Not only does a fact in physics, for example, look and behave very differently than a fact in, say, anthropology, but the demand for hard facts like those of physics tends to wear away at the fabric of inquiries into ‘softer’ disciplines, including studies of the Qur’an itself, distorting our investigative priorities, minimizing our awareness of the supersensory frames that we need to apply, and characterizing our findings in those fields as mere feelings and questions of power and privilege. As a result, we find modernists, feminists, and revisionists of all sorts running rampant within the field of Qur’anic interpretation, fuelled perhaps by the thought that if there are no hard, materialistic standards then there are no authoritative standards at all.
It is such assumptions as these that have led to the supposed clash between religion and science. In the face of this, we are compelled to constantly repeat that there are as many kinds of science (‘ilm) as there are kinds of inquiry.
. . . what characterizes science is the greater care in excluding possible alternative explanations, the more detailed elaboration with respect to data on which predictions are based, the greater care in detecting and eliminating sources of error, the more articulate connections to other pieces of knowledge, etc. On this position, what characterizes science is not that the methods employed are unique to science, but that the methods are more carefully employed.
. . . In this sense, science does not differ in kind from other kinds of inquiry, but it may differ in the degree to which it requires broad and detailed background knowledge and a familiarity with a technical vocabulary that only specialists may possess.3
Another unfortunate result of the narrow, anti-religious version of science now commonly supposed to be the only valid one is that an accumulation of knowledge within this shrunken frame, and of the facts, data, and the technologies that spring from them, constitutes progress. The number of patents applied for, the number of university graduates, the number of gadgets one owns, one’s income, and so on . . . all these quantities, which are measurable, are supposed to stand for a quality, which is immeasurable (i.e. supersensory). Facts of a material nature are converted into a value called ‘Progress’, and then either resold to us as a historical fact and an inevitable future or retained as a standard that can be used to shame us into conformity.
Since scientism claims to provide only facts, we tend to assume that its frame is also factual. The following quote illustrates how scientists actually work within what could almost be considered a religious environment, one based on faith in a glorious future:
Supposing . . . our scientist is confronted with a datum which he cannot explain; will he say: here is a brute irrational fact? No, indeed. He will say: give me (or my successors) time and the explanation will be found. So does a Christian confronted with human misery still say that God is good and that everything will turn out all right in the long, very long, run. Job said: though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him. So does the scientist say: though the facts slay my expectations yet will I trust in my principles. Both the Christian and the scientist are willing to stand by their conviction, not only beyond but also contrary to the evidence.4
As we saw in the previous chapter, mere accretion of data (or technology, or money) does not by itself represent an advance of knowledge (or success, or happiness). Awe-struck by their first few discoveries in the physical sciences and the industrialization that ensued, men of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries formulated a creed of progress that appears to have become too reassuring and self-congratulatory to be ever set aside or replaced. Humanity has become drunk on the psychic high of the myth of progress. Every new invention and each new ‘revelation’ in the field of science only seems to confirm the initial assumption that human improvement is inevitable as long as we encourage our children to think scientifically (i.e. apply the standards of the physical sciences to all knowledge) and act rationally (i.e. like the self-interested, materialistic creatures modern science says we are). Only religion, characterized as the epitome of everything science is not, stands in the way.
This dichotomy is a false one, of course, but it is implicit in modern Western discourse in the media and in virtually all of our interactions in schools, government facilities, and other public venues. You can exempt yourself and your family from some of its assumptions if you like, but such exemptions must remain personal and private. The only way to challenge them is through respectable, ‘scientific’ alternatives such as environmentalism or conservation of cultural diversity. To say that GOD Himself condemns this dichotomy is considered anathema and absurd in ‘polite’ company.
Today’s believers, therefore, are constantly confronted with an excruciating dilemma: do they reject the use of reason to maintain their faith, or do they abandon their faith to uphold the incessant demands for a particular kind of logic and truth in modern discourse?
3 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ‘Scientific Method’, section 7. Conclusion.
4 R. Demos, “Religious Faith and Scientific Faith,” in S. Hook, ed., Religious Experience and Truth (New York: N.Y.U., 1961), p. 130 – quoted in John Edward Sullivan, “The Idea of Religion,” The Great Ideas Today, 1978 (Chicago, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1978)
The GOD You Already Know 