Science, Religion and Atheism

 

One of the most remarkable things to struck me in the Cambridge course was the fact that the Christian west, besides being the modern drivers of the scientific enterprise, were also in the driving seat towards better understanding of the dialogue at the intersection of science and religion. This trend despite the fact that the western culture is, for the last few hundred years, oriented towards the Intellectual endeavor is also being fuelled by the recent rise in Atheism.

Modern Atheism, propagated by its most prominent proponent, Richard Dawkins, hides behind Neo-Darwinism to outrageously claimed that God (Or believing in him) is like a “malignant infection contaminating otherwise pure minds”. Other part of the arguments of Dawkins and Co. was that religion is the root of most the evil perpetrated by mankind. Yes, every student of history will concur to the fact of atrocities committed in the name of religion. The beatitudes spoken by Christ in the Sermon on the Mount were ignored as the Christians church carried out violent crusades in the Middle Ages and pursued a series of inquisitions afterwards. Prophet Muhammad’s farewell sermon on mount Arafat (which was the greatest document on universality) was equally ignored by false Jihadist to reign terror on innocent women and children. Even the supposedly non-violent religions of Hinduism and Buddhism occasionally engaged in violent confrontations, as is currently occurring in Sri-Lanka. The present day circle of violence between the Palestinians and the Israelis (a political issue disguised in religion)  is evident.

Well we should not dwell on one side of historical fact, looking at the non-religious violence in history especially the Marxist experiments in the Soviet Union and Mao’s China , aiming at establishing societies explicitly based upon Atheism, proved capable of committing more human slaughter and raw abuse of power than the worst of all regimes in recent times. And how about the events that led to the outbreak of the two world wars? Were they even remotely associated with religion? Certainly not, and they were the greatest tragedy to have befallen modern society.

The truth, lets face it, is humans are capable of good and evil and religion despite being instituted by God to restrain and leash the evil nature in human’s, some use religion as a vehicle for the manifestation of their evil. Can we condemn the air for allowing lies to be transmitted through it?

Darwin himself was never an advocate of Atheism as he succinctly declares in his autobiography “…My judgment often fluctuates…in my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an Atheist in the sense of denying God. I think I generally (and more and more as I grow older) but no always that an agnostic (who separate God matters from science matters)would be the correct description of my state of mind” So Darwin believed in God unlike his modern day disciples like Richard Dawkins that reject the idea of God completely. The greatest scientist of our time, Albert Einstein, like Darwin , believes in God but not the kind of the “Yahweh” God of the Jews.

This line of thinking is the crux of the matter as I observe more the 14 eminent Professors in our course. I attributed this trend to the lack of scientific materials in the Scriptures of the Jewish-Christian dispensations. This left the intellectual giants hanging, but as for me being from Islamic background and the availability of almost all the scientific facts in the Qur’an, I am not in any dilemma. We, Muslim, have at our disposal the arsenal to silence the growing rhetoric’s of atheism on their home ground (Science). But the sad fact is most scholars are apprehensive of science considering so much of it to be alien to our culture and religion. We should encourage more of our own scientist to study religion and more of our clerics to study the sciences. Dr. Paul Shellard, one of our lecturers in Cambridge says”The more you know, the more you know how little you know” God has already told us in verse of the Holy Quran that if all the oceans of the world were ink, cannot exhaust the words of the lord.    

 

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