You are currently browsing the tag archive for the 'science' tag.
Paul Salahuddin Armstrong discusses the creation of the first Light, from which all else was created. What the implications of this are and it’s relevance to us today.
Milad 2008 – Birthday Of The Prophet, PBUH.
Zia-E-Madinah Mosque, Darlaston. U.K.
OUR CHANGING BRAINS
Throughout life our brains undergo more changes than any other part of the body. These can be broadly divided into five stages, each profoundly affecting our abilities and behaviour.
But we are not just passengers in this process, so how can we get the best out of our brains at every stage and pass the best possible organ on to the next? New Scientist investigate
To read article, click here…
By JEFFREY KLUGER Thursday, Feb. 12, 2009
Most folks probably couldn’t locate their parietal lobe with a map and a compass. For the record, it’s at the top of your head — aft of the frontal lobe, fore of the occipital lobe, north of the temporal lobe. What makes the parietal lobe special is not where it lives but what it does — particularly concerning matters of faith.
If you’ve ever prayed so hard that you’ve lost all sense of a larger world outside yourself, that’s your parietal lobe at work. If you’ve ever meditated so deeply that you’d swear the very boundaries of your body had dissolved, that’s your parietal too. There are other regions responsible for making your brain the spiritual amusement park it can be: your thalamus plays a role, as do your frontal lobes. But it’s your parietal lobe — a central mass of tissue that processes sensory input — that may have the most transporting effect. (Read “Top 10 Medical Breakthroughs”.)
Needy creatures that we are, we put the brain’s spiritual centers to use all the time. We pray for peace; we meditate for serenity; we chant for wealth. We travel to Lourdes in search of a miracle; we go to Mecca to show our devotion; we eat hallucinogenic mushrooms to attain transcendent vision and gather in church basements to achieve its sober opposite. But there is nothing we pray — or chant or meditate — for more than health.
To continue reading, click here…
Source: www.time.com
DRIVING through the countryside south of Hanover, it would be easy to miss the GEO600 experiment. From the outside, it doesn’t look much: in the corner of a field stands an assortment of boxy temporary buildings, from which two long trenches emerge, at a right angle to each other, covered with corrugated iron. Underneath the metal sheets, however, lies a detector that stretches for 600 metres.
For the past seven years, this German set-up has been looking for gravitational waves – ripples in space-time thrown off by super-dense astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes. GEO600 has not detected any gravitational waves so far, but it might inadvertently have made the most important discovery in physics for half a century.
IN JULY 1837, Charles Darwin had a flash of inspiration. In his study at his house in London, he turned to a new page in his red leather notebook and wrote, “I think”. Then he drew a spindly sketch of a tree.
As far as we know, this was the first time Darwin toyed with the concept of a “tree of life” to explain the evolutionary relationships between different species. It was to prove a fruitful idea: by the time he published On The Origin of Species 22 years later, Darwin’s spindly tree had grown into a mighty oak. The book contains numerous references to the tree and its only diagram is of a branching structure showing how one species can evolve into many.
“In the end, we could get rid of every religion in the world and we would still find reasons to hurt, kill, be intolerant and oppress one another. Get rid of religion and people would reorganise along lines of politics, class, race, nation, gender, greed, wealth etc etc – in other words, pretty much behave as they have done since time immemorial.
People like to say that Religion is the cause of all conflict, forgetting of course that until recently we haven’t fought a religious war since the 17th Century. Vietnam, Korea, Angola, Lebanon, WW1 & 2, the Russo-Japanese War, the Franco-Prussian War, the American Civil War, the Napoleonic Wars – none of these were fought on religious grounds. Even the Arab-Israeli Wars were not religious, none of the opposing forces (Israel, PLO, Syria, Egypt, Jordan etc) being anything other than secular states.
The rise of religious militancy is very recent. The Muslim Brotherhood murdered Sadat but it was not until the 80s with the radicalisation of people like Hamas, Hizbollah etc that religiously inspired violence really took off. The PLO was always a secular, nationalist-political movement, even if its membership included Muslims. Even in America the religious motivation of things like the recent invasion of Iraq is disputed. Even though Bush claims God ‘told him’ to invade, in all likelihood the real reasons were oil and strategic control of the Middle East.
In the end, it boils down to the problems of human nature. We have a desire to be certain and we have a desire to belong to a tribe. Very few of us ACTUALLY are willing to admit we know very little and are happy to live with that. Human violence, fear, suspicion, desire for control, greed, lust for power – these are the problem, not anything else. Everything else is just sauce to enable us to do terrible things in the name of a higher good. People have killed with a clean conscience in the name of country, religion, the Revolution, the Master Race, family, whatever you want. And people have killed in the cause of Militant Atheism as much as they have Religion.
This last is one of Dawkins’ worst ommissions. Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot all actively persecuted religious people under their regimes, killing and imprisoning priests and monks, denying people the right to worship and closing down and destroying temples, churches and other religious centres. Atheism is no more a guarantee of moral behaviour than Religion is.
In the end its all US US US! If we want to root out the problem, we have to look within, not without. But because of who were are, we think its all external. Remove Religion and the world would be a better place. WRONG! Impose Religion and the world would be a better place. WRONG! Take a look at ourselves and work from there and the world would be a better place – PERHAPS! At least it would be a good place to start! But it doesn’t look like its gonna happen any time soon!
To me, I don’t give a hoot what a person believes. I am only interested in what a person is and how they behave. To use a religious remark, ‘By their fruit shall ye know them’ (I leave you to identify where that came from). I am not going to tell a religious person not to believe what they believe, but I am going to argue with them if they seek to hurt or take someone’s rights away from them.
Similarly I am not going to tell an Atheist he is wrong to believe what he or she believes, but I am going to argue with them when they tell me they have access to Absolute Truth or I or anyone else is stupid because they don’t agree with them. I am also going to argue with them if they operate from a position of arrogance and ignorance while attacking someone else on the grounds that THEY are ignorant.
I am also not going to agree with them when they tell me that Consciousness is an illusion! 
The problem is also, it seems to me, that we are confusing the words ‘God’, ‘Religion’ and ‘Spirituality’, all of which are related but not the same thing. Indeed, they are not even contingent upon each other! Religion takes as its justification the existence of God, but God doesn’t need Religion to exist. If there is a God, it may well be completely independent of any human Religion. Indeed, its not stupid to say that Religion is entirely man-made while God is not. There are plenty of people who believe in God who are not members of any Religion – indeed they are not members of any Religion BECAUSE they believe in God!
At the same time, there are plenty of people who are have a spiritual dimension to their lives who are neither members of any religion or even believe in God. Take Philip Pullman, for instance, who has been a big champion of Dawkins and has made many bullish Atheistic statements against Religion. Nevertheless in a recent interview he said that people had misunderstood him. He said that he absolutely had what he called ‘the Religious Temperament’, he was just against Religion when it got mixed up with Politics.
All of these three words swirl in amongst one another and are very hard to define. ‘Spiritual’ can mean no more than an investment in the inner reality of our lives – ie that part of us which experiences wonder, emotions and creates art, poetry, beauty. It doesn’t always mean belief in an afterlife, ghosts etc or even God. ‘God’ can mean a whole army of things, none of which are covered in Dawkins’ book or words like Theist or Deist. Religion can also mean a whole number of things.
There are wonderful people who are Religious and wonderful people who are not. Would the world be better without Dante, Michelangelo or T S Eliot? I don’t think so. Would it be better without Nietzsche, Larkin or Beckett? Again, I don’t think so. Should we tear down the Temple Mount, Westminster Abbey, Chartres Cathedral. the Taj Mahal etc? I don’t think so. Equally, should we burn the books of Bertrand Russell, James Joyce or Martin Amis? I don’t think so either (well, maybe Martin Amis). Would we be better off without Science? No – or rather maybe, as we wouldn’t have the nuclear bomb or chemical warfare. But then we would have to do without medicine. Would we be better off without Religion? No – or rather maybe, as we wouldn’t have Bin Laden or the Inquisition. But then we would also not have Leonardo da Vinci or Monteverdi…
So you pays your money and you takes your pick.
What disturbs me most of all, though, is the polarisation of the two viewpoints, one worshipping Matter, the other Spirit. Both perspectives tyrannise us because they elevate one above the other at the expense of the other. Unless we want an existence of division and polarisation, we need to start thinking about the consequences of this. The Mind/Body split has been catastrophic for the human race as it has completely divorced us from our surroundings. Nature has become a thing to ravage and exploit rather than live with and we remain very alienated from each other.
We need to bring things together again. We need to listen more. Arguments such as these force us into polarised positions which cause deeply held feelings to become abstractions, rendering them meaningless. All this fruitless discussion about God – who is never going to be ‘provable’ beyond experience or lack of it – is just so much waste of time, as any idea of God is meaningless except in so far as it works through us. After a while everyone becomes exhausted and ends up at the ‘who cards?’ point.
Really, we should take time to find out about everything and not rest on ignorant assumptions about Science or Religion. Everything is more subtle. If we believe in evidence-based conclusions, we need to be starting from that point…”
By Jake Murray
To visit Jake’s blog click here, THE TEMPLE
I strongly disagree with the idea that in order to follow a religion, we have to give up our ability to question. While this my be true in certain narrow minded cults, I personally I found my faith through questioning. I have always been extremely inquisitive, and that hasn’t changed since I started praying! Many scientists throughout the ages have been devout believers of one religion or another, a fact many choose to forget.
There are many things in this life we do not understand. Even though many today know far more than their forbears, this only causes us to realise how little we truly understand. If ever there was a case for the existence of God / Creator / Divinity, surely this is it! There is clearly beauty, detail and complexity in every aspect of this universe. When we discover one level of this, we find another, and yet another as we investigate further. Look for instance at the development of microscopes.
Scientists in the time of Charles Darwin, saw cells through microscopes, just thinking they were simple gelatinous blobs. With better microscopes, scientists realised cell’s contained various organelles inside. Today, when we look at cell’s through the latest electron-microscopes, we see that each minute cell is an incredibly complex structure.
We analyse the chemical processes that occur continuously within each cell, amazed how all this can happen within tiny cells, far more efficiently than our modern industrial chemical processes. Cell’s have inspired bio-chemists, to learn how we can improve our own chemical industry. We haven’t even discussed DNA yet. 
The sheer amount of information encoded into the DNA molecules of any cell, is enough to fill libraries, if it were written down as letters in books!
If we question sincerely, we have to wonder how all this came to be. While it makes sense, there must have been some process of how life came to colonise the Earth. Was this purely as the result of chance and coincidence, or is there more to it? Nothing humans have produced in our entire existence, has even come close to the complexity and ingenuity of nature. Hence, why many scientists are trying to reproduce natural processes and structures in the laboratory. Surely it takes more blind faith to believe all this came to be without a God, than to believe there is Supreme Intelligence guiding our existence!
Paul Salahuddin Armstrong
I’ve been a fan of Sir David Attenborough’s work since childhood. I share his fascination for the natural world. Unlike Sir David, I grew up believing things evolved, yet now I do feel this is all part of a Divine plan. Not that I disagree that life has evolved, in one way or another. But that there is a grand design in nature, which cannot easily be explained.
On the other hand, I think religiosity can be a serious problem, and I say this as a devout Muslim! There is little wrong with genuine spirituality, but the problem that often arises, when religion gets organised; It can lose the initial spark and profound wisdom of it’s guiding lights. Corruption sets in, and the “official” religious leaders are often just doing a job. Hence, the hypocrisy that arises, naturally causes people to shy away from religion.
Yet, I have found tremendous good in religion. I believe we need a spiritual outlook on life, that it is good for us. But we must retain perspective, reason and science. One of the great wisdoms found in many ancient scriptures, is that we need to find balance. We need to walk the middle way; as the Buddha discovered, “if you tighten the string too much, it will break. But if you leave it loose, it will not play.” In between these too extremes, we find harmony and enlightenment.
I feel I have profoundly benefited, from my scientific upbringing, as I have benefited from spirituality. I would give up neither, neither do I see any real contradiction. Our challenge is really narrow minded perception. Science and spirituality are equally valid ways of understanding, problems only arise when we don’t see this, and feel our way, is the only way of seeing things.
Paul Salahuddin Armstrong
