A CASE FOR RELIGION PROMOTING SCIENCE

When we think of science and religion, thoughts of Galileo and the Catholic church ignite in our heads. Thoughts of the church burning books and imprisoning great thinkers haunt us. We think of the "Dark Ages," when little to no advancement in science or culture was made. So naturally, we conclude that science and religion can not co-exist. If we want a religious society, we must avoid science, and if we want a free thinking society, we must leave religion.

However, the concept of science and religion being incompatible is uniquely a Western problem. For the bulk of Christian Europe, science was suppressed. It has only been about 400 years that scientists and philosophers freely, to a certain extent, think. However, this was not the situation in the rest of the world, especially in Muslim and Asian lands. For most of Muslim history, science was promoted by their religion.

The problem with us, Westerners, is that we view every culture and society through the lens of our own history. Since science and religion did not work out in the West, it should not work in the rest of the world either.

Many Western Muslims are confused by this dilemma as well. That in order to be a critically thinking person, we must leave Islam and follow the West into "separation of church and state."

However, if we analyze Muslim history and its contribution to human civilization, we realize that Muslims need Islam to become a productive civilization again. From the 7th century to the 18th century, Muslims had the most powerful empires; the greatest scientists, philosophers, engineers and doctors, while at the same time being extremely devout to their religion.

Muslims produced the greatest Islamic scholars along with the greatest scientific scholars. While one scholar codified Islamic jurisprudence, another scholar created the numerical digits that we use today. They all worked side by side and complimented one another, a relationship that was to be found nowhere else in the world.

All of this was going on while Europe had little to no progress. Spaniards and Frenchmen would travel to Muslim empires to seek knowledge and bring it back to their home lands. Interestingly, today it is the other way around. The only difference is that the West is not religious. It is extremely secular, just like the Muslims were extremely religious.

However, this form of scholarship and knowledge would eventually vanish from Muslim lands. Why? Because Muslims left Islam. In my next post I will dive into this topic more. When the Ottomans adopted a policy of secularism, it perished in scholarship and economic might, and the entire empire eventually crumbled, creating problems that we (Americans) still deal with today in the Middle East. Stay tuned!