Minute with a Muslim #322 – This Will CHANGE Your Perspective About Science and Islam

When it comes to science and Islam,

the first thing that is significant to me is that Islam is the only scientific faith out there.

And that seems like a bold statement, but I stand by that 100%. And that is with the definition of science as something that is process oriented. That is not cooking the books, or selectively cherry picking the evidence to match a prefabricated conclusion, right, that's not science, if we're going to take the scientific method seriously, is that you might develop hypotheses, but you're trying to follow the evidence where it leads you. And you follow the evidence that the conclusion? That's a slam, right, and Islam is the only religion like that. Because we say, Okay, what do we know for certain is communication from the Divine communication from the Creator, okay, we're certain after

doing a lot of work, we're certain that is that the Koran is authentic comes from the Creator, we're certain that these Hadith, this corpus of literature, or statements of his last prophets of Allah is setup. This is revelation. Okay.

Now, the question is, all of that data, that data set that raw material? Where does it lead us? Right, so Islam agrees on the process of how to interpret, and then we follow it to where it leads. And wherever it leads, we accept it.

And we don't come up with our conclusions ahead of time of where we think it should lead, and then look back and say, well, that doesn't mean what you think it means. It actually means this very, very esoteric meaning this is Christianity. This is other religions. Right? If you look at let's just take Christianity, you look at the history of the councils, the Council of Trent transit Council of Nicaea, the Council of this and that, they decided as to what was going to be orthodoxy, what was going to be the truth, the authoritative interpretation, and then they work backwards from there, which verses in the Bible support this, which go against it? How can we read that reinterpret

this, so that it affirms what we just decided? Right, this is unscientific, entirely. This is significant, because then within history, if you look at the different relationships to scientific discovery, they're completely 180 degrees night and day, when it came to Islam. Islam was such a productive force in scientific discovery, because there's this almost this shared process or this shared epistemology of understanding that, you know, you have to agree to a subset of assumptions and process and then follow the results. Whereas Christianity was fighting scientific discovery tooth and nail for centuries. Right. Well, this disproves what we thought, we believed about the

earth being the center of the world or about this, or about the age of the Earth, or about lots of different things. So it's no surprise that Islam had a completely different relationship to scientific discovery. And you find that there were many of the folks in the Islamic world, where making scientific discoveries that are very pious Muslims and they actually were producing works in both religious fields of knowledge and within, you know, secular or scientific fields of knowledge, it was not sort of a mutually mutually exclusive realm. Whereas other traditions, they had a lot more rocky relationship.

encounters and standoffs and antagonism between the church authorities and science and scientists that exists to this day.