Modern science is not a body of facts, but a process for the study of the natural world
The history of Islam’s relation to science has largely
been one of harmony. It offers no real parallel to the occasional bouts of
suspicion toward science that the Christian world experienced. Today, many
Muslims can be found in the fields of medicine and engineering. Even the
ultraconservative Muslims who long for a return to the ethical norms of the
seventh century see no need to abandon cell phones to do so, and even the most
extreme of Islamic extremists envies the high-tech oil-extraction techniques
and the weaponry of the West. Muslims, both conservative and liberal, issue fatwas (legal
opinions) over the Internet without any hesitation over the technology they
employ and with no fear that it may be haram (prohibited).
However, although contemporary Muslims tend not to be averse to science or
technology, their strong belief in the compatibility of science and Islam may
leave them vulnerable to dubious efforts to equate the two. The effort to
harmonize modern technical knowledge and practice with Islamic teaching is part
of a project known as the “Islamization of knowledge,” and is quite popular
among Muslim intellectuals today. The most visible area of this intellectual
work has been in the world of finance, with the development of so-called
“Islamic banking.” A wide variety of venture-capital investments,
joint-development projects, and partnership financing have been devised to
avoid the appearance of charging interest, a practice forbidden by traditional
Muslim jurisprudence. On a smaller scale, there has been a rising interest in
bringing the sciences into a conversation with Islamic teachings.
An offshoot of this project takes an absurd turn: it attempts to
demonstrate, in effect, that the Koran is a scientific textbook — that it is
not merely compatible with science but actually foretells and validates
specific modern scientific theories. This movement is troubling in part because
it is becoming associated with the term “Islamic science,” which has long been
used to refer to the medieval Golden Age during which the Muslim world made
important contributions to natural philosophy, medicine, and mathematics.
Confusing this new movement with that important period is a disservice to
history. Moreover, this new movement to seek out science in the Koran is
contrary to the scientific method and, in ignoring the Koran’s warning against
confusing allegory with basic facts (3:7), is contrary to
Islamic teaching.
As a 2002 article in the Wall Street Journal described,
these ideas have become popular among fringe Muslim scholars and students.
Organizations like the Commission on Scientific Signs in the Quran and Sunnah (based in
Saudi Arabia), and books with titles like Allah’s Miracles in the Quran and Scientific Miracles in the Prophetic Sunnah have further
promoted this pseudo-scholarly movement. These ideas are now widely available
online, in YouTube videos, on countless websites and blogs, and indiscussion forums.
This movement has even led its critics astray: the Pakistani physicist
Pervez Hoodbhoy, for example, scorns the movement but unfortunately accepts the label of “Islamic science” for
the ideology he attacks. In his book Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for
Rationality (1991), Hoodbhoy asserts that the “Islamic
science” of the classical era should simply be called “Muslim science” — that
is, science that just happens to have been done by Muslims — and so ends up
denying the elements of scientific methodology that actually were inspired by
Islamic teaching.
Given the spread of this movement, it is worth distinguishing the claim
that the teachings of Islam have been conducive to the development of the
methods of science from the extravagant notion that particular scientific
findings are foretold and validated by the Koran. It is my view that the Koran
is a book of guidance rather than a book of science, and its references to the
natural world are meant to be inspirational rather than demonstrative. I have
no problem with the view that the Koran is perfectly consistent with a
scientific understanding of the world, or with the belief that its Divine
Author, being the Author of Nature itself, understands the natural world
perfectly well. I do have a problem with the view that
scientific theories are the standard by which the teachings of the Koran should
be judged, or vice versa.
Modern science is not a body of facts, but a process for the study of the
natural world. Because of human fallibility, that process yields a constantly
changing set of conclusions about how this world operates. The Koran, on the
other hand, is an unchanging statement about why we are here. Conflating the
very different disciplines of religion and science can only work to the
detriment of both, as we will see.
Theory
and Observation
Before debunking the notion that the Koran is a
scientific textbook, it is worth noting not only that Islamic civilization was
the center of science and learning from about the eighth to the twelfth century
(as has previously been discussed in these pages; see “Why the Arabic World Turned Away from Science,” Winter 2011),
but also that Islamic civilization contributed to the rise of the modern
scientific method. There is of course no single method to modern science, but
its general approach is nonetheless distinguishable from pre-modern science.
Whereas pre-modern science was wrapped up in philosophical concerns, heavily
influenced by Platonic idealism, and reliant on deductive reasoning from first
principles, modern science seeks to strip itself from philosophical questions
and to depend as much as possible on inductive reasoning from empirical
observation of natural phenomena.
That the great minds of the ancient world did not see science the way we
moderns do can be very difficult to grasp. By way of illustration, consider a
book written by Robert R. Newton. The astronomer and science historian was
shocked to find that Ptolemy, the greatest astronomer of antiquity, had
calculated the positions of stars and then published them in his famous star
catalogue, the Almagest, as though they were actual observations.
This “deliberate deceit” so incensed Newton that he gave his 1977 book on the
subject the incendiary title The Crime of Claudius Ptolemy. For modern
scientists, Ptolemy’s actions might indeed seem criminal: although of course
predictions from theory often precede observations, as in the famous example of
Einstein predicting that starlight would bend around the Sun to a greater
degree than predicted by Newtonian physics, it would be considered an affront
to scientific practice to use calculated values in place of ones that had
already been actually observed. However, rather than thinking of Ptolemy as a
criminal, it makes more sense to think of him as a creature of his times, or
perhaps a victim of his epistemology.
The tension between deductive and inductive approaches to science has been
a more contentious issue for Christian than for Islamic scholars. In contrast
to the pre-modern understanding of science that often elevated what we now call
philosophy over what we have come to know as science, and long preceding the
advent of modern science, Islamic scholars were inspired by the Koran’s
teaching that the physical world is the perfect creation of the infallible
Creator and by its instructions to observe and study nature:
[Blessed be] He Who created the seven heavens one above another: No want of
proportion wilt thou see in the Creation of (Allah) Most Gracious. So turn thy
vision again: seest thou any flaw? [Koran (67:3), trans. Abdullah
Yusuf Ali]
While the preeminence of philosophy and theology in the pre-modern West
sometimes restrained free inquiry, especially if scientific findings
contradicted theoretical commitments, the Islamic world was more open to
adjusting theory to observation. It is this inductive process that the Koran
encourages with its repeated injunctions to look at the signs in the heavens
and on earth, to think and contemplate, and to travel through the world in
search of knowledge.
The
Koran as a Textbook?
The movement seeking to propagate the claim that the
Koran contains direct references or allusions to natural phenomena and
scientific theories beyond the ken of the contemporaries of the Prophet
Muhammad received much of its impetus from the influential 1976 book The Bible, The Qur’an and Science by the
French physician Maurice Bucaille (translated into English by Alastair D.
Pannell). Bucaille argues that the Koran has a greater internal consistency
than the Bible and that the metaphors in the Bible have become quainter with
the advancement of scientific knowledge while the metaphors in the Koran have
become more meaningful.
Bucaille also argues that certain phrases in the Koran seem to allude to
modern scientific discoveries, and considers this to be a miraculous testimony
to the Book’s Divine origin. For example, he suggests that a Koranic passage
referring to the production of milk in cattle posed a challenge to contemporary
understanding:
And verily in cattle (too) will ye find an instructive sign. From what is
within their bodies between excretions and blood, We produce, for your drink,
milk, pure and agreeable to those who drink it. [16:66]
This description might be considered incoherent or simply false from the
standpoint of our modern understanding of physiology. But Bucaille proposes his
own alternate translation from the original Arabic (here rendered through
Pannell’s English translation):
Verily, in cattle there is a lesson for you. We give you to drink of what
is inside their bodies, coming from a conjunction between the contents of the
intestine and the blood, a milk pure and pleasant for those who drink it.
As a physician who lived after the discovery of the details of the
digestive process, Bucaille interprets this passage as a poetic reference to
the scientific fact that the nutritional substances of the body, including
those used in the production of milk, are collected by the bloodstream through
the intestinal wall from chemical reactions taking place in the digestive tract
— a process completely unknown in Muhammad’s day.
Consider another Koranic passage cited by Bucaille, describing the Creation
of the universe. In the popular 1934 Koran translation by Abdullah Yusuf Ali,
the passage reads as follows:
With power and skill did We construct the Firmament: for it is We Who create
the vastness of space. [51:47]
Bucaille argues that the most literal translation of the verse would refer
not just to the “vastness” of space but to its expansion. He offers
his own translation (again, rendered here through Pannell’s translation into
English): “The heaven, we have built it with power. Verily, We are expanding
it.” Writing in the 1970s, when Edwin Hubble’s discovery of the expansion of
the universe was well known to all educated people, Bucaille was quick to argue
that the verse refers to the expanding universe “in totally unambiguous terms.”
Translators working in the years before Hubble’s discovery was widely
understood, like Yusuf Ali, might have avoided the literal meaning of the
original Arabic. They may well have found it unintelligible. But Bucaille
embraces the literal meaning, which conforms to our understanding of an
expanding universe — although, notably, he never suggests that one could have
deduced from the verse that the universe is expanding. Bucaille’s reading
reflects the view that the Koran is a book of guidance rather than a book of
science, while still anticipating future scientific discoveries. A verse that
could have been interpreted as alluding to the vastness of space may now be
understood as referring to the expansion of space; yet the point of the verse
was, is, and always will be that space, whatever its nature, is the creation of
the Almighty, and its nature is determined by His will.
As impressive as these interpretations were to Bucaille himself, it is
noteworthy that he never became a Muslim. Nor is there a single example of any
scientific discovery made by virtue of studying the Koran. Consider the case of
the thirteenth-century Arab physician Ibn al-Nafis, a Muslim who discovered the
pulmonary circulation system not through study of the Koran but of an entirely
different creation of God, the human body. The ability to interpret passages
about nature in a manner consistent with evolving scientific knowledge may
reinforce the faith of someone who already accepts the Koran as the word of
God, but in itself it makes an effective tool neither for converting people to
Islam nor for educating Muslims on science.
Part of the reason that Koranic passages should not be read as scientific
guides is that they tend to be open to varying interpretations — and therefore
are far too imprecise to be considered examples of theoretical predictions that
can be scientifically falsified. Bucaille’s preferred translation of the verse
on milk, for example, is debatable; most translations simply speak of milk
coming from between excrement and blood in cow’s bellies — a reflection,
Bucaille argues, of the translators’ unfamiliarity with modern physiology. Such
translations, however, loosely read, are perfectly consistent with the basic
anatomical understanding, available even at the time of the Koranic revelation,
that the same general place where nutritious milk resides — that is, the inside
of a cow — also contains far less appetizing substances.
The more direct meaning of the milk verse is clearer in the context of the
one that precedes it: “And Allah sends down rain from the skies, and gives
therewith life to the earth after its death: verily in this is a Sign for those
who listen” (16:65). The
significance of verse 16:66 was plain to Yusuf Ali,whose translation included a
footnote with an interpretation that surely could have been shared by early
readers of the Koran, even without the modern anatomical knowledge it draws on:
Is it not wonderful that the same food, eaten by males and females, produces
in the latter, when they have young, the wholesome and complete food, known as
milk? ... It is pure, as typified by its whiteness. Yet it is a secretion like
other secretions, between the excretions which the body rejects as worthless
and the precious blood-stream which circulates within the body and is the
symbol of life itself to the animal which produces it.
Neither the great theologians nor the great scientists of medieval Islam
felt that the Koran specified new theories of nature. Even when they were
condemning popular contemporary views in natural philosophy as contradictory to
the faith, they never pretended that a Koranic allusion to nature could be
demonstrably turned into a particular theory. Thus, when the great
eleventh-century Muslim scholar Abu Hamid al-Ghazali condemns the philosophers for claiming
that the sun is eternal, he does not try to develop some other theory about how
it decays — say, by taking the Koranic
reference to the sun’s “place of rest” as the
starting point of an argument that it must someday die, even though he clearly
believes that it must. Instead, he accuses the philosophers of disguising a
metaphysical claim (that the material universe is uncreated) as a physical
claim (that the lack of any observed decay in the sun over recorded human
history means that it is eternal, and so the universe that contains it must
also be eternal). He easily dispenses with the philosophers’ arrogant claim by
pointing out that the sun is so huge that it could have lost as much as a range
of mountains over the millennia without decaying enough to be observable from
Earth — a possibility, of course, demonstrated by astronomers many centuries
later. The movement to find “scientific miracles” in the Koran abandons the
approach of al-Ghazali and the other thinkers of classical Islam.
Pseudoscience
and Religious Distortions
The movement is of course not without its share of
critics. Hoodbhoy is perhaps the most notable among them. In Islam and Science, he describes a
conference that included a panel discussion on “Things Known Only to Allah” —
he quips, “I was unable to attend, but subsequently have often wondered what
secrets the panelists were privy to” — and papers were presented with such
startling titles as “Chemical Composition of Milk in Relation to Verse 66 of
Surat An-Nahl of The Holy Qur’an,” “Description of Man at High Altitude in
Qur’an,” and “Revelation of Some Modern Oceanographic Phenomena in Holy
Qur’an.”
The paper titles hint at the broader problem. Consider, for example,
another claim about the Korancommonly made by the movement’s proponents: that the surah (chapter)
called “Iron” holds some kind of science lesson about the
element for which it is named. Verse 25 includes
words that can be translated, “And We sent down iron, in which there lies great
force, and which has many uses for mankind....” “Sent down” is a phrase the
Koran repeatedly uses to refer to blessings bestowed by God, and the fact that
iron has “great force” — for example, in making weapons of war, as well as many
other uses — does not require modern science to appreciate.
For the modern advocates of scientific miracles in the Koran, however,
“sent down” must be understood to refer to the fact that all the heavy elements
in the earth, including iron, literally came from the sky —
namely, from the fusion of lighter elements over the eons in supernovas and in
heavy stars that have died out and scattered their matter, forming the stellar
nebula out of which the earth accreted billions of years ago. (This is the fact
behind Carl Sagan’s famous exhortation, “We’re made of star stuff.”)
That this twentieth-century discovery would be alluded to in a book written in
the seventh century would indeed be miraculous were other interpretations of
this verse not readily available — for example, as a reference to the fact that
much of the iron exposed and available on thesurface of the earth
comes from meteorites, a fact likely known to the ancients through direct
observation. The suggestion that this verse of the Koran makes such a specific
claim, detailing the process of nucleosynthesis in stars and the later
formation of the resulting heavy elements into planets, is simply not credible.
It is as if the Koran were a scientific text, the careful reading of which can
teach us the physical nature of the universe. This approach to revelatory
allusions to the natural world is pseudoscience, not science.
In just this manner, an article entitled “A New Astronomical Qur’anic Method for the Determination
of the Greatest Speed C” claims that two verses in
the Koran provide evidence for the special theory of relativity. Though the
provenance of this article is murky — its original date and place of
publication cannot be determined and its author, supposedly a Cairo-based
professor of physics named Mansour Hassab-Elnaby, could not be reached — its
central claim has been repeated very widely in the movement’s literature and in
online videos. But the article falls short, both on the grounds of scientific
methodology and on the epistemological grounds from which al-Ghazali attacked
the metaphysical claims of the philosophers. Verse 22:47, in the Yusuf Ali
translation that Hassab-Elnaby cites, reads, “...a Day in the sight of thy Lord
is like a thousand years of your reckoning.” It is surely true, as
Hassab-Elnaby claims, that this is an assertion of the relativity of time. But
it is patently an assertion of the relativity of psychological time,
not of the physical time of a body in motion for which the
special theory of relativity accounts. That a day of time to the omnipotent
Creator of the Universe would seem to us like a thousand years is to be
expected when we compare our finite capacity for comprehension to His infinite
Mind. Indeed, a thousand years would seem to be a rhetorical understatement.
Rather, one should say that an instant in the sight of God is as an eternity in
our time. Why, as others have pointed out, insist that this
sentiment be interpreted as a miraculous prediction of the discovery of
relativity and not accord the same status to the nearly identical statements in
the Bible in Psalm 90:4 and 2 Peter 3:8?
Hassab-Elnaby even goes so far as to claim that one can derive an accurate
figure for the speed of light from the Koran. For this calculation, he relies
on verse 32:5 (apparently
in his own translation):
God rules the cosmic affair from the heavens to the earth. Then this affair
travels, to Him (i.e. through the whole universe) in one day, where the measure
is one thousand years of your reckoning.
On the basis that the Islamic calendar, then as now, uses the lunar system
to measure time, Hassab-Elnaby claims that a “year” here actually refers to the
lunar year, so that “one thousand years of your reckoning” actually refers to
the distance traveled by the Moon in 12,000 orbits around the Earth. He then
uses a complicated calculation, which, he says, removes the effects of general
relativity from the equation, and — voila! — reproduces the
exact figure for the velocity of light.
This interpretation is stretched, to say the least. Hassab-Elnaby does not
explain his assumption that the “cosmic affair” travels at the speed of light.
In any case, the “day” which is a thousand years of our reckoning could be read
as referring to the Day of Judgment, which to our human perception seems like a
thousand years. And even allowing for the premise, if the verse really is read
as a reference to the theory of relativity, it could be interpreted as
referring to time dilation — say, to the fact that the “cosmic affair” travels
at a speed such that a day in its inertial reference frame is equal to a
thousand years here on Earth.
Hassab-Elnaby’s interpretation is attractive only because of his claim that
the numbers work out — a conclusion that relies on strained definitions and
mathematical artifice, as University of Vienna computational mechanics
professor Arnold Neumaier has pointed out in a technical rebuttal to the paper. These technical
questions would have been raised if the paper had been submitted for peer
review, from which pseudoscience is exempt.
Even if Hassab-Elnaby truly had shown that his interpretation yields a
number in agreement with the speed of light, he would at best have appended
another provocative factoid to Bucaille’s list. But he doesn’t stop there. He
goes so far as to suggest that this result itself provides evidence for “the
validity of the special theory of relativity,” as if the theory would have been
put in question if he had gotten a different number. It is one thing to suggest
that God sent Muhammad the speed of light in code, the way Galileo sent Kepler
his observation of the phases of Venus; it is something else entirely to claim
that this interpretation somehow serves as legitimate scientific evidence for
relativity. Where Bucaille claimed that scientific facts could be cited to
validate the Koran, his followers have completed the circle by citing the Koran
to validate science, distorting both in the process.
Real
Islamic Science
Should Muslims take these kinds of claims seriously,
they will set themselves up to turn scientific theories about the nature of the
universe into articles of religious dogma. Muslims must not marry the spiritual
guidance of the Koran to a specific theory, like the theory of special
relativity. Doing so could invite persecution of any scientist who questions
that theory, as Galileo was persecuted. A theory about the physical universe
stands or falls on its success in helping us to understand the universe. An
interpretation of a verse of scripture stands or falls on its ability to bring
us closer to the divine and into submission to His will.
Both those who believe that there is a conflict between religion and
science and those who believe that their respective claims are identical make
the same mistake. They think that because religion and science deal with the
great questions about reality, the questions each answers must therefore be
identical. They are not. Scientific inquiry and religious traditions deal with
different, complementary questions: science asks how, and religion
asks why. The reason Islam was conducive to science is not because
the Koran explains how the universe operates, but because it includes the duty
to investigate how it operates as an essential part of man’s purpose on earth.
Al-Ghazali warned against confusing these different types of questions with
one another. On the one hand, in his Incoherence of the Philosophers, he condemned the
claims of philosophers, arguing that the study of astronomy
has no bearing whatever on metaphysical investigation. For this is as if
someone were to say that the knowledge that this house came to be through the
work of a knowing, willing, living builder, endowed with power, requires that
one knows that the house is either a hexagon or an octagon and that one knows
the number of its supporting frames and the number of its bricks, which is
raving, its falsity obvious; or that one does not know that this onion is
temporally originated unless he knows the number of its layers and does not
know that this pomegranate is temporally originated unless one knows the number
of its seeds — [all] of which is abandonment of [rational] discourse,
discredited by every rational person. [trans. Michael E. Marmura; brackets here
and below appear in the translation]
Meanwhile, al-Ghazali also rejected the tendency of some religious people
to insist on literal interpretations of Koranic verses. In On the Boundaries of Theological Tolerance in Islam, he pointed out
that one could not accuse another of disbelief unless the other had accused the
Prophet Muhammad of being a liar; but saying that a particular pronouncement of
the Prophet constituted anallegorical rather than a literal truth
was not the same thing as accusing him of lying. Where a scientific conclusion
about the physical universe contradicts a literal interpretation of a
traditional text, rejecting the literal interpretation is in no way heretical.
Thus, in Incoherence, al-Ghazali cautioned against attempts to deny
the scientific explanation of eclipses:
Whoever thinks that to engage in a disputation for refuting such a theory
is a religious duty harms religion and weakens it. For these matters rest on
demonstrations, geometrical and arithmetical, that leave no room for doubt.
Thus when one who studies these demonstrations and ascertains their proofs,
deriving thereby information about the time of the two eclipses [and] their
extent and duration, is told that this is contrary to religion, [such an
individual] will not suspect this [science], only religion. The harm inflicted
on religion by those who defend it not by its proper way is greater than [the
harm caused by] those who attack it in the way proper to it. As it has been
said: “A rational foe is better than an ignorant friend.”
Another danger of literal interpretation in the interest of science is that
it misrepresents science as a body of facts instead of the process that it is.
The approach to science manifested by these pseudoscientists draws on the
educational system now dominant in the Muslim world, in which knowledge in
general is treated as a body of facts to be memorized rather than a product of
human effort that attempts to bring all known facts into a coherent whole.
One of the enduring Islamic contributions to science is the role it played
in encouraging the methodology that marks modern science. In the broadest
sense, the modern approach to scientific knowledge, which was the approach of
the early generations of Muslim scholars, is to critically examine the coherent
structure offered by previous generations of scholars with the intention of
understanding it, questioning it, reforming it, or, if necessary, replacing it
completely. What were once known as facts of science that the Muslims of the
classical era discovered have been superseded by newer discoveries, just as
many other scientific findings are regularly replaced by better insights. This
sort of critical thinking is the essence of ijtihad, a term that
refers to the sort of critical thinking that was considered to be the duty of
intellectuals during the Golden Age of Islamic civilization.
In contrast to the coherent methodology of science stands the incoherent
approach of the pseudoscientific movement seeking to treat the Koran like a
textbook, which suffers from the same flaws that al-Ghazali criticized in the
philosophers. The philosophers too sought to rationalize the “self-evident”
axioms of previous philosophers into harmony with the scientific theories
popular in their own day, and argued that the latter followed with logical
inevitability from the former. Today’s Muslim pseudoscientists take the
powerful symbols of holy text, give them an interpretation that can be
rationalized into harmony with the scientific theories popular today, and argue
that the latter follow with logical inevitability from the former.
Islamic civilization played an important role in the transformation of
ancient science into modern science. But the claim that the Koran contains
scientific facts in such a way that it “predicts” the discoveries of modern
science risks turning the phrase “Islamic science” into a sad joke, giving
those who claim there is nothing worthwhile in Islam more power over those who
know better.
Despite their fall from a once-preeminent position in the sciences to the
sad state in which they find themselves today, almost no Muslims have turned
against science. But among the Muslims there are literalists who, while
sincerely believing themselves to be enthusiasts of science, are laying the
groundwork for a rejection of science by repeating the mistake of the medieval
Christian Church — marrying their interpretation of scripture to
current scientific theory. Should the day come that the supporters of the
movement to find “scientific miracles” in the Koran finally accept that their
claims have been disproven, they and their intellectual heirs are likely either
to turn against the Koran, dismissing the sacred text as “unscientific” only
because a particular interpretation that was easy for an earlier generation to
accept was undermined by later discoveries, or else turn against science,
declaring it to be a heresy against an interpretation that they have confused
for scripture.
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