Can Science Survive?

The vendetta between human intellect and divine revelation (religion, Iqbal’s intuition or ishq) is quite old; in fact it dates back to the time when man first started to argue about physical objects and natural phenomena using his reason. In the beginning, man offered simplistic explanations for the natural phenomena. For instance, it rains because God wills it. And God has created the sun to provide heat and daylight and the moon for moonlight during the night. Again that God punishes the evil and the wicked and rewards the good people.

Pointing toward this primitive state of human thought, Popper (6) described in the context of Greek mythology, “To put it crudely, the pre-scientific myth-makers said, when they saw a thunderstorm approaching: ‘oh yes, Zeus is angry.’ And when they saw that the sea was rough, they said: ‘Poseidon (the Greek god of the sea) is angry.’ That was the type of explanation which was found satisfactory before the rationalist tradition introduced new standards of explanation.”

With the passage of time, man started to notice certain regularities, order, and periodicities in some natural phenomena (changing of weathers, for instance) and using such observations, he was able to make some simple predictions. After gaining confidence, man continued attempting to explain the happenings around him using his observations and reason. Gradually, he started explaining some natural phenomena which in the past he had ascribed to God. The gradual development of his intellectual faculty gave birth to intellectual process which we call rationalism.

It is now well understood that the natural phenomena in the material world can be explained rationally without invoking divine facilitation; such of them as have defied explanation so far could possibly be explained in the future when man’s knowledge has appropriately increased for this purpose.

What about the spiritual events and the supernatural entities? Those are beyond the realm of reason because they cannot be sense-perceived. Rational explanations are crucially dependent on the sense-perception data; hence the realm of rationalism is confined to the material world only.

Now the question arises: in what way does the conflict of human intellect (reason) and divine revelation arise? I have mentioned above that in the primitive stage of his development, man could only explain the natural events in terms of some god. When eventually he became capable of providing rational explanations to many natural phenomena and systems and synthesizing the observed facts into hypotheses and theories, some conflicts came to light between the old ‘divine’ and the new rational explanations. The believers of divine explanations wouldn’t give up their original simplistic explanations because that seemed to detract some power from their perceived God who was in most cases believed to be almighty and immutable. That is how Galileo and Copernicus affairs cropped up.

Although the accounts of the fiercest battles between the Christian revelation and human intellect are now buried in the European history of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries and a symbiotic equilibrium now exists between them in the west, the issue is still alive in the Muslim world. After the downfall of Baghdad in 1258 CE and the contemporaneous eclipse of the Abbasid Empire, the orthodox ulema had gained ascendancy in the Muslim world and banished, so to say, the rational tradition, which the great Muslim scientists and philosophers had established. Their battle cry was to return to the roots of Islam and do away with the innovations. The seeds of such orthodox thinking already existed even before the fall of Baghdad.

Ibn Taimiyyah who was born soon after the fall of Baghdad started preaching, in his adult life, to the Muslims to return to the original roots of Islam in which philosophy and the rational sciences did not play any role. Despite the apparent anachronism, this appealed to the defeatist Muslims who wanted to recapture the old glories. Ibn Taimiyyah despised rationalism and the philosophers and chose to adhere to the literal meanings of the Holy Scriptures.

Serajul Haque (9) has commented on Ibn Taimiyyah’s attitude toward philosophers and sciences in these words: “He (Ibn Taimiyyah) considers the syllogistic process of thinking artificial and useless. In his opinion, God endowed human beings with ‘necessary knowledge’ to understand their Creator and His attributes. But men invented, from the very early times, various sciences which the Shariah of Islam does not require for the guidance of mankind… He hates Aristotle and his followers for believing in the eternity of the world (qidam-al-alam), though most of the philosophers were against this view,” He outpoured his disdain further as described by Serajul Haque (9), “Ibn Taimiyyah rejects this theory (theory of atoms) on the ground that it is an innovation and that early Muslims knew nothing about it. Further, the theologians are not unanimous; some of them totally deny the existence of atoms and the composition of bodies from them …. None of the companions of Prophet nor their successors nor anyone prior to them in natural religion (din-al-fitrah) ever spoke about indivisible atoms. Naturally, therefore it cannot be suggested that those people ever had in mind the term ‘body’ and its being an assembly of atoms. No Arab could conceive of the sun, the moon, the sky, the hills, the air, the animals, and the vegetables being combinations of atoms. Was it not impossible for them to conceive of an atom without any dimension? The traditionists, the mystics, and the jurists never thought of such doctrines.” According to Serajul Haque (10) further, Ibn Taimiyyah believed, “..Allah has given to the Muslims more knowledge and perspicuity of expression combined with good action and faith than all classes of people.” Ibn Taimiyyah seemed to have his facts wrong. According to him, our predecessors and forefathers had greater knowledge than their descendents and the knowledge that they had was unchanging and permanent. The fact is that the knowledge is growing with the passage of time.

Unfortunately, he could not realize that the human knowledge did not begin with Arabs and the ancient Greek philosophers should not be despised simply because they were non-Muslims (they couldn’t be Muslims since they lived much earlier than the advent of Islam) or non- Arabs. Human knowledge is built brick by brick. Whosoever ignores the contributions of the ancient Greek philosophers to the human knowledge is culpable of committing a grave mistake. The Greek knowledge and their rationalist tradition are the valuable heritage of the humankind.

For example, Anaxagoras who was born around 500 BCE (more than one thousand years before the advent of Islam) was a great philosopher. According to Bertrand Russell (8), “It was he who first explained that the moon shines by reflected light…..Anaxagoras gave the correct theory of eclipses… The sun and stars, he said, are fiery stones but we do not feel the heat of the stars because they are too distant.”

Ibn Taimiyyah had started his onslaught on the philosophers from where al-Ghazali had left it earlier. For instance, al-Ghazali stated in his religious foreword of his “Incoherence of the Philosophers” (1), “The sources of their (al-Farabi, Ibn Sina and others) unbelief is their high-sounding names such as Socrates, Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, and their likes, and the exaggeration and misguided-ness of groups of their followers… There is no basis of their unbelief other than traditional, conventional imitation, like the imitation of Jews and Christians since their upbringing and that of their offspring has followed a course other than the religion of Islam.”

Al-Ghazali opposed rational thought with a dedicated ferocity. Explaining the nature of fire, he said (2), “Our (al-Ghazali’s) opponent claims that the agent of burning is the fire exclusively; this is natural, not a voluntary agent, and cannot abstain from what it is in its nature when it is brought into contact with a receptive substratum. This, we deny, saying: The agent of the burning is God, through His creating the black in the cotton and the disconnection of its parts, and it is God who made the cotton burn and made it ashes either through the intermediation of angels or without intermediation… Indeed the philosophers have no other proof than the observation of the occurrence of the burning, when there is contact with fire, but observation proves only simultaneity, not causation, and in reality, there is no other cause but God.”

Although it is spooky, Al-Ghazali’s claim that his postulate could not be logically refuted is true. Similarly, he could not prove that it was indeed God who burnt the cotton when it was brought in contact with fire. A statement which is irrefutable is not necessarily true. According to Popper (7), “There have been thinkers who believed that the truth of a theory may be inferred from its irrefutability. Yet this is an obvious mistake, considering that there may be two incompatible theories, which are equally irrefutable – for example, determinism and indeterminism. Now since two incompatible theories cannot be true, we see from the fact that both theories are irrefutable, that irrefutability cannot entail truth.”

Regardless of the above philosophical argument, al-Ghazali’s thesis is of the same genre as “Zeus is angry” and “Poseidon is angry”. While the Muslim world is still mired in condemning rationalism, thanks to al-Ghazali, Ibn Taimiyyah, and their followers, the rationalist west built on its materialistic understanding of the burning action of fire and, in due time, developed elegant theories of heat, thermodynamics, heat engines and much else using empirical information together with human intellect rather than totally depending on ‘divine causes’ and ‘divine explanations’. Rationalism opened the doors of scientific development in the west and negation of rationalism shut those very doors in the Muslim world and pushed it farther into mythological phantasm. The metaphysical influence of al-Ghazali is so far-reaching and grasping in the Muslim world that many of its modern thinkers continue indulging uncritically in the metaphysical arguments in upbraiding human reason and elevating revelation (intuition and the like) over it. One of the most influential modern thinkers of this kind was Allamah Muhammad Iqbal.

Iqbal’s Perspective and His Dilemma

Although Iqbal greatly appreciated the contributions to physical sciences of the medieval Muslim scholars, he is generally silent about their rational attitude and proclivities. When it came down to discussing divine revelation (inspiration, intuition, ishq, heart) and human reason, Iqbal invariably downgraded the reason. Regarding ‘heart’, he said (4), “The heart is a kind of inner intuition or insight which in the beautiful words of Rumi, feeds on the rays of the sun and brings us into contact with aspects of Reality other than those open to sense-perception….We must not, however, regard it (heart) as a mysterious special faculty; it is rather a mode of dealing with Reality in which sensation, in the physiological sense of the word, does not play any part.” This seems to be a good piece of poetical prose but what does it actually mean? I’m not sure if I understand it.

To avoid confusion and conflict, he could have allocated different universes (spheres of influence) to reason and revelation in which each of them operated, e.g., material world to reason and the spiritual (non-material) world to revelation; but it appears that he didn’t do so. It is true that he confined reason to the material world but his ‘intuition’ is superior to reason and holds sway every where. Even in the material world, Iqbal’s intuition is superior to reason. Although he wrote extensively on this subject, he failed to clarify the competing issues; he used a muddled religious metaphysical approach in describing them. His description is usually in very broad, general, and non-specific terms. It is difficult to obtain any specific and practically usable information from his metaphysics. But then religious metaphysics is seldom clear; it is always shrouded in the mists of vagueness and incertitude. Speaking about metaphysics, Carnap (3) wrote, “This (anti-metaphysical) thesis asserts that metaphysical propositions – like lyrical verses – have only the expressive function, but no representative function. Metaphysical propositions are neither true nor false, because they assert nothing, they contain neither knowledge nor error, and they lie completely outside the field of knowledge.”

His poetical works are replete with verses extolling intuition and degrading reason. In his ‘Fikr-e-Iqbal’, Khalifah Abdul Hakim (5) devoted one whole chapter to “Aql per Iqbal ki Tanqeed (Iqbal’s Critique of Reason)”. The author expressed Iqbal’s views, saying, “...uncertainty is the death of both the individual and the community. For this reason, Iqbal instructed the community to stay away from philosophy because apparently the faith of the common and uncommon people appears to be already weak. If the thinkers indulged in the wonderment which is the beginning and the end of philosophy, they will not be able to adopt any line of action with strong conviction.” This is exactly the reverberation of al-Ghazali’s and Ibn Taimiyyah’s views.

I now give some of Iqbal’s verses on this subject in the following to illustrate what he thought of reason in comparison to his ishq, intuition, and heart.

Khrid waaqif naheen haiy naik-o-budd sey
Badhi jaati haiy zalim apni hadd sey
Khuda jaanay mujhe kiya ho gaya haiy
Khrid bezaar dil sey, dil khrid sey

[Reason is not conversant of good and bad
The wretch is exceeding its bounds
God knows what has happened to me
Reason is sick of heart, heart of reason]

Alaaj aatish-e-Rumi kay soz mein haiy tera
Teri khrid peh ghalib haiy farngiyun ka fasoon

[Your cure lies in the heat of Rumi’s fire
Your reason is subdued by the magic of the west]

Kheerah nah kar saka mujhe jalwa-e-daanish-e-farang
Surmah haiy meri aankh ka, khak-e- Medina-o-Najaf

[The flash of the west’s intellect failed to dazzle me
Because my eyes are lined with the dust of Medina and Najaf]

Bura nah maan zara azmaa kay dekh issay
Farang dil ki kharabi, khrid ki maamoori

(Don’t take ill but test it
West is the sickness of heart and fullness of intellect]

Ilm mein bhi saroor haiy lekan
Yeh woh jannat haiy jiss mein hoor nahin

[Knowledge (symbol of reason) has its own pleasure, however
This is a paradise in which there is no houri]

Bey khatr kood pada aatish-e-Nimrod mein ishq
Aql thi mahw-e-tamashaiy lab-e-baam abhi

[Ishq jumped fearlessly into Nimrod’s fire
While reason was still watching from above]

There are hundreds of other similar verses in his poetry.

Iqbal is envious of the material advancement of the west. He wished the Muslim world was not so backward yet he would not support rationalism which is indeed the key to the material development. He is afraid that atheism would accompany the advent of rationalism in the Muslim world.
In one of his verses he says:

Hum tau samjhay thay keh laigi faraghat taaleem
Kiya khabr thi keh chala aaega alhaad bhi saath

[We believed that education would bring prosperity
We didn’t know that atheism would also come along with it]

If one wants to acquire rational knowledge, one knows how to go about it. If a person wants to become a civil engineer, for example, (s)he will go to an engineering college to acquire the required knowledge. Afterwards, (s)he will be able to design bridges, after acquiring sufficient training and practical experience, design dams, airports, etc. If one wants to become a physicist, philosopher, a chemist, etc., (s)he knows how to achieve her/his objective. But if one wants to acquire the so-called superior knowledge, say knowledge of intuition, where should (s)he go? And how would (s)he use such knowledge in practical life?

There is a great deal of confusion and conflict in Iqbal’s thought. Iqbal and his intuitionists existed in this world but they aspired most of the time of working ceaselessly to attain a distinguished station in the next world. They , so to say, lived in this world for the next world. They had almost turned their backs on the reality of this world and devoted their lives to formulate apocryphal religious metaphysics, which would guide them to secure a select place in the next world. They, like al-Ghazali, devoted more energy to the eschatological premises than on the real problems of the world in which they physically lived. For example, al-Ghazali declared the philosophers (al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and others) kafir on three questions one of which related to the resurrection of the dead bodies on doom’s day. Al-Ghazali ruled that the dead bodies would be resurrected in the exact forms in which they had died. The philosophers thought it was not possible and that the scriptural description of resurrection was merely a metaphorical discourse. Such philosophers as refuted physical resurrection were to be punished by death, ruled al-Ghazali. This issue is of no importance in the real world that we inhabit. Maintaining good health should be more important in this world than the conjectures as to what would happen to the dead bodies in the next.

They (the intuitionists) condemned rational knowledge and sought esoteric knowledge. There is nothing wrong in this quest if this is really what they wanted. But the trouble is that they wanted much more else. They wanted to excel in the pursuit of the material knowledge also without attaching much value and credence to the sense-perception information. In short, they wanted to achieve it by impossible means. Their esoteric knowledge is worthless in the natural world. This is the conundrum which they refused to comprehend and confront.

The scientists who engage in research do get intuitive flashes once in a while. Such intuitive directions may not always lead to the correct solution but the scientists do test them whenever they get such flashes. However, research is mostly hard work. It is sweat and grind. It took three hundred years for the mathematicians, for example, to find a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem.

Can Science Survive?

A skeptical and rational attitude is fundamentally important for doing research. It is very important to ask reasonable questions. No research can be accomplished if there is no problem to work upon. Divine explanation kills the spirit of enquiry and is thus mortally dangerous to scientific research. If all the questions can be answered with the invocation of God, where is the need for doing any research?

So, can science survive in the Muslim milieu? Although the title of this paper is quite pessimistic and depressing, there is a ray of hope that science would survive and even a scientific tradition might take root in the Muslim world. Rationalism is not completely dead, it is in suspended animation.

However, the reasons for germination of a scientific tradition in the Muslim world are mostly external so far. For example, the incessant enmity between Pakistan and India drove Pakistan to develop its own nuclear infrastructure to deter India which already had developed nuclear devices. A crash program was undertaken in Pakistan for the development of nuclear technology. Technology is not fundamental science but it derives its life blood from science. Some spin-off research facilities may have come into existence, which might facilitate further research in other related areas.

No matter what ulema may rule, for or against scientific research, it would have to continue if Pakistan is to survive as independent sovereign state. Same kind of dynamic forces are working in the rest of the Muslim world. A theocratic government in Iran is struggling very hard to build its own nuclear infrastructure. Even the Saudi Arabia, the conservative of the conservatives, is secretly planning for the acquisition of the nuclear know-how. If the technological infrastructure is established in the Muslim world, scientific research and development together with rationalism cannot be excommunicated. Although the way these developments are taking place at present is not the natural way in which a scientific tradition should be created, it is nonetheless opening up vistas for the growth of science and technology.

References

1. A l-Ghazali, “The Incoherence of the Philosophers,” tr. Michael Marmura, Brigham Young University, Utah, 1997, p.2.
2. Averroe (Ibn Rushd), “The Incoherence of the Incoherence of Philosophers,” tr. Simon van Den Bergh, The Trustees of the “E.J.W. Gibb Memorial, 1987, pp. 316-317.
3. Carnap, R., “The Rejection of Metaphysics,” in “Philosophy and Syntax”.
4. Iqbal, Allamah Muhammad, “The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam,” Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, Publishers, Booksellers, and Exporters, Lahore, Pakistan, 1999, p. 15.
5. Khalifah Abdul Hakim, “Fikr-e-Iqbal,” 2 Nursinghdas, Garden Club Road, Lahore, 1968, pp. 317-318.
6. Popper, K., “Conjectures and Refutations,” Routledge Classics, London and New York, 1963, p. 169.
7. Ibid. p. 264.
8. Russell, B., “A History of Western Philosophy,” Simons and Schuster, New York, 1972, p. 64.
9. Serajul Haque, “Ibn Taimiyyah – in ‘A History of Muslim Philosophy’,” ed. M.M. Sharif, Low Price Publications, Delhi – 110052, p. 810, 814.
10. Ibid. p. 809.