Due to the prevalence of scientism, which has become dominant because it promotes the domination of techno-totalitarian neoliberalism, there exists a certain proclivity towards treating “science” like it were something unique, absolute, and immutable. Consequently, we tend to forget that the so-called “human” or “social” sciences had little credibility compared to the so-called “exact” sciences before Wilhelm Dilthey intervened at the end of the nineteenth century in Germany, but we also seem to forget that even the “exact sciences” themselves have a significant amount of internal diversity.
For instance, many contrast the “macro” nature of physics with the “micro” nature of biology, which would mean that the physicist has a more “broad” vision of the cosmos, leading many of them to feign “spirituality.” In the modern West, perhaps it was Goethe—the famous 18th century German polymath considered to be the greatest German writer (and, interestingly, an admirer of Islam)—who inaugurated this approach. Within his works, particularly in botany, he tried to propose a holistic approach with his idea of “Urpflanze” (archetypal or primordial plant), not the atomist method of materialist scientists, against the reductionism of secular Enlightenment science.
By looking at the morphology of plants, Goethe asserted that there was unity behind their diversity, that they all converged into a single form. This is something that the scientific method or empirical observation-classification is not able to demonstrate, as they push us towards focusing on the “parts” rather than the “whole,” thus entirely missing this developmental unity, with each plant instead confined to its specific categorization.
Stuart Kauffman, an American academic, has made attempts to generalize this approach within the public discourse. According to him, physics may have a more comprehensive vision, but it is too “mechanical.” Biology, on the other hand, looks at the exact same reality and views it as something “alive.” Kauffman then speaks of complexity, self-organization, biosphere, etc. (For similar reasons, he also moves away from the neo-Darwinian “orthodoxy,” like Brian Goodwin who did so before him, especially when it comes to the dogma of natural selection, albeit while remaining within the evolutionist framework.)
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Of course, this is not to say that the “biologist approach” is somehow better or worse than what could be called the “physicist approach.” Indeed, since Humberto Maturana, the Chilean biologist, came up with the idea of autopoiesis in the seventies, that is, nature as a complex self-organizing system, we fall into a kind of pantheistic fetishism—just look at Sheldrake’s “morphic resonance” in our current day and age, which resurrects the “entelechy” of Hans Driesch (himself inspired by Aristotle) which was so fashionable in the 1930s.
In the preface of his book, Reinventing the Sacred, which perhaps best encapsulates his ideas, Stuart Kauffman himself is quite open in stating that such a “non-materialist” approach in science does not lead him to worship God but, rather, in a pantheistic fashion, to consider the natural order itself to be God:
If no natural law suffices to describe the evolution of the biosphere, of technological evolution, of human history, what replaces it? In its place is a wondrous radical creativity without a supernatural Creator. Look out your window at the life teeming about you. All that has been going on is that the sun has been shining on the earth for some 5 billion years. Life is about 3.8 billion years old. The vast tangled bank of life, as Darwin phrased it, arose all on its own. This web of life, the most complex system we know of in the universe, breaks no law of physics, yet is partially lawless, ceaselessly creative. So, too, are human history and human lives. This creativity is stunning, awesome, and worthy of reverence. One view of God is that God is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere, and human cultures.
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We also see this relativism in the final chapter of his book, wholly dedicated to the question of how to define “God,” as if the non-reductionist approach employed elsewhere is of no value here, functionally ending up with some sort of science-powered aesthetic agnosticism:
If the new scientific worldview I have discussed is right, a radical view requiring careful examination, we do live in an emergent universe of unending creativity, breaking the Galilean spell that all is covered by sufficient natural law. We can experience this God in many places, for this God is real. This God is how our universe unfolds. This God is our own humanity. No, we do not have to use the God word, but it may be wise to do so to help orient our lives. This sense of God enlarges Western humanism for those who do not believe in a Creator God. It invites those who hold to a supernatural Creator God to sustain that faith, but to allow the creativity in the universe to be a further source of meaning and membership. I hope this sense of God and the sacred can be a safe, spiritual space we can all share.
In physics as well the “mystical” approach (especially through quantum mechanics), it is essentially the same kind of approach but from “consciousness” instead, and, ultimately, neither option seems particularly pleasing from an Islamic perspective. (For further reading on this, you may refer to our article on “radical spiritualism,” a pernicious mirror to the radical materialism that is quite rightfully criticized.)
Another biologist who was projected as being “spiritual” was the late Lynn Margulis, who popularized the idea of “symbiosis” and who also spoke of interconnectedness, self-organization, etc. This subsequently leads him to embrace the “Gaia hypothesis” (alongside James Lovelock), i.e., the idea that the Earth was a kind of living being on its own—a self-regulating, organized living being—, a concept that is popular within ecological circles.
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It is worth noting that such an approach to modern biology (self-organization, holism, etc.) does enjoy an audience among some of the more religious-oriented scholars, for example, Francisco Varela (Chile) when it comes to Buddhism and Réda Benkirane (Morocco) when it comes to Islam. As mentioned earlier, however, such theories do not seem to be compatible with the definitive and clear-cut teachings of Islam.
Anyway, the purpose of this brief article was to exorcise the idea of the “sciences” (plural) somehow being unified and homogeneous, almost sacred in fact. Furthermore, one could apply this argument not only to the social sciences (how does an economist approach reality as opposed to a sociologist?) but even by even applying it within a single social science. German sociology, i.e., Weber, Simmel, etc., for example, is not the same as French sociology, i.e., Durkheim, etc., because of the different approaches to the “social fact,” positivism, etc.
Does the same apply to math or logic?