteristics of Modern Science, p.38-40.

References

[1] Sardar, Ziauddin, ‘Islamic Science: The Way Ahead’ (the text of a conference lecture given in 1995), in Ehsan Masood (ed), How Do You Know? (London: Pluto Press, 2006, p. 181).

[2] Campanini, Massimo, ‘Qur’an and science: A hermeneutical approach’, Journal of Qur’anic Studies 7/1, 2005, p. 54-55.

Al-Ghazali, at least in his writings aimed at the masses, seemed to deny causality, in conformity with the normative Ash’ari school. However, there were many leading Ash’aris after Al-Ghazali, such as Al-Razi, Al-Amidi and others, some of whom endorsed belief in secondary causality, i.e. that God did create causal effects in created things. And there were vigorous discussions on these matters amongst the Ash’aris, Maturidis and Mu’tazilis.

The Task Force’s discussion [1] on causality was based additionally on the Shaykh Afifi A-Akiti’s new research whose central thesis is that Al-Ghazali was secretly more rationalist than he appeared in his texts aimed at the masses, and that his method enabled the rational and natural sciences, seen as heretical in his time, to be accepted into the mainstream of Islamic scholarship and discourse in later centuries.

Reinterpreting Al-Ghazali’s alleged opposition to science

Akiti’s paper was based on his study of Ghazali’s recently-discovered work, al-Madnun bihi ‘ala ghayri ahlihi (“That which is restricted from those unfit for it”). Akiti refers to “The good, the bad and the ugly” of Ghazali’s conception of rational or philosophical knowledge, denoting respectively the knowledge he set out in his Madnun, Tahafut al-Falasifah (Incoherence of the Philosophers) and Maqasid al-Falasifah (Objectives of the Philosophers). In the latter, he had reproduced Ibn Sina’s Hikayah.

Afifi Al-Akiti refers to Al-Ghazali as Sunni, orthodox, Ash’ari, Sufi, Aristotelian and rationalist and claims that although he single-handedly managed to get rational and natural sciences admitted by the backdoor into theological scholarship, some of his contemporaries and successors saw through this. For instance, his “appropriation” (talwih) of Greek rational sciences was condemned by Ibn Taymiyyah as “deception” (talbis), but described by Sabra as “naturalisation” (tatbi’).

Nevertheless, claims Al-Akiti, Al-Ghazali was so effective that within a century of his passing Muslim theological schools and madrassas were churning out major influential works in rational and natural sciences.

Little agreement on Al-Ghazali’s legacy towards Science

There was much discussion amongst the Task Force members about Ghazali’s views on causality, among other things, and his alleged role in degrading the support for science at the height of the Muslim Golden Age of Science. The members expressed concerns about Al-Ghazali’s dissemination of knowledge and his views according to three levels of his audience: the elite, the scholars and the masses as to whether he was right to restrict promotion of the rational sciences, which he had sometimes seemingly attacked in other works written for the masses, to the elite, or whether he had a duty to be more transparent and consistent.

For example, he wrote that “natural sciences are a mixture of truth and falsehood, correctness and errors.” Furthermore, mathematics had to be avoided because it was often the preliminary and foundational science to “erroneous sciences”: “We forbid the study of the science of Euclid and Ptolemy (the details of calculation and geometry) – although it makes the mind and the spirit stronger – because of what it leads to; indeed, it is the preliminary to the sciences of the ancients, which contain wrong and harmful creeds…”

It was noted that Ghazali clearly said different things in different books and at different times, and his authorship of various works is sometimes disputed. For example, his Jawahir al-Qur’an (Substances of the Qur’an), in which he again addresses some of these controversial topics, is one of his last works, and there is also his Qawa’id al-‘Aqa’id (Principles of Creeds). Montgomery Watt severely doubted whether the Mishkat al-Anwar was by Ghazali, especially the last chapter.

Other topics relevant to the Task Force that had been addressed by Al-Ghazali were his assessment of the validity of philosophical proofs of God, and his view on causality: Ibn Rushd said in his reply to Ghazali, Tahafut al-Tahafut (The Incoherence of the Incoherence), that Al-Ghazali had used a causal argument to refute causal effects: in short, he had “used causality to deny causality!” The hadith scholar Ibn al-Salah also attacked Al-Ghazali in this regard. Frank argues that Al-Ghazali used atomistic language but ultimately argued against atomism.[2] Griffel [3], in his discussion of the 17th chapter of the Tahafut, argued that Al-Ghazali denied deterministic causality, i.e. that things had intrinsic causal powers.

With regard to the emphatic denial of causality and takfir (judgment of heresy or blasphemy) of naturalism found there, Task Force Members suggested that this is disputed within the Ash’ari school, with many Ash’ari theologians endorsing God acting through secondary causality. And Al-Ghazali seems to have endorsed secondary causality in the Madnun.

Skepticism and the challenges of re-writing and re-interpreting centuries of scholarship and its harm aside, Al-Ghazali’s influence and legacy in the Islamic world, both Sunni and Shia, is so immense and that the Task Force members agreed that discussion of some of these issues is crucial to the “Islam and Science” conversation, although some members questioned how relevant pre-modern theology was to the advancement of modern science in contemporary Muslim-majority societies. The next steps should be “integration” of the rational and natural sciences into Islamic worldviews.

By Usama Hasan.

Muslim World Science Initiative, 2016, Report of İhsanoğlu Task Force on Islam and Science, London and Islamabad

Muslim Responses to Science’s Big Questions

References

[1] List of Task Force members: Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, Usama Hasan, Tuncay Zorlu, Nidhal Guessoum, Bruno Guiderdoni, Mehdi Golshani, Farid Panjwani, Mohammed Ghaly, Mohammed Hazim Shah, Mohammed Basil Altaie, Afifi Al-Akiti, Rana Dajani, Philip Clayton, Willem B. Drees, Athar Osama

[2] Richard M. Frank, Ghazzali and the Ash’arite School, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 1994

[3] Frank Griffel, Al-Ghazali’s Philosophical Theology, OUP, 2009

Photo Credit

Detail from ‘The Meeting of the Theologians’ by Abd Allah Musawwir, mid-16th century. Courtesy Wikipedia.

Odeh Al-Jayyousi, Professor and head of innovation at Arabian Gulf University in Bahrain, scholar in sustainable innovation and a member of UN Global Scientific Advisory Panel, for UN Environment’s Global Environment Outlook 6 (GEO6), argues that Islamic worldview represents a unique model for a transition to sustainable development by focusing on justice, degrowth and harmony between human and nature.

He commented that Islam views the environmental challenges as an indicator for a moral and ethical crisis. Looking at the creation of human, Earth, and cosmos as signs of the Creator (Kitab Manthoor) is a key in Islamic values.

Prof. Al-Jayyousi elaborated that Islamic worldview defines a good life (Hayat Tayebah) living lightly on Earth (Zohd) and caring for both people and nature. Islamic discourse offers a sense of hope and optimism about the possibility of attaining harmony between human and nature. Earth will find a balance if humans rethink their lifestyles and mindsets as stated in the Quran:

Corruption has appeared in both land and sea
Because of what people’s own hands have brought
So that they may taste something of what they have done
So that hopefully they will turn back
Qur’an 30: 41

Professor Al-Jayyousi calls to revive the holistic view of Islam which is founded on the notion of harmony and “natural state” (fitra) and in respecting balance (mizan) and proportion (mikdar) in the systems of the universe. These notions provide an ethical dimension and a mandate for all humans to respect nature and all forms of life.

Hence, the overcoming environmental crisis and mitigating the impact of climate change, from an Islamic perspective is underpinned by defining the role of humans as trustees and stewards (khalifah). This balance has been disturbed because to human choices which result in overconsumption, overexploitation and overuse of resources.

Islamic values call to save integrity and to protect the diversity of all forms of life. Professor Al-Jayyousi commented that the ecological crisis is linked to human ethics and values. Human actions are responsible for the global ecological crisis. “Reflecting on the main environmental problems, such as the destruction of natural habitats, loss of biodiversity, climate change, and erosion of soil, we see that all are triggered by human greed and ignorance. Human responsibility is to save and protect livelihood and ecosystem services to ensure a sustainable civilization learning from and reflecting on the fate of past civilizations”, said Professor Al-Jayyousi.

He cited a verse from the Holy Book, Quran, “Every living thing is in a state of worship”. He commented that when one hurts a bird or a plant, he/she is silencing a community of worshippers. To celebrate the symphony of life, all humans need to celebrate and protect biological and cultural diversity.

Islamic worldview calls to make a transition to a sustainable society and economy by adopting responsible development and respecting sustainability principles. This change requires a shift in norms and practices. Religion can become a powerful part of the solution if humans embody a holistic spiritual view towards mankind, earth and cosmos.

In 2015 in Istanbul, the Muslim world in its Islamic declaration for climate change set the framework for an ethical code of conduct to build a low-emission climate resilient future.

Al-Jayyousi aspires to see a new Islamic discourse that emphasizes and links faith, reason and empathy to ensure an ecological insight (Baseera). He calls to rethink educational systems that neglected the beauty and majesty of nature and the cosmos.

“The extinction of species around us which are simply communities like us (Ummam Amthalokom) may extend to humankind unless we change our worldviews and development models”, warns Prof. Al-Jayyousi.  He calls to revive the concept of Green Endowment Fund (Waqf) to support a transition to sustainable economy by promoting innovation (ijtihad)  inspired by nature and culture.

He proposed a conceptual model with three domains to address climate change and sustainability:

• Green activism (Jihad)
• Green innovation (Ijtihad)
• Green lifestyle (Zohd).

He refers to this as a Green JIZ model, which represents an Islamic response to climate change embodying the concept of de-growth.

“Conflict and poor governance are putting the Middle East and North Africa at jeopardy” points out Prof. Al-Jayyousi. He calls for a sustainable region that is founded on human and environmental justice. An optimist, Prof. Al-Jayyousi is inspired by prophet Mohammed saying “If it is the Last day of life and you have a small plant, make sure you plant it”.

By Odeh Al-Jayyousi, published in UN Environment.

Professor Odeh Al-Jayyousi is the head of Innovation and Technology Management at Arabian Gulf University, Bahrain. He published a book on “Islam and sustainable development”, UK, (2012) and a book on Integral Innovation, 2017, UK. He is a member of UN GEO6- Scientific Advisory Panel.

Photo Credit

The Great Mosque at Djenné in Mali at sunrise, Credit Damon Winter The NYT.

Western readers often overlook the Muslim world’s speculative fiction. I use the term quite broadly, to capture any story that imagines the implications of real or imagined cultural or scientific advances. Some of the first forays into the genre were the utopias dreamt up during the cultural flowering of the Golden Age. As the Islamic empire expanded from the Arabian peninsula to capture territories spanning from Spain to India, literature addressed the problem of how to integrate such a vast array of cultures and people. The Virtuous City(al-Madina al-fadila), written in the 9th century by the scholar Al-Farabi, was one of the earliest great texts produced by the nascent Muslim civilisation. It was written under the influence of Plato’s Republic, and envisioned a perfect society ruled by Muslim philosophers – a template for governance in the Islamic world.

As well as political philosophy, debates about the value of reason were a hallmark of Muslim writing at this time. The first Arabic novel, The Self-Taught Philosopher (Hayy ibn Yaqzan, literally Alive, Son of Awake), was composed by Ibn Tufail, a Muslim physician from 12th-century Spain. The plot is a kind of Arabic Robinson Crusoe, and can be read as a

thought experiment in how a rational being might learn about the universe with no outside influence. It concerns a lone child, raised by a gazelle on a remote island, who has no access to human culture or religion until he meets a human castaway. Many of the themes in the book – human nature, empiricism, the meaning of life, the role of the individual in society – echo the preoccupations of later Enlightenment-era philosophers, including John Locke and Immanuel Kant.

We also have the Muslim world to thank for one of the first works of feminist science fiction. The short story ‘Sultana’s Dream’ (1905) by Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain, a Bengali writer and activist, takes place in the mythical realm of Ladyland. Gender roles are reversed and the world is run by women, following a revolution in which women used their scientific prowess to overpower men. (Foolishly, the men had dismissed the women’s learning as a ‘sentimental nightmare’.) The world is much more peaceful and pleasant as a result. At one point, the visitor Sultana notices people giggling at her. Her guide explains:

‘The women say that you look very mannish.’
‘Mannish?’ said I, ‘What do they mean by that?’
‘They mean that you are shy and timid like men.’

Later, Sultana grows more curious about the gender imbalance:

‘Where are the men?’ I asked her.
‘In their proper places, where they ought to be.’
‘Pray let me know what you mean by “their proper places”.’
‘O, I see my mistake, you cannot know our customs, as you were never here before. We shut our men indoors.’

By the early 20th century, speculative fiction from the Muslim world emerged as a form of resistance to the forces of Western colonialism. For example, Muhammadu Bello Kagara, a Nigerian Hausa author, wrote Ganďoki (1934), a novel set in an alternative West Africa; in the story, the natives are involved in a struggle against British colonialism, but in a world populated by jinns and other mystical creatures. In the following decades, as Western empires began to crumble, the theme of political utopia was often laced with a certain political cynicism. The Moroccan author Muhammad Aziz Lahbabi’s novel The Elixir of Life(Iksir al-Hayat) (1974), for example, centres on the discovery of an elixir that can bestow immortality. But instead of filling society with hope and joy, it foments class divisions, riots, and the unravelling of the social fabric.

An even darker brand of fiction has emerged from Muslim cultures today. Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013) reimagines Frankenstein in modern-day Iraq, among the fallout from the 2001 invasion. In this retelling, the monster is created from body parts of different people who have died because of ethnic and religious violence – and eventually goes on a rampage of its own. In the process, the novel becomes an exploration of the senselessness of war and the deaths of innocent bystanders.

In the United Arab Emirates, Noura Al Noman’s young adult novel Ajwan (2012) follows the journey of a young, amphibious alien as she fights to recapture her kidnapped son; the book is being made into a TV series, and touches on themes including refugees and political indoctrination. In Saudi Arabia, Ibraheem Abbas and Yasser Bahjatt’s debut science-fiction novel HWJN (2013) explores gender relations, religious bigotry and ignorance, and offers a naturalistic explanation for the existence of jinns who reside in a parallel dimension. The Egyptian writer Ahmad Towfiq’s bleak novel Utopia (2008), meanwhile, envisions a gated community in 2023, where the cream of Egyptian society has retreated after the country’s wholesale economic and social collapse. And in post-Arab Spring Egypt, the novelist Basma Abdel Aziz conjures a Kafkaesque world in The Queue(2016) – a book set in the aftermath of an unsuccessful uprising, in which helpless citizens struggle to get by under the thumb of an absurd and sinister dictatorship.

Speculative fiction is often lumped in with European Romanticism and read as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution. But if this gallop through the centuries of Muslim endeavour shows anything, it’s that pondering fantastical technologies, imagining utopian social arrangements, and charting the blurry boundaries between mind, machine and animal, are not the sole preserve of the West.

By Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad, published in aeon, June 27th, 2017.

Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad is a senior data scientist at Groupon, an affiliate associate professor of computer science at the University of Washington, and an inventor and artist. His research focuses on behavioural modelling, machine learning, and natural language-processing. He also writes for Three Quarks Daily (3QD).

Photo Credit

Flying Over Istanbul and the Galata Tower on the Magic Carpet from the 1001 Nights, Turkish miniature, 19th C. Photo by Rex.

Ramadan is a month of worship but it is also a time for reflection, and for slowing down our lives and appreciating this wonderful world that we have been given.

As the late philanthropist Sir John Templeton wrote: “Already science increasingly reveals creations of awesome magnitude, intricacy, beauty, and order, and we sense that what lies beyond our instruments is vastly greater still. It is finally an experience that should bring us to our knees in humility, to worship the infinite, omniscient, eternal Creator. We sense that maybe the universe has been made in such a way that its meaning and purpose somehow involve us and demand our attention and worship and even our participation. It is a book of wonder which can invoke in us a new kind humility, a deep devotion to the Creator of the vast unseen…”
This cosmic sense of awe and wonder, indeed this cosmic spirituality, has also been felt by scientists who are not religious, at least not traditionally so. Albert Einstein wrote: “The scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation… His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.”
And in “The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God,” the even less religious Carl Sagan wrote: “I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship.” Sagan realized that science brings forth a new type of spirituality that could at least complement the spirituality of the traditional religions.
In “Pale Blue Dot,” he wrote: “A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.”
The Islamic tradition is replete with references to the cosmos and its harmony. The Qur’an calls on Muslims to reflect and draw lessons from this mesmerizing creation. It says: “Indeed, in the creation of the heavens and the earth and the alternation of the night and the day are signs for those of understanding… who reflect on the creation of the heavens and the earth, ‘Our Lord, You did not create this in vain… Glory to Thee!”
It also stresses the order and balance in nature: “Verily, all things have We created in proportion and measure.” In addition: “And on the earth We have produced all kinds of things in due balance.”
In the 12th century, Fakhr Al-Din Al-Razi, the great Muslim theologian and philosopher, insisted that each object in nature has its proper mode of physical existence among many possible ones, a mode that is precisely predetermined by the Creator. For example, celestial objects have precise orbits and space-time coordinates that show “a complete ordinance” and “a profound wisdom” — similar ideas to how we see the cosmos today.
Finally, the Qur’an reminds us to remain humble, for “you have received but little of knowledge.”

By Nidhal Guessoum, published in Arab News, May 20th 2018.

Nidhal Guessoum is a professor of astronomy and physics at the American University of Sharjah, UAE. Twitter at: www.twitter.com/@NidhalGuessoum.

It wasn’t Einstein or even astronomer Edwin Hubble who came up with the Big Bang theory, but Georges Lemaître, a Belgian astrophysicist and Roman Catholic priest. Whereas Einstein and most of his contemporaries assumed the universe was static and eternal, Lemaître derived new solutions to Einstein’s relativity theory that indicated an expanding universe. Imagining what must have set the expansion in motion, he developed his evocative image of “the Cosmic Egg exploding at the moment of the creation.” With his theory, Lemaître brought a millennia-old philosophical question—whether the universe is eternal or finite—into the domain of empirical science.

To Jamal Mimouni, an astrophysicist at Algeria’s Mentouri University, Lemaître’s work is a demonstration of the value a religious worldview offers in tackling such questions. “Although Lemaître always stated that he kept his beliefs and science separate, his faith might have inspired him to consider ideas that others didn’t,” he says. “Many others were blinded by their adherence to the philosophy that the universe is eternal, but he didn’t have that problem.” By providing a diversity of viewpoints, researchers with an explicitly religious perspective can help push cosmology in new directions.

The multiverse attracts adherents because of its philosophical appeal, not its scientific rigor.

At the boundaries of our knowledge, where physics meets metaphysics, lie questions which are beyond scientific reach, at least for the moment. As cosmologists push at these boundaries, they derive answers, consciously or unconsciously, from philosophical preferences. Mimouni and other devout Muslim scientists find that the need to articulate metaphysical presumptions is often more apparent to them than to their colleagues. “In my view, the only problem with modern cosmology is that some cosmologists consider their findings final and make claims in the name of science, when these are actually metaphysical claims,” says Mehdi Golshani, a theoretical physicist and philosopher at Iran’s Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, the country’s leading research university. “The problem of creation is not a matter of physics alone.” Addressing the leading scientific questions of our age calls for a profound understanding not only of the science, but also of the philosophy of science, whether rooted in a theistic or a secular personal ideology.

Golshani has sought such understanding from an early age. “When I was in high school, one of my teachers encouraged me to study Arabic and Islamic jurisprudence and Islamic philosophy outside of school,” he recalls. He studied physics at Tehran University and later at the University of California, Berkeley, and in 1995 he established Iran’s first philosophy of science department at Sharif.

An area where cosmology intersects with philosophy is the suitability of the universe for life, a fact which we now think is an overwhelmingly unlikely coincidence. Small changes to any of a number of fundamental physical constants would have resulted in a radically different universe, presumably inhospitable to life as we know it. This apparent coincidence led to the formulation of the anthropic principle, which, in its most general form, simply notes that the values of physical parameters should be compatible with carbon-based life; stronger forms elevate this observation to a necessary condition for the universe, akin to the classical design argument.

Faced with the prospect of a universe seemingly designed to support life, many strict materialists have turned to multiverse theories. Multiple universes are predicted by a variety of physical theories, including certain inflationary universe models, the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and string theory. With countless universes of diverse composition, the remarkable coincidence dissolves into a selection bias. Rather than living in a universe finely tuned to produce us, we simply evolved in an appropriately tuned universe, while many sterile universes litter the multiverse.

Although multiverse theories may explain the universe’s suitability for life, the idea lacks empirical support and is arguably motivated by metaphysical discomfort with the alternatives. “Scientists who defend this hypothesis, and who at present represent a majority in the community, do it as much on the basis of a philosophical rejection of the anthropic principle as on the basis of some cosmological principles which lend it support,” wrote astrophysicist Nidhal Guessoum of the American University of Sharjah in his recent book Islam’s Quantum Question. Located at the seam of physics and metaphysics, multiverse hypotheses attract adherents because of their philosophical appeal, not their scientific rigor.

From the Muslim perspective, cosmological fine-tuning isn’t a problem.

From a broader perspective, the multiverse is one of several possible explanations, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. While the idea of a multiverse is also compatible with an Islamic worldview, many Muslims find a theological interpretation of fine-tuning more compelling. To them the remarkable coincidence is just another facet of the argument from design, which has a long pedigree in Islamic thought. The ninth-century philosopher Al-Kindi was the first Muslim thinker to formulate the argument, while Ibn Rushd’s Kitabal-Kashf, written in the 12th century, put it forth in nearly the same form that would be used by William Paley six centuries later.

From the Muslim perspective, fine-tuning isn’t a problem, but rather an example of the beauty and order of the cosmos. Multiverse proposals seem to willfully undermine this beauty, positing a plethora of universes to account for the observed characteristics of our universe. To Mimouni, the idea is also unscientific. “From an ontological point of view, it’s a catastrophe, because you’re proposing things you can never observe, universes that are causally disconnected from our universe,” he says. “In fact, it’s against the philosophy of science as we understand it because it talks about entities that can never be studied or have their existence proven.”

Mimouni raises similar objections to scientific explanations of creation from nothing. In the 1970s and ’80s, cosmologists such as Edward Tryon and Alex Vilenkin suggested that the universe may have come into existence because of a quantum fluctuation, but Mimouni argues that these models are based on a misapplication of quantum mechanics to a domain beyond its scope. More importantly, physical theories of creation ex nihilo are not strictly ex nihilobecause the laws of nature are assumed to precede the universe. “If you say ‘from nothing’ but that doesn’t include the laws of the universe, then that’s not really ‘nothing’,” he says. “It’s deeply philosophically and scientifically problematic. Basically, it’s an attempt to make a kun fayakun [the Islamic fiat lux] without a deity.”

Basil Altaie, an Iraqi physicist and philosopher at Yarmouk University in Jordan, goes one step further, seeing the Qur’an as a guide for scientific inquiries. Uncomfortable with the contradiction between the prevalent idea of an ever-expanding universe and Qur’anic eschatology, which describes the heavens being rolled up like a scroll, he has reworked solutions to Einstein’s equations starting with different assumptions. “We found a possibility for a flat universe to go through a collapse phase, a Big Crunch, before bouncing back to a new creation,” he says. Such a fate would be consistent with Qur’anic verses.

Altaie has also drawn on Islamic thought to address the notoriously contentious issue of interpreting quantum mechanics. According to a principle championed by the 11th-century Muslim theologian Al-Ghazali, the world is re-created every instant in a continuous act of divine intervention. To Altaie, continuous re-creation offers a novel interpretation of quantum mechanics. The moment-by-moment re-creation can unpredictably alter the values of physical parameters such as position and momentum, thus explaining both quantum indeterminism and uncertainty. Unlike most interpretations of quantum mechanics, Altaie’s makes a testable prediction: that gravitational time dilation described by general relativity would reduce the frequency of re-creation, so macroscopic quantum states should be detectable in strong gravitational fields, such as near the event horizon of a black hole.

Although some might deny it, all scientists approach research with their own preconceptions guiding the questions they ask and the interpretations they construct. As cosmology tackles ever-grander questions, a broader perspective can be found by informed dialogue between researchers with theistic and secular viewpoints. “Any question can be resolved in different ways, starting from different perspectives and explaining the same data,” says Mimouni, echoing the arguments of Ibn Rushd. “Experiments are the ultimate test, but they don’t show that a given perspective is the only valid one, just that it’s just one way of reaching the truth. We cannot exhaust all the possible ways of explaining something.”

By Sedeer El-Showk, published in Nautilus, January 2017.

Sedeer El-Showk is a science writer based in Morocco and Finland. @InspiringSci