Science and Religion in a Post Colonial World

Book excerpt: This book addresses selected issues in the emerging field of science and religion, and at the same time acknowledges the situation of Indonesia (or, more generally, a "Third World" country) as the locus for this discussion. The book is concerned with how various world religions, in particular Islam and Christianity respond to shared challenges posed by science, as new theories in cosmology, physics, and the life sciences have brought challenges to many traditional religious ideas. There are also more generally epistemological challenges that reflect the recent success of natural science as a mode of inquiry. These are felt as problems in both the Western and non-Western worlds, but with an important difference. While the Western world is considered the "legitimate owner" of modern science, some in the Muslim world, and the Third World more generally, see modern science as a cultural alien imposed on them, due to its initial introduction in the colonial period.