Islam's Quantum Question: Reconciling Muslim Tradition and Modern Science

In secular Europe the veracity of modern science is almost always taken for granted. Whether they think of Darwin’s theory of evolution, or of spectacular investigations into the boundaries of particle physics conducted by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, most people assume that scientific enquiry goes to the heart of fundamental truths about the universe. Yet elsewhere, science is under siege. In the USA, Christian fundamentalists contest whether evolution should be taught in schools at all. And in Muslim countries like Egypt, Pakistan and Malaysia, a mere fifteen percent of those recently surveyed believed Darwin’s ideasto be ‘true’ or ‘probably true’. This thoughtful and passionately argued book contends absolutely to the contrary: not only that evolutionary theory does not contradict core Muslim beliefs, but that many scholars, from Islam’s golden age to the present, adopted a worldview that accepted evolution as a given. Guessoum suggests that the Islamic world, just like the Christian, needs to take scientific questions with the utmost seriousness if it is to recover its true heritage and integrity. Islam’s ‘quantum question’, he argues, can be answered by a credible harmonization of Qur’anic belief and scientific truth. In its application of a specifically Muslim perspective to important topics like cosmology, divine action and natural selection, Islam’s Quantum Question makes a vital contribution to debate in the disputed field of ‘science and religion’.