A Qur'anic Approach to Scientific Investigation

By: Sabah E. Karam, Ph.D.
Professor Of Computer Information Systems & Mathematics,
Strayer University
The following paper based on the Qur'an verse 51:49 which describes the nature of creation. It's transliteration into English is, "Wa men kulli shayen khalqna zawgyne la'alakum tadhkaroon." The translation into English is, "And all things have We created in pairs in order that you may reflect on it."
The word 'zawgyne' is consistently translated into the English language as 'pairs.' In scientific literature its meaning is extended to incorporate such concepts as 'duality", 'complementarity', 'opposites', 'inverses' and several other concepts reflecting conjugate and/or reciprocal properties. Terms will be listed below, within their respective disciplines, from the natural, biological and social sciences. We find mentioned in the Tafsir of Ibn Kathir the following pairs of creation: the heavens and the earth, the sun and the moon, light and dark, night and day, the land and the oceans, life and death, Jannah and Narr. Ibn Kathir elaborates on the meaning of this verse saying that, "Every aspect of creation has the pair characteristic, extending even to the animals and plants. This is the case in order that we may reflect and know that Allah, The Creator, is One and there is nothing that can be associated with Him." Besides verse 59:41, there are five other Qur'anic verses that have the term zawgyne in it. They are: 11:40, 13:3, 23:27, 31:10, and 53:45.
Scientists in the 20th century have been on a quest to devise models of the universe which present accumulated knowledge in an integrated, coherent and unified manner. This paper will examine the historical attempts to produce unified models for the natural and physical sciences. It will also look at the contemporary efforts, continuing the Einstein tradition, of trying to find a model describing all forces in nature. Recalling the words of Mendeleev, in a lecture to his chemistry class, "It is the function of science to discover the existence of a general reign of order in nature, and to find the causes governing this order. And this refers in equal measure to the relations of man, social and political, and to the entire universe as a whole..."
Finding the causes that govern the general reign of order in the natural sciences has traditionally been done by observation and experimentation, theorizing about the results of the experiments, testing the predictive ability of the theory, reporting the findings, rewriting the theory to accommodate any anomalies, and then further experimentation. This process, generally referred to as the scientific method, has served the academic and science-based communities in the past when the traditional disciplines were compartmentalized with well-defined borders and boundaries. The technological applications of new discoveries have produced new sub-disciplines, the sub-disciplines further dividing into sub-sub-disciplines. Neuro-psychology, bio-physics, geo-chemistry, bio-geo-chemistry are a few of the new research areas. Findings from these fields are published in over 70,000 journals reporting on 25,000 research fields.
On the average, since 1978 over forty new scientific journals per week have been published. The explosion of information and subsequent 'knowledge' in all disciplines, scientific as well as non-scientific, has increased dramatically. Students of science are expected to learn a babel of tongues and theories. Attempts to "integrate" the science disciplines into a coherent whole have mainly fallen by the wayside and, in some cases, have developed into new scientific disciplines themselves. A classical example of an interdisciplinary science, created from two distinct scientific fields, is cybernetics, the comparative study of biological and electro-mechanical systems includes the study of machines that imitate human behavior and artificial intelligence. Technological applications, improvements and innovations are have contributed to the exponential growth in scientific knowledge.
The wealth of information in science has resulted in, not only, the inability to keep up with the new scientific discoveries but, even worse, the inability to teach science in a coherent way. Over 200 national reports on the status of science education today describe the present science curriculum as obsolete. Applying scientific principles to the knowledge-base of information would, in my estimation, contribute much to the evasive goal of a unified perspective on science. Let's look at some of the attempts to organize the methods of science and some of the arguments against the possibility of achieving such a goal.
Unified science, general systems, reductionism, consilience (a consolidation of theory) and synthesis are some of the key terms used to characterize the efforts of natural and social scientists to develop a unifying principle of all the sciences. The structure of the atom and Mendeleev's periodic table of chemical elements are classical examples, in physics and chemistry, of unifying principles. Newton's adaptation of Kepler's and Galileo's theories into the law of gravity is another example of a unifying model which, depending on one's orientation, can be called a theory in unification, reduction, synthesis or general system. The process of reducing or incorporating one theory into another is also characteristic of the scientific method.
Theories, to explain or reduce, existing facts into a complete and consistent descriptive model are used to make predictions about future events and investigate related phenomena. When new results, from experiments and observations render the existing model obsolete or anomalies and deviations from the predictive pattern of the model are found, a new model must be created. The development of new models can happen in many ways. The two most well known ways of model creation are rearrangement and generalization. At the time of Copernicus a geocentric model of the universe was in use. His rearrangement of the planets, which placed the sun at the center of the planetary system, resulted in a more complete and consistent solar model. The new model incorporated the older model that could no longer explain the current observations.
Generalization of the Newtonian concept of gravity, which included the notion of space, was used by Albert Einstein in his generalized principle of gravitation. Replacement, and reduction, of the principle of inertial mass with gravitational mass led to a more comprehensive theory. Reordering objects into other accommodating relationships or expanding a theory, to reflect previously unaccounted for facts, has been part and parcel of the scientific method since the time of Aristotle.