Richard Dawkins is so wrong it hurts: What the science-vs.-religion debate ignores [View all]

[undeterred]

Acolytes of Dawkins & Hitchens pretend that ignorant evangelicals represent all of religion. Here's what they miss
Sana Saeed

I’m supposed to hate science. Or so I’m told. I spent my childhood with my nose firmly placed between the pages of books on reptiles, dinosaurs, marine life and mammals. When I wasn’t busy wondering if I wanted to be more like Barbara Walters or Nancy Drew, I was busy digging holes in my parents’ backyard hoping to find lost bones of some great prehistoric mystery. I spent hours sifting through rocks that could possibly connect me to the past or, maybe, a hidden crystalline adventure inside. Potatoes were both apart of a delicious dinner and batteries for those ‘I got this’ moments; magnets repelling one another were a sorcery I needed to, somehow, defeat. The greatest teachers I ever had were Miss Frizzle and Bill Nye the Science Guy... I also spent my childhood reciting verses from the Qur’an and a long prayer for everyone — in my family and the world — every night before going to bed. I spoke to my late grandfather, asking him to save me a spot in heaven. I went to the mosque and stepped on the shoes resting outside a prayer hall filled with worshippers. I tried fasting so I could be cool like my parents; played with prayer beads and always begged my mother to tell me more stories from the lives of the Abrahamic prophets.

With age, my wonder with religion and science did not cease. Both were, to me, extraordinary portals into the life around me that left me constantly bewildered, breathless and amazed. Science would come to dominate my adolescent and early teenage years: papier mache cigarettes highlighting the most dangerous carcinogens, science fair projects on the virtues of chocolate consumption during menstruation; lamb lung and eye dissections, color coded notes, litmus tests on pretty papers, and disturbingly thorough study guides for five-question quizzes. My faith, too, remained operational in my day-to-day life: longer conversations with my late grandfather and all 30 Ramadan fasts, albeit with begrudging pre-dawn prayers. I attended Qur’anic recitation classes where I could not, for the life of me, recite anything that was not in English. I still read and listened to the stories of the prophets, with perhaps a greater sense of historical wonder and on occasion I would perform some of the daily prayers. Unsupervised access to the internet also led to the inevitable debates in Yahoo chat rooms about how Islam did not subjugate me as a woman. At the age of 16, I was busting out Quranic verses and references from the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad to shut up internet dwellers like Crusade563 and PopSmurf1967.

It never once occurred to me during those years, and later, that there could be any sort of a conflict between my faith and science; to me both were part of the same things: This universe and my existence within it. And yet, here we are today being told that the two are irreconcilable; that religion begets an anti-science crusade and science pushes anti-religion valor. When did this become the only conversation on religion and science that we’re allowed to have? This current discourse that pits faith and science against one another like Nero’s lions versus Christians — inappropriate analogy intended — borrows directly from the conflation of all religious traditions with the history and experience of Euro-American Christianity, specifically of the evangelical variety.

In my own religious tradition, Islam, there is a vibrant history of religion and science not just co-existing but informing one another intimately. Astrophysicists, chemists, biologists, alchemists, surgeons, psychologists, geographers, logicians, mathematicians– amongst so many others – would often function as theologians, saints, spiritual masters, jurists and poets as much as they would as scientists. Indeed, a quick survey of some of the most well known Muslim intellectuals of the past 1,400 years illustrates their masterful polymathy, their ability to reach across fields of expertise without blinking at any supposed “dissonance.” And, of course, this is not something exclusive to Islam; across the religious terrain we can find countless polymaths who delved into the worlds of God and science.

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