You guys are not being scientific, but are being theocratic.
This is why America and China will soon send people over to mars, while the Islamic world is still bickering over theology.
Most modern scholarly secular approaches to religion are based, in my opinion, on the false and mentally crippling idea, that the only kind of knowledge we humans can have is limited to the empirical order. We have to see, hear, touch, taste or smell something to know it; and obviously if that’s the case, we can know nothing at all about God or the spiritual world or human immortality. Modern scholars therefore who have this empirical bias are essentially limited to doing one of three things.
I often think in terms of these scholars as falling into three basic categories, we could call them primitivists or reductionists on the one hand, functionalists—a second group, and what I call fee-deists, a third group. The first simply look upon religion as nonsense and spend their time debunking it, cynically skeptically as something like residue from mans pre-scientific ways. That’s you I think. The second group of scholars, again with these empirical biases, functionalists as I would call them would say:
“No, religion has certain positive value, but that value is still strictly historical, horizontal and social. Religions promote virtues like honesty justice and so forth. “
Then we have the third group. Scholars I have called fee-deists, would themselves personally be believers in the transcendent but they would feel as they have to shield that belief their students and their work as that would be “unethical”. Still like the others scholars speaking only of historical matters, the transmission of sacred texts over time, archeological evidence from ancient sites and so forth in a dead and barren manner.
In striking contrast to all of those groups, I think you must begin with the conviction as Frithjof Schuon would put it, that “Man is made for the absolute”. That we have a capacity to know God directly, to know absolutely the spiritual world. The world’s religions are like condensations or crystallizations of that Supreme Truth, that wisdom, and that they are at the same time training programs or methods whereupon we can come to acquire that knowledge and understand God directly.
I think that can have a transformative impact in how one reads scientific literature, history and so on, changing not only how one looks at the world, but the world that one looks at. Changing the kind of person you are. The scientists of yore, meaning munks, Muslims, pious ascetics of various kinds, wrote chiefly for their own souls salvation and for those who might benefit. I think that’s the way forward again for us in the Islamic world.
