Sirajul Husain

The need to develop Islamic science also arises from the fact that most modern scientists are known to be secular, as they have consciously evaded the issue of the existence of a Creator. This is the result of their view that such a notion cannot be empirically substantiated. Thus it is even more necessary first to furnish a secular-free scientific justification of Islamic monotheism that could help direct the course of human intellectual inquiry.

Our thesis is that the malaise of the modern world, ironically, can be traced to its preoccupation with the monumental success in the applied sciences and technology. It is this very success which has, by and large, seriously impaired its epistemological acumen, one example being the outright rejection of the ontological necessity for the existence of a Creator of the universe. The fact that human beings are prone to succumb to secularism, as a result of the degeneration of their epistemological acumen despite their advancement in knowledge, is most poignantly pointed to the Prophet. "He taught man by means of pen; (He) Taught man what he knew not. But, indeed, man does transgress; He regards himself self sufficient" (Qur'an 964-6).

It is this very epistemological impairment that requires the formulation and development of the proposed discipline of Islamic science. Its main gads are to reverse this epistemological decline in modern times and, at the same time, to establish tawhid  in terms of an ontological necessity of the Creator's existence and then corroborate it in a scientifically justifiable manner.

Science proceeds only through ontological insights and epistemological rigor. This is exemplified by Einstein's reconstruction of Newtonian physics by freeing it from the inertial frame of reference based on Euclidean geometry, and the notions of absolute space and absolute time (Einstein 1955). Since science is the only mode in which the human mind functions meaningfully vis-a-vis the understanding of reality, any religion not characterized by a theology that is amenable to scientific study cannot be taken seriously. Islam meets this requirement, as the Qur'an continually exhorts Muslims to think, ponder, and avoid speculation.

In this sense, one may consider the modern world to be unscientific, for it has committed certain serious ontological omissions and exhibited equally serious epistemological lapses. The most outstanding example is its rejection of the notion of the Creator of the universe on the ground that it cannot provide any relevant empirical and scientific evidence. A recent survey of outstanding authorities in various scientific disciplines testifies to this malaise of the modern world (Ray1 and McKinley 1991).

The objective of Islamic science is to establish an Ontological necessity for the existence of the Creator and to provide an epistemologically sufficient ground for a scientific corroboration. We maintain that unless Islamic science can discuss and debate the concept of tawhid in concrete scientific term, use of the term "science" is unjustified.

It is important to note that the stand of the modern scientists is itself opposed to the scientific methodology. Science admits and thrives on purely abstract notions (i.e., entropy and infinity), in the absence of which the entire edifice of science would collapse instantly. Although most of these intangible and highly abstract notions cannot be subjected to any empirical proof, except indirectly or only theoretically as some mathematical function, no scientist would dare disown "belief" in them. In fact, science proceeds only through theoretical constructs of both tangible and intangible phenomena. Perhaps the best argument why a scientist cannot reject the concept of a supernatural, unseen Creator is provided by the observations of the famous scientist Wilhelm Roentgen.

One day, Roentgen was conducting experiments on the behavior of an electric current passing through a vacuum tube. At the end of this experiment, he discovered that a set of unused photographic films that had been enclosed in a black envelope and placed in the drawer of a wooden table located in a corner of his laboratory, were all exposed. Let us analyze his reaction to this incident.

Being a scientist, Roentgen did not dismiss the incident as a matter of chance or negligence on his part. On the contrary, he became curious and repeated the entire experiment under identical conditions. To his great surprise, these photographic films were also exposed. His scientific spirit did not regard the recurrence of the rather "supernatural" incident as something mystical and therefore not subject to examination by science just because there was no "tangible" means to explain the situation. On the contrary, he hypothesized that some kind of rays were emerging from his experiment which, although intangible and imperceptible to human senses, could penetrate his desk and the envelope and thereby affect the concealed photographic films. Since nothing more could be known about those unseen rays, Roentgen called them "X-Rays," meaning some unknown rays.

It is important to note here that the ontological insight demonstrated by Roentgen in accepting the existence of an unseen phenomenon, as well as his equally sharp epistemological rigor in formulating the hypothesis of X-Rays, constitutes pure science according to the principles and norms  of modern science. If he had heedlessly suppressed his scientific curiosity, along with his ontological urge and epistemological acumen, dismissing the incident as something beyond empirical corroboration, humanity and science would have missed a highly significant discovery.

In the above example, Roentgen was engaged in experimental or applied science. His use of logical and inductive rigor to devise a hypothesis concerning the observed phenomenon and constructing a concept constituted science in the real sense. It is this epistemological acumen to hypothesize, as well as the role of cognitive capability to form a concept, that have been studied in our recent research into neuropsychology, or what we call "cognitive kinematics" (Husain 1989).

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