Reformulating a comprehensive relationship between religion and science: an Islamic perspective

Islam & Science, June, 2003 by Osman Bakar

Having adopted the term science to comprehend this particular domain of scientific knowledge and activity, we now need to be clear whether we are only concerned with its epistemological dimension dealing with knowledge content or only with its ethical dimension dealing with applications of that knowledge, or with both. The word 'application' itself requires clarification. Some applications are theoretical in nature, producing results either within or beyond the domain of science proper. The rest of the applications are practical in nature, resulting in the production of techniques and technological products. As a whole, the domain of applications presents itself as the domain of ethical concern. Distinctions thus have to be made between epistemological and ethical concerns, because their relationships with religion involve different sets of principles. Likewise, we have to make distinctions between theoretical and practical applications for the same reason.

The Structures of Religion and Science

In our attempt to formulate a comprehensive relationship between Islam and science, it is necessary to examine the structures of both of them and then to relate the basic elements in the two structures to each other. Let us first examine the religious structure of Islam. According to a Prophetic hadith, Islam as a religion (din) is comprised of three dimensions: islam, iman, and ihsan. (6) The nature of each dimension is apparent from both its linguistic and religious content. Islam refers to the various acts of submission to the Divine Will and therefore to the domain of the Shari'ah, Islam's Divine Law or moral and ethical-legal dimension which determines the hierarchy of values of all human acts and objects. Iman refers to the fundamental truths and realities that must be believed or known, more precisely to the divine and cosmic realities and their correspondences within the human universe. This is the domain of theology, cosmology and psychology. Ihsan is simply the practice of islam and the realization of iman at the level of excellence. As such, ihsan pertains to a person's internalization of islam and iman, the former with the view of realizing spiritual and moral virtues that constitute the essential values of the Shari'ah, and the latter with the view of attaining knowledge of the inner realities of all things.

We now examine the structure of science as a branch of knowledge and as an intellectual activity. It is only meaningful to speak of the structure of science if we accept the fact that knowledge has been systematically organized and divided into numerous academic disciplines and these disciplines classified in groups according to some well-defined criteria. Just as knowledge grows through specialization, so the academic disciplines grow in numbers. In Islamic tradition, there was tremendous intellectual activity focused on the issue of organization of knowledge into disciplines and their classifications. (7) Muslim intellectual culture was also a witness to the creation of new scientific disciplines. Muslim philosophers of science called these disciplines 'sciences' ('ulum) and generally agreed that science understood in this sense is structurally divided into four basic components. The first component is a well-defined subject matter or object of study pertaining to which is established an accumulative body of knowledge in the form of concepts, facts (data), theories and laws, and the logical relationships that exist among them. This body of knowledge constitutes the main content of a science.