Rather than journeying towards the One God of mercy...

Rather than journeying towards the One God of mercy, justice and sustenance, these very features of God became individualized and regarded as entities of their own. No longer was there a single center, orientation, goal or purpose, nor was there recognition of just a single “god”; people worshipped whatever “gods” appealed to them.39 Worry has also been expressed regarding the “neutrality” of science.

Although modern science can be neutral in its study of facts, it nonetheless sets the stage and plants the seeds for havoc when in the hands of the ignorant. The issue today is that most people lack sufficient knowledge of the underlying nature of existence to be able to integrate the facts of science into a proper view of reality.40 Thus, through modern science, humans lavishly and greedily exploit the world’s resources for materialistic purposes.

Had there instead been an appropriate understanding of the underlying reality within nature, people could have better used science for purposes more harmonious with their environments and contributive to their relationship with God.

Moreover, it is not just modern science’s narrow view of the material and physical world that Muslim philosophers have protested, but more so its dominant claim for recognition as the only acceptable science of nature.41 The enactment of such a bold statement has had radical and grave results.

It has reduced other sciences, primarily those dealing with the studies of metaphysics and the sacred, to a seemingly inadequate view of the world and something along the lines of superstition-or at least in the eyes of the public and scientific world at large.42 In effect, there has been a loss of sacred symbolism linked to natural phenomena.

This worries Islamic scholars because they recognize that without symbolic intelligibility science itself becomes vain and harmful.43 The current environmental crisis bears enough evidence to justify such concern. Muslim philosophers such as Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Titus Burckhardt have expressed great unease with the movement from the traditional sciences to modern science alone.

Through this move, modern science’s vulgarized presentation of nature-as an entity void of any symbolic or spiritual meaning-has become the axiom through which the public and scientific communities at large see nature. Through the secularization of nature, symbols within it became mere facts and were thus divorced from other orders of reality.