By Dr Habeeb Haris
Science is a ‘tool’ for the benefit of humanity. But unfortunately the modernist world-view has made it the final judge of ‘good and bad’, ‘truth and falsehood’, and hence ‘what is acceptable and what is unacceptable’ in the society. Thus, modern science has been elevated to the status of ‘the religion’ to which all other religions must some how confirm. This thinking is called ‘Scientism’.
Those who put their faith in “modern scientific research” and either question Islam or try to do a ‘scientific interpretation’ of the Quran and Sunnah based on those “research studies” need to wake up from their ‘scientism’….
Apart from the Philosophical and Epistemological limitations of science, the way science is being done is itself questionable, even from the viewpoint of Empiricism.
Scientists themselves confess that most of the published ‘research’ findings are concocted. See the below excerpts from a few reviews to understand the unreliable nature of research today:
“Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”
“There is increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims.”
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1182327/#pmed-0020124-b6
The above is also a problem with lots of medical “research”.
See this article published in ‘The Economist’ titled:
‘There is a worrying amount of fraud in medical research’
“In 2009 PLOS ONE published a round-up of 18 surveys of scientists, mostly in America, that had asked about fraud. Though only 2% of respondents admitted falsifying data themselves, 14% said they knew someone who had. Similarly, a third of those asked confessed to other questionable research practices, such as dropping inconvenient data points based on “gut feeling”, or making important changes to a study’s protocol while it was in progress. But they pointed the finger at 72% of their colleagues.”
Also see this article in the reputed journal ‘Nature’ titled:
“Medicine is plagued by untrustworthy clinical trials”
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02299-w
“How many studies are faked or flawed?
Investigations suggest that, in some fields, at least one-quarter of clinical trials might be problematic or even entirely made up, warn some researchers.
By studying the IPD spreadsheets, he judged that 44% of these trials contained at least some flawed data: impossible statistics, incorrect calculations or duplicated numbers or figures, for instance. And 26% of the papers had problems that were so widespread that the trial was impossible to trust”