Science and Faith in Islam

Science and Faith in Islam

Science and Faith in Islam

Nature is a Sign from the heavens. It offers an inexhaustible reservoir of knowledge that reinforces faith. Man is a part of nature, immersed in the same ocean, connected to it by Divine Grace. This interconnectivity between man and nature offers humankind unlimited vistas to perceive Divine Signs in nature, and discharge the heavenly mandate to know and serve God.
It is a tragedy that modern man has dissociated himself from nature. He has accepted the compartmentalized assumptions of science that the body and soul are separate and distinct. He relegates the soul to “the other world”, while assuming that the body belongs to “this world”. In such a soulless world, he cannot find joy and happiness, justice and injustice, feeling and companionship. What he does feel is der angst. He is lonely, lost.
The function of science is to find the truth. In this grand enterprise, the mind, the body, the soul and the spirit work together. Man is both spirit and body. It is not the body that contains the spirit. It is the spirit that surrounds the body many times over. The secular cannot comprehend the spiritual. It is the spiritual, supported and confirmed by the empirical and the rational that leads to the truth.
Secular science has paraded itself claiming not only that it discovers the truth but that it has a monopoly on that truth. Modern man accepts the judgment of science as gospel. Alas! In the bifurcated and fossilized world-view of secular science, there is no feeling, no emotion and no love, only atoms and protons and chemical changes.
In this Series on Science and Faith we examine the various methods of acquiring knowledge, their characteristics and their limitations. The approach is universal and spiritual. The Qur’an is used as a source material, and the perspective is Islamic. This is a grand attempt, to integrate science, history and faith and offer humankind the possibility of an integrated world-view in which science and faith are partners, not antagonists.