Does Islam contradict science?
OP - October 22, 2022, 03:05 PM
It is often said by Muslims that they do not see a contradiction between Islam and science. They see a claim in the Quran or Hadith, and they see it as the same as some claims from scientific research.
But this is confused. And the confusion is caused by misunderstanding science.
Science is a set of methods of creating knowledge. Science is not a set of conclusions about reality.
The reason that we shouldn't see science as a set of conclusions, is that we change the conclusions as we learn more information. And those changes are a result of applying the methods. (Note that in science, we also continually improve the methods, not just the conclusions. The scientific approach was born with the tradition of criticism that started in Ancient Greece 2,500 years ago, and we've been evolving it since then.)
Religions are sets of ideas/conclusions. Religions do not have a built-in method for creating knowledge. Instead, religions claim to have knowledge without explaining how they arrived at that knowledge. Religions do say that God sent us messages, but they do not explain the reasoning behind why anyone should believe that God sent us messages, or why anyone should believe that there's a god at all (or one god versus many gods).
So what are some methods that we do in science that are not found in religions?
science, at its core, is about looking for contradictions and removing them such that we do not have contradictions in and between our theories. one example type of contradiction is this: a theory makes predictions about reality and reality disagrees with those predictions (which we find out through an experiment). in direct contrast, religions do not care about contradictions.
because of the above, in scientific research papers, there is a standard section of such papers dedicated for the author to explain all the possible ways his research could have been wrong. this helps the author, and others who study his research, find mistakes in the research. this is because the scientific approach recognizes our fallibility (that we could be wrong, and there's no way to guarantee being right). religions do not do this. there's no holy book that has a section that explains all of the ways that the book could be wrong.
So these are two contradictions between science and Islam.
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Topic: Does Islam contradict science?