Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

Understanding Modern Science as a Problem for Religion. Deep down many believers resent our age of science believing that it has undermined faith. But everyone would love to extol rational credentials of religion and avail many gifts of modern science at the same time. There are many who think that science can be an ally of faith. Such towering scientific minds as Darwin, Freud and Hawking, for instance, all have been critical of popular religion. Most scientists today are not believers. Many young people exposed to science turn against religion. This is a complex problem – note, for instance, heavy weights like Wallace and Darwin disagreeing on the question of including or excluding man in evolutionary account, and crucial disagreements between Freud and Jung, Russell and Whitehead, Iqbal and Nasr on the question of religion vis-a-vis modern science – and we propose to treat one aspect of it today.       The first point to be noted is the difference between...

What shall man be doing after 10,000 years from now? Scientists tell us that we shall always have tasks ahead and will not be bored. Science, in Kant’s famous words, is organized knowledge. Kant defined wisdom as organized life. Science is man’s great effort to know himself and the world better at many levels with or without concomitant increase in power or solving this or that problem. It has been part of comprehensive education from the earliest times. Modern science did succumb to certain Promethean and Faustian ambitions and thanks to its wedding with power or technology it has been a mixed blessing and a danger against which most of great thinkers, artists and poets have warned. In its wake many treasured traditional sciences have been a casualty and its myopia and hubris have been factors in the crisis of modern civilization. What we are concerned with today is not this scientism but science in the more general and universal sense that has been part of treasured intellectual a...

Exploring if Hawking may be read as an ally of genuine religion Should Hawking’s much publicized atheism bother truly religious souls? No, because it leaves the problem that religion basically addresses – the question of suffering/ignorance/alienation or meaning or God understood as the Meaning of Life – untouched. Hawking himself advocate a sort of intellectual/spiritual life that echoes/is parasitic upon the “worldview” of Religion. God talk is ultimately more about life lived here and now than enquiring about past or future dispensation or bothering about some account of what happened at the beginning of time. The most important question for religion is not of boundaries or edges of the universe or who began the show or whether it is self sustaining or what is the precise address of the Creator if there is one (as against none or two or more as if nondual Reality that grounds every inquiry or judgment is numerical question) or the structure of His Mind. It is, instead, how one ta...

Our religious scholars generally choose not to be well informed on the troubling questions that modernity has raised. How do we engage with “Neo-Salafi”/“Wahabi” Islam, “Sufi” Islam, Revivalist/“Political” Islam and in fact endless debates amongst various juristic and theological schools; and also consequent divisive interpretations of such important issues as Caliphate/State, women’s/minority’ rights, interfaith dialogue? We find fundamentalists on the one hand and aggressive secularists on the other. From antinomian pseudo-Sufis to politically hyperactive class of religionists we find other extremes failing to understand demands of either religion or contemporaneity. Our religious scholars generally choose not to be well informed on the troubling questions that modernity has raised.       It seems Muslims have been divided in their response to modernism, modern science and philosophy. From Mawlana Thanvi’s Answer to Modernism and his translator Hasan Askar...