Category: Past Events Published Date
Date: 31 Aug 2007
Title: Science, Religion and the Unity of Knowledge
Speakers: Ehsan Masood (chair), Dr Usama Hasan
Event Details
City Circle invites you to a presentation by Dr Usama Hasan on
"Science, Religion and the Unity of Knowledge" at 6.45pm on Friday 31 August 2007 at Abrar House, 45 Crawford Place, off Edgware Road, London W1H 4LP.
When new knowledge (such as evolution by natural selection) is seen to
conflict with the consensus on revelation, what are the options open to today's believer?
Much of our world is now characterised by fragmentation: our souls, our
neighbourhoods, our religious communities and our societies. According to Dr Hasan, one of the leading causes of this is the fragmentation of knowledge.
In the age of the Internet, we are drowning in information but parched from lack of knowledge and wisdom.
Can there be a unity of knowledge? One clue may lie in the past: Islamic empires created the conditions for advanced science, technology, innovation and learning lasting many centuries. Yet at the same time, memories and records of Islamic tradition were much more recent than they are today.
Join Usama Hasan for a lively discussion on the age-old debate between reason and revelation, science and religion; the sacred and the secular.
Usama Hasan memorised the Qur'an, from a young age, as well as many Hadith. He also holds an MA in Theoretical Physics from the University of
Cambridge and an MSc and PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of London. Currently, he is an imam at Tawhid Mosque in Leytonstone, London, a Senior Lecturer in Computing Science at Middlesex University and Planetarium Lecturer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich.
The event will be chaired by the journalist, Ehsan Masood. Ehsan writes
on science in the Muslim world for Nature and Prospect magazines.
Free entrance. All welcome.