THE SCOURGE OF SCIENTISM

And the Ecological Crisis

Scientism

"Scientism" is the tendency to turn science into an ideology, and specifically it is the tendency for the ideology of science to infect religion and distort or replace religious beliefs. "Scientism" is a characteristic of religious fundamentalism. Christian fundamentalists are as guilty of "scientism" as Muslim fundamentalists. In both cases we find that a typical mode of fundamentalist thinking is a deformed appropriation of science. "Scientism" is how fundamentalists supposedly get "modern". It is a bogus intellectuality that has a deeply corrosive effect upon religion.

In Islam, while clinging to a literalist, unintelligent reading of both Koran and Hadith the fundamentalists will try to graft modern science to Islamic religion and claim that the Prophet - peace be to him - was fully cognisant of modern science during his life in 6th century tribal Arabia. Similarly, they find the Koran to be a 6th C scientific text book full of wonderous prefigurings of modern science. Allah the scientist!

This results in many bizarre claims that do Islam no credit. Here are some of them:

God, having foreknowledge of computers, encoded the Koran with number cyphers that only computers can discover.

Neil Armstrong discovered a crevice extending all the way around the moon from where the Prophet - peace be to him - rendered the moon asunder with his glance. (Neil Armstrong, some will tell you, became a Muslim when he returned to earth.)

Astronauts often hear the Call to Prayer when in outer space. Neil Armstrong heard the Call to Prayer when he was walking on the moon.

The Koran is fully consistent with the theory of evolution. (Some will tell you that Charles Darwin became a Muslim when he read the Koran and realised that it showed foreknowledge of his whole theory.)

The Koran talks about the discovery of the DNA code.

The Koran is fully consistent with modern physics.

The Koran describes the Big Bang.

The Koran predicts the invention of the microwave oven, the television, automobile, the video player, the mobile phone and a range of other technological gadgets.

These claims bring Islam into disrepute. They involve a basic misunderstanding of what revelation (and science) is. No intelligent person can believe such nonsense. Yet throughout the Muslim world half-baked professors trying to accomodate their medieval interpretations of Islam with their work in modern sciences promote this type of thinking. Science proves Islam! You will also find many well-meaning decent Muslims who are infected with this approach to their faith. It is very important to them that science proves Islam. They happily embrace all manner of strange claims that do harm to both religion and to science.

These are people of weak and misconstrued faith who look to the High Priests of the laboratory to confirm their beliefs. There is an idolatrous deference to scientists who are given the power to set the standard of all truth. No attention is given to the fact that science, by its own methodology, is perpetually self-invalidating. As it happens, for example, the latest scientific speculation is moving away from the whole idea of a "Big Bang" creation. It is wrong to attach the Holy Koran, the eternal Word of God, to the transient theories of men.

Is the scientist a demigod? When does "faith in science" become idolatry?

Fundamentalism shows a profound ignorance of the traditional Islamic cosmology. While they dwell in medieval religious thinking they wholeheartedly embrace modern science and are utterly ignorant of the medieval cosmology in the context of which the Islamic religion took shape. This makes modern fundamentalist Islam a perverse misconstruction, an unintelligent hotch-potch of old and ultra-new.

One of the strangest features of religious fundamentalism of any type is that it typically combines primitivism with scientism. On some matters it is ultra-primitive. On others it is ultra-hitech. Thus Muslim fundamentalists will shun the modern toothbrush in favour of the tooth-stick often mentioned in the Hadith Literature. The tooth-stick is Sunnah, they will say. The toothbrush is an innovation. But these same people wear digital watches, watch DVDs, fly airplanes and have an uncritical acceptance of modern technology as "God's blessings." This, of course, makes no sense at all. It is completely inconsistent. Similarly, Christian fundamentalists use the medium of television to evangelize, they use airplanes, digital watches etc. but when it comes to healing they believe in the prescientific disease = demonic possession theory and resort to the laying on of hands.

But the fundamentalists are not the only problem here. Progressive Muslims and modernists are apt to have an uncritical love of science and also turn it into an ideology. They think that science and technology are unquestionably, inherently benevolent and that science and technology will "save the world."

In fact, in the modern era we are living through a storm, a hurricane, of scientific, industrial and technological change. Some of it is good and some of it is destructive. Some of it enhances the life of man and some of it threatens his very existence. Too often our religions are so eager to show themselves to be "modern" and "progressive" that they fail to make a stand against destructive and dangerous technologies, the dehumanizing aspects of industrialism and the corrosive ideologies of science.

Many forms of technology are clearly "Promethean" and idolatrous in that they place God-like powers in the hands of man who then becomes bloated with the illusion of own self-sufficency and forgets his rightful place as servant of God. Yet our religions have little to say about this. Often our religious authorities approve of these technologies and remain uncritical of the grossest abuses of technological power - nuclear weapons for example. How can any God-fearing religious man give his assent to nuclear weapons? This is why young people often grow cynical about religion. They see their future being squandered and the planet being degraded all around them every day - nuclear threat, climate change, pollution - and all their religious elders have to offer are sermons about the evils of dating.

 

Ecological Crisis

It is one of the greatest sins in human history that the Muslims of the Middle East have dregged up whole lakes of crude oil and sold it around the world without a thought for the environmental consequences of doing so. They have imposed no restrictions, damanded no safeguards, insisted upon no ecological restraints - it has been an uninterupted orgy of greed and environmental destruction, a wasteful blasphemy upon God's good earth. The Muslim world, as much as the Christian West, has failed to uphold the ideal of human stewardship and has used religion to endorse wanton exploitation of God's bounty. Industrial man has fouled his own nest, and Islamic man is no exception. Muslims are as much to blame as anyone else - and who can deny that the Muslims of the Middle East, Arabs and Persians, carry an especially heavy burden of guilt because of their wardenship over the world's oil resources.

In the face of the contemporary ecological crisis Muslims - like Christians and others - must reposition themselves and reassert the traditional doctrine of stewardship and again declare God as sovereign, His creation as sacred and man as a mere deputy whose charge over the earth is only temporary and provisional, not absolute.

Scientism is not the way to marry religion and modern science. The works of S.H. Nasr are highly recommended as an antidote to this type of thinking. His "Islamic Cosmological Doctrines" is an extremely important work, along with his "Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man" and copious essays on the same themes. These works establish Nasr as one of the outstanding Muslim thinkers of the 20th century.

The Nasr Foundation