Whereas science confines itself to discovering the laws...

Whereas science confines itself to discovering the laws governing the perceptible world-the part of the universe that is open to perception, experiment and empirical methods- religion directs its pursuit to the entire world of being and to domains that transcend empirical experience. Hence, from the viewpoint of Islam, there can be no intrinsic conflict between science and religion, nor is there any contradiction between reason and revelation.

Revelation is a source of knowledge for religious inquiry, whereas the empirical methods employed by science are a source of scientific knowledge. The use of reason as the basic instrument of inquiry is common to religion and science. Superstition, humbug, falsehood, falsification, forgery, distortion and perversion of truth and mental dishonesty are as much of an anathema to religion as they are to science.

When we understand religion as the pursuit of truth, there can neither be any conflict between it and science, nor can there be any conflict between those engaged in the religious pursuit, because their goal and objective is one. This is not to deny the unfortunate conflicts that have often arisen in the course of history between the savants of science and the self-styled patrons of religious traditions on the other.

Neither this is to deny the bloody conflicts that have at times plagued the relations between followers of different religious traditions. During the last four centuries or so, modern science developed in an environment marked by the growing domination of secular and humanistic schools of thought in Europe.

The historical conflict between scientific outlook and the religious worldview in the West has been mainly a conflict limited to Christendom and a product of the doctrines and dogmas of the Church. These dogmas, which developed in the course of history as a result of the intellectual activities of Christian theologians, were based on certain interpretations of the scriptures.

Hence it can be said that the Western conflict between religion and science was in fact not a conflict between reason and revelation as such, but one between reason and science on the one hand and a certain type of religious tradition on the other. Apart from the conflict between science and religious traditions, we have the divergent and conflicting doctrines of the various religious traditions.