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55.1%ANMag Issue 17 Global Awareness
Science and Religion II
By Ali Abubakar Sadeeq, Contributing Writer
Kano, Nigeria - At every stage of human development, due to insufficiency in knowledge or our nature of preferring established ideas, we may individually or collectively believe in something that is entirely wrong, and several examples could be sighted. Knowledge is the key to the existence of the universe, its sustenance and continuity. The scenario at the dawn of history, according to the leading religions of the world, depicted man as being caught up in a power play between God, the ultimate ruler of the universe and Satan, the challenger. In the book of Genesis God says, Gen 2:16-17: “You may freely eat any fruit in the garden except from the tree of knowledge.”
This is corroborated by the Qur’an in Q2:35: “Eat both of you freely with pleasure and delight of things therein as you will, but come not near this tree.” The story tells of man being prohibited by God to eat from the tree of knowledge because by the acquisition of knowledge man will be God-like, as he will have the power of freewill. And with freewill comes the responsibility of good and evil and God, knowing man’s weaknesses and Satan’s cunning ability, knew that he would mislead a great multitude of men. But Satan believed he can be a God of his own right and thus continued his campaign.
Q20:120: “O Adam shall I lead you to the tree of eternity and to a kingdom that never decays?” Satan is tempting man, saying the freewill he was forbidden was nothing but God’s plan to deprive him the ability to live eternally in a kingdom that could never decay. Eventually, man succumbs to the satanic whispers and God allows him a probationary period on earth to choose who is the real God − God or Satan. Man’s sojourn on earth is empowered by knowledge of good and evil as every kind of knowledge comes from God. This knowledge, the transcendental, is bestowed on all creations. Let me examine its various forms. There is what we can call the general type that is bestowed on all human beings regardless of class or race, such as speech and intelligence. Man is created with a unique capacity to speak in languages, and this ability is not learned but inborn, as children from the age of two develop areas in the brain responsible for speech. The child automatically learns all the peculiarities of the language in which he is brought up and earlier at birth infants automatically cry when disturbed, suck on breasts when hungry, and respond to sounds and several other external stimuli. All this knowledge is not learned but transcendental.
Because of certain individuals’ ability to put two and two together, they stumbled upon some great discoveries on how nature operates. As Newton was lying down in his garden, an apple fell off a tree and this momentary event prompted his research on gravitation, which eventually led to his formulation of the gravitational laws. Newton was only a tool in understanding gravitation, but gravitational laws existed in the universe for billions of years before the emergence of man on this planet. Man in his infinite quest for knowledge and domination of his physical and biological world, and through experiments and research, was able to overcome most of the barriers that handicap him. For example, by the nature of our eyes we cannot separate colors within white light, but by using a prism we can. Or by using a microscope we can see microorganisms, which ordinarily cannot be seen with the naked eye.
In the animal world, we see an instinct of survival that is programmed and enhanced throughout animals’ lives. If not for this instinctual ability, how could an insect like the bee organize its colony to the extent of separating cells for males, females, children and warehouses? Or how could migratory birds fly several thousands of kilometers every year, sometimes across vast oceans and back? In the inanimate world, the electrons revolve in their shells, and the protons and neutrons are confined to the nucleus. The arrangement of the shells allows for interactions between atoms to make molecules, which in turn make elements that arrange them to make compounds. Compounds are the infinite combinations that make matter in its various forms of solids, liquids and gas. Temperature on the other hand is responsible for the state in which matter exists and allows for the change of state from one form to another. Who tells a molecule of gas under specific temperature to either melt into liquid or solidify?
Mankind throughout history has been receiving prophets, as there are not people without the record of one form or another of religious activity. These messengers received transcendental inspiration to guide their people; in as much as both the Qur’an and Bible told us the story of Cain and Abel, the first set of hominids that segregated from the anthropoid family, the Australopithecines. One killed the other, and his corpse became a burden to him until God sent a raven to show him how to bury his dead. At that early stage of human existence, they were living like their primate relatives by leaving dead bodies out in the open to rot away. But as God wanted to elevate man from his primitive culture, a messenger was sent (a raven here) to show man how to bury his dead.
As the raven was scratching the ground for some purpose, it became a flash of inspiration to the killer. “Why not bury the corpse of my dead brother?” he thought, perhaps out of remorse. This imaginative gift that eventually resulted in the solemn act of burial had been the first spiritual demonstration that distinctively differentiated man from beast. The age of discovery by a flash of imagination-come-inspiration has just begun with the help of a messenger raven, and it is the same way that our great scientists like Newton, Einstein, Galileo, and more made some of the greatest discoveries. If God could use a bird to enlightened Mankind for such an important social and spiritual act of burying the dead, a culture that is so entrenched in every human society regardless of religious affiliation, what of using fellow human beings for guiding the society?
Man by nature is a selfish animal with evil inclinations, left on his own; these destructive tendencies will never allow him to rise above his animal nature, and therefore guided he must be to attain his higher destiny. His nature at every turn craves for guidance; yet, his selfish and evil inclinations perpetually reject it. This trend is more evident in a human child because at an early age when his selfish and evil inclinations cannot be restrained, the child tends towards harms way. It is only through parents, teachers and societal interference, by commands and prohibition that he begins to learn to differentiate between right and wrong actions. In a larger picture, mankind as a whole needs similar prodding from the almighty to live up to the expectation of their higher nature.
As patients need and believe in their doctors, our spirituality needs and must believe in Gods messengers. Patients trust their doctors not because they know how well they did in the preparation at medical schools; it is because they either trust the system that put them in charge, or they have seen a demonstration of their competence.