On “Science”

February 2024

There are no rijāl al-dīn (a priestly class, nor even ‘clerics’) in Islam, but instead we have al-ʿulamāʾ, the possessors of knowledge. And so, it is somewhat sad to see wisely wagging heads ordaining that ‘religious’ scholars must stick to religion, and ‘worldly’ scholars, to ‘the world’: although it is true that such pronouncements perfectly reflect the contemporary zeitgeist of the Civilisation of Liberal, Universal Modernity, Neutral and Scientific, that with such alacrity, Muslims now blindly follow.

The word ‘science’ was commandeered and expropriated by ‘modern science’ only quite recently; until the end of the 19th century, it was ‘natural philosophy’ and thus a branch of science still (at least nominally) continuous with metaphysics. The Latin scientia referred most fundamentally to demonstrative knowledge, with metaphysics being the most ‘scientific’ of the sciences because of the unequivocal nature of its principles and conclusions, its foundationality to the other sciences, and its irreducibility to any other sciences.

In Islam, amongst many definitions of ʿilm, the most pertinent — as indicating, rather than sheer perception, the theoretical certainty which is the fruit of (traditional) scientific activity — was ṣifatun tūjibu tamyīzan bayn al-maʿānī lā yaḥtamilu al-naqīḍ, and thereby ‘science’ pertained properly only to the universal, and thus, to cognition of intelligibles, not indeed to the empirical qua empirical at all. In the pre-Colonial past, then, the ʿulamāʾ were the final arbiters of all of the sciences, and they would study the physics and other ‘natural sciences’ of the time as a matter of course, because they too took their places in a subordinated model of the sciences crowned by metaphysical theology.

Yet today, for a host of sociopolitical and historical (and only very rarely authentically rational) reasons, most Muslims have also fully bought into the ‘bifurcated’ model where ‘the religious sciences’ and the ‘natural sciences’ are wholly compartmentalized divisions, ‘and never the twain shall meet.’ A visitor to most Arab countries today will find, for example, that the word ʿulamāʾ for most ordinary people primarily means ‘modern scientists,’ namely, Stephen Hawking, et al. The Arabic term ʿilm has been largely expropriated just as had previously taken place with the word ‘science.’ This usurpation embodies our unreflective acceptance of a radically idiosyncratic conception of natural science (formerly ‘natural philosophy’) developed in a very different philosophical milieu, in a Europe of the 16th-18th centuries Scientific Revolution, in which formal and final causality had been strictly banished from the realm of ‘nature,’ and prevalent conceptions of what was ‘really there’ in the natural world and thus worthy of study, explicitly confined to ‘primary qualities,’ that is, to fundamentally quantitative dimensions of physical reality.

Unlike the earlier forms of ‘natural science,’ this alien, dichotomous conception of ‘science’ never had time to become critically integrated into the Islamic sciences; and in the chaos and confusion of colonialism, the remaining ʿulamāʾ sought to preserve the basic essentials thereof, and thereby ceded, as if by default, the whole area of study of the natural world to the blind followers of the new natural science in the burgeoning third-rate secular schools and universities emerging in the Muslim world, who readily bought into its claims to ‘neutrality.’

The reality of modern science is that far from being ‘neutral,’ it is so geared towards instrumentality, adapting means to ends, and technology, that the best philosophers of science frequently opine that it does not in fact study the ‘nature’ of the physical world at all.

It is an urgent exigency, in order for us to counteract this bifurcated, unintegrated vision of reality, for us to begin to challenge and transform our contemporary conceptions of the ʿulūm, and of what it means to be an ʿālim. The ʿulamāʾ must as standard study the modern natural sciences, seek to understand their philosophical presuppositions and implications, and be capable of making the distinction between instrumentally-geared ‘model,’ on the one hand, and extramental reality, on the other; it should also become widely known that many and indeed most modern scientists are not able to tell the difference, simply due to their lack of philosophical training. They are incapable even of understanding the genuine demarcation of the domain in which they are themselves working. And this is precisely why so much of ‘modern science’ inexorably deteriorates into the glorified hocus pocus of a materialist cult, stewarded and guarded by an initiated priestly class, who send down their pronouncements to ‘follow the Science’ to the fervent ʿawāmm masses.

As we saw during the dark lockdowns of Covid, however, ‘The Science’ (almost personified, like a false god in the sky) changes its mind rather often, despite so often framing its directives as absolute revelations. Its alliance with the big pharmaceutical companies, which led to the disaster of the ‘follow the science’ Covid vaccines, is just the latest phase of a happy, long marriage between the new science and business; a marriage originally contracted by Francis Bacon, the first individual to have advised a government to invest in ‘Science’ as constituting the means for an increase in material power; this type of mentality would indeed go on to prove itself to be amongst the primary enablers of the Industrial Revolution.

The healthy nature of informed scepticism about 'science’ is further confirmed by the vast gulf and disconnect that today obtains between popular, false concretizations of scientific theories amongst consumers (as also passive inhalers) of ‘popular science,’ on the one hand, and the actual, highly tentative or even strictly groundless nature of the theories themselves, on the other: theories which are often little more than elaborate mathematical models enjoying exactly no empirical corroboration whatever after forty years of research (string theory), or even, no empirical corroboration even in principle (multiverse theory) — whereas widespread popular conviction (richly imaginative but ultimately fantasy) holds these multiple dimensions to be actual entities. And yet the scientists do not seem quite to be falling over themselves to disabuse the fantasists of this illusion.

A particularly preposterous instance amongst illimitable other examples of this type of phenomenon, lies in the existence of the many popular “Believers in Science” who imagine that once upon a time “Schrödinger's Cat” was indeed an actual cat, that was both alive and dead in a lab somewhere: an awesome testament to the power of the Science.

And yet far from being simultaneously alive and dead, Schrödinger's Cat was not an extramental entity at all, still less a cat. Indeed, Schrödinger's magical Cat was nothing more than a ‘thought-experiment,’ designed to show the absurdity of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, precisely because it would imply that the cat would be alive and dead at the same time. Almost the precise opposite, then, of the popular conception.

Another is the popular assumption that what philosophers of science call ‘theoretical entities’ and ‘unobservable entities,’ such as quarks and electrons (which latter are detected, but not observed, in cloud chambers), and even atoms, are straightforwardly self-existent, rather than constituting exigencies of explanation and coherence. Because in fact, the existence of these entities and others is the subject of vigorous debate between scientific realists and anti-realists. The latter particularly point to the underdetermination of theories by observational data, which is to say that the data could in fact be explained by numerous other theories. This is partly because of the unobservability of many of the theoretical entities posited by theory, implying that they could in principle be replaced by alternative theoretical ‘entities.’ Major proponents of this view, such as Larry Laudan in his ‘A Confutation of Convergent Realism,’ point especially to the empirical success of theories, invoking unobservable entities such as ‘phlogiston,’ which scientific consensus now deems entirely fictional.

Yes, scientific ‘facts’ exist; the greater accuracy of the Copernican rather than Ptolemaic models of astronomical phenomena, and so on; and yet the popular conception of these as directly ‘observed’ remains, in the vast majority of cases, false. One of the private tutors with whom I studied a little physics and astronomy, Dr. Youssef Ismail, took me through many of the steps involved in getting from the one to the other such that I was able to appreciate some of the monumental calculations involved, which in the process also showed that while the Copernican model removed the equant problem and replaced retrograde with relative motion, and is ultimately the basis of a more precise and accurate model, the Ptolemaic model has considerable predictive explanatory value, and is far from crude or primitive.

On a final note, it is an advanced historical consequence of the trajectory adopted by modern science at its very roots in the Scientific Revolution, particularly in its fixation on primary qualities and its abhorrence of final causes – that something as bizarrely irrational and hollow as physicalism could become a de facto ‘scientific’ orthodoxy of our time, even though it has nothing whatever to do with empirical science, even on the most generous of definitions thereof.

‘Consciousness is an epiphenomenon of brain states, and is therefore reducible to said brain states.’

And yet were this to be true, consciousness would be identified as such, that is, as an epiphenomenon reducible to “physical” brain states, purely through the brain-state mechanism itself. Now, the conscious enunciation of a proposition that the epiphenomenalist considers false, such as “epiphenomenalism is false”, correlates with the brain firing neurons at a certain frequency just as much as does the conscious enunciation of “epiphenomenalism is true.” But brain states have no truth value; “truth” is only a function of the conscious experience.

Now, the epiphenomenalist may concede that in light of this, there isn’t really any such a thing as truth; and it is surely fair to say that we needn’t be terribly concerned about the challenge of a theory whose own proponents do not in fact believe to be true. And if the epiphenomenalist is willing to affirm the truth of his theory, in any objective and literal sense, then it must necessarily be the case that reality (the “physical”, specifically, the human brain) is intrinsically directed towards consciousness, not as subjective experience, but as accurate representation of the intelligible structure of reality; and that as such, the “physical” cannot credibly be construed as “physical” at all.

This, then, captures what is without doubt the most fundamental clash between contemporary conceptions of the nature of “science”, and its own methodological commitments: the absurd abolition of mind from the “natural” world, and of the significance of the inexorable presence of the human knowing subject in all scientific activity. This bifurcation is already present at the roots of modern science in the Scientific Revolution, in its fixation on primary qualities and abhorrence of final causes, and there it has remained. It is not thus sufficient to merely make a few “metaphysical” alterations to modern science; we stand in need a complete rerooting.

And yes indeed, we would be naïve were we to think that this will be easy, and it is unclear if at this stage it is even feasible, and yes, the “success” of science in developing technology is undoubted; this success will continue, and we will eagerly consume it, often with insufficient discretion.

But as we have seen, science does not need to be a true picture of reality in order to produce instrumentally effective technology — and while the instrumental (if not epistemological) ‘success’ of science is not in doubt, it is surely rather less successful as a depiction of the nature of reality, and even less so as a moral guide .