A World Designed by God Science and Creationism in Contemporary Islam

Public conflicts between science and religion have become rare in the industrialized West. However, contemporary Muslim thought retains a much stronger sense of an explicitly designed universe infused with moral purpose. Anti-evolution ideas, for example, have been very successful in Turkey, particularly in a recent form adapting Protestant creationism to a Muslim context. The high level of popular misuse of science in the Muslim world suggests that major conflicts between science and religion will have an increasingly Islamic flavor in the coming years. Science and Religion, East and West In the industrialized West, science and religion interact in a complex manner. While there is potential conflict due to the supernatural perspective of religion and the naturalism of modern science, the institutions of Western science and liberal versions of Judaism and Christianity coexist happily. Many good scientists are quite religious as well. This institutional compatibility is strengthened by cultural separation: our conventional wisdom places science and religion in separate spheres