The Science and Religion in Islam research group is the result of a collaboration between a number of Muslim academics who have decided to work together to explore the interface between science and religion from the perspective of different disciplinary horizons. We hope to contribute to the emergence of a working culture which is based on a double perspective: on one hand that of a rationality that is open to problems of a metaphysical, spiritual or theological order and, on the other hand, that of a spiritual life, of a religious conscience, and an inner experience that is open to philosophical problems that arise from investigations in the area of contemporary science. We advocate this double perspective in the sense that we consider that science and religion have things to say to one another. But, at the same time, this requires a great deal of clarity in our intentions as well as rigour in our method. The bringing together in a illusory side-by-side, or a fallacious analogy, of Islamic religious knowledge and the findings of contemporary science can lead to disappointing results since, by ignoring the specificities of the two areas and the singularity of the principles which govern their respective movements, this approach prevents, in reality, the emergence of a real "convergence" between science and religion. For this reason, unlike a certain reading which dominates in the Islamic World, we do not think that these two spheres of knowledge can seriously enter into dialogue with each other in a direct fashion. In our opinion, the nature of the relationship between the two areas requires an "internal", philosophical, theological or spiritual inquiry. Hence we will be able to phrase the question as follows: what is it within science that can enter into a meaningful dialogue with Islam? And what is it within Islam that can enter into a meaningful dialogue with science?   When we speak of Islam we are not only talking about the religious component. In order to promote the emergence of a serious dialogue between science and religion in the perspective of religion, we need to consider all the dimensions of the culture that has arisen from the civilisation that has been nurtured by this religion. It is one of the reasons why our research group includes not only mathematicians, physicists, and astrophysicists but also theologians, historians and philosophers. An interdisciplinary approach is an important aspect of our work: creating links between the findings of each discipline while keeping within the rules of each discipline.   The science-islam site intends to function as a knowledge forum in view of the emergence of a genuine scientific modernity that is rooted in the conscience of intellectual, spiritual and ethical values. Under these four section-headings (articles, abstracts, bibliographical references and links) our site will propose a certain number of tools, concepts and methods, theses and structures which may, in some way, contribute to the renewal or, more accurately, the "revitalisation", of Islamic thought based on a profound comprehension of the challenges and the advancements that are being made in the 21st century. 

We live, it is said, in the Scientific Age. Members of the public, and even most scientists, take science for granted. They expect it to work. But why is science so successful in describing our world, and how is it that human beings have evolved the capability of understanding the deep principles on which the universe runs?

Of course, science didn’t spring ready-made into the minds of its founders like Galileo, Descartes and Newton. They were strongly influenced by two longstanding traditions that pervaded European thought. The first was Greek philosophy. In most ancient cultures people were aware that the universe is not completely chaotic and capricious: there is a definite order in nature. The Greeks believed that this order could be understood, at least in part, by the application of human reasoning. They maintained that physical existence was not absurd, but rational and logical, and therefore in principle intelligible to us. They discovered that some physical processes had a hidden mathematical basis, and they sought to build a model of reality based on arithmetical and geometrical principles.

The second great tradition was the Judaic world view, according to which the universe was created by God at some definite moment in the past and ordered according to a fixed set of laws. The Jews taught that the universe unfolds in a unidirectional sequence - what we now call linear time - according to a definite historical process: creation, evolution and dissolution. This notion of linear time - in which the story of the universe has a beginning, a middle and an end - stands in marked contrast to the concept of cosmic cyclicity, the pervading mythology of almost all ancient cultures. Cyclic time - the myth of the eternal return - springs from mankind’s close association with the cycles and rhythms of nature, and remains a key component in the belief systems of many cultures today. It also lurks beneath the surface of the Western mind, erupting occasionally to infuse our art, our folklore and our literature.

A world freely created by God, and ordered in a particular, felicitous way at the origin of a linear time, constitutes a powerful set of beliefs, and was taken up by both Christianity and Islam. An essential element of this belief system is that the universe does not have to be as it is: it could have been otherwise. Einstein once said the thing that most interested him is whether God had any choice in the form of his creation. According to the Judaeo-Islamic-Christian tradition, the answer is yes.

Although not conventionally religious, Einstein often spoke of God, and expressed a sentiment shared, I believe, by many scientists, including professed atheists. It is a sentiment best described as a reverence for nature and a deep fascination for the natural order of the cosmos. If the universe did not have to be as it is, of necessity - if, to paraphrase Einstein, God did have a choice - then the fact that nature is so fruitful, that the universe is so full of richness, diversity and novelty, is profoundly significant. The fact that it is also intelligible to at least one species on one planet is also profoundly significant.

Some scientists have tried to argue that if only we knew enough about the laws of physics, if we were to discover a final theory that united all the fundamental forces and particles of nature into a single mathematical scheme, then we would find that this superlaw, or theory of everything, would describe a unique logically consistent world. In other words, the nature of the physical world would be entirely a consequence of logical and mathematical necessity. There would be no choice about it. I think this is demonstrably wrong. There is not a shred of evidence that the universe is logically necessary. Indeed, as a theoretical physicist I find it rather easy to imagine alternative universes that are logically consistent, and therefore equal contenders for reality.

It was from the intellectual ferment brought about by the merging of Greek philosophy and Judaeo-Islamic-Christian thought, that modern science emerged, with its unidirectional linear time, its insistence on nature’s rationality, and its emphasis on mathematical principles. All the early scientists such as Newton were religious in one way or another. They saw their science as a means of uncovering traces of God’s handiwork in the universe. What we now call the laws of physics they regarded as God’s abstract creation: thoughts, so to speak, in the mind of God. So in doing science, they supposed, one might be able to glimpse the mind of God. What an exhilarating and audacious claim!

In the ensuing three hundred years, the theological dimension of science has faded. People take it for granted that the physical world is both ordered and intelligible. The underlying order in nature - the laws of physics - are simply taken by most scientists as given, as brute facts. The lawlike order in nature that is at least in part comprehensible to us is accepted as an act of sheer faith.

It has become fashionable in some circles to argue that science is ultimately a sham, that we scientists read order into nature, not out of nature, so that the laws of physics are our laws, not nature’s. I believe this is nonsense. You’d be hard-pressed to convince a physicist that Newton’s inverse square law of gravitation is a purely cultural concoction. The laws of physics, I submit, really exist in the world out there, and the job of the scientist is to uncover them, not invent them. True, at any given time, the laws you find in the textbooks are tentative and approximate, but they mirror, albeit imperfectly, a really-existing order in the physical world. Of course, many scientists don’t recognize that in accepting the reality of an order in nature - the existence of laws "out there" - they are adopting a theological world view.

Let us accept, then, that nature really is ordered in a mathematical way - that "the book of nature", to quote Galileo, "is written in mathematical language". Even so, it is easy to imagine an ordered universe which nevertheless remains utterly beyond human comprehension, due to its complexity and subtlety. For me, the magic of science is that we can understand at least part of nature - perhaps in principle all of it - using the scientific method of enquiry. How utterly astonishing that we human beings can do this! Why should the rules on which the universe runs be accessible to the human intellect? The mystery is all the greater when one takes into account the cryptic character of the laws of nature. When Newton saw the apple fall, he saw a falling apple. He didn’t see a set of differential equations that link the motion of the apple to the motion of the moon. The mathematical laws that underlie physical phenomena are not apparent to us through direct observation; they have to be painstakingly extracted from nature using arcane procedures of laboratory experiment and mathematical theory. The laws of nature are hidden from us, and are revealed only after much labour. The late Heinz Pagels described this by saying that the laws of nature are written in a sort of cosmic code, and that the job of the scientist is to crack the code and reveal the message - nature’s message, God’s message, take your choice, but not our message. The extraordinary thing is that human beings have evolved such a fantastic code-breaking talent. This is the wonder and the magnificence of science; we can use it to decode nature and discover the secret laws that make the universe tick!

Many people want to find God in the creation of the universe, in the big bang that started it all off. They imagine a superbeing who deliberates for all eternity, then presses a metaphysical button and produces a huge explosion. I believe this image is entirely misconceived. Einstein showed us that space and time are part of the physical universe, not a pre-existing arena in which the universe happens. In the simplest model of the big bang theory, the origin of the universe represents the coming-into-being, not just of matter and energy, but of space and time as well. Time itself began with the big bang. If this sounds baffling, it is by no means new. Already in the fifth century St. Augustine proclaimed that "the world was made with time, not in time". According to James Hartle and Stephen Hawking, this coming-into-being of the universe need not be a supernatural process, but could occur entirely naturally, in accordance with the laws of quantum physics, which permit the occurrence of genuinely spontaneous events.

The origin of the universe, however, is hardly the end of the story. The evidence suggests that in its primordial phase the universe was in a highly simple, almost featureless state: perhaps a uniform soup of subatomic particles, or even just expanding empty space. All the richness and diversity of matter and energy we observe today has emerged since the beginning in a long and complicated sequence of self-organizing physical processes. What an incredible thing these laws of physics are! Not only do they permit a universe to originate spontaneously; they encourage it to self-organize and self-complexify to the point where conscious beings emerge, and can look back on the great cosmic drama and reflect on what it all means.

Now you may think I have written God entirely out of the picture. Who needs a God when the laws of physics can do such a splendid job? But we are bound to return to that burning question: Where do the laws of physics come from? And why those laws rather than some other set? Most especially: Why a set of laws that drives the searing, featureless gases coughed out of the big bang, towards life and consciousness and intelligence and cultural activities such as religion, art, mathematics and science?

If there is a meaning or purpose to existence, as I believe there is, we are wrong to dwell too much on the originating event. The big bang is sometimes referred to as "the creation", but in truth nature has never ceased to be creative. This ongoing creativity, which manifests itself in the spontaneous emergence of novelty, complexity, and organization of physical systems, is permitted through, or guided by, the underlying mathematical laws that scientists are so busy discovering.

Now the laws of which I speak have the status of timeless eternal truths, in contrast to the physical states of the universe which change with time, and bring forth the genuinely new. So we here confront in physics a re-emergence of the oldest of all philosophical and theological debates: the paradoxical conjunction of the eternal and the temporal. Early Christian thinkers wrestled with the problem of time: is God within the stream of time, or outside of it? How can a truly timeless God relate in any way to temporal beings such as ourselves? But how can a God who relates to a changing universe be considered eternal and unchangingly perfect?

Well, physics has its own variations on this theme. In our century, Einstein showed us that time is not simply "there" as a universal and absolute backdrop to existence, it is intimately interwoven with space and matter. As I have mentioned, time is revealed to be an integral part of the physical universe; indeed, it can be warped by motion and gravitation. Clearly something that can be changed in this manner is not absolute, but a contingent part of the physical world.

In my own field of research - called quantum gravity - a lot of attention has been devoted to understanding how time itself could have come into existence in the big bang. We know that matter can be created by quantum processes. There is now a general acceptance among physicists and cosmologists that spacetime can also originate in a quantum process. According to the latest thinking, time might not be a primitive concept at all, but something that has "congealed" from the fuzzy quantum ferment of the big bang, a relic, so to speak, of a particular state that froze out of the fiery cosmic birth.

If it is the case that time is a contingent property of the physical world rather than a necessary consequence of existence, then any attempt to trace the ultimate purpose or design of nature to a temporal Being or Principle seems doomed to failure. While I do not wish to claim that physics has solved the riddle of time - far from it - I do believe that our advancing scientific understanding of time has illuminated the ancient theological debate in important ways. I cite this topic as just one example of the lively dialogue that is continuing between science and theology.

So where is God in this story? Not especially in the big bang that starts the universe off, nor meddling fitfully in the physical processes that generate life and consciousness. I would rather that nature take care of itself. The idea of a God who is just another force or agency at work in nature, moving atoms here and there in competition with physical forces, is profoundly uninspiring. To me, the true miracle of nature is to be found in the ingenious and unswerving lawfulness of the cosmos, a lawfulness that permits complex order to emerge from chaos, life to emerge from inanimate matter, and consciousness to emerge from life, without the need for the occasional supernatural prod; a lawfulness that produces beings who not only ask great questions of existence, but who, through science and other methods of enquiry, are even beginning to find answers. You might be tempted to suppose that any old rag-bag of laws would produce a complex universe of some sort, with attendant inhabitants convinced of their own specialness. Not so. It turns out that randomly-selected laws lead almost inevitably either to unrelieved chaos or boring and uneventful simplicity. Our own universe is poised exquisitely between these unpalatable alternatives, offering a potent mix of freedom and discipline, a sort of restrained creativity. The laws do not tie down physical systems so rigidly that they can accomplish little, nor are they a recipe for cosmic anarchy. Instead, they encourage matter and energy to develop along pathways of evolution that lead to novel variety, what Freeman Dyson has called the principle of maximum diversity: that in some sense we live in the most interesting possible universe.

Scientists have recently identified a regime dubbed "the edge of chaos", a description that certainly characterizes living organisms, where innovation and novelty combine with coherence and cooperation. The edge of chaos seems to imply the sort of lawful freedom I have just described. Mathematical studies suggest that to engineer such a state of affairs requires laws of a very special form. If we could twiddle a knob and change the existing laws, even very slightly, the chances are that the universe as we know it would fall apart, descending into chaos. Certainly the existence of life as we know it, and even of less elaborate systems such as stable stars, would be threatened by just the tiniest change in the strengths of the fundamental forces, for example. The laws that characterize our actual universe, as opposed to an infinite number of alternative possible universes, seem almost contrived - fine-tuned some commentators have claimed - so that life and consciousness may emerge. To quote Dyson again: it is almost as if "the universe knew we were coming". I can’t prove to you that that is design, but whatever it is it is certainly very clever!

Now some of my colleagues embrace the same scientific facts as I, but deny any deeper significance. They either shrug aside the breathtaking ingenuity of the laws of physics and the extraordinary felicity of nature as a package of marvels that just happens to be. Alternatively they embrace the so-called multiverse theory, explained by Hubert Reeves. According to this point of view, what we call “the universe” is but an infinitesimal component of a much larger system. There are other regions of space, or entire universes existing in parallel to ours, in which the laws are different. Perhaps all possible laws are manifested in a universe somewhere. But only in a tiny fraction of universes will the laws be bio-friendly, permitting life to emerge, and beings such as ourselves who can study their world and marvel at how propitiously the laws have been arranged. However, they would be wrong to read any significance into this observation, for such observers are merely winners in a vast cosmic lottery. The other, less hospitable, universes will go unseen.

The multiverse theory seems to have become the explanation of choice among scientists for the remarkable bio-friendliness of the observed universe. But I have problems with it. First, it is necessary to assume that all universes have laws of some sort. We still have to explain “lawfulness.” Secondly, if the multiverse theory is right, we should live in the least contrived and bio-friendly universe consistent with the emergence of intelligent life, because there will be many more universes where things are just contrived enough than universes that are even more contrived. There is no evidence that our universe “kust crosses the wire” when it comes to ingenious bio-friendly features. Thirdly, the ontological status of the multiverse theory is, I submit, isomorphic to classical theism. Both theories invoke an infinitely complex unseen agency to explain the universe we do see: the multiverse appeals to hidden universes, theism to a hidden Deity. There is a branch of mathematics known as algorithmic information theory that can be used to quantify the complexity of theories according to the information content hidden in their assumptions. I conjecture that, defined in the precise language of algorithmic information theory, the multiverse and classical Theism would turn out to be both equally – and infinitely - complex. One might say that the multiverse theory is merely theism dressed up in scientific jargon. My personal hope is that there is a “Third Way” in which the ingenious, bio-friendly lawfulness of the universe will be explained without appeal to infinitely complex unseen agencies.

If we reject the multiverse explanation, then the laws of the universe point forcefully to a deeper underlying meaning to existence. Some call it purpose, some design. These loaded words, which derive from human categories, capture only imperfectly what it is that the universe is about. But, that it is about something, I have absolutely no doubt.

Where do we human beings fit into this great cosmic scheme? Can we gaze out into the cosmos, as did our remote ancestors, and declare: "God made all this for us!" Well, I think not. Are we then but an accident of nature, the freakish outcome of blind and purposeless forces, an incidental by-product of a mindless, mechanistic universe? I reject that too. The emergence of life and consciousness, I maintain, are written into the laws of the universe in a very basic way. True, the actual physical form and general mental make-up of homo sapiens contains many accidental features of no particular significance. If the universe were re-run a second time, there would be no solar system, no Earth and no people. But the emergence of life and consciousness somewhere and somewhen in the cosmos is, I believe, assured by the underlying laws of nature. The origin of life and consciousness were not interventionist miracles, but nor were they stupendously improbable accidents. They were, I believe, part of the natural outworking of the laws of nature, and as such our existence as conscious enquiring beings springs ultimately from the bedrock of physical existence - those ingenious, felicitous laws. That is why I wrote in my book The Mind of God: "We are truly meant to be here". I mean "we" in the sense of conscious beings, not homo sapiens specifically. Thus although we are not at the centre of the universe, human existence does have a powerful wider significance. Whatever the universe as a whole may be about, the scientific evidence suggests that we, in some limited yet ultimately still profound way, are an integral part of its purpose.

How can we test these ideas scientifically? One of the great challenges to science is to understand the nature of consciousness in general and human consciousness in particular. We still do not understand how mind and matter are related, nor what process led to the emergence of mind from matter in the first place. Secondly, if I am right that the universe is fundamentally creative in a pervasive and continuing manner, and that the laws of nature encourage matter and energy to self-organize and self-complexify to the point that life and consciousness emerge naturally, then there will be a universal trend or directionality towards the emergence of greater complexity and diversity. We might then expect life and consciousness to exist throughout the universe. That is why I attach such importance to the search for extraterrestrial organisms, be they bacteria on Mars, or advanced technological communities on the other side of the galaxy. The search may prove hopeless - the distances and numbers are certainly daunting - but it is a glorious quest. If we are alone in the universe, if the Earth is the only life-bearing planet among countless trillions, then the choice is stark. Either we are the product of a unique supernatural event in a universe of profligate overprovision, or else an accident of mind-numbing improbability and irrelevance. On the other hand, if life and mind are universal phenomena, if they are written into nature at its deepest level, then the case for an ultimate purpose to existence would be compelling.

I believe that mainstream science, if we are brave enough to embrace it, offers the most reliable path to knowledge about the physical world. I am certainly not saying that scientists are infallible, nor am I suggesting that science should be turned into a latter-day religion. But I do think that if religion is to make real progress, it cannot ignore the scientific culture; nor should it be afraid to do so, for as I have argued, science reveals just what a marvel the universe is. It is not the plaything of a capricious Deity, but a coherent, rational, elegant and harmonious expression of a deep and purposeful meaning.