Religious Belief and Scientific Belief

Abstract

"Are those who know and those who
do not know equal!?" (Qur'an 39:9)
What we tend nowadays to call "science" in the MITOW or strict sense
cove= the latest developments and discoveries in the mathematical,
physical, and biological sciences. Yet the expression continues to be used
in a wider sense, one that covers our contemporary social sciences and
occasionally human Sciences (including perhaps the science of religion)
as well. If, when speaking of the Islamic perspective on, or conception of,
religious belief, scientific belief, and the relation between them, we mean
to'address the entire Islamic tradition, we will invariably be faced with
an impossible task. To do this successfully, we would have to start from
the Qur'an and go through Islamic history century by century, if not
generation by generation, and see how the Qur'anic perspective was
realized by the Muslim community in diverse regions and disciplines.
This process would reveal what tensions and conflicts arose, how these
were resolved, and what happened when the Muslim world was faced
with the adoption of what we now call "science."
Putting this task aside, we can perhaps touch on a few points in that
long and complex history. First of all, we will speak briefly of the
Qur'anic perspective and then say a few words about how the different
sciences, when developed, were organized into a general scheme of
human knowledge and how this organization implies a certain view of the
relation between religious belief and scientific belief. This talk will
conclude with the raising of some questions regarding what we understand
by the term "Islamic science" when we use it as a historical or
classificatory notion.
The Qur'anic Perspective
The Arabic expressions in the Qur'an that are used to signify mental
discipline and usually translated into English as "science" are primarily
two: 'ilm, normally rendered as "science" or "knowledge" (a faculty of
sciences is regularly called kulhyat al 'ulum in Arabic, 'ulum being the
plural of 'ilm) and &huh, normally tendered as "wisdom." To begin ...