Tariq Mehanna
In Surat al-Baqarah, v.79, Allah said: {"Then woe to those who write the book with their own hands and then say, 'This is from Allah!' to purchase a small prize with it. Woe to them for what their hands wrote and woe to them for what they earn!"}
Human tampering with divine revelation is prevalent in many of the world's religions, is a constant historical occurrence, and has had devastating consequences for the reputation of religion in general. A classic example is the series of events that led up to the conflict between science and religion in Western thought.
Back in the 4th century, Christianity entered the pagan Roman Empire. However, rather than affect Rome with its originally monotheistic teachings, Christianity instead was affected by the pagan traditions of the Romans. As emperor of the Romans, Constantine brought about a sort of hybrid tradition that joined both Christian and Roman pagan doctrine. The result was a distorted version of Christ's original teachings exercising full authority in what is now Europe. All through the Middle Ages, this version of "Christianity" – a.k.a. the Catholic Church – remained the supreme reference for all aspects of European life. Therefore, as the sole interpreter of the Bible, the Pope was both the supreme religious and political head of state. Revelation – or rather, the Pope's interpretation of it – was the source of all knowledge, religious and secular/scientific.
However, by the 15th century, there emerged a sort of protest against what the Catholic Church had by then incorporated into Christianity, such as the notion of the Trinity, confession, etc. The reform efforts of Martin Luther, Calvin, among others rejected the Pope's exclusive authority to interpret divine scripture, and also rejected many beliefs that were added onto the original Christian doctrine – such as the Trinity – rather than having been original teachings of Prophet Jesus. The result was the formation of the Protestant Church (from the word "protest"), which seceded from the Church in Rome. So, this was a response to the Church's distortion of religious teachings of Christ.
Two centuries later, you saw rebellion against the erroneous scientific teachings it had taken upon itself to formulate and impose. The Catholic Church violently opposed any type of scientific discovery that contradicted its teachings. All of this was done in the name of religion, and the scientists and philosophers at the time, with their natural desire to inquire into the scientific matters the Church had already ruled on, were thus put at odds with religion, namely the Church. This November marks the 350th anniversary of the formation of the Royal Society in London, which was the dozen or so scientists of various fields who met and were said to have developed the processes of scientific publishing, peer review, and organized experimentation. In short, they are credited by the Western World with founding modern science. The important thing to note was that this was seen as a challenge to accepted Church teachings – it was seen as a challenge to "religion."
So, the 17th century saw a decline in the regard given to the authority, and this was in reaction to the Church's oppressive enforcement of baseless teachings regarding the physical world, which was inseparable from its distortion of the pure monotheistic teachings of Prophet Jesus (peace be upon him). This decline coincided with religion being subject to increased debate and discussion by European philosophers.
Towards the middle of the 18th century, the trend emerged where religion became subject to reason, while before, reason was subject to religion when Church doctrine was the undisputed authority in all areas of life. So now, reason and rationale took precedence over all other sources of knowledge and guidance, and replaced religion as the source of politics, law, etiquettes, and even religion itself. This "knowledge" was manifested in the ideas of philosophers. This period in European history was known as the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Humanism, and the Age of Deism – deism because these philosophers made "intellect" and "reason" the replacement for God. They taught that all authority belonged to the intellect, and intellect alone. Their goal was to debase religion as the authority, and they were driven to this goal as the result of the conditions brought upon European life by the corrupt teachings of the Church in the areas of religion, politics and science.
By the 19th century, there were those who thought that the Age of Enlightenment didn't go far enough in wiping religion out of the spheres of life. See, the philosophers for the most part didn't wish to deny the concept of religion in totality. They merely wished to subject it to reason, to make reason and rationale the authority by which all other sources of knowledge were to be judged, including religion. This new philosophy, however, sought to deny legitimacy to anything that was not tangible, anything not seen in the nature around us. So, not only was religion defunct as a source, but the faculties of reason and intellect were now considered as having no inherent value or authority except as the result of whatever nature imparted them. Whatever could not be seen physically and felt by the senses was deceit, according to this emerging school of though. In short, this was the point when science was overtly used as a tool to oppose religion (namely, the Catholic Church). Once again, this was a reaction to the manner in which the Church distorted existing beliefs, formulated additional ones, and imposed them on Europe in an exploitive manner. When Darwin refused to attribute the creation of the human being to Allah, it wasn't because he had scientific facts to prevent him from doing so. I remember how surprised I was when I took a cultural anthropology class in college and learned that Darwin didn't even have a theory as to when the ape-to-human shift allegedly took place. Rather, his motivation was to counter the Church, due to conditions it had placed on society.
Here in America, in Massachusetts, if one wishes to take serious religion classes at Harvard University, he must walk half a mile to the secluded and separate Divinity School – this at a university that was founded in 1636 as a training ground for Christian missionaries, and had as its motto for over 200 years 'Christ et Ecclesiae' (For Christ and the Church) until it was taken down in 1843 and replaced with 'Veritas.'
Thus emerged the gap and historical conflict between religion (rather, the Western concept of it) and science. It was all a direct result of the distortions carried out by the Church all those centuries back. So, praise be to Allah who has left His final Revelation unaltered and left no contradiction between it and the confirmations of Science.
