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by 2Gkashmiri 1935 days ago
yes. I had read this one some time ago. My question still stands, what made muslims go from inquisitive science seekers like the one in the article, father of robotics, to "science=bad". This sentiment is continuing to this day with almost all the religious preachers who find it "incomprehensible" that science can exist in the same plane as religion. To explain my point, the "talk of the town" is usually whenever the weatherman comes on the news and says something like "we forecast heavy rains for 2 days then sunny day for a week". As a person who "gets science" i know what this guy just said so i'm like "ok. fine so prepare for a jacket to work" while the religious folk say "this is heresy. do you know if god wants, god can change night into day, rain into sun in the blink of an eye. saying what will happen tomorrow is saying you are not a believer in god because god can end the world today and there be no tomorrow or god can make tomorrow a sunny day when this guy is saying it will rain".

You know in india and pakistan, in present times, 2020 and coming 2021, there is "always" a fight between science people and religious people on the "appearance of crescent" on religious days. the science folk say the motion of moon is calculated and we can precisely know for next hundreds of years if on a particular day the crescent will be visible from a location but the religious folk refuse to accept.

what i am saying is what made these religious folk distrust and hate science ? did someone tell them don't promote science or it will eat their lunch? or something else?

3 comments

Religious muslims don't say that the weather forecast is heresy, that would be nonsense. Perhaps someone said to you that God can change the weather to be other-than-what-was-forecast, which from the Islamic POV is simple plain sense.

Religious folk don't deny that the course of the moon can be calculated, some say that for establishing the start of the lunar month a sighting must be obtained, this is a complex issue that has nothing to do with believing or not in the predictable motions of astronomical objects.

In the Islamic empire it was mostly due to the economic and political conditions that caused the decline of scientific study. However in the modern world, people of science generally view religious folks with distrust and they have the mindset that you can't be religious and a person of science yet historically most scientists were religious as well. Take Isaac Newton as an example who was a scientist and a theologian and had even written multiple literary works on the Bible.

With the moon sighting issue you presented this is similar in other countries too. However it isn't predominantly due to a distrust of science; sometimes certain scholars and groups will not adapt their rulings due to the fact that their parents and previous generations did this and they won't change not because they hate science.

The view in the UK on the moon-sighting debacle is that viewing the moon is necessary to commence the month as it was mentioned to the nearest meaning by the Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w) himself that we do not rely on calculations and the month is sometimes 29 and sometimes 30 (not 29 and a fraction of day as is the scientific view). The most correct and accepted view is that this isn't prohibiting or belittling astronomical calculations in deciding the month, rather it is a lessening of the burden to calculate and act upon exact calculations.

However the consensus is that astronomical calculations can be used to negate impossible viewings of the moon.

Why did Germans go from having a functioning liberal democratic society, to becoming some of the most cruel barbarians in human history, to becoming a peace-loving nation, all over the course of a few decades?

Things are complicated and the forces of history move in unpredictable and difficult to explain ways. We can identify broad trends which change cultures and societies: catastrophic events, economic changes, political changes, etc. But there's often no single explanation.