In my study of religion, scholars have a very hard time trying to define what is religion and whether such a thing exists distinctively from its sociological, psychological and political surroundings. It occurred to me that there is a principle that is shared by all religions, at least the ones that I know of. It is the principle of Unity. Islam, for example, is perhaps the most rigid of these religions in this regard. The most basic principle of Islam is Tawhid, or Unity. To be a Muslim, you only need to utter the word that God is One and that Muhammed is his Prophet. Because of this, something that Karen Armstrong said in her Islam: A Short History, Muslims find it hard to separate politics from religion, reason from faith, science from spirituality, and so on. Al-Mu’tazilat, a major theological school in Islam, were famously known to be the people of Unity and Justice. Since Allah is the only source of everything, Muslim philosophers used to ague that all sciences, natural ones, morality, politics, etc, are interconnected, complimentary and constitute integrated pars of one united system of existence.
All far Eastern religions, Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, share the beautiful idea that everything is interconnected, something that was later proven to be the case by the General Theory of Relativity, I guess. Of course, all other monotheistic religions, Judaism and Christianity, by their very name, have one God that created everything else.
If you think about it, the principle of Unity of existence is something that even scientists cannot escape. Science does only two things: Unification and Simplification. Physicists for the past forty years have been working on that project to “unify nature” by trying to discover the “Law of Everything,” LOE is what they call it! Now, why would scientists want to do that? Think about it. How do they know that this has to be the case? Keep in mind that only 40% of scientists believe in God (a Jeadue-Christian-Islamic personal God by the way, not a philosopher “first principle” God), and keeping in mind that among the physicists, only about 20% of them believe in God.
The principle of Unity seems to be a good solution to the malaises of modernity, to use Charles Taylor’s term. If we manage to connect spirituality, morals, politics, and natural sciences all together in one integrated and plausible synthesis, we will overcome much of the spiritual crisis of modernity.
It seems that Western civilization had the problem of this dichotomous view of the world seeded in its very beginnings. I wouldn’t blame the Greek philosophers since they had integrated all their knowledge in the “philosophy” or love of wisdom. Aristotle thought that the question of the purpose of material things is essential to truly knowing it. But later on, Christianity had dominantly held the view of Fideism, the notion that religious beliefs cannot be supported by conclusive evidence and that one has to willfully make a step to overcome the gap between evidence and the belief held. This doctrine is volatile to the question of why holding this particular belief rather than another. Later, natural scientists abandoned the question of “why?” or “what’s the purpose?” and even “what is?” to rather “how much?” This is why even though “design” or at least intentionality is an idea that almost everybody holds, and even though order in nature is the very premise of science, all science, it is rejected as a non-scientific theory, which is true according to the new scientific paradigm. Little bit later, Descartes dropped his bomb of Dualism, mind and body, which profoundly impacts both scholarship and popular culture in the West until today.
