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Big Questions About the Human Being - Episode 1 | Science and Religion: How Can We Know Anything at All?
65 Plays2 months ago
Big Questions About the Human Being: Bioscience and Islam in Dialogue Hosted by Dr. Aasim Padela In this opening episode, Dr. Aasim Padela introduces the focus of our inaugural podcast series – an exploration of the deepest questions about human existence.
From evolution, artificial intelligence, and human consciousness to transhumanism, free will, and even extraterrestrial life, this series brings leading scholars and thinkers from across the world into dialogue at the intersection of philosophy, science, and theology.
Drawing on his own professional and academic journey – from Islamic seminary to biomedical engineering studies and as a practicing emergency medicine doctor– Dr. Padela reflects on how religion and science need not be kept in separate boxes, and why the integration of knowledge and ideas matters for understanding ourselves, our place in the universe and in shaping our future.
What you’ll hear in this episode:
● The story behind the podcast series
● How bioscientific and religious views on human being can intersect
● Why epistemology and humility matter in the pursuit of knowledge
● A preview of upcoming conversations with experts from Cambridge, Oxford, Malaysia, Turkey, Oman, and beyond.
Join us as we begin this global conversation on the biggest questions about the mystery of humanity..
Subscribe to follow the series and not miss an episode! A Podcast by The Medic and The Mufti A production of The Initiative on Islam and Medicine (II&M)
#Bioscience #Islam #Philosophy #ScienceAndReligion #BigQuestions #podcast
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:26
Speaker
As-salamu alaykum and peace be unto you, to your listeners around the world. Welcome to our podcast series titled Big Questions About the Human Being, Bioscience and Islam and Dialogue.
00:00:38
Speaker
On behalf of the entire team that contributed to this series, let me say, we have thrilled that you have tuned in. Thank you. Thank you.
00:00:53
Speaker
I'm Dr. Asim Padella, and I'm honored to be your host for this series. We will explore connections between philosophy, science, and theology to address some of the most fundamental questions about the nature of reality and about ourselves.
00:01:09
Speaker
We will investigate topics at the heart of what it means to be a human, from evolution to artificial intelligence, human consciousness, transhumanism, free will, and even extraterrestrial intelligent life.
00:01:23
Speaker
We will ask, Who or what are we? How did we come to be? What do we imagine the future of humankind may look like? And to what extent can we, as individuals, shape our own futures?
00:01:36
Speaker
We will be bringing you experts from around the world who are leading the current thought on these topics. You'll be hearing from voices from our small blue planet, from Cambridge and Oxford to Malaysia, Turkey and Oman.
Bridging Science and Religion
00:01:49
Speaker
not to mention spanning the east and the west coast of the U.S., with a fair few of us in the Midwest. That is certainly a lot of ground to cover, pun intended, but it's exciting stuff, wouldn't you agree?
00:02:00
Speaker
Hold on, don't answer that rhetorical question. Please do let me assure you that we've assembled a team of intrepid guides to help us navigate this terrain together. That said, before we undertake our journey of discovery, let me introduce myself a bit more fully, share a little bit about the origin story of this podcast series, and give you a sneak preview of this episode along with the rest of the series.
00:02:24
Speaker
According to ChatGPT, I'm a leading American emergency medicine physician and bioethicist with expertise in public health, ethics, and religious studies. That's mostly true and rather flattering, but like much AI-generated text, it's a bit thin on nuance.
00:02:40
Speaker
So here's the 100% human authored version. My life's work, both personal and professional, has been to bridge the worlds of bioscience and Islam. I was trained bioengineering, medicine, and health research.
00:02:54
Speaker
I've also studied classical Arabic, Islamic theology, and law. And for the past two decades, I've been asking, how do religious beliefs shape our health experiences? And how might Islamic ethics speak to the moral challenges of modern medicine?
00:03:09
Speaker
This podcast actually grew out of one such project, a research and education initiative supported by the John Templeton Foundation. We noticed a striking gap in medical education. Across the globe, the default bioscientific concept of medical treatment is that the human being is a biological machine.
00:03:28
Speaker
Medical training tends to skip over deeper questions about human nature, purpose, and meaning. And what about religious perspectives? Well, if they show up at all, they're far too often represented as being in conflict with science.
00:03:43
Speaker
So I brought together a team of scientists, theologians, and educators to design a seminar-based curriculum for Muslim students preparing for medicine. We explored five big questions about the human being.
00:03:55
Speaker
Where do we come from? What are we made of? Are we free? Can we be changed? And are we unique? Our aim was to examine those questions from both bioscientific and Islamic lenses, and to do so using a framework that respects the different ways of knowing these traditions offer.
00:04:13
Speaker
We piloted the resulting curriculum in the United States and in Malaysia, and it's now being shared and taught in several countries. If you're curious, you can find more resources and details on our website, medicineandislam.org.
00:04:27
Speaker
This podcast series is one way that we're taking the work to the broader public, inviting you into the conversation, and hopefully planting some seeds of curiosity, inspiring you to explore these questions further.
00:04:40
Speaker
Now that you've got the backstory, let's look ahead. This series unfolds over six episodes. Each one will tackle a specific question at the intersection of bioscience and religion.
00:04:51
Speaker
We'll begin with a real-world case scenario to ground the discussion. Then we'll hear from scientists and philosophers who will walk us through the relevant, up-to-the-minute scientific theories and discoveries.
00:05:02
Speaker
Our Muslim theologians and thinkers will then explore what the Islamic tradition has to say on the topic. Finally, I'll wrap up with a few reflections, connecting the dots between the case and all the in insights we've gathered.
00:05:15
Speaker
Make sense? Well, I hope it does. Buckle up. Our journey starts now.
00:05:32
Speaker
This first episode is titled, Science and Religion, How Can We Know Anything at All?
Science and Religion Interplay
00:05:38
Speaker
It lays the groundwork for the rest of the series by introducing ways in which scientists, philosophers, and theologians have attempted to answer this question.
00:05:47
Speaker
We'll investigate and evaluate different sources of knowledge and modes of inquiry, and we'll hear about how both religious knowledge and science fit with an irrational epistemological framework.
00:06:00
Speaker
And in each episode, we'll offer a case study for you and our experts to consider. Here's today's, read by my colleague, Dr. Rauda Yunus. Imagine yourself to be a clinician scientist.
00:06:12
Speaker
By that, I mean your professional life consists of taking care of patients in the clinic, but also spending time leading a research lab. You have spent your career working at a prestigious cancer hospital and in the clinic.
00:06:27
Speaker
You often encounter patients fighting cancer with all their will, as well as patients meeting their imminent death with grace. Many of these patients engage in God talk and draw upon the strength of their faith.
00:06:43
Speaker
Yet when you enter the lab to conduct research, you leave God at the door, as you have been taught that you have to adopt an extremely objective scientific mindset, only believing in what your senses convey and what your mind deduces from the data.
00:07:02
Speaker
But as someone with a religious background, you begin to wonder, how can I believe in the unseen while at the same time adopt a radically different lens in the lab?
00:07:13
Speaker
must i leave my religion at the door when i enter the lab At the end of the episode, we will return to this case and we'll try to answer these questions, so keep them in the back of your minds.
00:07:25
Speaker
For now, let's zoom out to a broader view and consider how can we know anything at all?
Nature of Knowledge
00:07:31
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This question sets up the rest of our podcast series where we'll be focusing on addressing big questions about the human being.
00:07:39
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Tackling this question will be philosophers, theologians, scientists, and educators as discussants. For this episode only, contributions from our Islamic scholars and thinkers are interwoven throughout the whole conversation.
00:07:52
Speaker
To start us off, we have physicist Paul Davies, who is Regents Professor at Arizona State University. The fact that we are even here together, pondering what and how we can know prompts some questions for him, but should deeper than scientific investigation, even investigations into the workings of the universe.
00:08:10
Speaker
I take seriously how the universe is put together, but my real interest is in is there an ultimate explanation for the universe? Is it ever possible for us to explain existence including our own existence and the universe that we perceive.
00:08:25
Speaker
The theologian Paul Tillich referred to the ground of being. And so I like to say, well, what is the rational ground in which the laws of physics are rooted?
00:08:36
Speaker
Is that something we can grasp? Do we live in ah and a universe in which there is a sort of moral dimension? Is it something built in at the fundamental level or is it just something that humans invent along the way?
00:08:50
Speaker
Do humans invent mathematics? Well, we do, but then we find it has application to the natural world as well. So we see it out there all along. With these truly big questions setting the scene, we next hear from Professor Shoaib Ahmed Malik, lecturer on science and religion at Edinburgh University, and a member of the team behind the project this podcast stems from.
00:09:12
Speaker
Along with Professor Davies, he places the question of ultimate purpose at the heart of knowledge seeking. I think the central aim of acquiring knowledge is to be able to know your purpose. At least that's the way it's viewed in Islam.
00:09:24
Speaker
In that you have praiseworthy knowledge and you have blameworthy knowledge. And then there's knowledge that is neither the two, it's just neutral. So since the very purpose within Islam is to worship God, it really is to worship God.
00:09:37
Speaker
That is the most praiseworthy knowledge that you can obtain. Hence why, you know, theology was treated very seriously, philosophy was treated very seriously, and anything that worked towards those goals was always thought as a means to a higher intention.
00:09:51
Speaker
That's why you have like a hierarchy of knowledge. You have a hierarchy of disciplines as well with metaphysics at the very, very top. So I would say that, you know at least from a classical lens, contemporary setup of knowledge is very fragmented.
00:10:04
Speaker
And missing here really is that hierarchy of knowledge that was so embedded in traditional learning centers. And I'm speaking across all the traditional classical modes of learning, be it in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
00:10:16
Speaker
You always had an understanding that every single discipline that you're learning is part of a whole. It's part of a system. And that hierarchy of knowledge forming a holistic system is an important concept we'll return to later in more detail.
00:10:29
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Osama Javed Mirza, an another member of our project team, joins us from the University of Cambridge, where he is a doctoral researcher and Gates Cambridge scholar. He also echoes the importance of purpose.
00:10:40
Speaker
I think central is this idea that for a Muslim, science should be an act of worship. In fact, all knowledge seeking should be an act of worship because the Quran and the Sunnah are very explicit that you should go out of your way to seek knowledge that is beneficial to society.
00:10:56
Speaker
So this is lost in us because most of us are doing the study of science for passing our final exams and going up the corporate ladder and getting jobs as opposed to thinking about this being an act that pleases Allah and that could be a benefit to larger society.
00:11:11
Speaker
but da la more me
00:11:27
Speaker
the ne island O Prophet, do not rush to recite before the revelation is fully complete, but say, Lord, increase me in knowledge.
00:11:39
Speaker
Now that we've heard about the importance of ultimate purpose and knowledge seeking, can we actually say what knowledge is? We started by asking Professor Jennifer Nagel, who teaches philosophy at the University of Toronto, to boil down for us the most basic essentials of how she would define knowledge and its relationship to truth.
00:11:59
Speaker
Knowledge is cognitive mastery of something, of the environment, of reality. Knowledge is a state of mind. of the type you can have only to truths.
00:12:10
Speaker
Truth is something very foundational. It's not something that can be broken down and analyzed in terms of simpler constituents. When we talk about knowledge, we're talking about cognitive success. We're talking about not just happening to hit the truth, but getting it in the right way, getting in it in a way that's robust and repeatable.
00:12:32
Speaker
From an Islamic perspective, there is a rich body of thought to draw on as part of our investigation into what constitutes knowledge and where it resides. Dr. Umar Qureshi, another member of our core project team, who is currently Director of Integrated Curriculum at Yaqeen Institute and has training in the Islamic sciences as well as a doctorate in education.
00:12:53
Speaker
He shares a nuanced understanding of the nature of knowledge that can be drawn upon from an Islamic epistemic framework. In the Islamic tradition, the understanding of knowledge is such that the scholars or theologians address it in within a specific discipline. For example, like in Kalam theology, which is the Islamic tradition of systematic or rational theology.
00:13:15
Speaker
Many theologians held that you can't actually define knowledge. It's so obvious. However, at least in the Kalam theological tradition, the description of knowledge that's provided centers around this idea that knowledge is it's an attribute of a person's soul.
00:13:34
Speaker
And that attribute provides to the person in their soul an image of the object of knowledge. And They would say that knowledge of the object is accompanied by a level of certainty such that they have not made a mistake or an error in perceiving that particular object.
00:13:54
Speaker
One component is of the object itself, but also it's accompanied by a certain type of certainty that no error has been made. The definitions of knowledge we've heard so far set the bar pretty high.
00:14:07
Speaker
Using terms like cognitive mastery and certainty, We'll take a closer look at certainty in more detail a little later. But first, let's get some clarity about the types of knowledge and how we go about seeking them.
00:14:21
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Professor Nagel shares. We could break knowledge into different scientific disciplines. There's a more sort of foundational division between types of cognitive mastery. And there's a set of divisions that you find even marked in different languages around the world.
00:14:39
Speaker
And these tend to split knowledge into at most about four categories. So we have perceptual knowledge, knowledge gained by the senses. We have testimonial knowledge transmitted to us from others.
00:14:54
Speaker
ah We have inferential knowledge, knowledge secured on the basis of reasoning from premises. And the last category might be introspective knowledge or awareness of your own phenomenal states, the kind of knowledge that you might have of the fact that you're dizzy or the fact that you're hungry.
00:15:11
Speaker
Those are sort of foundational divides in ways of knowing. It's interesting to notice the large amount of common ground shared by these types of knowledge that Professor Nagel just enumerated.
00:15:22
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and the three primary categories of knowledge in an Islamic epistemic framework, which Dr. Malik will share next. The first mode of knowledge is through pure reason. So we have the ability, without having any empirical input, to be able to make certain inferences.
00:15:39
Speaker
So I know that if i put two objects together, it must mean that one plus one is equal to two, right? So that's one mode. The second mode is to do with what we can know empirically.
00:15:51
Speaker
So this is based on our experimentation and things that we can do to make meaningful inferences from the world around us. and this parallels things like regularities, laws of nature and the very function of science is to be able to determine what are the laws of nature things that are observable with our bare eyes so when I drop something we can infer that there's something that's pulling this down and then there's a third kind which is to do with revelation and revelation at least in Islamic thought is sent via prophets
00:16:26
Speaker
Now, in addition to these three primary categories, Dr. Koreshi introduces us to several other sources of knowledge. There's this knowledge called wujidan, which is the inner sense, which is a person's self-knowledge. Simply when a person's qualities, such as when they feel joy, sadness, hunger, satiation, these are all objects of knowledge that a human being has.
00:16:49
Speaker
Also, what they would call immediate or primitive knowledge, like knowledge of first principles. And these are knowledge that's innate and they're always with a person. They extend it also to other sources of knowledge. It's what's called hads or intuition.
00:17:05
Speaker
And this is also a source of knowledge that a person has. They also look at things like ah dream visions that a person may have, what they would call ilham or inspiration.
00:17:17
Speaker
And these are cognitions that occur to a person, ah which is a faculty in the Islamic tradition called the heart or the qalb. And usually they talk about it as inspiration is a is a conviction which ah God creates in the heart of a person during the state of wakefulness.
00:17:34
Speaker
And then other sources of knowledge too, which are similar to this, which is, they will say, revelation, you know, which also occurs to the heart. While Dr. Qureshi mentions a myriad sources of knowledge, when we turn to our final panelist for this episode, Professor Tara Shears, a particle physicist at Liverpool University in the United Kingdom,
00:17:54
Speaker
and asked her, how can we know anything at all? She metaphorically skipped the line at the banquet buffet and went straight to her favorite dessert. Not the velvet cake. Sorry, professor.
00:18:04
Speaker
We have to drop our metaphor here now. One particular mode of knowledge-seeking.
Islamic Epistemology
00:18:09
Speaker
There are different ways in which we can approach getting knowledge, but the key is knowing when we have that knowledge and when to believe that we have a really good understanding.
00:18:20
Speaker
And for me, the best approach is through science and the scientific method. As Professor Shears just alluded to, whichever types of knowledge we seek, we also need ways to assess the reliability of that knowledge.
00:18:33
Speaker
Professor Nagel points out that for each category of a way of knowing, there is corresponding evidence available to support the knowledge that that way of knowing yields. So if you have perceptual knowledge, there's evidence out there in the world that's accessible to you and accessible to others who possess the same senses as you do.
00:18:53
Speaker
Testimonial knowledge is knowledge from other people. So if you describe it knowledge of a fact that's relayed to you from a third party, you'd be marking it as testimonial.
00:19:06
Speaker
Inferential knowledge involves some kind of combination of evidence from various sources and processes of reasoning within you. And then introspective knowledge really locates the source just within you. You have privileged access to your own phenomenal states.
00:19:25
Speaker
um states like pain or pleasure or hunger, and other people don't have that kind of access to it. So you can think of knowledge as really broken into these four main streams depending on the location of the evidence that's supporting your claim.
00:19:41
Speaker
So now that we've heard about different ways of knowing and types of evidence, what kinds of systems can be used to assess the certainty of knowledge? In this series, our primary focus is on epistemic frameworks developed within scientific and Islamic contexts.
00:19:55
Speaker
Dr. Malik gives us an example of how one particular type of knowledge, testimonial knowledge, is verified within an Islamic framework. There's a whole discourse within Islamic epistemology on how you understand, how you validate, and how you verify testimony reports, right?
00:20:14
Speaker
So there are false reports, there are true reports, and there are mechanisms and methods whereby you can obtain useful information through those reports. So I'm assuming, just for the sake of the argument, that listeners who may be hearing this None of us may have ever gone to Antarctica, but we all know what Antarctica is. We have full knowledge of it because we've come to that information via so many independent channels that to think that is a lie would be to think that you're living in a massive conspiracy.
00:20:44
Speaker
And the interactive way in which we not only acquire and transmit knowledge, but also evaluate it is a uniquely human activity according to Professor Nagel. We can scrutinize things using our senses.
00:20:58
Speaker
We can mull over things in reasoning, construct mental models. We can introspect and try to become more aware of our inner feelings. But I think one of the most important forms of knowledge pursuit that we have is interactive. So we are uniquely positioned among animals on this earth to use each other to improve our own epistemic position.
00:21:26
Speaker
We've got natural language, which enables us to talk about virtually anything. So we've evolved alongside language, some epistemic control systems that enable us to selectively seek out and attend to people who are epistemically well positioned.
00:21:46
Speaker
So a big part of knowledge pursuit for us is questioning. You may have started your day by tuning into the news, or perhaps by double-checking with a family member on the dinner plans that you had agreed to.
00:21:57
Speaker
Every day, interactive inquiry like this is so pervasive that we take it for granted. And Professor Nagel has also pointed us towards a higher level of assessment in her mention of selectivity and epi epistemic positioning.
00:22:12
Speaker
You are engaged in selecting and evaluating right now by attending to the views of our experts and weighing them up for yourself. In order to do so, you might go on to debate a topic you heard in this episode with a close friend at your favorite coffee shop, or peruse scholarly works to check out what you've heard.
00:22:31
Speaker
If you decide to do your own research, as an academic whose job it is to critically assess the reliability of sources, I feel compelled to issue a friendly caution. The internet and chat GPT should not be considered to be a reliable guide, let alone a repository of scholarly works.
00:22:48
Speaker
Your local librarian or a leader in your community like a scholar or a imam, on the other hand, could be helpful in pointing you towards reliable sources of information. This mode of inquiry that we use in our daily lives also exists at greater levels of skill and sophistication in the form of a myriad of thought traditions throughout history and across cultures.
00:23:09
Speaker
So now, let's turn our focus to a particular systematic method of approaching knowledge. You heard me mention this at the beginning of the episode, the Islamic Epistemic Framework, and Drs. Malik and Qureshi have already shared some pieces of this framework on how knowledge can be accorded with any certainty.
00:23:28
Speaker
We heard about the certainty accorded to different sources of knowledge, where divinely revealed knowledge has the highest level of certainty. and we heard about particular methods for probing veracity in the case of how transmitted or testimonial knowledge is assessed.
00:23:43
Speaker
Let's listen in as Dr. Qureshi introduces us to how the Islamic and Epistemic Framework applies critical evaluation in the case of uncertainty.
00:23:54
Speaker
Depending on the different degrees of certainty and depending on the different sources, there's a spectrum of knowledge. One can have what's called presumptive knowledge, one can be in a state of doubt, One can be in the state of just ah holding something to be true, but it's unlikely that it's actually true.
00:24:10
Speaker
And one can be certain also that one has knowledge of, in this case, it's actually false, meaning it doesn't correspond to reality as well. Muslim theologians, when they talk about this, they have this definition, but then they also understand that human experience of what they know is on a spectrum.
00:24:29
Speaker
So it's interesting to have this idea of a spectrum of certainty. rather than a kind of binary black or white categorization of knowledge as simply true or false. It's interesting to consider that knowledge assigned a high level of improbability is not simply discarded.
00:24:46
Speaker
This strikes me as a useful approach. If we think about it, we can readily call to mind examples of ideas that were scornfully rejected in their time, but later on became widely accepted in the light of new information.
00:25:00
Speaker
We'll hear an example of this in our next episode, which discusses evolutionary theory. I'm not saying that classical Jorunnian formulation is absolutely correct, simply that we will evaluate it in the next episode.
00:25:13
Speaker
The category that Dr. Kirish mentions of things we really doubt, but nevertheless decide to entertain, puts in mind so-called thought experiments. These are a technique used in the discipline of philosophy to test a particular idea to the limit.
00:25:28
Speaker
And in episode 3, we hear some fun thought experiments which invite us to imagine being a bat or even a zombie. Don't worry, I'm giving you some previews here. This will all make sense in time.
00:25:40
Speaker
But back to the main point here. For people of faith, it's important to know how to live up to the teachings of that faith. Even religious truths that are accorded the highest degree of certainty leave space for us as followable human beings to do our best to discern their meaning.
00:25:57
Speaker
and how we can apply them in our lives. It's in this space of discernment that doctrinal disputes arise. But while we're waiting for a definitive answer to emerge on a disputed theological point, we still need to be able to live our lives in accordance with our faith.
00:26:12
Speaker
Dr. Qureshi continues. One can have ah just a presumptive level of knowledge in order for a doctrine to be followed. And there's a famous principle that Muslim theologians hold, which is that my opinion or my position, I believe to be correct with the possibility of of it being wrong.
00:26:32
Speaker
Whereas your position of the opponent, I hold to be wrong with the possibility of it being right. So this possibility being acknowledged that is a possibility that I've committed an error, this allows for continual inquiry and it allows for discussion and debate, a very lively debate as well.
00:26:49
Speaker
The application that Dr. Goreshi has described of the spectrum of certainty to challenges we face in our everyday life evokes some facets of the culture of thought in the Islamic world. There is a pragmatic approach, enabling believers to follow a doctrine which might not be absolutely certain, but can be followed on the basis of presumptive knowledge.
00:27:10
Speaker
It's like adopting a working assumption, if you will, so that you can carry on at the practical level. There is humility. meaning I believe my position is correct, but I'm open to the possibility that it isn't correct.
00:27:24
Speaker
There's respect for diversity of thought, meaning I believe that my opponent's position is wrong, but I hold the possibility that my opponent is actually correct. And finally, there is a spirit of continual questing for knowledge, not clinging on to fixed positions.
00:27:40
Speaker
And it's kind of paradoxical. As adherents of faith, we seek truth. As scientists, we seek increasingly certain evidentiary support for our theories. But at lower levels of certainty that Dr. Qureshi is talking about, there is nevertheless a tolerance for ambiguity within the Islamic epistemic framework.
00:28:01
Speaker
This tolerance creates fertile ground for deliberation. And this deliberation, in turn, helps us to keep refining and extending our knowledge. And while divine revelation carries the highest level of certainty, we've also heard about testimony.
00:28:19
Speaker
Its level of certainty depends on the strength of its corroboration. And for some, parts of divine revelation are carried upon testimonial knowledge.
00:28:29
Speaker
So back to our Antarctica example. A Sir David Attenborough documentary might weigh significantly into your level of certainty that Antarctica exists, as may the penguin photos a close friend showed you from their recent Antarctic cruise.
00:28:44
Speaker
When it comes to scientific inquiry, empirical evidence comes together with a rational assessment related to the strength of that data stream.
Scientific Inquiry Process
00:28:52
Speaker
In other words, the corroborating evidence that lends its strength or to the inductive or deductive processes that help us posit what reality that data stream, or in other words, the empirical evidence, speaks to.
00:29:06
Speaker
Professor Nagel reflects on the processes of rational inquiry embedded in the scientific pursuit of knowledge. I think something that lies really at the heart of science is the idea that we can not only question each other, but we can, in a sense, question nature.
00:29:20
Speaker
We can develop hypotheses that we can test according to whether their predictions are or are not upheld in our observation. So I think controlled experimentation and observation of reality is a really vital source of knowledge for us.
00:29:38
Speaker
Let's pause for a moment to entangle a few threads. Back at the beginning of this episode, we heard about different sources of knowledge. These are closely related to modes of knowing. The easiest example might be that sense perception is a source of knowledge, and its corresponding mode of knowing is observation.
00:29:56
Speaker
In order to make meaning and assess the validity of knowledge gained from observation, we may need to bring in further sources of knowledge and modes of seeking to bear. So for example, axiomatic knowledge and reasoning.
00:30:09
Speaker
So we have developed various methods to do this. One of these methods is the idea of controlled experimentation that Professor Nagel just mentioned. And the process of testing empirical knowledge through controlled experimentation has been codified into one particular method of inquiry that has come to be known as the scientific method.
00:30:29
Speaker
Professor Shearer spells out how scientists use it in practice. It's a circle, there's no one starting point. You either start with a hypothesis or you start with a measurement. If you start with a measurement, you need to understand it.
00:30:41
Speaker
So you need to think of an explanation, a hypothesis. If you do that and it matches that explanation, that's great. You have an explanation that works within the context of what you've been able to measure.
00:30:56
Speaker
But is it really the truth? To know that, you have to go back to that hypothesis and s think, well, if this is true, this means that something else must happen.
00:31:08
Speaker
And you take that something else, that next prediction, and you test that experimentally. And if that works, you've moved your understanding a bit more. You go around the circle again, you make another hypothesis, you test it again.
00:31:22
Speaker
You do it again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again. And in this whole industry, you expand your knowledge outwards and outwards and outwards. You could also start with a hypothesis that you want to test, test it, and then see if it works. And if it does, think of what a corollary might be that you can then test.
00:31:43
Speaker
I really like how Professor Shears describes this method as a cyclical process that involves multiple cognitive moves, from measurement or observation to theory, to verification and assessment.
00:31:55
Speaker
It is not a straight line, and each step along the way is subject to critique and reconsideration. Let's take a tangent for a moment to consider the historical, in quotes, teaching about the scientific method.
00:32:09
Speaker
It tends to be represented as a direct product of the European scientific revolution. Yet in fact, the method has deep historical and cross-cultural roots. And the clue to the problem with monolithic representations of the scientific method is in the name.
00:32:24
Speaker
It's a method. It's a method for seeking answers about the natural world. It is not an answer in itself about the nature of reality. Hence, it can't answer every question.
00:32:35
Speaker
Let's consider the concept of falsifiability widely considered to be the cornerstone of the scientific method. Professor Shears summarizes this principle. Falsification is an approach that we use in science when we're testing a hypothesis that we want to see if it's the data or not.
00:32:54
Speaker
And if we have a hypothesis that makes a prediction that we can either verify or make a measurement that shows it's untrue, then we have a method for testing whether our hypothesis is on the right track, is is true or not.
00:33:12
Speaker
So this notion of falsification, which is really proving that your explanation is rubbish and and and not the right answer, is one of the approaches that that moves our scientific knowledge onwards.
00:33:26
Speaker
So that might sound like a ringing endorsement for falsification, but Professor Shearer is careful to add a nuanced assessment of just how far the principle can get us along the path towards knowledge.
00:33:38
Speaker
Although I have to say it's a little bit more subtle than that. And I've come to realize in my branch of science, particularly my branch of science, where we have a theory that's seems to survive all the experimental tests that we throw at it. It is a falsifiable theory in that sense.
00:33:57
Speaker
But it occupies this grey area where we think it's not a ah true understanding yet because we haven't been able to test it all the way around the edges and we don't believe it's going to supply a fundamental explanation.
00:34:10
Speaker
So falsifiability is a key component of moving forward with understanding but it's not the only ingredient in understanding whether you're going to get to the truth.
00:34:22
Speaker
The principle of falsification is far from unknown to the Islamic-Pastemic framework. Remember, we heard Dr. Koresh expound on the importance of holding the possibility that our positions may prove to be incorrect.
00:34:35
Speaker
So we hold on certain knowledge presumptively rather than conclusively. And he joins Professor Shearer in reflecting on the limits of falsification. His critique is specifically framed in the light of an Islamic and epistemic framework.
00:34:50
Speaker
So when it comes to the scientific method, the way Muslim theologians will look at this is they will say this is a type of inductive reasoning. And what it can do is that it can tell you perhaps what's false.
00:35:02
Speaker
right which theories or hypotheses are false and have to be rejected, then they can say the remaining hypotheses are possibilities. Can it tell you which hypothesis is actually true?
00:35:14
Speaker
It can't really do that. And the second thing is that they would say that this type of reasoning doesn't lead to the certainty that informs and forms part of the conception of knowledge that we talked about earlier.
00:35:26
Speaker
As Professor Davies relates, these limits are perhaps most evident on the outer reaches of scientific investigation. There's a rough and ready consensus of how we go about testing things and making hypotheses and so on.
00:35:40
Speaker
But during my career, i have to say, that an awful lot of theoretical work, I'm a theoretical physicist, a lot of that work has gone off into what some people feel is never never land.
00:35:53
Speaker
They often cite as string theory, for example, as incredibly mathematically elegant, almost impossible to test, and occupying the resources of a large fraction of the theoretical physics community.
00:36:07
Speaker
I would say at the end of the day, something has to be testable. There has to be some connection to observation or experiment, but exploring the outer reaches of theory can often be but very entertaining and stimulating and can lead to other ideas in other branches of the science.
00:36:25
Speaker
I was wondering when string theory was going to come up. So string theory is a really good example of a a theory that aims to provide a unified understanding of our universe and the laws of physics, a really deep fundamental understanding.
00:36:42
Speaker
And yet, perhaps because it is so hard mathematically, it has not yet matured to a point where it's experimentally testable. And I have no idea whether it's true or not, simply because there are no predictions that I can test in my experiment.
00:36:59
Speaker
There are mathematical features of the theory that you can test in analogous situations elsewhere, but that's not the same thing as testing it directly. So string theory is out there on the periphery of potential understandings of what the truth of the universe is, where we haven't yet reached the technological maturity to be able to pin it down and really see whether it it is or not yet.
00:37:24
Speaker
Professor Nagel expounds on the point that we just heard from Professor Shearers to consider whether the scientific method is, in fact, applicable to the whole of what we call the sciences. I'm not sure that there is something that deserves to be called the scientific method, because I think there are multiple methods used within science.
00:37:42
Speaker
There are some sciences that don't require experimentation, astronomy, for example, and some sciences where experimentation plays a vital part. I do think it's characteristic of science that empirical observation ends up playing a crucial role, except that I also want to classify, for example, mathematics, broadly speaking, as a science. It's a very, it's a disciplined investigation. It's not an empirical science.
00:38:11
Speaker
At the same time, mathematics is crucial in structuring the modeling that's performed across a great variety of different sciences. So I think our understanding of science and scientific methods is actually quite complex and it continues to evolve as we develop new techniques over time.
00:38:33
Speaker
I think we're always looking for ways of thinking that are robust and ways of thinking that can be counted on to deliver the truth, to reduce uncertainty, to reduce ambiguity.
00:38:48
Speaker
But I wouldn't want to jump in and say we can quickly define what the vast scientific method is now and always will be, because I think we're we're continuing to come up with new ways to tackle the problem of the nature of reality, recently including innovations even in artificial intelligence. so we're perhaps starting to come up with ways of using tools that have cognitive capacities of their own, in some ways outstripping ours.
00:39:21
Speaker
Professor Nagel mentions an intriguing possibility here. As a species, we have built instruments to extend our empirical reach, for example, by extending our sense of sight through microscopy and telescopes.
00:39:33
Speaker
However, tools that may potentially extend our cognitive reach could prove to be revolutionary by comparison. We will touch upon this while exploring questions related to AI and human consciousness in episode 3.
00:39:47
Speaker
But for now, let's go back to the scientific method and one of its foundational philosophical underpinnings, naturalism.
Naturalism and Reductionism
00:39:56
Speaker
Naturalism is the idea that only physical objects, by which I mean matter that takes a space and volume and is subject to time, exist.
00:40:04
Speaker
And that only forces that operate upon these physical objects are natural laws, for example, gravity. Hence, naturalism is closely aligned with the ideas of physicalism, materialism, and it is, by its nature, reductionistic.
00:40:20
Speaker
This idea is a philosophical one that makes claims about the nature of reality, hence scholars separate philosophical naturalism, also termed as metaphysical or ontological naturalism, from methodological naturalism.
00:40:34
Speaker
Methodological naturalism, arguably, separates tools of inquiry into physical objects and into those natural laws from the truth claim that all that exists is physical and all that exists that is physical is also subject to those natural laws.
00:40:52
Speaker
To those of you that are listening who come from a religious background, you would likely not agree that all that exists is physical in nature and not everything is subject to the laws of physics.
00:41:03
Speaker
This would preclude the existence of angels, the occurrence of miracles, and other things like this. However, you may concede that the adoption of methodological naturalism is indeed a viable means to ascertain knowledge about reality.
00:41:19
Speaker
And that is the point. As critical assessors of knowledge, you must be vigilant in detecting the philosophical views that can be spangled in with methodologies of scientific inquiry.
00:41:32
Speaker
Osama Mirza cautions us against an ideological mechanistic reductionism that can creep into biomedical settings, and in some cases can be distorted to support unethical uses of biomedicine.
00:41:46
Speaker
Now to the point about reductionism specifically, this idea that you can reduce man to being a machine, that human beings are made up of subatomic particles and particles and they all obey quantum mechanical equations or Newton's equations.
00:41:59
Speaker
Thank you to quantum mechanics, because now we know that there is an inherent inherent level of uncertainty that you cannot determine things in that way. But this idea has seeped in that free will is an illusion and hence moral actions are inherently relative. There is no need to hypothesize a soul.
00:42:18
Speaker
These sort of ideas have now seeped into the public conscious within increasingly secularized societies. They're not necessarily critically unpacked. And They are related to this idea that you can reduce a human being to just biology and beyond beyond our biology to mathematics and physics, that there is nothing subjective beyond that. And so when you remove that sense of sacred, when you remove that sense of things that are beyond our comprehension, what has also then happened is that it has created space for things like eugenics.
00:42:53
Speaker
that okay this is a machine we can improve the machine by overtime interbreeding the machine to create a better machine however we understand a better is seen to be Dr. seems to agree with Osama Mirza,
00:43:05
Speaker
but he suggests that the methodology of naturalism isn't the exclusive preserve of the modern west or especially of near-darwin atheist ideologues i sometimes suspect want to put a special claim to it Dr. Mullick continues, he offers a vision in which naturalistic science can be in conversation with, rather than precluding religion.
00:43:26
Speaker
For a Muslim whose metaphysics, you know, whose worldview is not just couched in naturalism, they of course appreciate what science is able to deliver, but the world is larger, the fabric of the cosmos is much, much wider than that.
00:43:37
Speaker
And so they don't have a problem necessarily by saying, yes, I can accept what science has to tell me, but I also believe that there are deeper realities behind science, right? The very fact that the universe has intelligible laws.
00:43:49
Speaker
Science can never explain that, but theology you can, you know, metaphysics can. And I think that's where you can kind of see hopeful spaces where you can have dialogue and discussion, where people can hopefully see the utility of how science can work within a religious framework.
00:44:07
Speaker
Lest you're beginning to get the impression that only religious people see uncritical recruitment of naturalism to ideological ends as a problem, Professor Davies jumps into the fray.
00:44:18
Speaker
He points out, reductionistic thinking pitting the mechanistic model against the ideas of agency present many religions can limit our understanding and may even blind us to new ways of conceptualizing the universe.
00:44:32
Speaker
That's the difficulty we come up against, I think. And we hit it Obviously, for people who would like to have some transcendent explanation for the world, ah really there have been only two types of causation discussed in the history of human thought, and particularly in the history of science.
00:44:51
Speaker
The first of these is mechanism, that Earth goes around the Sun and there are eclipses and so on, that's a mechanism and we have some mathematical predictability. And the other is agency.
00:45:03
Speaker
Something happens because a person or a conscious being or might be something more abstract but brings it brings it about for a purpose. And then agency got sort of pushed out of most of our explanation of the world in favour of mechanism.
00:45:20
Speaker
And it got to the point where in contemporary science some people want to revert this and explain agency in terms of mechanism. There are no agents. you know Even human beings are some sort of... very elaborate automata that just operate according mechanism.
00:45:34
Speaker
So we've seen the two extreme views that everything is agency, everything is mechanism. But I've always felt this sort of very impoverished way of you know fighting but for the one or the other.
00:45:46
Speaker
Why can't there be other concepts which we haven't yet come up with, which would replace ah both agency and mechanism? Agency and mechanism might be the effective way of explaining things under certain circumstances, but there may be a deeper explanation in terms of some new type of conceptual structure that goes beyond those two traditional ones.
00:46:08
Speaker
So I'm very open to that idea and that we could come to understand more about the world by approaching it through some novel conceptual superstructure which we haven't yet yeah put together.
00:46:21
Speaker
We've heard a lot so far, and as your host, I'm going to try to synthesize that into a metaphor. The idea that we might come up with a new conceptual superstructure is really exciting.
00:46:32
Speaker
But how do we even start to get there? At this point, I hope it's becoming evident that disclosing the nature of reality and of our beings requires bringing together various sources of knowledge into conversation.
00:46:44
Speaker
To me, it's like putting together a puzzle. You must recognize that there are many puzzle pieces and that only when we put together the puzzle pieces correctly will we see the picture that someone else wants us to see.
00:46:58
Speaker
Each puzzle piece must be assessed as to where it fits in relationship to the other puzzle pieces. And at times, we have to also assess whether the puzzle piece belongs to this puzzle at all, or perhaps it's left over from your colleague who's working on a different puzzle.
Integrating Knowledge Forms
00:47:14
Speaker
To extend the metaphor, the puzzle pieces represent different domains or different sources of knowledge, which some of our discussants were relating to modes of knowing. Considering whether the puzzle pieces fit to the puzzle at hand and how they come together represents assessing the certainty around the data streams coming from a specific domain of knowledge and making interpretive judgments about that evidence.
00:47:39
Speaker
If we are lucky enough to piece together different data streams, and they all have similar epistemic weight, you might be able to see part of the picture come into view. And we've just heard you must be alerted to seeing part for the whole.
00:47:53
Speaker
In other words, holding the view that one puzzle piece represents the entire picture, or that there are no other puzzle pieces to be had. We also must recognize that we do not have a templated picture to refer to at the beginning of our inquiry.
00:48:08
Speaker
We cannot check ourselves against a blueprint. Isn't it frustrating when you lose a box the puzzle came in? There indeed is no blueprint. This process is pure discovery.
00:48:21
Speaker
Accordingly, this process requires wisdom and a healthy dose of intellectual humility, which I think is implicit in Professor Devi's reflection here. Dr. Qureshi also speaks to this in his discussion about certainty.
00:48:34
Speaker
For me, it's one of the very attractive... features of Islamic civilization as a whole is that they are able to identify what doctrines and what practices are to be held with this level of certainty.
00:48:49
Speaker
But then they understand that many things we know, how we interpret scripture, and even certain you know theological doctrines or legal doctrines are not at that level of certainty.
00:49:00
Speaker
And hence, what that does is to say that we hold certain things in a presumptive manner. What this allows for then is a recognition that there is a possibility of error.
00:49:12
Speaker
And hence, if somebody differs with us, they're able to get along. It doesn't cause communal strife. And they understand that there's a difference of opinion that is all within the Islamic community. One is not excommunicated from the Islamic community by holding a difference of opinion on certain issues.
00:49:31
Speaker
because these are all presumptively held, these particular positions. And so this idea of epistemological humility and epistemological tolerance is introduced. And this humility enables the epistemological framework to be applied in an even-handed manner, regardless of the domain of knowledge.
00:49:50
Speaker
To understand this unified approach to all domains of knowledge, it's important to understand the centrality of knowledge in the Islamic faith, and the idea of oneness of knowledge that flows from this. In the Islamic tradition, the conception of faith is that you must believe in God and the claims of the Prophet Muhammad based on knowledge.
00:50:10
Speaker
You can't be forced to believe something, it has to be based on knowledge. Hence the centrality of knowledge right in the Islamic tradition. And what they mean here by knowledge is all types of knowledge, right? So knowledge is considered one, as some of the famous theologian and philosophers have said that truth cannot contradict truth, right?
00:50:30
Speaker
And so the way to believe in God and to understand his revelation, both they consider the revelation of the book and then the revelation of the world. So the natural world is considered a type of revelation of God as well. He's revealing himself through his creation as well.
00:50:46
Speaker
To understand both, and they're both coming from the same source, which is God, knowledge is a necessary condition. And keep in mind this beautiful exposition of the oneness of knowledge while Dr. Qureshi walks us through how this epistemic framework is applied in cases where scientific claims may appear to clash with theological principles.
00:51:07
Speaker
Both scientific inquiry and theological inquiry, they both have their foundations in rational principles, specifically the principle of non-contradiction. Now this principle informs both theological inquiry but also scientific inquiry.
00:51:22
Speaker
And so there is a common ground. The second assumption is that in the Sunni-Klan framework, all empirical, here we mean scientific propositions, we can classify them as rationally possible.
00:51:34
Speaker
That's also the case with transmit or reveal propositions. They're both considered to be rationally possible. And as a consequence of these two assumptions, there can be no genuine conflict between a transmitted revealed proof and rational here science empirical scientific proof another assumption that they hold is that empirical scientific propositions they fall on a range of epistemological strengths some of them are known with certainty while others are presumptively known to varying degrees and same thing with transmitted or revealed propositions you know religious knowledge
00:52:10
Speaker
That also falls on a range of epistemological strengths. Again, some are known with certainty, and while others are only presumptively known. And the final assumption is that in no scenario right should the proofs of each scholarly community should be entirely discarded.
00:52:26
Speaker
right They have to engage each other. And hence, anything that's known with certainty, absolute certainty in the area of science, and anything that's known with absolute certainty in the area of theological knowledge, there can be no genuine conflict at all.
00:52:41
Speaker
And so what this allows for now is that the theologians should look at the best and the most reliable accounts of scientific knowledge when trying to understand how these truths should be engaged and should be understood as well. So I think it really allows for um both communities to to speak to each other and to build a genuine relationship with with each other to understand the type of knowledge that's delivered by each discipline.
00:53:09
Speaker
I hope you were listening intently there and caught the moment where Dr. Kurishi just appended the whole trope of religion versus science. He has skillfully set out nothing less than a rational epistemological framework which acknowledges that the domain of religion can be incorporated with insights from science.
00:53:27
Speaker
Moreover, that framework does so in a way that does not require us to ignore knowledge from either domain. Dr. Qureshi has just given us a comprehensive and compelling case for the impossibility of true conflict between religious and scientific knowledge.
00:53:44
Speaker
We may perceive conflict, but that doesn't necessarily mean there is and actual conflict about the nature of reality. Back to my metaphor, it could be that we have two pieces of the puzzle that are too far apart to put together, or that one piece is too blurry to be able to understand how it connects to the other one in our hand.
00:54:05
Speaker
there is no need to get dogmatic about what we think we know based on scattered pieces of evidence. Instead, the Islamic epi epistemic framework consistently reminds us to remain humble and to use wisdom in our conversations in the hope that together we may build a more complete picture.
00:54:24
Speaker
With that elusive yet compelling bigger picture in mind, we circled back to re-ask the first question we put to Professor Shearer's. how is it that we can understand anything at all?
00:54:35
Speaker
And we added, just how is it that the universe can be understood in theories that we can formulate? I don't believe anybody has an answer to this. It's just a remarkable observation that using the very simplified approach based on mathematics, looking for patterns in behavior, building up laws of behavior and physical laws of the universe from those observations,
00:55:01
Speaker
simplifying, abstracting, generalizing, making the most succinct description that you can. That approach has worked for us since the times of the Greeks in gaining a deeper and deeper and deeper understanding as to what everything around us is ultimately composed of, what the interior mechanisms of the universe are.
00:55:26
Speaker
Why that approach has worked for us in extending our understanding I don't know. i don't know if it's because the universe is fundamentally like that. We are attuned to think like that. Whether we've stumbled across a way of describing it that it has nothing to do with the actual nature of the universe, but just describes the bubble that we live in.
00:55:46
Speaker
It could be any of these. I really, really don't know. But the actual observation that we have observed so much and understood so much is is still a source of of really...
00:56:00
Speaker
real wonder to me. It is particularly notable that Professor Shears uses words like simplifying and wonder there. Osama Mirza strikes a similar tone while adding the words of elegance and unity.
00:56:13
Speaker
I argue that it would be nice if, for example, we found this harmony that whether you are someone who is of no faith or you are someone of any faith, we can appreciate that there is a certain beauty in the world around us and that there are certain concepts that, as scientists, we seem to intrinsically seek.
00:56:29
Speaker
For example, harmony and symmetry. Talk to any theoretical physicist and they will tell you we are pursuing symmetry. Paul Dirac, a very famous theoretical physicist here at the University of Cambridge, he was just playing around with some equations.
00:56:43
Speaker
And he was putting all these messy equations on the board. And he's like, I want to make it beautiful because he believed that truth must be elegant. He rearranged them in a new form. And from that, he predicted the existence of antimatter.
00:56:56
Speaker
So this is something that within the Islamic science tradition is... also manifested. There is this sense that we should find unity in the world around us. Everything should reflect that there is a creator.
00:57:08
Speaker
So Al-Kindi, for example, a famous Muslim chemist, tried to assemble a whole encyclopedia of chemicals to try to find unity amongst them, like a precursor to the periodic table, if you will.
00:57:20
Speaker
So this idea of unity has always been an overarching impetus and driving theme. And historically, not only within the Muslim world, but subjects were never compartmentalized. So for example, if you go to a mosque within Andalus, you will see, and in many other parts of the world, you will see an obsession with geometric symmetry.
00:57:39
Speaker
The amount of mathematical precision, the kind of sophisticated mathematics that went into that, you can see that they were trying to bring art and mathematics and architecture together.
00:57:50
Speaker
again, as an act of worship, because ultimately everything was reminding you of the ultimate unity, that is, that there is a single creator. So I feel like the search for beauty, the search for elegance, the search for simplicity, the search for harmony, the search for peace, these are things that are intrinsic to our human nature, I would argue, that we can find a lot of unity amongst people of faith and no faith, and we should have more conversations about that.
00:58:15
Speaker
And the idea of the commonality of that human search resonates with what many knowledge seekers have understood throughout history and across many thought traditions as the unity and universality of knowledge.
00:58:28
Speaker
Before I share my reflections on the case that opened this episode, let's listen in on what the Islamic theology discussants thought.
Faith in Scientific Work
00:58:35
Speaker
I'll just remind you, we asked, when a cancer research scientist enters the lab, should he or she leave religion at the door?
00:58:43
Speaker
Dr. Mullig reflected on his own experience of changing his field from engineering to theology when considering this question. I changed careers into theology, so I don't do engineering anymore. And I really wished that had I done philosophy and theology prior to engineering, I probably would have been a better scientist because that allowed me to tease out things, you know more carefully in a more refined way that I think I would not have been able to had I not had them.
00:59:08
Speaker
What ah is existence? you know What is the nature of morality? Those questions you don't really entertain in an engineering degree. And so what theology did for me was it gave me a map on how to view all knowledge structures.
00:59:21
Speaker
Your metaphysics explains things like reality, existence, the very fact that laws of nature are there, right? So it undergirds those possibilities. And then science comes into play and allows you to do this amazing thing that we call science.
00:59:35
Speaker
It sounds like, with the benefit of hindsight, Dr. Mollick would not like to have left religion at the door of his chemistry and engineering labs and in the classroom. Next, we hear from Osama Mirza.
00:59:47
Speaker
I believe that all knowledge is from Allah. And so any knowledge I gain when I'm doing science in a lab is by the mercy of Allah. And the truth is from Allah entirely.
00:59:58
Speaker
And that discernment is a gift that Allah gives me in order to sift out the truth from falsehood. For me, then, every act in my existence is an act of worship. I make no distinction between praying or between eating or breathing or doing research in a cancer lab.
01:00:17
Speaker
So, I mean, I would think really critically if I'm in this cancer lab, am I torturing mice? The research that I'm doing in the lab, where is that funding coming from? Is it causing genocide to my brothers and sisters in Palestine?
01:00:29
Speaker
The other thing I would think about, of course, again, is that when I'm researching any living entity, it's not just It's physical makeup that I'm interacting with. it it has a spiritual component. It has elements that I cannot see.
01:00:43
Speaker
And that is a key part of human healing as well. For me, everything is integrated. There is no concept of leaving my Islam at the door when I enter the science lab.
01:00:55
Speaker
And that applies to all facets of my life. I'm sure you were moved by how Osama Mirza takes as a starting point a reflection on how belief in the Creator and understanding one's a relationship to the Creator permeates every aspect of his life.
01:01:10
Speaker
It then becomes impossible to separate the conduct of science from ethical and spiritual perspectives. This raises a profound challenge to the business-as-usual way in so much of how our science, technology, and biomedicine functions.
01:01:26
Speaker
Asama Mirza sounds a wake-up call to people of faith and conscience who are involved in any aspect of scientific activity, they must resist sliding into complicity with norms of scientific practice that clash with their beliefs and moral principles.
01:01:40
Speaker
Dr. Qureshi affirms this holistic understanding. I would definitely say that one does not have to leave God at the door once one enters the lab.
01:01:51
Speaker
in looking at the Islamic tradition, it doesn't require one to do so. And Muslim scientists have not done so. They've definitely invoked God in different ways in their investigations, not just solely in seeing their activity as praising God, but also in, I guess, if we extend God to what we would call non-natural causes in explaining observed natural phenomena, then they also invoked non-natural causes there.
01:02:20
Speaker
And so they definitely wouldn't expect a Muslim scientist to leave God at the door in order for them to conduct their scientific inquiries. So there'd be no epistemological reason why one would have to leave God at the door and going into the lab, nor leave the scientific world you know at the door when trying to understand God's revelation.
01:02:41
Speaker
We opened our conversation today with a question of whether a cancer researcher with a religious background should check their faith at the door when entering the lab. And that question resonates deeply with me.
01:02:53
Speaker
As an undergraduate studying biomedical engineering and later in medical school, I spent time in labs working on diagnostic tools to distinguish cancerous from non-cancerous lesions. But before all of that, I studied in an Islamic seminary.
01:03:08
Speaker
And truth be told, the view I inherited during that time was that religious and worldly knowledge belonged in separate domains. Maybe it was because I was a precocious teenager and my instructors felt that I wasn't ready to engage in those questions of integration.
01:03:24
Speaker
Or maybe they were trying to protect me. This was during the era of the so-called clash of civilizations after all. Whatever the case, I walked away from my training believing that compartmentalizing my identity was a safer and smarter move.
01:03:40
Speaker
But as my career unfolded, I came to appreciate what our guests today have so eloquently shared. Epistemology matters, and with it, intellectual humility. We all come to knowledge from somewhere, and those commitments, religious or otherwise, shape what we are curious about, what we question, and what we think is worth knowing.
01:04:00
Speaker
There is no need to check your faith at the door. In fact, faith can be a powerful catalyst for discovery. Let me give you just two examples. When I was working on a mesh model of the human knee, my mentor, Professor Amy Lerner, pointed out that prosthetic knees often fail earlier in Middle Eastern patients.
01:04:20
Speaker
One likely factor, Muslim prayer movements, those repeated motions that standard prosthetic models hadn't accounted for. That insight led to better data, better modeling, and ultimately better prosthetics for Muslim patients.
01:04:35
Speaker
And better design for one demographic will certainly result in better design for many. Years later, I heard a cancer researcher who was also a rabbi describe how his innovations in drug delivery were inspired by reverence for the body's own systems.
01:04:50
Speaker
Why try to outdo nature, he said, when you can try to learn from it. And so, He modeled his technology on the body's innate protein delivery pathways. These examples remind us that science isn't separate from culture or belief.
01:05:04
Speaker
It's shaped by them, and sometimes even strengthened because of them. Of course, integration isn't always easy, but it's far more fruitful than keeping our intellectual and spiritual lives in separate silos.
01:05:17
Speaker
My hope is that this episode has offered a glimpse of what that integration might look like. what it means to think both faithfully and rigorously, to pursue truth with both mind and soul.
Preview of Next Episode
01:05:29
Speaker
In our next episode, we take up the question, how did we come about? The question of human origin. We'll explore what science says about where we came from and what Islamic theology adds to that story.
01:05:42
Speaker
And there's still time to bring a friend along the journey. Invite someone to listen in. These are big questions after all, and the more minds pondering them, the better. I'm your host, Asim Padella, and I look forward to continuing this exploration with you.
01:05:56
Speaker
ah Until next time, ma'as-salamu and peace be unto you.
01:06:11
Speaker
Big questions about the human being, bioscience and Islam and dialogue was presented by me, Dr. Asim Padella with Dr. Rauda Younos. Muaz Mis'ud, Muhammad Darsha and their team from ACA Media Global and EMC Media LLC were consultants and dissemination partners.
01:06:30
Speaker
We would like to thank all of the discussants for giving their time and scholarship so generously. This podcast was supported by the John Templeton Foundation and hosted by the Initiative on Islam and Medicine and the Medical College of Wisconsin.
01:06:43
Speaker
The producers are Kirsten Dwight and Martin Redfern, and this was a Beacon Hill production. For more details about this podcast and about the project in general, please visit medicineandislam.org.
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dot org