Science and Religion in Islam: The Link.: March 2008

Saturday, March 29, 2008

338)The much-visited and wildly popular Ismaili Mail website surpasses its usual thoroughness in its reporting of Aga Khan IV's visit to Dubai and UAE

Thursday, March 27, 2008

337)Showcasing Mamdoochacha's Satires Blog; fragrances of our old hometown neighbourhood, biting poetry on ecology, finance and much more; good blog.

Mamdoochacha writes about himself:
Born and raised in apartheid South Africa during the depression in the Asian ghetto of Pretoria, Mamdoochacha has always understood hardship. He has lived in Tanzania, Texas and Toronto over the last 45 years:

The link to Mamdoochacha's Satires blog appears in the Suggested Links section in the top right hand corner of my blog:
http://mamdoochacha.blogspot.com/

Here is a sampling of his material:

1)Languages in the Location

As I reflect on my life, I sometimes go back to my childhood days and recollect my thoughts about the life we led in the non-white ghetto in Pretoria. There were three ghettos in a total area of about a mile and a quarter by a mile and a quarter for the three basic non-white groups, namely coloured or Cape coloured (those of mixed race), Indian or Asian and African or Bantu. The ghetto was made up of Marabastaadt, the area for blacks, the Asiatic Bazaar for Indians and the Cape Location for those of mixed race. All of us who lived there just called it Location.

By the mid-forties, the Black African population was growing rapidly and they were slowly being moved out to Atteridgeville. The blacks called it Pelindaba --a basic bare-boned city, some 8 or 9 miles West from the City of Pretoria. Atteridgeville was ethnically divided to keep people from different black tribes who came from different areas of South Africa apart. This was in keeping with the divide and conquer philosophy of the ruling party in South Africa –Apartheid began at the ethnic or root level. Once the Blacks had been moved out, plans for moving the Coloureds was initiated. The Coloureds were moved to Derdepoort, an area some 10 miles East of Pretoria. Similar arrangements were made in Johannesburg and other major and minor cities of South Africa. Indians in Pretoria were to be moved to Laudium, which today is a reality and somehow also ethnically divided. However, before all those events took place, all three races lived in the one Location.

The Location was bounded on the North side by the Magalis (pronounced with a throaty g –almost like a raspy h) range of low mountains. Struben Street acted as the Southern border. The Municipality of Pretoria had a fence along the entire Southern border, behind which they stored road building equipment and other requisites. The West side of the Location was cut off by a highway called Von Wielligh Street. The East side was cut off by the Apis (Monkey) River. Boom Street ran through the middle of the Location, connected by a bridge on the East side to the White areas and the outside world. These three major groups of people shared their destiny of being cut off from so-called superior White civilization. We definitely lived in a world of our own.

Some Indians who had shops in the City of Pretoria, from the early part of the century before the official Apartheid policy came into effect, were allowed to go to their businesses during the day, but had to be back by evening to spend the night in the Location. Some Indian businessmen did have homes behind their businesses in the City, but this was an anomaly from the early part of the century. By the mid-fifties they were already ear-marked for removal –both business and residence. This was part of the Group Areas Act which set aggressive milestones for the separation of the races.

Those were years of increasing oppression and being on the receiving end of an inherently discriminatory and divisive policy. South African White policy in those years was designed to progressively remove all economic and political opportunities from non-whites. However, reminiscing of the days in the Location, all is not lost because life is not measured in terms of money, places or status. It is measured in how we lived with our fellow man and the trials and tribulations we bore together and how we emerged from it all.

The first great thing that came to be was that Mahatma Ghandi came to live in the Location in the early part of the 20th century. This was surely divinely ordered. He lived there for many years before moving to Natal and eventually back to India. Everyone knows the mark he left on India. Few have heard of the legacy he left in South Africa –a legacy of pride in heritage, fighting for freedom and belief in the greatness of ordinary people. I went to school with many children who came from families who took the Mahatma as their leader. Many of them later played important roles in the South African freedom movement.

Now my thoughts go back to the fact that the Location was probably one of the richest sources of cultural exchange on the face of the globe at that time –something never to be repeated in this fast changing, modern world of ours. Toronto is probably the only other place where this cultural heterogeneity is encouraged, to a point. However, Toronto is not a ghetto and it is also so large that the ethnics have their own ghettos. But Pretoria’s Location was unparalleled on the planet because nowhere else were so many different people put together in such a small area from where they could not leave by their own choice.

The richness of life that I’m also talking about is the people who lived in this Location. And my memory takes me to re-meet the neighbours and their cultures and the languages that were spoken here all around us. The Location was over-crowded because the Indian area was no more than about ¾ of a mile by ¾ of a mile. There were close to 10,000 people in that small area, living in poverty and under an oppressive regime. Families and extended families of 20 or 30 people using one toilet was not uncommon. But people got along. We survived. We learned to tolerate each other. Understand each other. We visited each other in our homes. We went to school together in this one-of-a-kind place in the world, the Location. We had three movie theatres, showing Indian, American, British, Egyptian and Tamil movies. This was our escape.

When I look back on my school days and school mates, first of all, everyone spoke either one of the country’s major legal languages, English or Afrikaans. The Coloureds mostly spoke either local or Cape Afrikaans (a Dutch-German derivative language, with a smattering of Flemish and English mixed in). The African servants and black customers at the local shops (blacks were allowed to be there until 7 pm, but had to observe the curfew that forced them to go back to their areas by 7 pm), spoke either Zulu, Xosa, Venda, Sesutho, Swazi, Ndebele, Tswana or Mchangan. Most of the Indians and local business people spoke at least 2 of the above languages, including their own local language from India. In addition most also spoke Hindi, English or Afrikaans or both.

Indians were truly multi-lingual out of necessity. They were the trades people of the area –running small shops and service businesses for the blacks and coloureds, who worked in the white areas. There were also a couple dozen Chinese families living in the Location. Some came from Mainland China, others from Hong Kong or Macau. They spoke either Cantonese or Mandarin.

In the Location, there were Indians from South India, especially Tamils, who were a big percentage of the population. They spoke, depending on where they came from in the South of India, Madrasi, Telegu or Malayalam. Also, some from the mid-section of India spoke a few different dialects of Indian languages. There were the Hyderabadis, who spoke their own language. There were Cochnis from Cochin, they spoke their own distinct language. There were a few from Ceylon, who spoke Sinhalese. Moving North towards Pakistan, there were many Urdu speaking peoples. Indians from Mumbai spoke Marhastran. And Parsis, who also came from the same area, especially from Mumbai, spoke Gujerati. Then there were the Gujeratis, with a big ethnic population, who spoke their different brands of Gujerati –the Kanamyas, the Surtis, the Katchis, the Katchi-Mehman and Halai-Mehman from Sindh. There were Sindis who spoke pure Sindi, with their own unique script. There were those who spoke Hindi and as we go further North, we find the Sikhs, with their own language, Punjabi. There were people from Kolkata, speaking Kalkatian language. And from Bangladesh, people spoke Bengali. There were Patthan-speaking Indians from the North West of India and Punjabi-speakers from the Punjab.

This was a microcosm of almost all the people you could think of. Pizzaro and Cortes didn’t allow the Aztecs and the Mayas to be in the Location, otherwise we would have had them also. And the North American Indians and the Northern Aboriginals all fighting for survival –they were not here.

There were Portuguese-speaking Indians who came from Portuguese speaking enclaves in India. The Malays of the Cape were also here, with their Malay-mixed Afrikaans. They had come to South Africa with the Dutch from Malaysia. There were German-speaking coloureds who came from the Cape province, on the border with Southwest Africa, where they spoke German. And there were Arab-speaking Mullahs at the local Madrassa.

I’m sure I’m forgetting some other people with their peculiar language here. But they were there in this Location. All their children, boys and girls, were at the local school. Nowhere on Earth will you find this. The children of the very, very wealthy and those of the very poor, went to the same school because of the Apartheid ghetto –which did not differentiate between rich and poor –only between white and non-white.

In spite of the oppression and lack of opportunities, what could be more momentous than having one of the greatest men on this planet as a neighbour living in this Location? That’s what it felt like to have Mahatma Ghandi as part of our neighbourhood. It gave our lives and experiences meaning and richness in a larger global sense. When I see Ben Kingsley portraying Mahatma Ghandi, I say to myself, ‘We had the real thing.’

In conclusion, I must reiterate the richness of this once-in-a-lifetime, once-in-a-long-historical-period that only divine intervention could have produced. Where in the world would you get a Location of so many cultural and sub-cultural backgrounds with their rich heritage of music, dress, color, religion and language have come together in such a small place? Yes, there were even Ismailis here. One family in particular, the Keshavjees, had very close contact with Mahatma Ghandi. This was truly a historical event of a magnitude that would have world-wide impact. Mahatma Ghandi was part of this beautiful historical mosaic. Indians and Africans played out their roles, while the British and Dutch looked on from the side-lines with their attitudes of Apartheid, snobbery and British arrogance. Look where they are today.

This was a one-time phenomenon with, not Ben Kingsly whose relatives are also known to me, but the real thing thrown in: the Mahatma. This is my legacy. A tapestry full of riches, a mosaic to cherish, with all the different music, art, religion, dances, stories and languages woven into the fabric of life. The White man in South Africa, with his one superior language truly missed out. To him, Ghandi was yet another `coolie` to be derided and ridiculed. What irony. Wake up Canada, smell the real world that the divine created. Embrace it or you’ll lose out also.

Mahomed(Mamdoo) Keshavjee, written in 2007

http://mamdoochacha.blogspot.com/2008/03/languages-in-location.html

2)Bay Street Blues

The brokers and bankers on Bay Street drank Bear-Stearns’ illicit booze
And tried to abscond with the windfall without paying their dues
But drinking an unknown proof always leads to a drunken doze
Basin Street has nothing on Bay Street’s drunken snooze

From the resulting financial hangover nobody will have any clues
Senile investors will now have to wake up and soberly choose
Or their families will soon have to go without even a pair of shoes
Everybody and their mothers will soon be singing the Bay Street Blues

Some firms of brokers and bankers on Wall Street lit a fuse
Thinking they’d have some firecracker fun and not pay the dues
But Monday morning March 17 came the earth-shattering news
That those who trusted these brokers and bankers everything will lose

The SEC pretended to police the Wall by cooking Martha Stewart’s goose
But the real wolves were busy inflicting on the public a nasty ruse
That cooked goose was the Street’s smoke and mirror ruse
Their own crookedness and greed to hide and excuse

The Nation many more billions of greenbacks will lose
So the fat cats on Wall Street can have more of that expensive booze
Better to go to Vegas where you can dine, dance and your game choose
And come back home empty-handed, but with a satisfactory excuse

Since Katrina, Basin Street has lost its basins and has its own blues
Those basins could have stored the Street’s ill-gotten monetary refuse
But all that’s left in the Big Easy are some bowls with stale rice, alligator and moose
They can serve as begging bowls for brokers and bankers with their soul-less shoes

Soon Bay Street will be to nobody of any use
But instead will only serve as a jazz singers muse
And a symbol of those who their savings lose
All Canadians are now singing the Bay Street Blues

Mahomed(Mamdoo) Keshavjee. Essay#362

http://mamdoochacha.blogspot.com/2008/03/bay-street-blues.html

Easy Nash

The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)

Sunday, March 23, 2008

336)Nasir Khusraw's poetry reflecting Intellect and Soul in the Al Sijistani-Khusraw cosmological doctrine; link between science and religion in Islam

In an online discussion two friends of mine quoted two poems written by Nasir Khusraw and one of the poems described, in a poetic fashion true to this cosmologist-philosopher-poet, a cosmological and philosophical doctrine that became commonly accepted during the 9th century Shiite Renaissance in the Islamic world and subsequently in the early to mid Fatimid period of the Shia Ismaili Muslims:

1)….Time had countless ruses and pretexts to entrap me; I became caught in such a pretext, such a deception

I found help against the devil’s persecution and cunning when I entered the sanctuary of the Imam of mankind.

When the light of the imam shone upon my soul, even though I was black as night, I became the shining sun.

The Supreme Name is the Imam of the time, through him, Venus-like, I ascended to the heavens.

(Shimmering Light, translated by Faquir M. Hunzai, pp 60-61)

2)The Sovereign of the Time
By Nasir-i Khusraw

The Soul of the universe
is the sovereign of time,
for God has raised up
the body through the Soul.
When the auspicious Jupiter
saw his face, it became
the source of munificence,
the mine of good fortune.
As long as the clouds
of Navroz wash all quarters
of the garden with
showers of lustrous pearls;
and the nightingale laments
the rose at the break of dawn,
like a grieving soul
separated from its lover:
may the authority of
the Sovereign of time
prevail over space and time
and the denizens of the world!

Nasir Khusraw certainly has a way of taking the most complex and "dry" cosmological and philosophical exposition and poetising it: He was particularly eneamoured by the cosmological doctrine of Yakub Al-Sijistani(died 971CE), who lived during pre- to early Fatimid times whereas Khusraw himself lived during mid- to late Fatimid times(1004-1060CE). Al-Sijistani was the only cosmologist who expounds the case of a single Universal Intellect emanating the Universal Soul, which is the creator of the universe, of time and the soul of man(as opposed to Al-Kirmani, who espoused, along with Alfarabi the series of Ten Intellects).

In poem no.2 above he talks about "The Soul of the universe is the sovereign of time, for God has raised up the body through the Soul"(Soul in this poem refers to the Universal Soul as espoused by Al-Sijistani).

In the following poem(taken from Dr. Azim Nanji's article "Ismaili Philosophy") Nasir Khusraw talks about the first two of four wellsprings of knowledge that make up Al-Sijistani's structure of Truth, namely, Intellect(Universal Intellect), Soul (Universal Soul), Natiq(Speaking Prophet) and Asas(Founder):

As Nasir Khusraw, the best known of the Ismaili writers in Persian, states in a passage paraphrased by Corbin:

Time is eternity measured by the movements of the heavens,
whose name is day, night, month, year.
Eternity is Time not measured, having neither beginning nor end…
The cause of Time is the Soul of the World….;
it is not in time, for time is in the horizon of the soul as its instrument,
as the duration of the living mortal who is "the shadow of the soul",
while eternity is the duration of the living immortal
- that is to say of the Intelligence and of the Soul":
http://www.iep.utm.edu/i/ismaili.htm

Interestingly, Mawlana Sultan Mohamed Shah, His Highness Aga Khan III, in his Memoirs of 1954, makes reference to the same Universal Soul as espoused in the Al Sijistani-Khusraw cosmological doctrine:

"Islamic doctrine goes further than the other great religions, for it proclaims the presence of the soul, perhaps minute but nevertheless existing in an embryonic state, in all existence in matter, in animals, trees, and space itself. Every individual, every molecule, every atom has its own spiritual relationship with the All-Powerful Soul of God"(Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954)

All of the above is very relevant to me because the Al Sijistani-Khusraw cosmological doctrine provides the easiest to understand template upon which I have structured my blog on the link between science and religion in Islam. The preamble to my blog states the following:

This is what drives my blog: The Prophet Mohammed said that the first(and only) thing that was originated, through the Divine Command or Will, by the Absolutely Transcendent God, was Intellect(Aql). Intellect(from which all else emanates) provides 'tayyid' or inspiration to Natiq(Speaking Prophet, of whom there were six great ones) and Soul; Natiq composes('talif') a scripture made up of words and sentences from this inspiration, and Soul composes('tarkib') a universe made up of matter from this inspiration. This is what forms the basis of the link between science and religion. The compositions of Natiq and Soul are equivalent(both called 'ayats' or 'signs') and each contains Intellect wrapped within it. The Asas(Founder) interprets('tawil') the compositions of the Natiq and Soul, unincorporating them to uncover Intellect in its pure glory.

In a letter to a friend entitled "What have we forgotten in Islam?", Mawlana Sultan Mohamed Shah, His Highness Aga Khan III, makes a clear connection of equivalence between objects and events in the Universe and the verses of the Noble Quran, calling them both Ayats or Signs:

"Islam is fundamentally in its very nature a natural religion. Throughout the Quran God's signs (Ayats) are referred to as the natural phenomenon, the law and order of the universe, the exactitudes and consequences of the relations between natural phenomenon in cause and effect. Over and over, the stars, sun, moon, earthquakes, fruits of the earth and trees are mentioned as the signs of divine power, divine law and divine order. Islam is a natural religion of which the Ayats are the universe in which we live and move and have our being………..The God of the Quran is the one whose Ayats are the universe……"(Aga Khan III, Karachi, Pakistan, April 4th 1952)

In a Quran Symposium at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in 2003 Mawlana Hazar Imam, His Highness Aga Khan IV, stated in eloquent and alluring language:

"In this context, would it not also be relevant to consider how, above all, it has been the Qur'anic notion of the universe as an expression of Allah's will and creation that has inspired, in diverse Muslim communities, generations of artists, scientists and philosophers? Scientific pursuits, philosophic inquiry and artistic endeavour are all seen as the response of the faithful to the recurring call of the Qur'an to ponder the creation as a way to understand Allah's benevolent majesty. As Sura al-Baqara proclaims: 'Wherever you turn, there is the face of Allah'.The famous verse of 'light' in the Qur'an, the Ayat al-Nur, whose first line is rendered here in the mural behind me, inspires among Muslims a reflection on the sacred, the transcendent. It hints at a cosmos full of signs and symbols that evoke the perfection of Allah's creation and mercy"(Aga Khan IV,Speech, 2003, London, U.K.)

Related posts:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/277intellectual-pluralism-in-10th-to.html
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/284abu-yakub-al-sijistani-cosmologist.html
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/274nasir-khusraw1004-1060-ruby-of.html

Easy Nash

The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)

Saturday, March 22, 2008

335)Star explodes 7.5 billion light years away from Earth with the emitted light reaching us on Wednesday March 19th 2008, 7.5 billion years later!!

In this article it is important to understand the clear difference between distance and time. 7.5 billion light years away is a measure of distance whereas 7.5 billion years ago is a measure of time elapsed. 1 light year away is the distance light travels in 1 year, which is 10 trillion(ie, a 1 with 13 zeroes in front of it) kilometers away.

It is also important to understand that the light that we see coming from a star or other bright object in space is a physical substance. It is an expression of one of the 4 forces present in nature(the Electromagnetic Force) and is made up of discrete particles called photons. As a material substance it also has wave-like properties and light propagates itself at 300,ooo kilometers per second by creating alternating magnetic and electrical wave fields till it reaches its destination. Nothing in the material universe can travel faster than the speed of light. At a speed of 300,000km/sec light will travel 10 trillion kilometers in one year and this is known as a DISTANCE of 1 light year. Light 7.5 billion light years away will therefore take 7.5 billion years to reach us.

The other momentous fact to take away from the event described in the article below is that this stellar explosion occured 7.5 billion years ago whereas our own solar system(made up of our sun and surrounding planets) was only formed about 5 billion years ago. This explosion therefore occured 2.5 billion years before our planet Earth was created and the light emitted from the explosion only reached us 2 days ago.

7.5 billion light years away in kilometers is therefore 75 with 9 zeroes in front of it, multiplied by 1 with 13 zeroes in front of it, giving 75 with 22 zeroes in front of it, kilometers. This is a mind-boggling and unimagineable distance for the human mind to appreciate. It is also a distance that is only about half the size of the actual universe. This brings to my mind the following quotes of Aga Khans III and IV:

"..Islam's basic principle can only be defined as mono-realism and not as monotheism. Consider, for example, the opening declaration of every Islamic prayer: "Allah-o-Akbar". What does that mean? There can be no doubt that the second word of the declaration likens the character of Allah to a matrix which contains all and gives existence to the infinite, to space, to time, to the Universe, to all active and passive forces imaginable, to life and to the soul"(Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954)

"The creation according to Islam is not a unique act in a given time but a perpetual and constant event; and God supports and sustains all existence at every moment by His will and His thought. Outside His will, outside His thought, all is nothing, even the things which seem to us absolutely self-evident such as space and time. Allah alone wishes: the Universe exists; and all manifestations are as a witness of the Divine Will"(Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954)

"In Islamic belief, knowledge is two-fold. There is that revealed through the Holy Prophet (s.a.s.) and that which man discovers by virtue of his own intellect. Nor do these two involve any contradiction, provided man remembers that his own mind is itself the creation of God. Without this humility, no balance is possible. With it, there are no barriers. Indeed, one strength of Islam has always lain in its belief that creation is not static but continuous, that through scientific and other endeavours, God has opened and continues to open new windows for us to see the marvels of His creation"(Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan University, 16 March 1983, Karachi, Pakistan)

Above 3 quotes and excerpts taken from:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/02/327comprehensive-quotes-of-aga-khan-iv.html

CNN.com, March 21 2008:
Story Highlights:
-The aging star exploded in a gamma ray burst 7.5 billion light years away
-Explosion set record for most distant object seen on Earth by naked eye
-Before it exploded, the star was about 40 times bigger than our sun.
-Explosion vaporized any planet nearby

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The explosion of a star halfway across the universe was so huge it set a record for the most distant object that could be seen on Earth by the naked eye.

A star 7.5 billion light years away exploded, giving off the brightest gamma-ray burst afterglow ever seen.

The aging star, in a previously unknown galaxy, exploded in a gamma ray burst 7.5 billion light years away, its light finally reaching Earth early Wednesday, March 19th 2008.

The gamma rays were detected by NASA's Swift satellite at 2:12 a.m. "We'd never seen one before so bright and at such a distance," NASA's Neil Gehrels said.

It was bright enough to be seen with the naked eye.

However, NASA has no reports that any skywatchers spotted the burst, which lasted less than an hour.

Telescopic measurements show that the burst -- which occurred when the universe was about half its current age -- was bright enough to be seen without a telescope.

"Someone would have had to run out and look at it with a naked eye, but didn't," said Gehrels, chief of NASA's astroparticles physics lab at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

The starburst would have appeared as bright as some of the stars in the handle of the Little Dipper constellation, said Penn State University astronomer David Burrows. How it looked wasn't remarkable, but the distance traveled was.

The 7.5 billion light years away far eclipses the previous naked eye record of 2.5 million light years. One light year is 5.9 trillion miles(about 10 trillion kilometers).

"This is roughly halfway to the edge of the universe," Burrows said.

Before it exploded, the star was about 40 times bigger than our sun. The explosion vaporized any planet nearby, Gehrels said.

Easy Nash

The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)

Friday, March 21, 2008

334)The Science of Religion: reprint of an article from The Economist magazine; quotes of Aga Khan IV and others.

The Shia Ismaili Muslim view of the link between science and religion is clear and unequivocal. Examples of original doctrinal material written and uttered on this subject can be found at:

http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/02/327comprehensive-quotes-of-aga-khan-iv.html

The science of religion

Where angels no longer fear to tread

Mar 19th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Science and religion have often been at loggerheads. Now the former has decided to resolve the problem by trying to explain the existence of the latter.

BY THE standards of European scientific collaboration, €2m ($3.1m) is not a huge sum. But it might be the start of something that will challenge human perceptions of reality at least as much as the billions being spent by the European particle-physics laboratory (CERN) at Geneva. The first task of CERN's new machine, the Large Hadron Collider, which is due to open later this year, will be to search for the Higgs boson—an object that has been dubbed, with a certain amount of hyperbole, the God particle. The €2m, by contrast, will be spent on the search for God Himself—or, rather, for the biological reasons why so many people believe in God, gods and religion in general.

“Explaining Religion”, as the project is known, is the largest-ever scientific study of the subject. It began last September, will run for three years, and involves scholars from 14 universities and a range of disciplines from psychology to economics. And it is merely the latest manifestation of a growing tendency for science to poke its nose into the God business.

Religion cries out for a biological explanation. It is a ubiquitous phenomenon—arguably one of the species markers of Homo sapiens—but a puzzling one. It has none of the obvious benefits of that other marker of humanity, language. Nevertheless, it consumes huge amounts of resources. Moreover, unlike language, it is the subject of violent disagreements. Science has, however, made significant progress in understanding the biology of language, from where it is processed in the brain to exactly how it communicates meaning. Time, therefore, to put religion under the microscope as well.

I have no need of that hypothesis

Explaining Religion is an ambitious attempt to do this. The experiments it will sponsor are designed to look at the mental mechanisms needed to represent an omniscient deity, whether (and how) belief in such a “surveillance-camera” God might improve reproductive success to an individual's Darwinian advantage, and whether religion enhances a person's reputation—for instance, do people think that those who believe in God are more trustworthy than those who do not? The researchers will also seek to establish whether different religions foster different levels of co-operation, for what reasons, and whether such co-operation brings collective benefits, both to the religious community and to those outside it.

It is an ambitious shopping list. Fortunately, other researchers have blazed a trail. Patrick McNamara, for example, is the head of the Evolutionary Neurobehaviour Laboratory at Boston University's School of Medicine. He works with people who suffer from Parkinson's disease. This illness is caused by low levels of a messenger molecule called dopamine in certain parts of the brain. In a preliminary study, Dr McNamara discovered that those with Parkinson's had lower levels of religiosity than healthy individuals, and that the difference seemed to correlate with the disease's severity. He therefore suspects a link with dopamine levels and is now conducting a follow-up involving some patients who are taking dopamine-boosting medicine and some of whom are not.

Such neurochemical work, though preliminary, may tie in with scanning studies conducted to try to find out which parts of the brain are involved in religious experience. Nina Azari, a neuroscientist at the University of Hawaii at Hilo who also has a doctorate in theology, has looked at the brains of religious people. She used positron emission tomography (PET) to measure brain activity in six fundamentalist Christians and six non-religious (though not atheist) controls. The Christians all said that reciting the first verse of the 23rd psalm helped them enter a religious state of mind, so both groups were scanned in six different sets of circumstances: while reading the first verse of the 23rd psalm, while reciting it out loud, while reading a happy story (a well-known German children's rhyme), while reciting that story out loud, while reading a neutral text (how to use a calling card) and while at rest.

Dr Azari was expecting to see activity in the limbic systems of the Christians when they recited the psalm. Previous research had suggested that this part of the brain (which regulates emotion) is an important centre of religious activity. In fact what happened was increased activity in three areas of the frontal and parietal cortex, some of which are better known for their involvement in rational thought. The control group did not show activity in these parts of their brains when listening to the psalm. And, intriguingly, the only thing that triggered limbic activity in either group was reading the happy story.

Dr Azari's PET study, together with one by Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania, which used single-photon emission computed tomography done on Buddhist monks, and another by Mario Beauregard of the University of Montreal, which put Carmelite nuns in a magnetic-resonance-imaging machine, all suggest that religious activity is spread across many parts of the brain. That conflicts not only with the limbic-system theory but also with earlier reports of a so-called God Spot that derived partly from work conducted on epileptics. These reports suggested that religiosity originates specifically in the brain's temporal lobe, and that religious visions are the result of epileptic seizures that affect this part of the brain.

Though there is clearly still a long way to go, this sort of imaging should eventually tie down the circuitry of religious experience and that, combined with work on messenger molecules of the sort that Dr McNamara is doing, will illuminate how the brain generates and processes religious experiences. Dr Azari, however, is sceptical that such work will say much about religion's evolution and function. For this, other methods are needed.

Dr McNamara, for example, plans to analyse a database called the Ethnographic Atlas to see if he can find any correlations between the amount of cultural co-operation found in a society and the intensity of its religious rituals. And Richard Sosis, an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, has already done some research which suggests that the long-term co-operative benefits of religion outweigh the short-term costs it imposes in the form of praying many times a day, avoiding certain foods, fasting and so on.

Leviticus's children

On the face of things, it is puzzling that such costly behaviour should persist. Some scholars, however, draw an analogy with sexual selection. The splendour of a peacock's tail and the throaty roar of a stag really do show which males are fittest, and thus help females choose. Similarly, signs of religious commitment that are hard to fake provide a costly and reliable signal to others in a group that anyone engaging in them is committed to that group. Free-riders, in other words, would not be able to gain the advantages of group membership.

To test whether religion might have emerged as a way of improving group co-operation while reducing the need to keep an eye out for free-riders, Dr Sosis drew on a catalogue of 19th-century American communes published in 1988 by Yaacov Oved of Tel Aviv University. Dr Sosis picked 200 of these for his analysis; 88 were religious and 112 were secular. Dr Oved's data include the span of each commune's existence and Dr Sosis found that communes whose ideology was secular were up to four times as likely as religious ones to dissolve in any given year.
A follow-up study that Dr Sosis conducted in collaboration with Eric Bressler of McMaster University in Canada focused on 83 of these communes (30 religious, 53 secular) to see if the amount of time they survived correlated with the strictures and expectations they imposed on the behaviour of their members. The two researchers examined things like food consumption, attitudes to material possessions, rules about communication, rituals and taboos, and rules about marriage and sexual relationships.

As they expected, they found that the more constraints a religious commune placed on its members, the longer it lasted (one is still going, at the grand old age of 149). But the same did not hold true of secular communes, where the oldest was 40. Dr Sosis therefore concludes that ritual constraints are not by themselves enough to sustain co-operation in a community—what is needed in addition is a belief that those constraints are sanctified.

Dr Sosis has also studied modern secular and religious kibbutzim in Israel. Because a kibbutz, by its nature, depends on group co-operation, the principal difference between the two is the use of religious ritual. Within religious communities, men are expected to pray three times daily in groups of at least ten, while women are not. It should, therefore, be possible to observe whether group rituals do improve co-operation, based on the behaviour of men and women.

To do so, Dr Sosis teamed up with Bradley Ruffle, an economist at Ben-Gurion University, in Israel. They devised a game to be played by two members of a kibbutz. This was a variant of what is known to economists as the common-pool-resource dilemma, which involves two people trying to divide a pot of money without knowing how much the other is asking for. In the version of the game devised by Dr Sosis and Dr Ruffle, each participant was told that there was an envelope with 100 shekels in it (between 1/6th and 1/8th of normal monthly income). Both players could request money from the envelope, but if the sum of their requests exceeded its contents, neither got any cash. If, however, their request equalled, or was less than, the 100 shekels, not only did they keep the money, but the amount left was increased by 50% and split between them.

Dr Sosis and Dr Ruffle picked the common-pool-resource dilemma because the communal lives of kibbutz members mean they often face similar dilemmas over things such as communal food, power and cars. The researchers' hypothesis was that in religious kibbutzim men would be better collaborators (and thus would take less) than women, while in secular kibbutzim men and women would take about the same. And that was exactly what happened.

Big father is watching you

Dr Sosis is not the only researcher to employ economic games to investigate the nature and possible advantages of religion. Ara Norenzayan, an experimental psychologist at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, has conducted experiments using what is known as the dictator game. This, too, is a well-established test used to gauge altruistic behaviour. Participants receive a sum of money—Dr Norenzayan set it at $10—and are asked if they would like to share it with another player. The dictator game thus differs from another familiar economic game in which one person divides the money and the other decides whether to accept or reject that division.

As might be expected, in the simple version of the dictator game most people take most or all of the money. However, Dr Norenzayan and his graduate student Azim Shariff tried to tweak the game by introducing the idea of God. They did this by priming half of their volunteers to think about religion by getting them to unscramble sentences containing religious words such as God, spirit, divine, sacred and prophet. Those thus primed left an average of $4.22, while the unprimed left $1.84.

Exactly what Dr Norenzayan has discovered here is not clear. A follow-up experiment which primed people with secular words that might, nevertheless, have prompted them to behave in an altruistic manner (civic, jury, court, police and contract) had similar effects, so it may be that he has touched on a general question of morality, rather than a specific one of religion. However, an experiment carried out by Jesse Bering, of Queen's University in Belfast, showed quite specifically that the perceived presence of a supernatural being can affect a person's behaviour—although in this case the being was not God, but the ghost of a dead person.

Dr Bering, too, likes the hypothesis that religion promotes fitness by promoting collaboration within groups. One way that might work would be to rely not just on other individuals to detect cheats by noticing things like slacking on the prayers or eating during fasts, but for cheats to detect and police themselves as well. In that case a sense of being watched by a supernatural being might be useful. Dr Bering thus proposes that belief in such beings would prevent what he called “dangerous risk miscalculations” that would lead to social deviance and reduced fitness.
One of the experiments he did to test this idea was to subject a bunch of undergraduates to a quiz. His volunteers were told that the best performer among them would receive a $50 prize. They were also told that the computer program that presented the questions had a bug in it, which sometimes caused the answer to appear on the screen before the question. The volunteers were therefore instructed to hit the space bar immediately if the word “Answer” appeared on the screen. That would remove the answer and ensure the test results were fair.

The volunteers were then divided into three groups. Two began by reading a note dedicating the test to a recently deceased graduate student. One did not see the note. Of the two groups shown the note, one was told by the experimenter that the student's ghost had sometimes been seen in the room. The other group was not given this suggestion.

The so-called glitch occurred five times for each student. Dr Bering measured the amount of time it took to press the space bar on each occasion. He discarded the first result as likely to be unreliable and then averaged the other four. He found that those who had been told the ghost story were much quicker to press the space bar than those who had not. They did so in an average of 4.3 seconds. That compared with 6.3 seconds for those who had only read the note about the student's death and 7.2 for those who had not heard any of the story concerning the dead student. In short, awareness of a ghost—a supernatural agent—made people less likely to cheat.

Who is my neighbour?

It all sounds very Darwinian. But there is a catch. The American communes, the kibbutzim, the students of the University of British Columbia and even the supernatural self-censorship observed by Dr Bering all seem to involve behaviour that promotes the group over the individual. That is the opposite of Darwinism as conventionally understood. But it might be explained by an idea that most Darwinians dropped in the 1960s—group selection.

The idea that evolution can work by the differential survival of entire groups of organisms, rather than just of individuals, was rejected because it is mathematically implausible. But it has been revived recently, in particular by David Sloan Wilson of Binghamton University, in New York, as a way of explaining the evolution of human morality in the context of inter-tribal warfare. Such warfare can be so murderous that groups whose members fail to collaborate in an individually self-sacrificial way may be wiped out entirely. This negates the benefits of selfish behaviour within a group. Morality and religion are often closely connected, of course (as Dr Norenzayan's work confirms), so what holds for the one might be expected to hold for the other, too.

Dr Wilson himself has studied the relationship between social insecurity and religious fervour, and discovered that, regardless of the religion in question, it is the least secure societies that tend to be most fundamentalist. That would make sense if adherence to the rules is a condition for the security which comes from membership of a group. He is also interested in what some religions hold out as the ultimate reward for good behaviour—life after death. That can promote any amount of self-sacrifice in a believer, up to and including suicidal behaviour—as recent events in the Islamic world have emphasised. However, belief in an afterlife is not equally well developed in all religions, and he suspects the differences may be illuminating.

That does not mean there are no explanations for religion that are based on individual selection. For example, Jason Slone, a professor of religious studies at Webster University in St Louis, argues that people who are religious will be seen as more likely to be faithful and to help in parenting than those who are not. That makes them desirable as mates. He plans to conduct experiments designed to find out whether this is so. And, slightly tongue in cheek, Dr Wilson quips that “secularism is very maladaptive biologically. We're the ones who at best are having only two kids. Religious people are the ones who aren't smoking and drinking, and are living longer and having the health benefits.”

That quip, though, makes an intriguing point. Evolutionary biologists tend to be atheists, and most would be surprised if the scientific investigation of religion did not end up supporting their point of view. But if a propensity to religious behaviour really is an evolved trait, then they have talked themselves into a position where they cannot benefit from it, much as a sceptic cannot benefit from the placebo effect of homeopathy. Maybe, therefore, it is God who will have the last laugh after all—whether He actually exists or not.

Easy Nash

The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

333)Dawood L'Etterman's Top Ten reasons why you should read Easy Nash's blog(for the month of March 2008)

World renowned late night talk show host Dawood L'Etterman's Top Ten reasons why you should read Easy Nash's blog:

No. 10:
Pluralism and Ikhwan al-Safa: If society is to start from a premise that knowledge should be foundational, what form should that knowledge take?:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2007/12/267pluralism-and-ikhwan-al-safa-if.html

No. 9:
Basics on the vast distances and sizes in Astronomy:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/273basics-on-vast-distances-and-sizes.html

No. 8:
Abu Yakub al-Sijistani: Cosmologist, Theologian, Philosopher par excellence:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/284abu-yakub-al-sijistani-cosmologist.html

No.7:
Al-Nitak, Al-Nilam, Mintaka, Betelgeuse, Al-Deberan: Arabic-named stars in nearby constellations in space:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/289al-nitak-al-nilam-mintaka-betelgeuse.html

No. 6:
Big Dipper and Little Dipper in the night sky: legacy of Astronomy during Islam's golden era:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/295big-dipper-and-little-dipper-in.html

No. 5:
One mega-post, encompassing five regular posts, on the pioneering 9th century Muslim scientist Ibn al-Haytham or Alhazen(965CE to 1039CE):
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/296one-mega-post-encompassing-four.html

No. 4:
The Death of Science in Islam/What have we forgotten in Islam?-COMBO DELIGHT :
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/305the-death-of-science-in-islamwhat.html

No. 3:
So how old is the Universe anyway, 6000 years or 14 billion(14,000,000,000) years old?; Quotes of Aga Khan IV:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/317so-how-old-is-universe-anyway-6000.html

No. 2:
Allegories in Nature: "....a Cosmos full of signs and symbols that evoke the perfection of Allah's creation and mercy"; Quotes of Aga Khans:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/03/332allegories-in-nature-cosmos-full-of.html

No. 1:
And the No. 1 reason why you should read Easy Nash's blog is:

Comprehensive quotes of Aga Khan IV and others relating to knowledge, intellect, creation, science and religion-FROM 2007CE DOWN TO 322BC:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/02/327comprehensive-quotes-of-aga-khan-iv.html

Dawood L'Etterman is the franco-muslim way of saying David Letterman.

Easy Nash

The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)

Saturday, March 1, 2008

332)Allegories in Nature: "....a Cosmos full of signs and symbols that evoke the perfection of Allah's creation and mercy"; Quotes of Aga Khans.

"Islam does not perceive the world as two seperate domains of mind and spirit, science and belief"(Aga Khan IV, McMaster University Convocation, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, May 15th 1987)

“Muslims believe in an all-encompassing unit of man and nature. To them there is no fundamental division between the spiritual and the material while the whole world, whether it be the earth, sea or air, or the living creatures that inhabit them, is an expression of God’s creation.”(Aga Khan IV, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, 13 April 1984)

Allah alone wishes: the Universe exists; and all manifestations are as a witness of the Divine Will"(Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954)

"Once man has thus comprehended the essence of existence, there remains for him the duty, since he knows the absolute value of his own soul, of making for himself a direct path which will constantly lead his individual soul to and bind it with the universal Soul of which the Universe is, as much of it as we perceive with our limited visions, one of the infinite manifestations. Thus Islam's basic principle can only be defined as mono-realism and not as monotheism. Consider, for example, the opening declaration of every Islamic prayer: "Allah-o-Akbar". What does that mean? There can be no doubt that the second word of the declaration likens the character of Allah to a matrix which contains all and gives existence to the infinite, to space, to time, to the Universe, to all active and passive forces imaginable, to life and to the soul"(Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954)

Source:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/02/327comprehensive-quotes-of-aga-khan-iv.html

I beleive that signs and processes in the external world are harbingers of the mysteries and realities of the spiritual world. Mowlana Hazar Imam mentioned as much in eloquent language at an Institute of Ismaili Studies convocation in 2003:

"The famous verse of 'light' in the Qur'an, the Ayat al-Nur, whose first line is rendered here in the mural behind me, inspires among Muslims a reflection on the sacred, the transcendent. It hints at a cosmos full of signs and symbols that evoke the perfection of Allah's creation and mercy"(Aga Khan IV, 19th October 2003, London,U.K.)

Some examples, IMHO, of "a cosmos full of signs and symbols" include:

1)The presence of invisible dark matter and dark energy, which makes up by far most of the matter in the universe and whose physical presence can only be inferred by its gravitational effect on visible matter, which makes up less than 5% of all matter in the universe; the common belief is that if something is not amenable to the senses of perception it must not be there and cannot be real. Well, dark matter makes up 25% of our universe and dark energy 70% and neither of these is visible to the eye. Only a mere 5% of our universe is visible to us. The message is, just because you cannot see it with your physical eye does not mean it is not there. The same may be said about the world of spirit;

http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/310the-axion-possible-particle-of-dark.html

http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/298invisible-dark-matter-making-up.html

2)Particles of matter and their anti-matter counterparts. Each particle of matter in the universe has its own, specific anti-matter partner, which can be situated anywhere in the universe but whose behaviour is intimately connected to its corresponding matter particle. When a matter particle undergoes any change its corresponding anti-matter particle responds to this change no matter where it physically is in the universe. When these two opposing matter particles come together they annihilate each other and create a 'poof' of energy(light). Here one sees the interchangeability of matter and energy(light) and the allegory that this 'ayat'(sign) can represent:

"Islam does not perceive the world as two seperate domains of mind and spirit, science and belief"(Aga Khan IV, McMaster University Convocation, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, May 15th 1987)

3)Quantum mechanics, which describes the microscopic and submicroscopic universe and does not follow the rules that the macroscopic universe follows, demonstrates a blurring between the worlds of existence and "non-existence" and is forced to use probabilities and not certainties to describe the properties of matter:

http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/297tiniest-matter-strange-world-of.html

4)Ubiquitous processes in nature like Photosynthesis and Protein Synthesis, IMHO, reflect deeper truths when one studies them sequentially:

In Photosynthesis, green plants capture uv light from the sun, convert it into chemical energy in the form of well-known high-energy molecules, then use this energy to power a reaction where carbon dioxide is extracted from the atmosphere and combinedwith water to create food or nourishment(carbohydrate or sugar), releasing oxygen back into the atmosphere. The image of taking light from the sun and using it to create nourishment in the form of food can be a symbol of the light(noor) of Imam providing spiritual nourishment to an impoverished individual human soul or community of souls:

http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/288no-4-ayatssigns-in-universe-series.html

In Protein Synthesis the specific instructions for making a protein in the cell's interior come from the master DNA molecule in the nucleus, which literally is at the geographical center of that protein's universe. A protein's function is totally dependent on its 3-dimensional structure, which in turn is totally dependent on its unique and specific amino acid sequence, which itself is entirely dependent upon coded instructions from the DNA master molecule in the nucleus. In a very real way the master DNA molecule is the celestial essence of that protein. We can see in this ayat(sign) of Protein Synthesis a symbolism speaking to the hierachy of spiritual knowledge and that while there may be(and is) beauty in the physical universe, the real story and beauty lies at the level of its Celestial Essence:

http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/282no-7-ayatssigns-in-universe-series.html

I think there are many other examples in nature, many of which have been discovered by the rational intellect of man during the 20th century.

Easy Nash aka easynash

The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)

Science and Religion in Islam: The Link.