Religion and Science
An excerpt from the article “Without God” by Steven Weinberg, in The New York Review of Books. Weinberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. (click here for full article)
…A third source of tension between science and religious belief has been more important in Islam than in Christianity. Around 1100, the Sufi philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali argued against the very idea of laws of nature, on the grounds that any such law would put God’s hands in chains. According to al-Ghazzali, a piece of cotton placed in a flame does not darken and smolder because of the heat of the flame, but because God wants it to darken and smolder. Laws of nature could have been reconciled with Islam, as a summary of what God usually wants to happen, but al-Ghazzali did not take that path.
Al-Ghazzali is often described as the most influential Islamic philosopher. I wish I knew enough to judge how great was the impact on Islam of his rejection of science. At any rate, science in Muslim countries, which had led the world in the ninth and tenth centuries, went into a decline in the century or two after al-Ghazzali. As a portent of this decline, in 1194 the Ulama of Córdoba burned all scientific and medical texts.
Nor has science revived in the Islamic world. There are talented scientists who have come to the West from Islamic countries and do work of great value here, among them the Pakistani Muslim physicist Abdus Mohammed Salam, who in 1979 became the first Muslim scientist to be awarded a Nobel Prize, for work he did in England and Italy. But in the past forty years I have not seen any paper in the areas of physics or astronomy that I follow that was written in an Islamic country and was worth reading. Thousands of scientific papers are turned out in these countries, and perhaps I missed something. Still, in 2002 the periodical Nature carried out a survey of science in Islamic countries, and found just three areas in which the Islamic world produced excellent science, all three directed toward applications rather than basic science. They were desalination, falconry, and camel breeding….
The bridge between science and religion was first made by Goethe in his Theory of Colors and Faust. Later Rudolph Steiner developed Goethe (and Nietsche) their thoughts into Anthroposopy, which brings in Conscience Science. Pretty practical in all the disciplines of science.
Newton = everything is measurable; Einstein = everything is relative; Bohm = everything is probably.
hans
Yet another reason why the issue about Richard Dawkins’ website ban in Turkey transcends legal and free speech issues. Turkey, of all the predominantly Muslim countries, could be poised to emerge as a center for science and discovery in the 21st century. But that is unlikely to happen when websites of famous scientists (and Dawkins may rank as the most famous living biologist) are unjustifiably and inexplicably banned.