Science and Religion

This is a record of the eighth Building Bridges seminar convened by the Archbishop of Canterbury in the summer of 2009 - Charles Darwin’s 200th anniversary - at Bahçesehir University in Istanbul. The first such seminar, uniting leading Christian and Muslim scholars, had been convened, shortly after 9/11, by the former Archbishop George Carey, now Lord Carey. After meeting in Doha, Washington, Sarajevo, Singapore, and Rome, the current conference participants mainly hailed from the US, Turkey and the U.K; some of them coming from Bosnia, Germany, Italy, the Lebanon, Malaysia and Nigeria. Georgetown University’s David Marshall - denying any intrinsic hostility between a scientific worldview and religious faith - acted as director, and Qur’anic translations were taken from M. A. S. Abdel Haleem (Oxford University Press). The book impressively opens with John Hedley Brooke’s learned discussion of Science and the Christian Tradition, focusing on Sir Isaac Newton’s deity, ‘very well skilled in mechanics and geometry’, and typically ending with a list of questions. Equally splendid is Ahmad Dallal’s following analysis of Science and Religion in the History of Islam, starting with the 9th century translation movement and leading to an unprecedented practice of science. Before modern times, no other civilisation engaged as many scientists and produced so much scientific literature – with rational and religious sciences neatly intersecting – before religious and scientific knowledge were each assigned their own compartments. (This did not prevent many early mosques from being misaligned, including the famous al-Qarawiyyin in Fes, misdirected to the south.)