28. Framing Science and the Myth of Progress (2)

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I use the word “experiment” advisedly, albeit with the same irony GOD employs. AL-LAH has complete and prior knowledge of His universe; we could even describe the material universe as His ‘body’ of knowledge, or the part of His Knowledge that is expressed physically. But in the Qur’an He often presents His signs as they appear from our point of view, which is limited in innumerable ways and, in particular, blind to the future. An experiment is one way by which scientists seek to interrogate that future, which for them is theoretically unknown. GOD, to Whom nothing is unknown, nonetheless speaks to us as if He also wants to know, by way of encouraging us to want to know. In other words, He is the Principal Investigator, and invites us to be co-investigators in a matter of burning interest – ourselves.

So closely aligned is the modern concept of science with the experiment that we have come to believe that contemporary science invented the experimental method. But the chief components of an experiment can be applied to any body of knowledge, including the Qur’an itself. Whatever we intend to interrogate for answers, whether they lie in the future, the past, a book, or the soul of man, requires us to follow more or less the same procedure, although not always in the order provided here:

In each example of what could be termed the scientific method (albeit with varying degrees of precision consonant with the subject matter), the examiner is working on facts, and the outcome is simply new facts, higher-tier facts, or meta-facts. The whole process is only a tool, just as facts are only tools.

This process, however impressive it may be in general, does not by itself validate the frame in which the process takes place. An experiment with freezing water and sugar assumes the validity of materialism to prove its point, and therefore does not prove the validity of materialism itself. The process of studying the contents of the Qur’an is not what validates the Qur’an, but rather the specific contents that argue for its truth. And in the same way, an inquiry into the development or degradation of national morals will not convince us that virtue is superior to decadence.

Every experiment, and indeed every rational inquiry, begins with a frame of assumptions that govern what can be investigated, on the one hand, and what is excluded from questioning, on the other. The modern scientific enterprise has declared its frame to be physical phenomena, and set the conditions for investigating them, which is only right and proper. . . within that frame. But the success of this venture within the physicalist frame has somehow deluded its proponents into thinking either that there is nothing knowable outside it, or that the facts they find within can be extrapolated beyond the frame, almost as if there were no frame there at all. They may also dismiss other frames as being too ‘fuzzy’ to be taken seriously.

In the chart above, some critics may complain that the examples provided are not strictly commensurate or comparable. We know what water is, and what freezing looks like, but how do we identify a “doctrine”? How can we determine a “tradition”? What is “character”? What are the parameters of “arrogance”? Implicit in all such questions is the assumption that if we cannot define something in physical terms it deserves less respect and attention.

² https://examples.yourdictionary.com/scientific-method-examples.html

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