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Has anyone else noticed that atheists have suddenly become a lot more vocal than ever before? It’s quite a departure from the quiet indifference that characterised them in the past — indeed, this new breed of atheists displays a decidedly religious zeal in their anti-theism. The questions they raise are interesting to me in questioning and understanding my own faith, particularly in the context of the reading I’m doing these days, the awesome Sophie’s World.

One of the leading voices is Dr. Richard Dawkins, whose book The God Delusion (must-read review) has become a bestseller. Dr. Dawkins is also all over YouTube, where you can see him debating Christian evangelists, patronisingly answering Christian questioners and upsetting Ted Haggard (a leading gay-marriage-opposing evangelist who was revealed to be gay and a meth-head).

Dr. Dawkins’ argument is that organised religions in general, and the Big Three (Christianity, Judaism and Islam) in particular, are desperately out of place in today’s world, where scientific method has established several key tenets to be false. The one that comes up most often is the Biblical notion that the world is 6,000 years old. Carbon dating and other methods inform us the earth is several billions of years old, a claim Christian evangelists laughably counter with the assertion that carbon dating doesn’t work as advertised. Similarly, the notion that there’s an ‘invisible old man in the sky’ (a reference to the Christian belief that God created Man in his image) dictating our destiny is scorned as a supernatural explanation for natural events. (I think there’s a connection, possibly tenuous, between the Christian notion of God-as-Man and the polytheistic roots of the Neoplatonic philosophy that so influenced Christian thought in its early days. This would be similar to the Greco-Roman influences that led to the widespread depiction of Jesus and Mary even though the Bible expressly forbids ‘graven images’.)

This, of course, echoes ancient philosophy, which also sought to answer certain ‘eternal’ questions in order to break away from the unfounded mythology of ancient polytheistic religions. The key difference is that most ancient philosophers did not question the existence of God, or the ‘first mover’, who set all things in motion. The reason, of course, is that reason — and now science, with the Big Bang theory — informs us that there was, in fact, a Beginning, and that therefore there must have been a Force that caused it.

Religion

“People like to say that faith and science can live together side by side. But I dont think they can. They’re deeply opposed. Science is a discipline of investigation and constructive doubt, questing with logic, evidence, and reason to draw conclusion. Faith, by stark contrast, demands a positive suspension of critical faculties.” - Dr. Richard Dawkins

I guess Mr. Haggard and others don’t help their cause by bashing science without adequate knowledge to support their arguments. For example, Mr. Haggard claims that ’some evolutionists’ think the eye and the ear ‘happened by accident’. And in a session with Dr. Dawkins, a questioner asked the (almost) pertinent question of how we are to believe quantum physics when it cannot be experimentally tested, and thus held up to scientific scrutiny. Unfortunately, the questioner probably meant to ask about string theory, since quantum mechanics are well-understood and tested. Dr. Dawkins, let off the hook (in as far as the tough question goes), patiently (or patronisingly, depending on your mood) pontificated on how accurate and testable quantum physics actually is.

As a Muslim, my first reaction to all this is anger that Islam is automatically grouped with Christianity as irrational. This seems to be a result of the (surprisingly common) view that Islam is simply a derivative of Christianity, which in turn is a polite (if subversive) way of implying that Islam is simply Muhammed’s (PBUH) way of prostrating the world before him.

Ignoring the stupidity inherent in that thought, the fact is Islam has always held science in high esteem, nourishing it when Europe was embracing ignorance in the Middle Ages. Indeed, a Muslim scientist, Ibn Al-Haitham, is credited as the originator of what is known today as ‘the scientific method’, and his many colleagues gave us the basis of algebra, astronomy and medicine.

I will not go into detail on the number of amazing things on which science agrees with Islam as these have been already been detailed. Instead, let us restrict ourselves to the observation that Islam does not claim the universe is only 6000 years old. And immediately, the most glaring problems — intelligent design (which sort of has to exist in a Christian universe because there isn’t enough time for evolution to happen at its leisurely pace), refuting the Big Bang theory etc. — that Dawkins identifies disappear. Intelligent design, for example, becomes as palatable as evolution, since evolution has no provable/testable answer for the origin of life either.

As for the ‘invisible old man in the sky’, Islam maintains a very clear distinction between God and his creation, never implying any similarity between the two. Indeed, the Quranic description of Allah, as ‘nur ala nur’ (’light upon light’, where ‘light’ may be interpreted as ‘energy’), is completely reasonable as a description of the Force that set the universe in motion, the ‘first mover’ of antiquity. (The question of the Force’s sentience is an interesting one, and one that pantheism might make tractable.)

Interestingly, the history of the two religions provides further insight into why science has always worked better with Islam than with Christianity. Christian theology was heavily influenced by idealism and Neoplatonism, which were based on Plato’s elegant (but completely unfounded) notion of a dualism in the transient and eternal forms of body and soul. Muslim philosophy, on the other hand, found its roots in the reasoned conclusions Aristotle drew from his careful examination of nature. Thus, the two religions approached the natural world differently from the very outset: Christianity ignored science altogether, whereas Islam viewed it as proof. This was rectified to some extent at the end of the Middle Ages by St. Aquinas, who introduced Aristotlean philosophy to mainstream Christian thought, partly by reconsidering classical interpretations of the Bible. Unfortunately, this was completely undone during the Reformation when, in a protest against the stranglehold the Church had established on personal faith, Martin Luther’s cry of “the Scripture alone” returned Christian theology to a literal interpretation of the Bible, ignoring again the progress science and philosophy had made.

Update: I took out the ‘relevance of Islam’ bit — it’s a different subject altogether and didn’t fit well with this post.