I have been up a stump more times than I want now. I have been disappointed by more statements than I would like to hear. Religion is not relevant anymore.
Religion had and have been a popular topic among the mass media but all for the wrong reasons. Religion is the main cause of disorder all around the globe. Religion is the cause of civil wars. Religion does not fight for the human rights. Religion is oppressive. People of faith surrounded by scandals and wrongdoing. People killing each other unnecessarily in the name of God. The list goes on. The negatives outweigh the positives.
Mass media may have been biased. But that doesn’t explain, in total, of people’s perception towards religion. Saying mass media may have been biased alone does not justify the fact that more and more people are choosing not to be affiliated to any certain religion. To avoid the argument that this might be my perception only, I have been trying to search for the numbers and figures.
The closest and most relatable research is from PEW Research Center titled America’s Changing Religious Landscape. I choose this research because it is the only research with good credentials and background that I can find for now that shows the trend of the religious landscape throughout a certain period of time.
Link for the full report: http://www.pewforum.org/files/2015/05/RLS-08-26-full-report.pdf
The report shows the religious landscape at 2007 and 2014 in America. It shows the number of unaffiliated individuals inclined the most by 6.7%. In contrast, the number of Christians fell by 7.8% and the number of non-Christian faiths increased by 1.2%.
This may be due to a lot of reasons. Some of them I might have already stated above. But I also believe there is another perspective towards it. There might be another reason that religion might not be relevant anymore. Another personal point of view of mine that I would like to share.
Please note that over 60% of the population of my country are Muslims. Thus, my perspective might incline more towards the Muslim society. I will do my best to keep it as general as possible as I received more readers from overseas compared from my own country. Haha
I want to be an academician. Thus, I always look for an opportunity to have an open and mind building conversations. There are more times than I would like to admit that some discussions regarding sciences with people of a high religious background are somewhat, simply put, close-minded.
Why?
I also believe in a certain God and a certain religion. And I know that for most people of faith, they will hold their religion far greater than any kind of advancement. For them, religion is the truth. It is supreme. It is undeniable. It is far greater than what a human mind can ever accomplish.
Thus, for some people, it is a taboo to ask too much. For some people, they treat their religion as “take it or leave it”. For some people, if you pledge to their belief, you have to follow it without asking questions. Some even went to such an extent that questioning is considered as a sin.
They believe that knowledge should be controlled. Intellect is an enemy of faith. They are afraid the advancement in the knowledge of science at some point will disapprove religion. That at some point in the future, religion will be rendered as illogical and outdated. Science will be the new religion of its own.
I am a Muslim. When I talk to people with the same faith, the only way for them to show the relationship of the great people of Islam and science is by digging up centuries-old history. From the golden age of Islamic science that ended around A.D. 1258. Ironically, that is also the only example that I can give out to my non-Muslim friends. Pathetic, isn’t it?
We can see that in the past, Muslims strive in a scientific community. The discoveries made by Muslim scientists centuries ago are still being learnt and applied into this modern society. Their understanding of sciences surpass their own time. They were ahead of their contemporaries in Christian Europe. And yet, Islam still exists now. Their knowledge of science does not disapprove Islam. In fact, a lot of discoveries made by modern scientists, at the very least, does not defy Islam. Some of them even proves that Islam is right. The sad thing is most, if not all, modern day discoveries that will be remembered for the next few centuries to come are not conducted by Muslims.
“The question really comes up when people talk about the decline of Muslim science, which I think was real, and some scholars of Muslim civilization think was real. Others vociferously defend the continued excellence of Muslim science. I don’t believe that. With a few exceptions, you don’t find great names in Muslim science after about 1100.”
-Steven Weinberg, a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist
So, why do we want to put a barrier on knowledge? Maybe the barrier is not to protect Islam but to protect ourselves. It’s not because we are afraid that their knowledge will disapprove Islam but because we are afraid of our own ignorance and our inability to provide relevant answers. Because we have been distracted for too long. We thought we can gain back our golden age by mastering the knowledge of Islam solely without the help of science.
Why science matters?
We live in a modern society where almost everything needs to be proven. A statement needs to have solid arguments and an extensive research and data to back it up before we can call it as the “truth”. If you talk without a good backing of research and knowledge than your arguments will be rendered as baseless. Thus, science can be a bridge for the people of faith to be accepted by the public. It can be a language to tell the tales of greatness of Islam.
Yes, it is true that a lot of universities in the middle east have been destroyed. Libraries containing treasures have been deliberately burnt down with the intention to halt the advancement of knowledge. Strategic strikes have been carried out to tear down learning institutions because knowledge is clarifying. Knowledge leads to greatness. But this shouldn’t stop us from learning. There are still a lot of ways to access learning materials. Only that we are more distracted toward other things. We are easily distracted. Our priorities are easily shambled.
I believe in Islam. I do hold Islam as the absolute truth. But that does not mean that I repel scientific knowledge. That does not mean I have scientific explanations to every statements in the Quran either. It means that I believe everything and anything stated in the Quran is true. It means that I believe the effective way of communicating religion to non-believers is through scientific evidence. It means that I believe one of the ways for the people of faith to be heard by public is to appear knowledgeable. True, not everything in the Quran is proven by science, yet. There are also scientific theories that haven’t been proved yet but people still believe in science. Also true, not everything in Islam are meant to be questioned. In example, what does Allah looks like? But there are more truths to be found in the Quran than we realize.
Today, more and more discoveries are being made to suggest that there is in fact a creator to our world. Some of them are even atheist themselves. The fine-tuning of the universe has been a great argument to challenge the stance of atheism. Fred Hoyle, a world-renowned astronomer who coined the term “Big Bang” said “My atheism was greatly shaken by these developments.”
“The remarkable fact is that the value of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.”
-Stephen Hawking
That is, in my view, why people are becoming more repellent towards religion. It is not Islam that is not relevant. It is the people of Islam are getting more and more ignorant. It is us, the people of Islam, that have been perceived as an illogical society because most of us follow the truth blindly. We believe in our respective faith and we thought that is enough for us. We thought that it is enough for them to understand. We thought that other people will hear what we have to say just because we believe in it. No. In this modern, scientific society, we have to be erudite to be heard. Our knowledge of our faith alone won’t help them seeing religion with our perspective. We need to be open and think outside the box.
A Walk of Life 