kategoria a critical review 26 - tgc-documents.s3...

ISSN 1326-3802K

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|2002

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Science and

Islamic jihad

26 Justice —

Creation and art

the quest for God

kategoriaa critical review

part of the brain?

kategoria 26/text ART 14/10/02 10:36 PM

© Matthias Media. All rights reserved.

kategoria is a quarterly journal published by the Matthias Centre for the Study of Modern Beliefs, a non-profit body established to research and critique the modern intellectual estate from a Christian perspective.

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contents

Editorial 5

articles Our sense of justice 9

Evolutionary accident or hard-wired? K E N H A N D L E Y

Science and the quest for God? 21 L E W I S J O N E S

Understanding the Islamic jihad 39 D A V I D P H I L L I P S

books & ideas Creation, invention and artistic endeavour 53

G R E G C L A R K E

kategoria 26/text ART 14/10/02 10:36 PM Page 5

K A T E G O R I A 2 0 0 2 N U M B E R 2 6 P P. 5 – 7

Editorial

We have recently held the second annual Smith lecture, the lecture series inaugu

rated last year in honour of theological scholar and man of humanities, the late Bruce Smith. This year we were privileged to have a judge of the Supreme Court of NSW, the Honourable Justice Ken Handley, address an audience in the Renoir Room of Le Meridien Hotel in Sydney. Justice Handley spoke on the fundamental issue of justice—a concept crucial to our society but little understood by it. A revised text of Justice Handley’s lecture is our leading article.

It is five years now since I wrote an article on astrology, debunking its astronomical basis as well as its philosophy and reasoning. More recently I have received a number of queries about the validity of my astronomical criticisms. It appears that astrological theory has moved away from the astronomical assumptions that I criticized as being different from the actual stars overhead.

One enquirer put it this way:

You described astrology as being concerned with both the planets and the stars behind them, which from some cursory reading and from my discussions I have found to be inaccurate. There appears to be a generally understood distinction between Sidereal and Tropical astrology: whereas Sidereal astrology considers the constellations themselves to be important, Tropical astrology differentiates between the astrological signs and the constellations, the former merely having been named after the latter when they were aligned. Even the Collins Pocket Dictionary acknowledged a grasp of tropical astrology in its entries on ‘zodiac’ and ‘astrology’.

This oversight affects the validity of your criticism of astrology based on the precession of the


K A T E G O R I A 2 0 0 2 N U M B E R 2 6

6 equinoxes. You described West from the constellation did it. What on and Toonder’s answer as irrelevant, which it is not, if modern

earth does that mean? What is the sign if not the stars?

astrology does not take the essential nature of the constellation to be significant.

Certainly, the precession of the equinoxes does not matter to astrology if the nature of the constellation is not significant. But what, then, is astrology?

It is true that I dismissed tropical astrol- At most, it then claims that my birth was ogy rather cavalierly in my earlier arti affected (perhaps) by the sun being in a cle, as none of the books on astrology I position where certain stars were thouconsulted at the time took it seriously. sands of years ago and so was consid-Nonetheless, in the last few years I’ve ered significant then. What is significant seen more and more references to it, about that patch of sky now? This avoids perhaps because the problem of the the problem of precession by removing equinoxes is becoming more well the only explanation astrology ever gave known (that’s purely a guess.) But the for its working. “generally understood distinction” is It may be that astrologers are claiming not an ancient one. The astrological that the bit of sky which once held that signs were the constellations. They were constellation is significant, not because of not merely “aligned”; the signs were the the influence of star constellations but names given to the stars. because there just is something about

That is why, in sidereal astrology, it is that thirty degrees of sky. It may be that a serious flaw to claim that I came under the date itself is somehow significant, and Aquarian influences at my birth, since the astrologers are retracting the centuriessun was not in Aquarius when I was old claim that it was because of the stars. born. However, if my being in the ‘sign’ Perhaps the significance is unknown, the of Aquarius is something quite indepen reply being ‘even if we don’t understand dent of the actual stars and their positions it, the system makes real predictions that (as claimed in tropical astrology), it is work’. That would be a valid answer, and quite true that this criticism is invalid. then we turn to testing whether it works:

However I find it hard to see that this but then the empirical criticisms would is any improvement in the strength of still apply. astrological theory. It appears to mean I do not see that tropical astrology is that astrology has dispensed with any any better than sidereal (unless there is explanation of the influence at all. some whole other theory being offered Instead of saying I was influenced that I am yet to discover). But as it has because of the position of the sun in been presented to me so far, tropical relation to the stars of Aquarius, now it’s astrology merely escapes the problems said the ‘sign’ of Aquarius as distinct of sidereal astrology by denying its own


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Editorial

basis. Its claims about the universe were shown to be false; but doing away with the need to have any connection to the real universe at all is hardly an improvement.

It is not just the irrational version of star-gazing that can be a problem. In

this issue astrophysicist Lewis Jones discusses the difficulties that arise when science becomes a religion—that is, the arbiter of truth and what gives meaning to life. Ironically, this goes to press not long after the announcement that the speed of light is apparently not a constant after all (Nature, vol 418, p 602).

The implications of this remain to be seen, but the fact that such a claim can be made underlines the very changeability which is the essence—and the empirical strength—of science. Science is a very useful field of study, and the fact that its claims must undergo constant testing and evaluation is what gives us so much confidence in it. But if we are to take seriously the value of testing, we have to take seriously the possibility that its claims may be wrong. It’s never safe to be too complacent about science.

Kirsten Birkett Editor, kategoria


K A T E G O R I A 2 0 0 2 N U M B E R 2 6 P P. 9 – 1 8

Our sense of justice: evolutionary accident or hard-wired? S M I T H L E C T U R E 2 0 0 2 | K E N H A N D L E Y

Iexpect you have all asked yourselves some ultimate questions. Why am I here? Is this all that there is? How

did life start? What is the origin of the cosmos? Many don’t bother to follow up these questions. Like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind they won’t think about that today. They will think about it tomorrow. Many live as though the answers don’t matter, others on the basis that there are no answers. One of those questions is: how did we get our sense of justice and our sense of right and wrong?

All functioning human societies, however primitive, have a legal system to maintain law and order. But of course there can be law and order without justice as the history of Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia and apartheid South Africa demonstrates. We don’t get our understanding of justice from our legal systems. That exists outside any legal system and we use it to evaluate a legal system

and its decisions in particular cases. There is of course no universal con

sensus about moral values, which differ from society to society and from time to time. There is nevertheless a broad measure of agreement about basic things like murder, violence, rape and theft. An understanding of justice and injustice appears to emerge spontaneously in our children at quite an early age. If we discipline one for what he or she did to a sibling we may be told in no uncertain terms that this was unfair because the other started it.

Not all legal rules have intrinsic moral force. In the abstract it is neither right nor wrong to drive on the left hand side of the road but if we want orderly traffic we need some rule. The rule we adopt may acquire moral force because it is our rule. Thus it may become morally wrong to drive on the incorrect side of the road if this endangers the lives of others. The


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rules of rugby union which are not directed to player safety have no intrinsic moral force. There is nothing morally wrong about a knock on. However, we regard some rule breaches as cheating and we apply concepts of justice to decisions of the referee. We think it’s unjust if a player is penalized for something

he did not do or is not penalized when he

We don’t apply our should have been. We

standards of justice to also think it is unjust if

the physical world. the referee is biased, and that his biased decisions

Gravity, electricity and are unjust. arsenic can kill but we We don’t apply our don’t think of them as standards of justice to unjust or morally wrong. the physical world.

Gravity, electricity and arsenic can kill but we

don’t think of them as unjust or morally wrong. If someone dies from a fall or from an electric shock we don’t think that gravity or electricity were morally responsible for the death, because we know that those forces could not act in any other way. We don’t apply our standards of morality and justice to animals, either. Lions eat other animals and sharks eat fish but there is no such thing in moral terms as a good or bad lion or a good or bad shark. They cannot act differently.

On the other hand we think it is morally wrong for a human being to mistreat a pet. In this and other ways we regard ourselves as different from animals. We take it for granted that we are special. Why is this so? I suggest it is

because we have free will and the capacity to make choices. We can act differently and we do have moral standards.

For the same reasons our concept of rights is confined to human beings or their legal entities. In recent years we have heard about animal rights and even the rights of the environment, but neither can demand recognition or respect for anything and they can’t sue anyone. Men and women interested in those matters make demands about them on society and others, and bodies like the RSPCA can prosecute cases of cruelty to animals. But it is really meaningless to speak or think of animals or the environment as having rights.

Where then did our moral standards come from? Education, of course, but who wrote the text book? Some modern thinkers have developed the concept of evolutionary ethics to explain our moral values. Human societies are said to be based on social compacts supported by ‘live and let live’ patterns of behaviour. Moral values, it is said, have evolved to discourage antisocial behaviour and encourage the opposite. They are said to be merely the product of enlightened self-interest. Ethical values generated in this way can have no intrinsic validity. They are no different in moral terms from the rule which requires us to drive on the left hand side of the road. They are valid for one society but not necessarily for another.

I find the idea horrifying. Are those thinkers really saying that what happened at Auschwitz was only driving on


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Our sense of justice

the wrong side of the road taken to an ultimate and obscene extreme? Evolutionary ethics show the lengths to which people will go who deny a divine source for our sense of right and wrong. Evolution is said to involve the survival of the fittest. In social terms this will be the strongest and thus we arrive at ‘might is right’. Auschwitz itself was a by-product of the anti-Christian and atheistic views of the 19th century German philosopher Nietzsche, who thought that the triumph of the strong was the only ethic for mankind, and that gave as the Master Race.

A pragmatic ethical system can produce what most of us would regard as morally acceptable results on a micro level in families and other small groups where there is reasonable transparency and power is shared more or less equally. Such systems will not work well and their rules will not command general acceptance on moral grounds where there is no transparency and persons or groups are in positions of power. Power elites who act without regard for external moral values act selfishly. Their ethic tends to be to do what you can get away with and don’t be found out. Enron,WorldCom and HIH are recent examples.

It is hard to see why social and other structures could generate ethical values that could command acceptance outside those structures, or which could be used to judge them, and act as a catalyst for change.Those in positions of disadvantage in such societies appeal to external moral values from outside their structures. The

slogan of the French Revolution, “Liberty, equality, fraternity” is a case in point.

History records some remarkable examples of long established institutions which were dismantled on moral grounds. I will mention one from the East, and one from the West. Hinduism sanctioned, indeed required, the practice of suttee, or widow burning. On the death of the husband his wife or wives were burnt alive on the funeral pyre when his body was cremated. The practice reduced the claims on Those in positions of the deceased’s property disadvantage in such and was supported by societies appeal to the self-interest of male external moral values heirs. It also reflected

from outside their the subordinate status of women in Hindu society. structures.

When the British began to consolidate their power in India they made the practice illegal and backed up the prohibition by force and moral persuasion. The practice was suppressed, although isolated cases still occur and one was reported in The Sydney Morning Herald recently. The British found support for its suppression on moral grounds from all levels in Hindu society. On the other hand their attempts to improve the lot of the small minority of untouchables made little progress against the opposition of the rest of Hindu society. Untouchables are thought by Hindus to have done terrible things in a former life.

The institution of slavery had been part of otherwise civilized societies for


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thousands of years. In 1800 there were immense vested interests in slavery and the West African slave trade in Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and their colonies. The slaves themselves were utterly powerless. Slavery had existed in Greece and Rome in classical times and was mentioned in the Old and New Testaments without explicit criticism. However, in the last decades of the 18th century a group emerged within Christian circles in Britain which claimed that slavery was contrary to Christian standards and should be abol

ished. Moral arguments persuaded the British

Why do some moral Parliament to abolish

values appear to be the West African slave trade in about 1806.

intrinsically superior to The slaves in the others? Where do we British Empire were get the yardstick we use emancipated by an Act when we make such of the British Parliament

comparisons? in the 1830’s on payment of compensation of £30 million to the

slave owners, an immense sum for those days.Thus an institution, which had survived in Christendom for over 1,700 years, and was supported by immense vested interests, crumbled in Britain and its Empire within 50 years when challenged on purely moral grounds.

How could moral values, from outside the structures and social compacts of those societies, change the way they viewed entrenched practices and act as a catalyst for change? Why do some moral values appear to be intrinsically superior

to others? Where do we get the yardstick for such comparisons?

Two broad world views are competing for acceptance. One is that the

cosmos is a closed system and is all there is. There is no one out there and no absolute moral values.The other is that it is an open system and God its creator is out there and is the source of absolute moral values.

Atheists believe that the cosmos emerged as the chance outcome of the blind undirected laws of physics and chemistry, and that life emerged on this planet and evolved in the same way. They used to say that the cosmos had no beginning because it had always been there, but this theory has been exploded in recent decades by evidence that it began with the Big Bang. The Bible opens with the words, “In the beginning”, and for nearly two thousand years Christians have believed that there was a beginning. Only in recent decades has there been scientific support for this belief.

Cause and effect are universal phenomena in the physical world, in the natural order, and in ordinary life. However, when we trace causes back we finally hit a brick wall. What was there before the beginning? Nothing, or a first cause? It is entirely rational for Christians to believe that outside our physical world of cause and effect there is a first cause we call God. If there is no God there really should be nothing at all.

If we are the end result of the undi


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rected and chance interaction of the laws of physics and chemistry, which can’t make choices, how come we, as one of their by-products, can make choices? Since the laws of physics and chemistry are morally neutral, how come their undirected and chance interaction produced human beings with a capacity for moral judgment, and concerned with questions of justice?

If we test the blind chance hypothesis against ordinary experience and common sense, we can only conclude that it is highly improbable. A stream cannot rise higher than its source, and in the physical world you cannot get out more than you put in.You know the saying about computers, rubbish in and rubbish out.

Scientists have been trying to create life in the laboratory for over 100 years but so far without success. Optimistic forecasts at the start of the 90’s that this would occur before the end of the century have not been realized. A scientific breakthrough could occur at any time, but if it did it would not disprove the existence of a creator God, because that new life would have been created by other life according to a plan. In the meantime Christians are entitled to say that the theory that life emerged on this planet spontaneously and that blind evolution did the rest is unproven because, apart from other reasons, its starting point is unproven. You should not make the mistake of thinking that all scientists are unbiased in these matters. Chemist Robert Shapiro has notably written:

Some future day may yet arrive when all reasonable chemical experiments run to discover a probable origin for life have failed unequivocally. Further, new geological evidence may indicate a sudden appearance of life on the earth. Finally, we may have explored the universe and found no trace of life, or processes leading to life, elsewhere. In such a case, some scientists If we are the end might choose to turn to result of the blind and religion for an answer. undirected chance Others, however, myself interaction of the laws of included, would attempt physics and chemistry, to sort out the surviving

which can’t make less probable scientificexplanations in the hope choices, how come we, as

of selecting one that was one of their by-products,still more likely than the can make choices?remainder.1

You certainly can’t accuse Shapiro of having an open mind on the existence of God.

In his book The Blind Watchmaker,2

Richard Dawkins defends the theory that the cosmos and all life on this planet are the chance outcome of the interaction of the laws of physics and chemistry. Chance is the blind watchmaker of the title. The belief that this is what happened has no more scientific validity in our present state of knowledge than belief in a creator God, and it requires just as much, if not more, faith. As a wag once said: “If you believe nothing, you


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will end up believing anything”. This is not a new development. Three

thousand years ago David wrote in Psalm 14: “The fool says in his heart there is no God”. Nearly two thousand years ago Paul, writing to the Church in Corinth, quoted God’s message to the prophet Isaiah: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise” and added: “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world … for the foolishness of God is wiser than

men”.3 More of that later. The sophisticated

There is scientific scientific wisdom of evidence that our moral The Blind Watchmaker is sense is centred in a the ultimate foolishness.

Contemporary philoparticular part of the brain and if this is sophical arguments

damaged the victim’sagainst deducing the existence of God from

behaviour will reflect creation date back at different moral values. least 250 years but they

contradict our common sense. Would you buy a

watch from a blind watchmaker? If not, why would you buy this theory?

When we look at the physical creation we find that it functions

according to laws which we can discover by scientific means. There is regularity and order down to the smallest particles of matter. It all hangs together. Our common sense, without any need for a PhD, tells us that the cosmos and life on this planet, like our watches, were the deliberate work of a creator and not the results of chance.

There is scientific evidence that our moral sense is centred in a particular part of the brain and if this is damaged the victim’s behaviour will reflect different moral values. The internationally renowned primatologist, Frans de Waal, writes:

… conscience is not some disembodied concept that can be understood only on the basis of culture and religion. Morality is as firmly grounded in neurology as anything else we do or are. Once thought of as purely spiritual matters, honesty, guilt and the weighing of ethical dilemmas are traceable to specific areas of the brain.4

De Waal is not a Christian. We recognize that the moral side of our nature is connected with physical and chemical functions in the brain because persons who are significantly affected by alcohol or mind-altering drugs behave differently. Self control and moral inhibitions are progressively lost as intoxication increases. If our morality was simply the result of teaching and experience, you would expect it to be centred in the area of the brain concerned with memory, but this is not the case.

There is therefore scientific evidence that we are hard-wired with the capacity to make moral choices, as Christians have always believed. Paul, writing to the Church in Rome, said that the requirements of God’s law are written in our hearts.5 If we are simply physical matter,


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why should it even occur to us that there is life after physical disintegration? Yet 3,000 years ago King Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes that God has put eternity in our hearts.6

The chimpanzee is our closest living relative and we have something like 98% of our DNA in common. Nevertheless there are enormous differences between us, and the mind of the chimpanzee is fundamentally different from our own.7 One of the most remarkable aspects of our minds is our consciousness or subjective awareness. Our minds can record and react to external stimuli, such as light or sound, that we can understand. But they also generate ideas without external stimulation when we want them to, when we remember something or imagine something we have never seen or heard. Our minds can also make choices, initiate action, and develop abstract ideas such as aesthetic beauty, goodness, compassion, love, duty, right, wrong and justice. Scientists do not know how the physical structures in our brains produce our consciousness, but evolutionary materialism seems an implausible explanation.

David Chalmers, one of the leading thinkers in this field, who is not a Christian, has written: “No explanation given wholly in physical terms can ever account for the emergence of conscious experience”.8 Some atheist thinkers are still confident that a scientific, materialist explanation will be found, but it has not been found yet. Even if scientists dis

cover the physical or chemical processes which occur during our conscious experiences, this will not explain why those processes are accompanied by conscious experience. A lot of physical and chemical activity goes on in our minds without any corresponding conscious experience, for example during sleep. There seems, in other words, to be dimensions to our mind which are not purely physical or chemical.

People believe that justice requires that the innocent be acquitted, and the guilty convicted and punished. Justice without punishment is a nonsense. Punishing wrongdoing involves identifying the relevant rule of conduct, making a judgment on what happened and why, and fixing the punishment. The hardest thing is to decide what happened and why. Many guilty people escape justice in this life because of the difficulty of determining what really happened and the motivations involved. There may be no witnesses and even when there are the accused must be given the benefit of the doubt. If we are simply physical

Apart from justice, matter, why should it guilt and punishment, there is also mercy. This occur to us that there

is a feature of many legal is life after physical systems, and our own disintegration? makes provision for leniency to be extended to first offenders and the young and gives the Judge a discretion on sentence. We recognize that justice and punishment rigidly enforced without any


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mercy could be intolerable. The Bible instructs us to show mercy. The prophet Micah wrote: “What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God”.9

Our free will, our sense of right and wrong, our capacity to make moral choices, and our notions of justice and responsibility are all perfectly under

standable if, as the Bible claims, we were created

Our free will, our sense by a holy and just God of right and wrong, our in His image. However,

capacity to make moral the initial hard wiring is not enough. Like other

choices, and our notions of hard wiring ours needs

justice and responsibility power to work properly, are all perfectly the power that can come understandable if, as the to us from God. We Bible claims, we were need to know and fol

created by a holy and just low the manufacturer’s

God in His image. instructions.

The Bible has some remarkable things to say about human justice. God says

to Moses: “You shall do no injustice in court.You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbour”.10

Even more remarkable is the passage in Deuteronomy: “Hear the cases … and judge righteously, between a man and his brother Israelites or the alien who is with him. You shall not be partial in judgement. You shall hear the small and the great alike”.11

These statements could not have been

man-made. Evolutionary ethics would not suggest justice for the weak and the powerless. Enlightened self-interest would favour the rich and powerful over the poor and powerless, and the Israelite over the alien. We have here absolute and impartial standards of justice which were and still are revolutionary. They certainly did not reflect contemporary standards in Egypt or other Middle Eastern societies three and a half thousand years ago. Even today many legal systems fail to meet these standards, yet we instinctively recognize their validity. Why is this so? Do they resonate with our hard wiring? What is the materialist explanation? The Christian explanation is that these statements came from God and reflect His nature, His commandment to love our neighbours as ourselves, and Jesus’s golden rule that we do to others as we would have them do to us.

How come, then, there is so much injustice, and so many unjust structures? The Christian explanation is that our free will enables us to reject God. If societies do this, and in particular if their power elites do this, and continue doing it, those societies will move further and further away from God’s standards.

Our hard wiring cannot work properly without external power. When in the Lord’s Prayer we ask God for our daily bread we are asking for His spiritual food as well. Just as we become physically weak if we are not physically nourished, you and I become spiritually weak if we are not spiritually nourished.


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We need to plug into God’s power to reach our moral potential.

Up to this point I have concentrated on justice at the human level, what

I may describe as horizontal justice. But what about the evil men who die in their beds while still in power, like Stalin or Pol Pot, or the staff at Auschwitz or similar camps, who escaped detection and punishment? What about those like Hitler who escaped human justice by committing suicide? Did Hitler simply disappear into oblivion? We feel strongly that there ought to be a next life so that people like this can receive the justice they escaped in this life. The Christian view is that there is justice in the next life, what I may describe as vertical justice.

As parents we want our children to treat each other properly and to show us love and respect. God the Father wants us to do likewise and thus we have the Ten Commandments and Jesus’s summary of them which speak of our duty to love God and our neighbour. If there is a God whom we should love and respect, we should expect there to be a vertical justice system.

The Bible tells us that there is such a system with laws, a judge, justice, judgment, and punishment. Thankfully there is also mercy. We are told that God will judge us impartially and that He knows exactly what we did and what our motives were. In the vertical system there will be no error and no such thing as the benefit of the doubt. I know

enough about myself to know that my conduct could not withstand the scrutiny of an impartial, infallible, all knowing, and utterly holy God. My only chance lies in God’s mercy.

God invites us to put our faith and trust in His son, Jesus, and if we do He accepts us, in the beautiful words of the Anglican Communion Service, “not weighing our merits but pardoning our offences”. The method is simple and is available to children and persons with little or no education and of modest intelligence. It is also available to well educated intelligent adults. There is no discrimination and no favouritism. It is available to you.

Although he loves us, God cannot simply overlook the way you The Bible tells us that and I have treated him there is such a system and our neighbours. with laws, a judge, Somehow the demands justice, judgment, and of justice for the way

punishment.Thankfully we treated God and our neighbours had to be there is also provision

met, somehow the for mercy. penalty had to be paid. If we were not going to pay it someone else had to. Jesus, the son of God, volunteered to take our place and pay the penalty. Only he was good enough, only he was blameless. Jesus on the Cross shows us not only how much God loves us but also how much he hates the way we have treated him and our neighbours. God’s mercy came at a great cost, and he paid it.

Therefore, God’s mercy depends on


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our attitude to Jesus and what he did on the Cross. We have to recognize that he did this for us and that we have a problem which he has solved. If we don’t think we have a problem we won’t understand the solution. If we know

we have a problem but don’t take advantage of

If we don’t think we have the solution we will end a problem we won’t up rejecting God’s Son

understand the solution. and God’s mercy. We cannot expect to find some other way to God.

If the problem was so bad that only the son of God could fix it there can’t be any other way.

That is how in the vertical justice system mercy and perfect love have been reconciled with perfect justice. Down the centuries from the very beginning of the Christian era many have thought the whole idea foolish but God in his wisdom does not weigh our merits but through Jesus he can pardon our offences.

Justice Ken Handley is a Judge of the New South Wales Court of Appeal.

E N D N O T E S

1 Robert Shapiro, Origins: A Skeptic’s Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth, Heinemann, London, 1986, p. 130.

2 Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, Penguin Books, London, 1986.

3 1 Corinthians 1:19-25. 4 Frans de Waal, Good Natured:The Origins

of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1996, pp. 217-18.

5 Romans 2:15.6 Ecclesiastes 3:11.7 Stephen Mithen, The Prehistory of the

Mind: A Search for the Origins of Art, Religion and Science, Thames and Hudson, London, 1996, p. 16.

8 David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 1996, p. 93.

9 Micah 6:8. 10 Leviticus 19:15. 11 Deuteronomy 1:16-18.


K A T E G O R I A 2 0 0 2 N U M B E R 2 6 P P. 2 1 – 3 7

Science and the quest for God? L E W I S J O N E S

If we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human rea-son—for then we would truly know the mind of God.

Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

Since Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, there have been few books in the popular science genre

which have not eagerly appropriated the sentiment of the above quotation as a sort of manifesto. God is a frequent player in science these days, it seems. In 1993, Nobel laureate Leon Lederman wrote The God Particle as an evangelistic

tract to persuade the US government to spend the US$30 billion it would take to build the Superconducting Super-Collider.1 In it he likens particle accelerators to cathedrals.

At Amazon.com, I searched for books in the subject “science” with the word “God” in the title. There were 473 matches. I was only the click of a mouse and a credit card payment away from answering such questions as Does God Play Dice?, Is God a Geometer?, Is God the Only Reality?, and Is God Silent? I discovered that by Finding God in Physics I was finding Einstein’s Missing Relative, and if I wanted to get personal, I could have a look at the DNA of God, The Science of God, or get to know God’s Other Son (apparently science). Looking for answers to how God made the universe, I might need to know something about The Breath of God and the Big Bang (this one is an introduction to the theory of stress line mechanics!), God’s Equation, God’s Secret Formula (prime numbers),


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or The Loom of God (mathematics). If I am on a quest for God himself, then science might get me started by Expanding Humanity’s Vision of God, and if I am a scientist looking for God, don’t despair,

there are Paths from Science to God, and sci-

The evolution of science ence will Show Me God, into a religion has been reveal The Hidden Face of aided primarily by two God, and even Where

factors: first, the history God Lives in the Human Brain. We still haven’tof scientists as the

interpreters of God’srealm of creation, orbook of nature, andsecond, the power of

gotten to the meaning of life, but when you’re ready, Genes, Genesis, and God will enlighten you on Values and their Origins; indeed Sciencescience to describe and

change the world. Points to a Deeper Meaning of the Universe, and you’ll discover How

Science Reveals the Ultimate Truth. Finally, we all want to know what happens to us after we die, and if you thought science might come up short there, think again. Frank Tipler has weighed in with The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God, and the Resurrection of the Dead.

What I really wanted to know at the end of my browsing was Why God Won’t Go Away! Whatever conclusions might be drawn about the “mind of God”, these scientists obviously have God on their minds. Or do they? Would any current world religion recognize the god they are invoking? Why are they invoking god in the first place? Is it a public relations stunt designed to sell books? Is it because they see a genuine connection between

their science and a spiritual world? I will argue that scientists are preoccupied with god because science has become a religion; indeed, a fairly traditional one at that, with a deity, dogma, priests, rituals, and sacred writings. The evolution of science into a religion has been aided primarily by two factors: first, the history of scientists as the interpreters of God’s realm of creation, or Book of Nature, and second, the power of science to describe and change the world. In this article, I will consider those two factors in turn, take a look at the shape of the religion of science, respond to a few of the issues raised, and conclude with some questions to ponder.

Interpreting the Book of Nature

The world is mathematical. That is, mathematical forms mimic material forms. Ever wonder why nine is called a square number? Try this:

In the sixth century BC, Pythagoras discovered that numbers have form, and that those forms correspond to the forms we see in the world around us. So, six, ten, and fifteen are triangular numbers, and twelve is rectangular.

Most of the Pythagoreans’ powerful mathematical formulas were found by arranging dots in various patterns.2

Abstract mathematical formulas correspond, surprisingly, to things in the world. Planets and stars and ripples in a


Science and the quest for God?

pond can all be described by mathemat uinely embraced by scientists. But there 2323

ical formulae. 3 This mathematical nature was a confusion of categories that of creation, both astonishing and almost could not be helped. Given the extremely useful, has led to a confusion usefulness of mathematics to describe of the roles of science and the church. the world, there seemed no question

Even for Pythagoras, mathematics was that God was a mathematician, so, natufirst and foremost a religious activity. He rally, a human mathematician had access believed numbers to be eternal, indeed to the mind of God in a gods themselves, so by contemplating mathematical relationships he was tran

way that a mathematical layman did not. It was Mathematical physics

scending the earthly order and entering from deep within this was from the start the eternal realm of the numbers. “Four Chr isto-Pythagorean profoundly religious. flowers might wither, four melons might mindset that Kepler rot, four men might die, ...but the num could comment that ber four itself seemed eternal and inde astronomers were “the priests of God, structible—like the gods.”4 called to interpret the Book of Nature”.6

Within Christianity, mathematics has The Pythagorean goal of transcendnever been deified, but the power of ing the physical through mathematical mathematics to describe and predict forms, coupled with the thoroughly physical phenomena has for centuries Christian emergence of mathematical been applied to the problem of under physics in the seventeenth century, has standing how God made the world. meant that even in a post-Christian sub-Mathematical physics was from the start culture (such as science) the language of profoundly religious. Practitioners transcendence is still tied up with God. hoped to bring the wonder and majesty And, yes, that is God with a capital “G” of the Creator to light, inspire awe that because, owing to the Christian origins would bring people to bow their knee of their field, as well as their own perto the glory of God. Science was a ser sonal and cultural backgrounds, a great vant of the church. Indeed, Isaac many scientists assume that the mind-Newton believed that the “recovery of behind-it-all that they are getting to the true scientific account [of nature] know is indeed the Christian God. would thus be followed by a restoration However they, and not Jesus, are the true of the true morality, since it would be revealers of that God. founded on a genuine conception of God and his providence”.5

Newton brought natural theology to new heights. On the surface, the rela- It works! tionship between science and the “For it is the chief characteristic of church was perfectly clear and gen the religion of science, that it works...”7


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muses the narrator of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. The planet Terminus, in his novel, has managed to keep itself alive by fobbing off their superior technology to neighbouring planets in the guise of religion. The other planets soon become dependent on the technology for their defence and the religion of science becomes indispensable, a religion which can only be learned on Terminus. This religion is so successful because it works. When the priests say something is going to happen, it happens. When the

priests curse a spaceship, the engines stop.

It just keeps on working This is precisely the —finding cures for picture of science as we diseases, creating stronger know it as well. It just

keeps on working—find-materials, using lasers to do surgery, connecting the ing cures for diseases,

creating stronger materiworld with instantaneous als, using lasers to do communication, mapping surgery, connecting the the universe, building world with instantatowns in space, and neous communication, heating your coffee in mapping the universe,

thirty seconds. building towns in space, and heating your coffee in thirty seconds.The fact

that science works is an undeniable part of our everyday lives. The new discoveries and technological developments that change the way we live and think are just the surface manifestations of something more profound. Because nature appears to be fundamentally mathematical, we can know the world through mathematical relationships, and that gives us power.

In science, there are two broadly dif

ferent ways of knowing a piece of information. The first is to know because you have tested it, and the second is to know because you have a principle that predicts it. The latter is what gives science its theoretical, and predictive, power. It means you are not limited to knowing only the results of experiments you have done. When you understand the theory behind the experimental results, you can (in principle) know the results of any experiment before you do it.

Science writer Bryan Appleyard likens this mathematical way of knowing the world to a map. If you rely on observation only, then all you will ever know about the earth is where you’ve been, but the power of science is to know where a place is without ever going there.8 Once I have my lines of latitude and longitude laid down on the globe, I don’t need to go to the other side of the earth to know where it is. I can see clearly that there is a place at such and such coordinates. Similarly, once I know a mathematical relationship between height and boiling point, I don’t need to boil water on the top of Mount Everest: I already know what the boiling point there will be. Once I have the relationship between current, voltage, resistance, and power dissipation in an electrical circuit, I don’t need to build a microwave to find out if it will work.

All of this is possible only because nature is mathematical. As celebrated physicist Richard Feynman notes,

[t]he rules that describe nature


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seem to be mathematical. This is not a result of the fact that observation is the judge, and it is not a characteristic necessity of science that it be mathematical. It just turns out that you can state mathematical laws, in physics, at least, which work to make powerful predictions.9

Prediction is the name of the game. The value of past observations is in the predictions they allow you to make about the future. Again, Richard Feynman, in talking about predictions says,

[i]t has to be done because the extrapolations are the only things that have any real value. It is only the principle of what you think will happen in a case you have not tried that is worth knowing about. Knowledge is of no real value if all you can tell me is what happened yesterday. It is necessary to tell what will happen tomorrow if you do something—not only necessary, but fun.10

Observations can only ever tell us, on average, what has happened in the past. Our rational minds, coupled with the amazing and mysterious fact that the world is mathematical, can take those observations and turn them into powerful predictions about the future.Then we can build microwaves and space stations.

Science works, and standing behind its effectiveness is its power to make

predictions. The fact of its effectiveness has had implications for human society, both in the way we live our daily lives, and in the way we think about ourselves and the world around us. This effectiveness has especially had an impact on the scientists themselves.

Confidence The power of science to answer questions and make predictions has produced in scientists an increasing confidence, both in their ability to ultimately know everything, and, as society turns more The fact of its and more to them for effectiveness has had answers, in the appropri- implications for human ateness of the application society, both in the way of their knowledge to the human condition. This ris- we live our daily lives,

ing confidence can be seen and in the way we think from as far back as the end about ourselves and the of the eighteenth century. world around us. Philosopher and physicist Immanuel Kant was working on dispelling the idea of the “God of the gaps”, and physicist Pierre-Simon Laplace was working out how the solar system could have come into existence without God.

Kant tried to make people to understand that it was only a matter of time before science would fill in the gaps of our knowledge, and God would be out of a job. In the process he called into question the whole enterprise of natural theology which had risen to such great


26


heights with Newton, saying that science could not serve theology. His confidence that science would eventually explain everything in the world led him to drive a wedge between science and theology, not because he wanted to get rid of God, but because he saw that a God of the gaps would ultimately lose out. He wanted to protect theology from the onslaught of science. Likewise, Laplace, in his reputed response to Napoleon’s query about the author of the system of the heavens proposed by the scientist, said, “I have no need of that hypothesis.” Laplace was not denying the existence of God, but demonstrating his confidence that the

workings, and to a certain extent, the origins,

Laplace was not denying of the natural world the existence of God, could be explained withbut demonstrating his out God.11

confidence that the This confidence con

workings, and to a certain tinues today and, bolstered by the success

extent, the origins, of the of science, continues to natural world could be grow. Hawking’s ‘mind explained without God. of God’, or theory of

everything, would be a complete map of the

history of the universe, past, present, and future, so that with it you could predict everything that has happened and will happen. You would know where any given rain drop would fall, where a moth would hit your windscreen, and you could even predict the advent of kategoria and your subscription to it.

Physicist Paul Davies demonstrates

his confidence as he discusses his concern that science might never discover a mechanism for the universe to create itself. Without such an explanation, the cosmological argument for the existence of God12 would be “hard to fault”.13 He breathes a sigh of relief, then, as he describes “serious attempts to explain the origin of the universe within the framework of physics.” He goes on,

I should say at the outset that this particular explanation could be quite wrong. However, I don’t think that matters. What is at issue is whether or not some sort of supernatural act is necessary to start the universe off. If a plausible scientific theory can be constructed that will explain the origin of the entire universe, then at least we know a scientific explanation is possible, whether or not the current theory is right.14

Of course, the hope he has expressed here can only be described as desperate, irrational, and unfounded, but it serves to illustrate the confidence of our generation of scientists. Davies dresses his hope with words like “serious”, “scientific”, and “plausible”, but what he has said is simply, “X is a theory for the origin of the universe from within the framework of physics, therefore, there exists Y, which is the correct theory for the origin of the universe from within the framework of physics.” The natural world has been so accommodating in allowing us to make our mathematical


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predictions and thereby shape our future, that we now believe if nature even lets us imagine a solution, then it must be within our grasp.

Answers This confidence has led scientists to two related, but different, conclusions concerning ‘cosmic’ questions. Such questions have traditionally been regarded as the sole purview of the church—the meaning of life, the origins of the universe, and so on. But now we see two kinds of answers from within science. Writers have either deemed those questions unaskable, and discarded them as meaningless, or annexed them into the realm of questions answerable through science. Either way, scientific gurus have asserted their confidence that science will answer everything, or at least everything worth asking.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins is probably the most popular and outspoken proponent of the first reaction to questions of meaning and purpose. In an article in Scientific American, Dawkins insists that the “Why?” or “What is it for?” question is inappropriate when it comes to living beings.15 He says that “[w]e humans have purpose on the brain”, wanting to know the purpose of everything we see, which, he says, is natural, as we are surrounded by things which have been made for a purpose— machines, tools, works of art, etc. However, while the “What is it for?”

question is legitimate for cars and tin openers, the “mere fact that it is possible to frame the question does not make it legitimate or sensible to do so.” It is like asking the temperature of jealousy, or colour of prayer. In the same way, we:

have no right to assume that the[why] question deserves ananswer when posed about a boulder, a misfortune, Mount Everestor the universe. Questions can besimply inappropriate, howeverheartfelt their framing.

Dawkins considers it “notorious” that theologians have occupied themselves with the question of meaning for living beings.

The true process that has endowedwings, eyes, beaks, nesting instinctsand everything else about life withthe strong illusion ofpurposeful design is

Dawkins considers it now well understood. It is Darwinian nat- “notorious” that

ural selection. theologians have occupied themselves with the

Scientists having now discovered this truth, it question of meaning for

is “only the scientifically living beings. illiterate” who embrace the “Why?” question. I’ll let the implications of that statement sink in without further comment.

Building from the biological outworkings of natural selection, Lee Smolin, a theoretical physicist, makes a similar case for the universe as a whole. He says,


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…we’re beginning to realize not only that it’s unnecessary to think in terms of an intelligent designer but that the idea that the complexity and beauty we see around us was intended by a single intelligence is silly. Instead we understand, in the biological context, that the living world has created itself—organized itself—because of the action of simple principles, primarily natural selection, that inevitably operate. I believe that the same will turn out to be true about the laws of physics and the structure of the cosmos.16

Why does he believe Those scientists who that? He doesn’t say, but

what is clear is that his follow Davies’ line do not see any need to rule out belief is in science, not

‘why’ questions. what it knows, but the power to know.

Dawkins sums up his picture of our universe, in which the “Why?” question is inappropriate.

Nature is pitilessly indifferent. This lesson is one of the hardest for humans to learn. We cannot accept that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous: indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.17

So we must discard the question of “Why?” as meaningless in the kind of world we live in, thereby removing both the need to answer it, and the right to

ask it. This argument assumes that our understanding of the physical world defines the space of legitimate questions. All questions can be framed, but not all questions should be framed.

There has been another reaction to questions of meaning and purpose

from within the scientific community: that is, to annex such questions for science alone to answer.This stems primarily from the fact the questions just won’t go away. However much Dawkins might wag his finger, the public keeps asking them. Because of the power of science to answer questions, the public has begun to ask these questions of scientists. What’s more, the vast majority of scientists can’t seem to learn their lesson that the world is meaningless.

Theoretical physicist Paul Davies is one of those “scientifically illiterate” scientists who persist in writing books on the subject of ‘why’. Davies has even won the Templeton Prize for contributions to the dialogue between science and reli-gion.Those scientists who follow Davies’ line do not see any need to rule out ‘why’ questions. They are simply confident that any answers we find will be from within the realm of science.

Davies writes that Hawking’s pronouncements on the “deep issues of God, existence, and humanity” stem from “important and exciting scientific discoveries”. He also displays his eagerness to tackle these questions in statements like “[i]t’s only in recent years


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that scientists have exercised any sort influence over what might be called the big questions”.18

Deep questions of existence— How did the universe begin and how will it end? What is matter? What is life? What is mind?—are not new. What is new is that we may at last be on the verge of answering them.19

Davies ultimately stops short of answering those questions (so far), but claims that science teaches us that there is meaning in the universe and that we are meant to be here.20

Other writers from the biological sciences are willing to go farther. Geneticist David Suzuki and Amanda McConnell in The Sacred Balance derive an environmental ethic grounded in “the Earth and its life support systems”. The life cycle of the environment is the basis for understanding our physical, social, and spiritual needs, which will lead to a just and sustainable society as well as meaningful lives; hence, they conclude that the meaning of life is life.21 Similarly in The Sacred Depths of Nature, Ursula Goodenough, a cell biologist, presents a “credo of continuation”. Although at the beginning of the book she thinks the universe is meaningless, she is desperate not to be defeated. Her solution is that somehow the fact of the existence of life also is the meaning of life.22

The theoretical physicists approach the issue rather abstractly, from mathe

matical principles, and the biologists from an inspection of the dirty business of life on the planet. But they all want the answers to the meaning of life, and they are all supremely confident that those answers will come from within the bounds of the cosmos itself.

Science works. Science produces knowledge about the world and technological change at a rate that is unable to be absorbed by any one person. It is powerful not only because of what it knows, but also because it has this mysterious power to know, stemming from the unexplained, yet undeniable, mathematical character of the world. Scientists, and indeed, the general public, have a confidence that science will But what quality of

in fact be able to explain answers can we get from everything, answer every science, restricted as it is question. The status of to this physical existence? science and scientists in our society is similar to witch doctors in primitive societies, or priests in the Catholic Church, who, in physical make-up are exactly the same as everyone else, yet without whom we are subject to the merciless forces of nature and the spirit world, and in whose hands is held our salvation. Placed in their hands, some scientists (like Dawkins) have thrown us back to pitiless nature without meaning or hope. Others have risen to the challenge and searched for purpose derivable from this physical world—the only place scientists know how to search.

But what quality of answers can we


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get from science, restricted as it is to this physical existence?

The religious success of science

It is remarkable, Hardin, how the religion of science has grabbed hold. I’ve written an essay on the subject—entirely for my own amusement; it wouldn’t do to have it published.23

So says Poly Verisof, high priest of the religion of science, to Salvor Hardin,

Mayor of Terminus City. The same comment

The question of obligation could be made of our only finds its significance world. The religion of

in the face of sacrifice to science has indeed

meet that obligation. grabbed hold. We’ve discussed why it’s taken

Science, however, keeps us hold—the overwhelmfrom getting to the point ing power of science to of sacrifice. explain the world—but

there is still more to say regarding how it has

taken hold in people’s lives.

Because of its effectiveness, [s]cience transports the entire issue of life on earth from the realm of the moral or the transcendent to the realm of the feasible. This child can be cured, this bomb can be dropped. ‘Can’ supersedes ‘should’; ‘ability’ supersedes ‘obligation’; ‘No problem!’ supersedes ‘love’.24

We can point to various social trends that illustrate this comment from Bryan Appleyard. In the past, caring for an ageing relative might not have been a question of ‘am I able to do this’, but ‘am I obliged to do this’. Now, with medical advances, home care services, and the luxury of time afforded by our wealth and technology, we don’t ever have to ask the question of obligation, because it is relatively easy to make sure someone is looked after.

This might seem a banal observation, but it presents a deep challenge to our understanding of ourselves. The question of obligation only finds its significance in the face of sacrifice to meet that obligation. Science, however, keeps us from getting to the point of sacrifice. In so doing, it ensures that we do not have to face the human issue of whether we are actually willing to make a sacrifice for the other person. It’s just not necessary. Moving us from the moral to the feasible turns life into

a series of separate problems with separate answers. [Life] is not an issue in itself so much as a container of issues.25

Day-to-day life has become so comfortable and so easy, that the previously obvious questions, like the purpose of suffering, have become hazy memories at the edges of our lives. The religion of science has worked its way into our lives by making life easy, by allowing us to meet our obligations and yet removing the need for sacrifice. That was too good to pass up.


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Of course, in accepting science’s reign, the one sacrifice that was required of us was to give up ideas of meaning and purpose. Those are outside the realm of the great comforter, science. We can see a backlash in the flocking of people to New Age spirituality, astrology, and other superstitions in order to recapture something of their soul. Science as the source of meaning trampled underfoot the edifice of traditional, institutionalized religion because there was no more need to be comforted in this life, no need to look forward to something better in the future. Religions made claims about the world and about history that were apparently unsustainable in the light of scientific discoveries. That then created a spiritual vacuum. Even with the answers available in science, the question of God would not leave people’s consciences.

No matter how well we are educated, no matter how scientifically literate Richard Dawkins can make us, the question of “What is it all for?” is here to stay. This has given some scientists pause for thought. As Poly Verisof continues,

[t]reating the problem sociologically, ...it could be considered that science, as science, had failed...To be reaccepted it would have to present itself in another guise— and it has done just that.26

Everything was expected of science and it fell short. Science has risen to power, but it couldn’t stop two world wars, the atom bomb, cancer, AIDS, or hunger, and

the list goes on. Is there a mathematical formula to explain the reason for all that? We are still caught, living in a dying world, and we want to know what it’s all about. The popularizers of science have heard this plea and have recast their work as another alternative to institutionalized religion alongside those of the New Age genre. This is evidenced by the 473 science books for sale at Amazon.com that mention “God” in the title. There is no need to include God in those titles; indeed, fifty years ago, the same The message is that books would have been science now really written without him. does have it all; your The books are about a one stop shopping for wide range of subjects, a comfortable and but only a couple of them have a genuine meaningful life.

interest in things divine. Is God a Geometer? could have as well been entitled Our Geometrical Universe. This is a self-conscious attempt to sell books, but not just to make money.These scientists sell books in order to spread the word that God is on the agenda for science, that you can have all the comforts science provides without sacrificing the meaning of life, that you can subscribe to all of the new discoveries and technologies, but not end up a meaningless accident of natural selection.

The message is that science now really does have it all; your one stop shopping for a comfortable and meaningful life. Paul Davies makes the ironic claim that “science offers a surer path to God than religion.”27 The claim is ironic because


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what is religion, but a path to God? He continues by saying that “science has actually advanced to the point where what were formerly religious questions can be seriously tackled”, but again, what is a path to God that answers questions of meaning, but a religion? The enterprise of science is being sold as a religion, exercising influence over the big questions, and “capturing not only the minds but the hearts of the population.”28

The feeling of being The priests of Old Testament Judaism

possessors of special, higher knowledge isintense and widespread

were those who mediated the relationship between God and the people. They had the in the scientific

community at large. Law which they read to the people, and thus communicated with the

people on behalf of God. They offered the sacrifices to God on behalf of the people which were required to demonstrate their status before God and remind them of their dependence on God for their continued well being.

The priests of science similarly have access to God that laymen do not. They know the mind of God, they have the path to God, and their work is required to make that knowledge accessible to laymen.Their activity of empirical investigation is the sacrifice they make on our behalf in order to continue to bring us their life-giving knowledge. It would be ludicrous to suggest this was a self-con-scious pursuit on behalf of all scientists,

and yet Einstein himself portrays these sentiments in his understanding of his role as a scientist. “In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this [religious] feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.”29 Indeed, he carries on to say that “serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people.”

Ursula Goodenough wants to establish a planetary ethic that will flow from her religious naturalism and serve as the basis for an enduring, peaceful world community, but the only solid foundation for such an ethic is the truth of The Epic of Evolution as revealed by scien-tists.30 John Brockman’s third culture31

is populated with

those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.32

It is probably most fair, then, to ascribe a self-conscious pursuit of the priesthood primarily to those popularizers of science, Brockman’s third culture. Nonetheless, in my experience the feeling of being possessors of special, higher knowledge is intense and widespread in the scientific community at large. Appleyard comments, “[s]cientists will inevitably take on the mantle of the wizards, sorcerers, and witch-doctors. Their miracle cures are our spells, their experi


33


ments our rituals.”33 There will always be plenty of candidates for the priesthood.

What then is the content of the religion of science? What does it offer

to its devotees? Uncertainty.The only certainty offered by the religion of science is that all answers will be found. While that sounds promising, there is no way to know when you have found the answer, and, by the principles of empirical investigation, you are never allowed to assume you have. The answers of science are by definition falsifiable, and, therefore, inherently uncertain. As Appleyard puts it, “[t]hey can be changed if something better comes along.”34

If scientific knowledge is uncertain, then what of the fundamentals of the faith? All scientific opinions, says philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell, “are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.”35 It is this doubt that leads to further progress. Without doubt and the recognition of our ignorance, we would not propose new directions and queries, and no new information would be gained. As soon as you think you know something, all free thought is ended and no more progress is made, so doubt is not just a necessary by-product of empiricism, but fundamental to its continued usefulness as a way of gaining knowledge. In response to people asking how he can live without knowing something for sure, Richard Feynman says, “I do not know what they mean. I always live without

knowing. That is easy. How you get to know is what I want to know.”36

Having this philosophy of ignorance, as Feynman calls it, as the central tenet of your religion leads to two major conse-quences.The first is an enforced relativism about everything. It is interesting to note that for all the power of science to know things, it is only to know things better than you did before the last experiment. You can never actually know the truth. When society adheres to this philosophy of gaining knowledge called empiricism, the belief that knowledge can be gained only through sense experience, then nothing in society can be held as absolute. Everyone’s beliefs, be they religious, political, or ethical, must be held The only certainty offered

as private, and while dis- by the religion of science cussion can take place is that all answers will be between people of differ- found.While that sounds ing views, to hold what promising, there is no way you believe to be true is,

to know when you haveby definition, untenable,because all knowledge is found the answer.

tentative.Second is what I call ‘Help Desk Phone

Queue Anxiety’. There will be an anxiety, or unsettledness, in society, as a result of the necessity of continual change brought on by the attempts to falsify our current understandings. The feeling is something akin to being in the phone queue of a computer help desk.You get in the queue and are told that your call will be handled in the order it was received. You have no way of knowing how long you’ll be there. The music is playing, you


34


wait. The recording comes on saying that your call has progressed in the queue, it is important to them, and that you should continue to hold. This sequence happens a second time and a third time. The question is how long will you wait? You don’t know what number your call was at first, and worse, you don’t even know if your call really will be handled in the order it was received. Maybe something happened to your particular call and it will never be answered.

Living under the religion of science, basing your decisions about life on the values and ethics provided by our under

standing of the universe, is like that feeling just

People no longer have before you hang up the a view of the future phone.You’ve decided to stretching out even hang up the phone on

through their own the count of three, but

lifetimes, much less you’ve been waiting for fifteen minutes, and

through the lifetimes of maybe you should just their children.They realize hang on a little longer, that things are moving so you count slowly, start fast that you can’t really to move the receiver imagine the life your child away from your ear, but

is going to lead. you are listening desperately for a human voice to stop you before it’s

too late.There’s no way to decide what to do, and similarly, under the regime of science, you will never have the information you need to make the best decision, only the best information available at the time you have to make the decision. If I wait another day or week or month, maybe then I’ll feel more certain about

the state of the world and will make a better decision then. By waiting, you will always have access to more information, but you will never be more certain about the state of the world.You will live in that constant state of being just about to hang up the phone, not knowing if it is the right decision.37

Daniel Hillis, a computer scientist, comments on the changes society is going through as the rate of change is increasing.

We’re going through a qualitative change. People no longer have a view of the future stretching out even through their own lifetimes, much less through the lifetimes of their children. They realize that things are moving so fast that you can’t really imagine the life your child is going to lead. That’s never been true before, and it’s clear that the course of that change and that discontinuity is science, somehow. Anybody who is not brain dead wants to try to get a hold of things—is strongly motivated to do so—and one way to do it is to read books by scientists.38

What Hillis is pointing to is the ‘change anxiety’ I’ve described above. We can’t even reasonably imagine any longer what our own lives will look like in the next few decades, so we feel insecure, helpless, out to sea.This is the religion of science; a constant flurry of change, nowhere to hang your hat, and either promises of meaning that can never be fulfilled, or just



outright meaninglessness. God reveals himself in his own way and 35

The great power of science is the in his own time. He is not discovered on power to find out in the future, but it our terms but revealed on his. His ways means never to know everything in the and his thoughts cannot be known by present. human beings except for the kindness

and mercy of God. Moreover, the mind of God is not fundamentally concerned

The Mind of God for the workings of the universe, but for our relationship with him. Seeking God

The paths to God from science are involves the wicked forsaking his way, founded on that Christo-Pythagorean and God having mercy and freely paridea that God is fundamentally a mathe doning. His mind is fundamentally matician, and by discovering the equa moral, not mechanical. tions which govern the mechanics of Science is a great service to society in particles and planets we truly know the its ability to create comfort and alleviate mind of God. It is an idea that puts suffering, and even in its knack for lift-God’s primary concerns in the realm of ing our minds above the daily routine of running the cosmos, making it tick in life, to think about something interestan orderly fashion day in and day out, ing outside of ourselves. But the power until he decides enough is enough. to reveal God is in God’s hands alone,

In considering these issues, let us not and he has revealed himself supremely forget another great comment about the in his son Jesus Christ. Science cannot mind of God from Isaiah the prophet. compete with that.

“Seek the Lord while he may be found; Lewis Jones has held postdoctoral call on him while he is near. research positions in astrophysics and is Let the wicked forsake his way now studying theology. and the evil man his thoughts. Let him turn to the Lord, and he

will have mercy on him, E N D N O T E S

and to our God, for he will freely pardon. 1 This technology was to reveal the workings of a particle known as the

‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, Higgs boson, and help distinguish neither are your ways my ways’, between competing theories of what declares the Lord. happened in the first few minutes after ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, the Big Bang. so are my ways higher than your ways, 2 Margaret Wertheim, Pythagoras’Trousers: and my thoughts than your thoughts.” God, Physics, and the Gender Wars, Isaiah 55:6-9 Random House, New York, 1995, p. 27.



36 3 It is interesting to note that nobody 11 Wertheim, op.cit., pp. 143-44. seems to know why it is the case, that a closed, rational system like mathematics, not only can, but does, in

12 Crudely put, the cosmological argument is that if the universe exists, someone must have created it.

fact, correspond to the way nature does things. Why is it that the harmonies of an octave, a fifth, and a fourth, arguably

13 Paul Davies, The Mind of God: Science and the Search for Ultimate Meaning, Penguin Books, London, 1992, p. 39.

the most universally pleasant to the human ear, are created by string lengths (given equal thickness and tension) in

14 Ibid, p. 40. 15 This paragraph is all taken from Richard

Dawkins, ‘God’s Utility Function’, ratios of 2:1, 3:2, and 4:3, respectively? Why not 25:12? Why is it that those harmonies are the simplest ratios? One

Scientific American, 1995, pp. 62-67. Note the irony of his title.

16 Lee Smolin in John Brockman, The of the greatest minds in physics of the 20th century, Richard Feynman, puts it this way when discussing the rules of

Third Culture, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1995, pp. 30-1.

17 Dawkins, op.cit., pp. 62-3. Dawkins nature and how we ‘check’ them. “Incidentally, the fact that there are rules at all to be checked is a kind of

laments the “unpalatable truth” that this lesson still has not been learnt by “an absolute majority of the world’s

miracle; that it is possible to find a rule, like the inverse square law of gravitation, is some sort of miracle” and

population”. 18 Paul Davies in Brockman, op.cit., pp. 24-5. 19 Paul Davies, God and the New Physics,

later, “Why nature is mathematical is, again, a mystery”. (Richard Feynman, The Meaning of It All, Penguin Books,

Penguin Books, London, 1983, pp. vii-viii. 20 Davies, Mind of God, op.cit., p. 232. 21 David Suzuki with Amanda McConnell,

London, 1998, pp. 23-4.) 4 Wertheim, op.cit., p. 28. 5 Piyo Rattansi, quoted in Wertheim,

The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature, Mountaineers Books, Seattle, 1999, p. 274.

ibid., p. 125. 6 Johannes Kepler, quoted in Wertheim,

ibid., p. 71.

22 Ursula Goodenough, The Sacred Depths of Nature, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998, p. 171.

7 Isaac Asimov, Foundation, Panther Books, London, 1960, p. 106.

8 Bryan Appleyard, Understanding the

23 Asimov, op.cit., p. 76. 24 Appleyard, op.cit., p. 9. Appleyard’s

emphases. Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man, Pan Books, London, 1992, p. 5.

9 Richard Feynman, The Meaning of It All,

25 Ibid., p. 9. 26 Asimov, op.cit., pp. 76-7. 27 Davies, The New Physics, op.cit., p. ix.

Penguin Books, London, 1998, p. 24. 10 Ibid., p. 25.

28 Paul Davies in Brockman, op.cit., p. 25. 29 Albert Einstein quoted in Wertheim,



op.cit., p. 186. 34 Ibid., p. 9. 37

30 See Lewis Jones, ‘Sacred Depths of 35 Bertrand Russell, Philosophy and Politics, Inconsistency’, kategoria, 2001, 20, pp. Cambridge University Press, London, 39-47. 1947, p. 22.

31 An answer to C. P. Snow’s The Two 36 Feynman, op.cit., pp. 27-8. Cultures, written about the lack of 37 If you’re more accustomed to car communication between scientists and analogies, think of the decision to literary intellectuals. either sell your car or keep putting

32 Brockman, op.cit., p. 17. money into it. Same problem. 33 Appleyard, op.cit., p. 9. 38 Daniel Hillis in Brockman, op.cit., p. 26.



Understanding the Islamic jihadD A V I D P H I L L I P S

The website for the Australian Nida’ul Islam magazine, produced by the Islamic Youth Movement,

is noteworthy for giving great prominence to the Islamic jihad.1 A significant goal of the magazine is to reflect “the views of the Jihad stream amongst the Islamic movements”. Other goals mention jihad as “the only path to establish the Islamic State” and important for “the youth generation” that “forms the fuel for the Islamic movement.” How are we to understand this emphasis on the Islamic jihad by Australian Muslims?

At the same time, the big question we try to understand about the 11 September 2001 attack on the World Trade Centre is: Why did they do it? What motivated nineteen educated Muslims to commit suicide and kill thousands of innocent men, women and children in New York and Washington? Mohamed Atta, who flew the first plane into the World Trade Centre and played a key role in organizing the whole opera

tion, was the son of a middle-class lawyer in Cairo.The family was comfortable enough to afford a getaway home on the Mediterranean coast. Atta studied architecture at Cairo University, followed by urban planning at the Technical University in Hamburg, Germany. Fellow students said he was smart, hard-working and communicated easily with children, old men, professors and people in government.2

Atta joined a group in Egypt associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, whose extreme propaganda included the demonization of the United States. Described as “very, very religious” and “searching for justice”, he was a man on a mission. His thesis was dedicated with this quote from the Qur’an: My Prayer and my sacrifice and my life and my death belong to Allah, the Lord of the worlds. 3

What is it about Islam and its teachings on jihad that leads able young men to undertake a suicide mission with such terrible consequences? The initia


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K AT E G O R I A 2 0 0 2 N U M B E R 2 6

tor of the jihad against America, Osama Bin Laden, explained his reasons in his 1996 Declaration of War against America.4 He lists the domestic woes of Saudi Arabia, which revoked his citizen

ship and expelled him in 1994.5 Bin Laden’s

Bin Laden’s solution solution to what he calls to what he calls the the “atrocious plans” of “atrocious plans” of the the Saudi Ministry of Saudi Ministry of Interior Interior is that the “peo

is that the “people of ple of Islam should join forces and support each

Islam should join forces other to get rid of the

and support each other main Kufr [infidel]”, to get rid of the main namely the USA.6 Why Kufr [infidel]”, namely does the failure of Saudi the USA. domestic policy justify a

jihad against America? Closer to home, why

did Australian convert to Islam, David Hicks, feel obliged to fight in a civil war in Muslim Afghanistan? And how did the Taliban justify fighting a jihad against other Afghans?

To understand such questions we must understand the Arab-Islamic concept of jihad, which is so different from Western-Christian thought and culture.

The first jihad The origin of the Islamic jihad is found in Muhammad’s life in Mecca and Medina when he founded Islam in the 7th century AD.

Muhammad was born in Arabia around AD 570. The region was domi

nated by wild, lawless Arab nomads who worshipped stars, sacred stones and idols. However, their highest loyalty was to their tribe and the veneration of their tribe’s common ancestor. Muhammad belonged to the Quraysh tribe who lived in the well-watered valley of Mecca. They were guardians of the cube-like shrine, the Ka’bah, sacred to the deity known simply as “the god” (Allah— from al-ilah = the god). The Quraysh tribe had skilfully elevated Allah above the hundreds of tribal divinities, whose images were also displayed in and around the Ka’bah, so that other Arab tribes came to Mecca on annual pilgrimage to worship and to trade.7

In the vicinity of Mecca lived several groups of monotheists: Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians (or Magians). Some of the Arabs at that time began to seek an alternative to the prevailing practice of idol worship and were identifying the God of the Jews and Christians with Allah, the Lord of the Ka’bah.8

Approaching his fortieth year, Muhammad experienced a vision of an angel telling him to proclaim Allah, the Lord of the Ka’bah, as the one true God who demands submission (islam) to the exclusion of all other deities. This and other angelic messages were recited by Muhammad and written down by his followers to form the Qur’an (or Koran, Arabic for “recitation”). The Qur’an has 114 suras (or chapters), arranged in order of decreasing length—except for the first sura, which is short and used in daily prayers.


41

Understanding the Islamic jihad

Muhammad understood his mission as restoring the faith of the prophet Abraham (Ibrahim), seen as the first muslim, meaning one who submits to Allah. When Muhammad began proclaiming Allah as the creator, guide and judge of every person, most Meccans scoffed. Then their mockery turned to anger. They feared that trade would suffer if the Ka’bah had only one god instead of hundreds tribal idols that attracted many clans to Mecca.

About this time Muhammad’s two major supporters, his wife and his uncle Abu Talib, died. Fearing for his small band of followers, Muhammad fled from Mecca for the oasis settlement of Yathrib later renamed Medinat al-Nabi (or “City of the Prophet”), usually shortened to Medina.

The migration (hijrah) to Medina in AD 622 saw a major change in Muhammad’s fortunes, and the event is celebrated by Muslims as the commencement of the Islamic era. Muhammad had been invited to the town to arbitrate between feuding tribal factions. Through a series of pacts, he established an ordered community (ummah) reflecting the tribal values of the time but in submission to Allah and Muhammad.

This concept of a community, with every aspect of life—political, religious, social and economic—totally submitted to the will of Allah, is at the heart of Islam. Given the ongoing threat from Mecca, Muhammad now acted to secure the new community from external threat and internal dissension. Believers

were exhorted to struggle (jihad) against the forces of unbelief and were promised a great reward for their action: “to him who fights in the way of Allah whether he is slain, or is victorious, we shall in time grant a mighty reward”.9

The first successful jihad was the Battle of Badr in AD 624—a raid on a large caravan of traders led by Abu Sufyan, the most prominent man in Mecca, and protected by a Meccan army a thousand strong. In one of the most fateful battles in history, 350 Muslims won a victory that is still revered within Islam as their finest hour on the battlefield.10

Muhammad instructed his followers to pray towards Jerusalem, expecting them to accept him as the prophet of God. However, three Jewish tribes in Medina refused to accept him as a prophet. Tensions mounted and Muhammad ordered attacks on each tribe in turn. The first two tribes were exiled, The first successful jihad leaving their fields and was the Battle of Badr possessions as spoils for in AD 624—a raid on a the Muslim warriors.The large caravan of traders jihad against the third led by Abu Sufyan, the tribe resulted in over 600 men beheaded, the most prominent man

women and children in Mecca, and protected enslaved, and their prop- by a Meccan army a erty plundered.11 thousand strong.

Next came a challenge to Mecca—still controlled by the hostile Quraysh tribe. Muhammad told his followers to pray towards the Ka’bah in Mecca and to fulfil there the ancient pilgrimage rites.


42


After intermittent skirmishes over several years a truce was signed in the sixth year of the hijrah (migration to Medina) achieving a pause in hostilities. Within

two years, Muhammad cancelled the truce and

Although the duty of marched on Mecca in

jihad or holy war against command of an army

infidels is not counted ten thousand strong. Some hasty negotiations

among the five pillars by secured the capitulation most Muslims, it is of his staunchest enerepeatedly emphasized in mies and Muhammad the Qur’an and Traditions, was able to occupy

Mecca in AD 630,and is considered to be sufficiently fulfilled when destroy the idols of the

Ka’bah, and declare the performed at least by city a Muslim commua certain number of nity.12 Two years later, Muslims. after a brief illness,

Muhammad died in Medina where his tomb

is still visited by pilgrims today. The central role of the jihad in

Muhammad’s campaign to enforce Islam first on Medina and then on Mecca has provided a model for Muslims ever since. Submission (islam) to the will of Allah means, in practice, submission to a Muslim military or political leader.

The pillars of Islam The Qur’an commands Muslims to express their communal identity by performing certain acts, sometimes called the “pillars” of Islam.13 The primary act is that of witnessing that There is no god

but Allah and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.

Prayer facing the Ka’bah in Mecca is obligatory five times a day at sunrise, noon, afternoon, sunset and evening. In Muslim communities the stillness of dawn is broken daily by the voice of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer.The noon prayer on Fridays is in the mosque followed by a sermon, and religious police in many countries may ensure that all Muslim men attend.

Fasting is required between sunrise and sunset during the month of Ramadan. Alms-giving is commended as a means of purifying one’s wealth and helping the poor. The most complex ritual duty is the pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca, which should be undertaken at least once in a believer’s lifetime if the means are available.

Although the duty of jihad or holy war against infidels is not counted among the five pillars by most Muslims, it is repeatedly emphasized in the Qur’an and Traditions, and is considered to be sufficiently fulfilled when performed at least by a certain number of Muslims.14

The jihad is included as the sixth pillar of Islam by one Muslim tradition dating back to a dissident group of largely of Persian origin in about AD 661.15

Muslim doctrine of jihad The Arabic word jihad literally means struggle, of which there are three kinds: military struggle, preaching struggle,


43


and personal struggle.16 A Muslim tradition says “whoever among you sees anything blameworthy shall alter it with his hand [jihad of the sword]; if he cannot do this, he shall do it with the tongue [preaching jihad]; if he cannot do this, he shall do it at heart [jihad against one’s sinful inclinations].”17

The legal interpretation of jihad in mainstream Muslim teaching is “fighting the unbelievers by striking them, taking their property, demolishing their places of worship, smashing their idols and the like”.18

The treatment of non-Muslims subject to jihad differs according to whether they are unbelievers, such as animists, or “People of the Book” which includes Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians.When a jihad is declared against unbelievers, traditional Muslim jurists give them three options: convert to Islam, become slaves or be killed. People of the Book, however, may either convert to Islam, accept subjugation under Islamic rule as a “protected minority” (dhimmi) in return for payment by every adult male of a poll-tax (jizyah—waived in the event of conversion to Islam), or be killed.19

In Muslim doctrine, the world is divided into the House of Islam where Islamic law prevails, and the House of War where infidels rule, such as Australia.20 In the House of War, “there is a morally necessary, legally and religiously obligatory state of war—that can only be interrupted, at Muslim expediency, by a truce of limited duration but not by a peace treaty—until the final and

inevitable triumph of Islam over non-Islam”.21

This obligatory state of war, as Pakistani religious scholar Mawdudi wrote, is because Islam is not just a religion but “a revolutionary ideology and program which seeks to alter the social order and rebuild it in conformity with its own tenets and ideals”.22 The Qur’an and Muslim tradition (hadith) discourage permanent Muslim residence in non-Muslim territory. “The only option for Muslims with a conscience and the means of living in the House of War is hijrah (migration), in keeping with the Prophetic example, to prepare for military jihad against such a sys- ... he will be shown his tem. Jihad is, therefore, a seat in paradise, he will necessary religious duty be decorated with the to which a Muslim ded- jewels of belief (Imaan),icates himself in the ser married off to the vice of God.”23

The reward for being beautiful ones, protected

killed in a jihad, as bin from the test in the

Laden explains in his grave, assured security in 1996 Declaration of War, the day of judgement, is that “... he will be crowned with the crown shown his seat in par- of dignity…adise, he will be decorated with the jewels of belief (Imaan), married off to the beautiful ones, protected from the test in the grave, assured security in the day of judgment, crowned with the crown of dignity, a ruby of which is better than this whole world (Duniah) and its entire content, wedded to seventy two of the pure Houries (beautiful ones of Paradise) ...”24


44


Branches of Islam Islam was divided into the Sunni and Shiite branches very early, in a dispute over leadership that arose while Muhammad’s body was awaiting burial. Shiites believe that Muhammad intended his son-in-law Ali to succeed him, since Muhammad had honoured Ali before a large Muslim assembly shortly beforehand. Ali was the first male to accept his message and, as father of the Prophet’s only surviving grandchildren, he could have kept the leadership within the Prophet’s family.25

While Ali and kinsmen were preparing

The Caliph’s duties Muhammad’s body for

included defending the burial, other Muslim leaders hastily chose an

House of Islam from older man from the external threat and Quraysh tribe, Abu Bakr, internal rebellion, if as his Successor or necessary with a call Caliph.26 Sunni Muslims to jihad. follow from those who

supported this decision to choose the Caliph.

Two years later, on his deathbed, Abu Bakr averted another dispute over leadership by appointing Umar to succeed him as Caliph.

The Caliph’s duties included defending the House of Islam from external threat and internal rebellion, if necessary with a call to jihad.27 Umar made full use of the jihad to establish the Arab Muslim empire by conquering Syria, Iraq, Egypt and Persia. After a decade of military conquest Umar was murdered.

The council of electors again passed

over Ali and appointed as Caliph Uthman from the Meccan clan of Umayyah, which had once led opposition to Muhammad. After twelve years of controlling the Muslim empire mostly by his own clan, he also was murdered.

At last, Ali became Caliph. The Medinans hailed him but leading Meccans raised an army against him. Although this rebellion was suppressed Ali was subsequently deposed and replaced by Muawiyah of Syria, who founded the Umayyad dynasty that lasted nearly a century. The Umayyad victors forged the mainstream Islamic culture that became Sunni Islam (named after the sunnah or customs of Muhammad and the Caliphate).28 The Sunnis today comprise about 90% of the Islamic world.

The losers, who sided with Ali, became known as Shiites or Shi’ah, meaning the faction of Ali. Today, Shiites make up most of the population of Iran and are also found as minority groups elsewhere.

The Wahhabi branch of Sunni Islam developed in the late 18th century from the teaching of Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab. After studying in Mecca and Medina, Wahhab called Muslims to return to the pristine core of faith found in the Qur’an and the Traditions (hadith). He called for a close imitation of the Prophet and his Companions and denounced as unbelievers all who ignored his message, making them subject to jihad. A local chieftain, Muhammad ibn Sa’ud, responded to his appeal and together they waged military campaigns in Arabia that led to the cap


45


ture of Mecca in 1803. Although subsequently defeated by an Ottoman army in 1818, six years later Ibn Sa’ud, a descendant of Muhammad ibn Sa’ud, revived Wahhabism, recaptured Mecca and established the modern state of Saudi Arabia.29

Today, Wahhabi Muslims dominate that country and their influence extends throughout the Muslim world due to the centrality of Mecca to Islam.

Sufism is a minority Muslim tradition that is essentially mystical: “Sufism is keeping the heart pure from the pollution of discord”, explains a Sufi maxim.30

Sufis, such as former Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid, are inclined to be tolerant of other religions and emphasize personal rather than military jihad. For example, Sufi teacher Mahmud Muhammad Taha led an Islamic reform movement in Sudan stressing the qualities of tolerance, justice, and mercy and opposed the implementation of shariah law as being contrary to the essence of Islam. Other Muslims condemned Taha’s teaching and he was executed for heresy in January 1985.31

Some Muslim reformists seek to redefine Islam as a religious community without the political and military elements. However, such views are not representative of mainstream Islam.

Muslim military threats The spread of Islam during its first hundred years was spectacular. During that time it conquered all of the Middle East

to the borders of India, all of North Africa, Spain and the Iberian Peninsula, and by AD 732 it was only a short distance from Paris. Until then, Islam had only known victory. But the outnumbered French forces defeated the Muslims at the Battle of Poitiers under the command of Charles Martel.

One of the greatest Muslim military achievements was the Ottoman Empire, centred in the region now called Turkey, that began about 1300 and lasted 600 years until 1922. Almost continuous military jihad against Christian Europe saw Ottoman territory expand greatly. Christian Constantinople fell to During the 20th century, the Ottomans in 1453. jihads have occurred in Christian Europe was countries throughout again threatened when the world, particularly in Vienna, the chief remain- tropical Africa. ing bulwark against further Muslim advance, was besieged in 1529 and 1683 by an Ottoman army. These attacks failed and Christian Europe was preserved.32

During the 20th century, jihads have occurred in countries throughout the world, particularly in tropical Africa. Dr John Azumah from Nigeria has documented the Black African experience of Muslim jihads during recent centuries in his book The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa.33

Dr Azumah writes,

the waging of holy war against traditional African communities was always explicitly stated in the


46


appointment letters of emirs, and the jihad movements subjected traditional African communities to unimaginable brutality.

An example is the terror inflicted by Hamman Yaji, a particularly ruthless jihadist (1912-27), in north-eastern Nigeria.

On one raid Hamman Yaji’s soldiers cut off the heads of the dead pagans in front of [the palace], threw them into a hole in the ground, set them alight and cooked their food over the flames. Another time they forced the wives of the dead men to come forward and collect their husbands’ heads in a calabash.34

These militant campaigns against traditional people groups, particularly in the Middle Belt of Nigeria, continued well into the late 1950s. In these campaigns,

the jihadists were echoing the traditional

Militant campaigns Muslim teaching that against traditional people unbelievers were essengroups, particularly in the tially enemies of Islam Middle Belt of Nigeria, and should not rule over

continued well into the Muslims. They should

late 1950s. be fought, killed, enslaved or subjugated by Muslims.35

Sudan is another African country that has experienced horrific consequences of an Islamic jihad. The National Congress (formerly National Islamic Front) which controls the government of Sudan (led by Lieutenant General Omar Hassan Al-Bashir) treats Islam as a

state religion that must undergird all laws, institutions and policies. For example, while non-Muslims may convert to Islam, conversion from Islam to another religion is punishable by death. Over 70% of the Sudanese are Sunni Muslims who are concentrated in the north. The remainder, comprising about 19% Christians and 10% adherents of tribal religions, live in the south or in the Nuba mountains in central Sudan.

The US Department of State Religious Freedom Report on Sudan for 2001 estimates that some 2 million people have been killed or have died of starvation and 4 million have been displaced since 1983. The governmentdeclared jihad against the south has resulted in killings, abductions and rapes, the burning and looting of villages, and the bombing of schools, hospitals and markets.36

Government and associated forces in Sudan routinely kill people or take them to “peace camps”, where children are removed from their parents and sent elsewhere for indoctrination into Islam. The young men are trained as soldiers and sent back to fight the South. Young women and girls are forced to labour on farms and are frequently raped by their captors. When food is scarce in the camps, only those who have converted to Islam are given enough to eat.37

Islamic shari’ah law The prime objective of a jihad campaign


47


is to bring a community or state under Islamic or shari’ah law. At the practical level, the most important and comprehensive element of Islam is the shari’ah, which literally means “path to a water place”, that is to the source of life. Thus the shari’ah is understood by Muslims as the path of righteous living that leads to Paradise.

Every Muslim has an obligation to Allah, as one commentator puts it:

to act as his viceregent on earth, ordering the good and forbidding wrong (Qur’an 3:104 and 3:110). In other words, it is a duty to accept responsibility for the establishment of proper public order. The law, as the concrete expression of Allah’s will and guidance, is therefore central to the individual and collective Muslim identity.38

Shari’ah law is based on four principles or “roots of the law”: the Qur’an, the Prophet’s sunnah, reasoning and consensus. Regarding the first two principles, “if a belief, a practice, or a point of law has been clearly enunciated in a text of the Qur’an or the Prophetic sunnah, it must be accepted as absolutely binding.” The third principle, of reasoning, means that an issue not directly covered in the Qur’an or sunnah may be settled by analogical reasoning from similar cases. The fourth principle, of consensus, is the most important in practice and refers to general acceptance of a new idea or law by the Muslim community.39 No separation is made between moral and legal obligations or between theology and law.

The importance of shari’ah law to Muslims is evident from the establishment of the Shari’ah Court of the UK by British Muslims associated with the extreme Islamist organization Al-Muhajiroun and the Society of Muslim Lawyers. Although this so-called “court” has no legal standing in the UK, its judge, Omar Bakri Muhammad, issued a fatwa (judgment) in 1999 sentencing to death Terrence McNally, author of the blasphemous play Corpus Christi.40 This fatwa has no effect, except possibly inciting some Muslims to take the law into their own hands and try to execute McNally.

Shari’ah law applies differently to Muslims, dhimmi (such as Jews and Christians), and slaves.

Any non-Muslim is free to become a Muslim but not vice versa. From early times it has been taught that Any non-Muslim is free to the penalty for the apos- become a Muslim but not tasy of any individual vice versa. From early from Islam is death. times it has been taughtWhile the Qur’an con

that the penalty for the demns those who forsake Islam, warning that apostasy of any individual

they will incur the wrath from Islam is death. of Allah, it does not command death.41 The death penalty is obligatory nevertheless by the second principle of shari’ah, the Prophet’s sunnah, recorded in the hadith, for example: “Zaid b. Aslam reported that the Apostle of Allah (may peace be upon him) declared that the man who leaves the fold of Islam should be executed.”42

Islamic history shows that this penalty


48


has often been enforced, occasionally by public authority but usually by relatives and others taking the law of Islam into their own hands.

The status of dhimmi (or “protected minority”) protects a person’s life, property and religious practices in return for payment by every male adult of a poll-tax or tribute (jizyah). This tax, however, is the real mark of subjugation to the Muslim authorities and avoidance of its social stigma is a strong incentive to conversion. As the Qur’an (9:29) says, “Fight against such of those to whom the Scriptures were given and...do not

embrace the true Faith [Islam], until they pay

Islam is essentially a tribute out of hand and

community or nation, are utterly subdued”.

not just a religion as The inferior status of the dhimmi is reinforced

understood in the through other shari’ah Western world. regulations. Dhimmis

are forbidden to touch a Muslim woman (though

a Muslim man can take a non-Muslim as a wife). They are excluded from public office and are forbidden to bear arms. Dhimmis are not allowed to give evidence in court against a Muslim. To defend himself, the dhimmi would have to purchase Muslim witnesses at great expense.This leaves the dhimmi with little legal recourse when harmed by a Muslim. Dhimmis have also been forced to wear distinctive clothing. In the ninth century, for example, Baghdad’s Caliph al-Mutawakkil designated a yellow badge for Jews, setting a precedent that would

be famously followed centuries later.43

Conclusion The jihad, or holy war against infidels, lies at the heart of Islam. Muhammad used the jihad to establish the earliest Muslim communities, first at Medina and subsequently at Mecca. The Qur’an instructs Muslims time and again to use the jihad to bring unbelievers into submission to Allah. The early Caliphs, who led the Muslim community following Muhammad’s death, used the jihad to conquer neighbouring Arab regions. During the centuries that followed, the remarkable expansion of Islam into North Africa and Europe achieved through the jihad threatened the survival of Christian Europe. Today, Islamic jihad campaigns continue and are currently being waged in Afghanistan, southern Sudan, northern Nigeria, eastern Indonesia and other countries. Throughout its 14 century history, Islam’s borders have always been bloody.

Islam is essentially a community or nation, not just a religion as understood in the Western world. No distinction is made in Islam between political, military and religious leadership— Muhammad and the Caliphs who followed him exercised all three roles. This union of religion, politics and military action is achieved through shari’ah law. Hence the introduction and preservation of shari’ah law has always been a central objective of Muslims. Shari’ah


49


law assigns different rights to different people groups: only Muslims have full rights, “People of the Book” including Jews and Christians are subjugated with limited rights, and unbelievers or idolaters are subjected to slavery (or killed).

Islamic thought divides the world into two distinct camps: the House of Islam where shari’ah law applies and the House of War elsewhere. As the name implies, the House of War (which includes the whole Western world) is an inevitable target for Islamic jihad.

Dr Phillips is a recently retired Principal Research Scientist who is also qualified in theology. He is currently researching and writing on contemporary social issues from a Christian perspective. He has a longstanding interest in the different cultural implications of Islam and Christianity.

E N D N O T E S

1 Nida’ul Islam magazine website, general information page: www.islam.org.au/info.htm.

2 Peter Finn, ‘A fanatic’s quiet path to terror’, Washington Post, 22 September 2001, p. A1.

3 Ibid.; Qur’an 6:162. 4 Ladenese Epistle: Declaration of War

against Americans occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places, 23 August 1996, published in London-based Arabic newspaper Al Quds Al Arabi, translated by the Committee for the Defense of

Legitimate Rights, a pro-bin Ladenorganization, and posted on theInternet in October 1996.

5 ‘Hidden enemy, Al Qaeda’s mission of terror’, Defence Information Bulletin, November 2001, Defence Public Affairs, Canberra, Vol 4, No 7, p. 10.

6 Ladenese Epistle, op.cit. 7 ‘Islam, History of’, Encyclopaedia

Britannica, Macropaedia, 15th Ed, 1973, Vol 9, p. 927.

8 David Waines, An Introduction to Islam, Cambridge University Press, 1995, Chapter 1 “There is no god but Allah ...”

9 Qur’an, 4:74. 10 John Gilchrist, ‘The founder of Islam at

Medina’, Muhammad and the Religion of Islam, Answering Islam, answering-islam.org/Gilchrist/Vol1/index.htm.

11 John Gilchrist, op. cit., ‘The conflict with the Jews’.

12 John Gilchrist, op. cit., ‘The conquest of Mecca and the final triumph’.

13 David Waines, op cit., pp. 30 and 89-93. 14 David Waines, ibid., p. 100. 15 John Alembillah Azumah, The Legacy

of Arab-Islam in Africa: A Quest for Inter-religious Dialogue, OneworldPublications, Oxford, 2001, p. 66; thedissident group was called the seceders(khawarij).

16 The three kinds: jihad al-sayf (military), jihad al-qawl (preaching), and jihad al-nafs (personal).

17 J. Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, trans. Andras and Ruth Hamori, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1981, pp. 170-4; cited by Azumah, op. cit., p. 65.



50 18 R. Peters, Islam and Colonisation— Greene, The Diary of Hamman Yaji: A The Doctrine of jihad in Modern History, Mouton Press, Paris and New York, 1984, p. 10; cited by Azumah, op. cit.,

Chronicle of a West African Muslim Ruler, Indiana University, Bloomington, 1995, pp. 13-14; cited by Azumah, 2001,

p. 66. 19 John Azumah, op. cit., p. 66. 20 House of Islam (dar al-islam), and the

op. cit., p. 92. 35 John Azumah, 2001, ibid., pp. 92, 95. 36 International Religious Freedom Report

House of War (dar al-harb). 21 John Azumah, op. cit., p. 67. 22 S. Abu ‘Ala Mawdudi, 1980, Jihad in

on Sudan, 2001, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, US Department of State, www.state.gov/

Islam, 3rd ed, Islamic Publications, Lahore, 1980, p. 5; cited by John Azumah, op. cit., p. 67.

g/drl/rls/irf/2001/5680.htm. 37 Human Rights Report, Christian

Persecution in Sudan, International 23 John Azumah, op. cit., p. 68. 24 Ladenese Epistle, 1996, op. cit., quoting

Muslim authority Saheeh Al-Jame’

Christian Concern, www.persecution.org/ humanrights/sudan.html.

38 David Waines, op cit., p. 63. As-Sagheer.

25 David Waines, op cit., p. 155. 26 “Islam, History of ”, op. cit., p. 928.

39 ‘Islam’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Macropaedia, 15th Ed, 1973,Vol 9, p. 921.

40 Audrey Gillan, ‘Muslim death sentence 27 David Waines, op cit., p. 100. 28 David Waines, ibid., p. 46. 29 David Waines, ibid., pp. 207-8.

on playwright’, The Guardian, Saturday 30 October 1999; Charity Commission for England and Wales report on The

30 David Waines, ibid., Ch 5 ‘The way of the Sufi’.

31 John Azumah, op. cit., p. 201;

South London Middle Eastern and South Eastern Asian Women’s Issues charity, www.charity-commission.gov.uk/

www.sudan.net ‘Tune into the new conscience of Islam’, UNESCO Courier, November 2001.

investigations/inquiryreports/mesea.asp. 41 See, for example, Qur’an 2:217 and

16:106. 32 ‘Ottoman Empire and Turkey, History

of the’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Macropaedia, 15th Ed, 1973, Vol 13,

42 Muwatta Imam Malik, p 317; cited by John Gilchrist, op. cit., ‘The Consequences of Apostasy From Islam’.

pp. 776-779. 33 John Azumah, 2001, op. cit., Ch 3

‘Muslim jihad and Black Africa’.

43 Bat Ye’or, The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, NJ, 1985,

34 J. H. Vaughan and Anthony H M Kirk pp. 30, 56-57, 185-86, 191, 194.


Ideas Books



Creation, invention and artistic endeavour G R E G C L A R K E

George Steiner Grammars of Creation Yale University Press, New Haven, 2001. 344pp.

Jesus Christ is the artist’s ultimate admirer. According to poet Gerard Manly Hopkins, he is “the only just

judge, the only just literary critic…who prizes, is proud of, and admires, more than any man, more than the receiver himself can, the gifts of his own making” (quoted in Steiner, p. 86). And yet the artist’s greatest admirer is also his biggest detractor. Making graven images, building godlike towers, and worshipping or serving created things is, in fact, to sin against God. The artist must be careful not to overstep the line.

How does one stay on the right side of the line—working in order to please God, but not falling over into idolatry or image-worship? This is George Steiner’s

question in his powerful but ultimately dissatisfying book, Grammars of Creation. His answer is that theism is at the root of truly great art, because there is a ‘godcopying’ element to the creation of new things—paintings, poems, literary characters, great buildings, music. If it’s good art, Steiner concludes, it must have come from a theist, or at least someone leaning on theistic concepts even if they fall short of personal belief. Perhaps, he admits, in the future technology will be “an act of poeisis”, an undertaking cut free from belief in God, but it isn’t yet.

This argument is developed through a very detailed and sophisticated discussion of the concept of creation—creation by God, creation by artists (painters, writers, musicians), and what Steiner calls ‘invention’ or ‘discovery’ by scientists and technologists. The difference in the terms underscores one of his major ideas—that scientists are doing something ‘lesser’ than artists. Where artists are reshaping God’s world and adding


54


something to it—creating after God— scientists and technologists are just revealing what is there. Science develops, art emerges independently; science moves along a frontier, art appears out of nowhere; science is usually developed by teams; art comes from “generative solitude”; science gets replaced by better theories and experiments; one work of art doesn’t ‘replace’ any other. “A nineteenth century steam-engine is now an historical curio. A novel by Dostoevski is not”, Steiner claims contentiously.

Steiner knows that his case isn’t watertight, but that there is something in it which

While acknowledging he worries at throughout the imaginative powers this book (originally the

of a Newton or an 1990 Gifford Lectures). He has a romanticized

Einstein, Steiner is view of art, whereby the

sceptical whether the ‘muse’ visits an individsame creative genius is ual and something origibehind the great nal emerges, but it is a scientific discoveries. view tempered by mod

ernism, which has relocated the muse from

heavenly inspiration to psychological or social distress. He is enthralled by the genius of Dante, Michelangelo and Shakespeare, and wonders whether the technological future can in fact produce art to parallel theirs. While acknowledging the imaginative powers of a Newton or an Einstein, Steiner is sceptical whether the same creative genius is behind the great scientific discoveries. Here’s a summary of the distinction he draws:

In the sciences, discovery, theoretical proposal, crucial experimentation are, to be sure, fuelled by individual talent or genius. But there is in scientific developments an anonymous, collective inertial motion. Had this man or that team not “made the discovery” (a suggestive idiom), another scientist or team would have done so, possibly at almost the same moment. The invention of calculus, of the theory of natural selection, or of the structure of DNA are famous cases in point. Though material possibility, economic and social circumstance, [and] historical openings bear on aesthetic creation, the making of a poem, of the painting, of the sonata remains contingent. In every case, it could not have been… There is no logic to its necessity, however imperative the psychic, private motives for its genesis…

It is not only that the poem or symphony or canvas might, need, not have been. There is a sense in which it should not have been, in which its composition and completion betray, fall desperately short of, the purposed truth or harmony or perfection. (p.29)

Creating a work of art, then, is to do something more ‘godlike’ than to conduct an experiment. But such claims to act like the divine are frowned upon in Scripture (witness the Tower of Babel).


55

Creation, invention and artistic endeavour

So, in Dante’s Divine Comedy, does the author commit the ultimate blasphemy by claiming that his literary art is in fact a revelation of the divine? God’s authorship is blended with human creativity in a manner which the Bible never allows. (Actually, it’s a manner which the Bible embodies, but disallows to any other literature. As John, the author of the Book of Revelation, said, if anyone adds to the prophetic Word, let him be cursed and afflicted, Rev 22:18). Steiner recognizes this theological problem, but does not consider Dante guilty of it. Rather, Steiner builds a case for Dante as the ultimate artist/creator, for whom “truth and fiction are made one…imagination is prayer and Plato’s exile of the poets refuted” (p. 106). How does Steiner come to this view? He does so by arguing that God gives to his creatures (at least, to some of them) the same freedom that he himself had in creating the world. He donates to human beings the same capacity to create something out of nothing, out of pure act and pure love. For this reason, Steiner concludes that great art cannot be born of hatred; it must have about it in the final analysis something of heaven and eternity. It must come from theism.

Furthermore, Steiner is suspicious that mathematics, often regarded by practitioners as a search for ‘beautiful equations’, is not bringing anything into being but is just describing the world that is in different ways. I am told there is great debate about such things at present (in set theory, for example);

Steiner (like me!) admits that he is not competent to call the epistemological status of mathematics, but he writes of it as more a science than an art. He is willing to make one distinction: “Pure mathematics would pertain to the realm of creation as do applied mathematics to that of invention” (p.140). It can at least be said that mathematics provides new metaphors and symbols which can be used artistically to develop new things (e.g. Escher’s drawings derive from mathematical theories of symme- It can at least be said try and pattern, as was

that mathematicsfamously discussed by Douglas R. Hofstadter in provides new metaphors

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An and symbols which can Eternal Gold Braid). be used artistically to

Steiner’s argument develop new things… doubles back on itself at various points. For instance, he acknowledges that literature leans on previously established archetypes of character, plot and metaphor. Much modern literature is a variation on classical literature or fairy tales—it has hardly emerged unheralded, as Steiner earlier claimed for art over science. “Could it be, therefore, that literature is the most inventive but least creative of artefacts?” (p.159). The division he argued for in the first place between art as creation and science as invention doesn’t in fact seem very strong, and he prevaricates over it during the book. Furthermore, he argues that the creation of characters by an author is akin to Adam’s naming of the creatures in


56


Genesis 2, while at the same time admitting that it is all an illusion. Characters such as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina or Shakespeare’s Hamlet really did not exist, and yet it is as if they almost did.

Steiner remains fascinated with this problem—the obvious artifice of human creation tantalizingly associated with the very real creativity of God

himself. God made the world, and us in his

Either we believe in image. We make and something or someone remake, with such evibeyond time, or we dent limitations, and yet imagine and attempt what we do is marvel

to create artistically lous and makes very real

something which enables differences to people’s lives and futures. Music,

us to experience fictional characters (at something beyond time, the moment, especially in a different time to from films), poetic reality itself. imaginings all have an

impact in the world of people and things,

sometimes seeming more real than life itself (witness the confusion of actors with the characters they play)—and yet they are fabrications:

Axiomatically, viscerally, it may be that we feel, that we share with other “normal” sensibilities the “common sense” finding that the personae out of literature and the arts do belong to a different branch of reality than those persons we crowd up against in the underground. The provocation, however, remains: that alternate

reality can exercise on our consciousness, on our daily lives, a pressure of presence, an intrusive impact, a memorability altogether in excess of that which we define as the “actual”, as the tangible… Something very nearly physical is occurring. (pp.163-4)

This ‘almost physical’ occurrence suggests to artists that they are doing something ‘almost godlike’, since something ‘almost real’ is being created. This is very exciting to those who dwell on such things, but the importance of the ‘almost’ mustn’t be understated. Steiner claims there are only two ways that human beings transcend “the eradicating dictate of biological-historical time, which is to say: death”. These two ways are through authentic religious belief, and through aesthetics. Either we believe in something or someone beyond time, or we imagine and attempt to create artistically something which enables us to experience something beyond time, in a different time to reality itself. “Poeisis authorizes the unreason of hope”, he writes (p. 259). And science, the lesser truths of equations and axioms, does not. So, “in that immensely significant sense, the arts are more indispensable to men and women than even the best of science and technology (innumerable societies have long endured without these)” (p. 259).

However, art bases its hope on human perception—on the genius of the artist to move and influence his or her reader or viewer or listener. It is a


Creation, invention and artistic endeavour

human work. Belief, in the Christian work of Jesus. God does the creating and 57

understanding of it, is a work of God the new creating, and we are less co- or himself which re-establishes a relation- sub-creators than the creation itself— ship between creator and created that less minor potters than we are clay. was lost through sin. Art may provide Finally, Steiner says he is haunted by epiphanies and fuel grand passions, it a sentence from Rousseau: “such is the may illuminate dark corners of human nothingness of things human that, experience and elevate its recipients to except for the Being which exists selfmore wonderful appreciation of their created, there is nothing beautiful existence. However, that is where it except that which does not exist” stops; that is the ‘almost real’ aspect. God (p.33). This invites discussion of some himself, through his uncreated, cosub of the perennial concerns of biblical stantial Son, Jesus Christ, makes the eschatology: Will anything of this world divine connection a reality. Art works survive into the new creation? Does the after the fact, to aid us in comprehend fact that Christian people are new creing and responding to God’s kindness, ations now by the Spirit mean that some but it doesn’t get us there. of their work will stand on the day of

Steiner’s work is a profound state judgement? If so, what kind of world is ment of the way in which art draws eternal for Christians? Steiner does little upon a theology of creation for its form to answer such questions of specific and content. I agree with many of the interest for Christians, but those who associations he draws between artistic seek to themselves will find elegant, if activity and godlike activity; what artists out of step, reflections for the task in offer the world ought not be down- Grammars of Creation. played, as if it wasn’t in some way incredibly transcendent at times. However, Steiner does not wrestle with Greg Clarke has a PhD in English the theological notion of revelation, by literature and is an editor for which God draws humanity to himself, Matthias Media. even into himself, through the person and


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