In a world where right is equated with might, we must learn that what is truly right is pursuing basic human rights and dignity for all.

The highest ideal of human life is an individual elevating to unite with their soul, reaching radiant metaphysical realms, having divine secrets divulged to them, and attaining spiritual pleasures. A soul that takes wing toward this lofty ideal is always happy, and every endeavor made in this direction is internally enlightening and laudable; a person who targets such a life is virtuous, and the land of such people is a land of virtue.

The belief that humanity is nothing more than an animal species has done enormous harm to humanity. This thought first destroyed an individual’s desire for elevating their soul and then closed up the roads that take them to true virtue. And by reducing humanity into swarms of bugs, it deprived them of the comprehension and will to look into and supervise themselves.

According to this understanding, it is perfectly normal and necessary for the strong to destroy the weak, and for those who cannot fight back to be exterminated. When this understanding, which was derived from the idea of natural selection, was applied to human communities, it demolished the feeling of respect for general rights; it made “might” more oppressive; and by accepting unlimited animal freedom as a foundation, it reduced humanity to the level of other creatures. According to this wrong understanding, what was right-with all its aspects-depended on might. This meant that whoever had a strong body or fist, whoever had the better command of written or spoken expression, or whoever had good relations with the upper level of society, were viewed as being right and were even praised. And whoever was weak, whoever lacked power, financial means, and sycophancy – they were always mistreated and scorned.

In the meantime, notions such as the might of the soul, might of the right, and might of belief were erased from memory, in an effort to make younger generations oblivious to them. This situation put the truth and the followers of truth in a weak position before the oppressive powers and humiliated. Lowly considerations of gratifying carnal desires and the sole pursuit of personal pleasures and benefits seized souls completely, and this turned people of faith into a plaything for oppressors. The hungry wolf was respected by society, and he, in return, expected those walking corpses to pay tribute to him.

In the past centuries, the mansions of oppressors were surrounded by circles of people who, for the sake of seeking benefits, accepted being disgraced and despised, and at the same time, flattered their oppressors. Hence, there emerged queues of those who worshipped worldly power. And today as well, might still holds the upper hand, and the right and the rightful are within the grasp of that hand. The only difference is that an oppressive minority has come down and oppression has been widely distributed.

In the past, oppression and cruelty came from a few individuals; the masses are now the oppressors. Instead of the cruel individuals of the past, there are networks of cruelty all around. Nowadays, they cheerfully show up in society, revealing their ill-fated and debauched faces. During this festivity, neither the cry of the oppressed is heard, nor does anybody speak up.

Almost all of these things appeared for the first time when the notion of “right” and the understanding of freedom began to be abused. Then these views spread all over the world under the guardianship of the “industrial revolution” and the resulting technology. Thanks to the non-developed countries’ excessive love and interest for science and technology, these views were welcomed almost everywhere. Thus, the yearning for science and technology degenerated into a terrible open-door policy. Now, everything was taken in; everything was affirmed without asking for a password, without considering whether it suited the nature of that nation-particularly things that harm the social body. After this, people went astray, driven by loose morals, and they competed to deceive and oppress. Might is the only ruler; freedom is an oft-repeated pretext for every kind of corruption…

According to this new philosophy, traders can sell their goods at any price they wish. People have the freedom to hoard goods and sell them when the time comes, and to travel to lands where their ancestors marched in honor, pursuing any ignominious purpose. The media knows no limit in deprivation of character and conveys illicit content to the most remote corners – and they claim to do it to disseminate knowledge. Their publications that are audio-visually charming assail sound thinking, faith, and language; the youth are free to give way to chaos by disregarding every kind of lofty feeling and value; those who abuse religious feelings and thoughts are free to expect some benefit in return for their mumblings… how free, rightful, and wise they are, aren’t they? O freedom, how cruel do you become when abused to allow every kind of corruption!

According to the thought which has taken most of humanity within its grasp today, a good doctor is one who discovers the way to attract many patients to his personal office; a good lawyer is one who speaks for the interests of anyone-rightful or not; a good engineer or architect is one who draws projects to fill his pockets, deprived of scientific morality and a feeling of responsibility; a good singer is one who uses his or her voice to abuse the pure feelings of the people, and so on…

On the other hand, the lofty souls who observe others’ rights as well as their own, and who live for virtue, are viewed as stupid and unwise! In such a world, everything is related to a material purpose, and it is natural and inevitable that human communities and notions of humanity are replaced by a group of animals, by an understanding of humanity based on materialism and sensuality, and the belief that human values and the true notion of right will be forgotten. However, a happy future for humanity seems possible by giving due value to truth, saving it from the transgression of falsehood, taking animal freedom under control, backing the freedom of those who think, strive, live for others, and present the fruits of their lives to society before they depart from this world, making them live “forever.”

We do not wish to see humans act as slaves to carnal desires, getting more miserable every passing day with lowly feelings. We wish to see the faces who have reached inner tranquility by being servants to the Truth, those who kept away from the dark and dirty affairs of oppressors, the pure faces which reflect heavenly beauties on their foreheads. We consider these faces crystallized in colorful lines-by faith and hope, by service and joy, by love and humanity-as the guardian angels of this blissful world, and we applaud them.

How laudable are these people in service of Truth, who have been purified while flowing toward eternity, who smile at their fortune with gratitude, and who seek the Creator-the source of all beauties-through the tongue of the fish in the ocean and the gazelle on the plain, and who are enraptured with the pledge of eternity!

“It’s very hard to grow a tree,” he said. “Just like it’s very hard to grow a person.”

“Well” my brother said, “if you and mom could grow me, I can grow a tree.” He was eleven at the time.

By the end of the summer, only one of his sprouts was still alive. He’d forgotten what kind of tree it was – in his enthusiasm, he hadn’t time for labels. On a Sunday in early September, after church, my family went out to our backyard with hand shovels and a rake. On our hands and knees, we took turns digging in the soft, wet earth. It was a warm day, and the late-season sun spilled like gold filigree through the leaves of our large oak tree. My brother and father, rich earth worked into the fissures of their hands, tenderly planted the sapling. I could tell, by my father’s face, that he didn’t give the tree a chance. But my brother believed completely, and when the planting was finished to his satisfaction, he stood and said a prayer, a brief benediction and blessing for our house.

He spent that autumn tending to the sapling. He would water it daily, and measure its progress with a ruler. Against all odds, it continued to grow.

So, too, did my brother. As the years passed, and the tree grew thicker, my brother grew taller. He fell in love, had his heart broken, lost his way. By the time he left home, seven years later, the tree had grown into a healthy, albeit small, tree. It had claimed its unceremonious space in our backyard. But it hadn’t borne fruit, and we had mostly forgotten to notice that the tree was there. We still had no idea what kind of tree it was.

“A defective tree,” my father said one night, bitterly. “A tree incapable of growing fruit.” My brother had been gone a year then, and we heard word of him sparingly – a postcard from Louisiana, or a phone call from a hotel in Oklahoma. I left home the next year. I took my first trip to Paris, where I fell in love with the city, and a woman, my future wife. Another year passed, and my brother and I did not speak.

When I received word that my brother had died in a car crash in Texas, I was living in the south of Spain with my wife. She was pregnant by then, a small sapling growing inside her, and when I hung up the phone on my father, the first thing I thought of was what my brother had said all those years before: There’s a whole tree in this little seed. I looked at her and thought: There’s a whole person in this little seed. Then, naturally, I cried.

It was late June. We arrived in Philadelphia just in time for the funeral. It was a small affair at a church outside the city, on a small plot of land overlooking a creek. The grave had already been dug, the fresh earth piled high beside it. I remembered my brother’s small hands, their crevices grooved with dirt. Afterwards we returned to our house. It had grown quiet in the years since my brother and I had left, and my parents would soon sell it.

That night at dusk, my father took me out to the backyard. “I have something to show you,” he said. We walked barefoot through the grass, the cicadas murmuring in the dense, sultry summer air. When we got to my brother’s tree, I noticed something moist and wet beneath my foot. I knelt down. It was a plum. There were plums all over the ground, and more on the tree.

“It’s the first year it blossomed,” my father said. “I couldn’t believe it.”

We roamed through the gloaming, prospecting the luscious, purple globes from the low branches, biting into the soft flesh, the juices spilling down our chins. They tasted good. As I ate, I picked out the seeds, put a few of them in my pocket. They came with me on the plane back to Spain. I planted them in cups all over our house, much to my wife’s amusement. I watered them diligently, checked them daily for growth. When we planted one of the seedlings at the end of the summer, my wife’s stomach was already large, and while I worked in the earth, she sat on our porch and watched. “It will never grow,” she called out to me. “Seedlings never grow.”

As I write this, our son is playing in our backyard, his small, growing body shaded by the small, growing branches of a plum sapling.

A system of education without a clearly defined target and purpose will only serve to confuse future generations. We have to be careful that our youth is taught the proper material in an effective manner to ensure that they are actually learning rather than simply becoming conduits of data.

The social structure of a nation is closely related to the importance it places on the education of its populace. The education of the current generation is especially crucial as they will become the educators of following generations and will share with their students the knowledge they have acquired as part of their own education and experiences. It is vital for the society and morality of a society that its values are transmitted to its younger generation in the process of their learning experience. Value transmission is best possible in a successful marriage, which thus makes family an important educational institution, a vital one for the continued existence of a nation. Those nations which fail to establish the institution of marriage on sound and essential values without regard to the spiritual and moral condition of their society are doomed to extinction.

The development of individuals is strongly influenced by other individuals, dominant customs and traditions, and more importantly by their parents. Similarly governments have a strong influence and authority over the different parts of its populace.

A nation that effectively utilizes their resources is closely aligned with the thoughts, concepts, and culture of the individuals who make up the society and with the prudence, foresight, and sincere devotion of those in power. The administrators that are responsible for the level of care given to individuals and their efforts toward becoming a social entity will be an indication of how closely aligned they are with the prophetic principle that “All of you are shepherds, and all of you are responsible for those under your care” and that “being glad with making others’ happy instead of self concerns.”

Those who are responsible for educating future generations – no matter under what title they do it – should never forget the importance of this. As members of society we try to do whatever it takes to ensure the best possible future for our children by doing everything in our power and overcoming any and all difficulties so that our children are not deprived of anything as we try to prepare a world like Paradise for them. Will it not be a waste of all our efforts if we fail to elevate them to the level of morality and virtue, the capital of true value, if we cannot elevate them to a state of satisfaction, having acquired consciousness and culture? The nations who obtain this capital will have gained a mysterious key to the treasures of the world. On the contrary, the masses that have not elevated to the level of such a cultivation and understanding will lose their first struggle for social life in the future and be knocked out at the first round.

If the new generations’ minds are equipped with the sciences of their time and their hearts are not lit up with breezes from beyond and if they are provided with an ample education, with all their needs fulfilled and all opportunities available for them to succeed then they can look forward to a bright future. These future generations will be able to stand up to every kind of obstacle in the struggle of life, they will be able to overcome – material or spiritual – every kind of difficulty and will never give in to despair. All the hardships that we will have encountered along the way in providing our children with a better education will have been worth it.

As for the unfortunate ones who are deprived of this consciousness will waste away the inheritance they received from their fathers, spiritually as well, they will lead an unstable and pessimistic life, and then perish between the ferocious teeth of misery.

The authorities today, who are at the crossroads of elevating their children to the level of humanity or leaving them to be beasts in human form, have to think the responsibility on their shoulders heavier than mountains and find more profound and consistent cures against the decays brought by years-long neglects. Otherwise, the unfortunate generations who lost the most precious ores of their being in the unknown seas for thousands of times through different erosions will completely lose their ability to germinate and they will become completely barren, never be able to find existence with their own essence, and never reach the glory of the past again.

This particular kind of freedom is presented as one of the causes of war in the book Muhammad: The Messenger of God by Fethullah Gülen. If one approaches the problem from a partial analysis, rather than a holistic one, then one can easily come to the conclusion that “war can be waged to ensure spiritual guidance and communication.” In the aforementioned book, Gülen basically says that force is allowed if there is a resistance against the preaching of Islam and others are prevented from listening to its message.

Viewing the issue from this aspect, it is not correct to reach a conclusion that Gülen, thus Islam, does not recognize freedom of religion and conscience. Those who reach such a conclusion means, they are disregarding Islamic verses and the literature on the traditions of the Prophet that pertain to the freedom of religion and conscience, as well as the important interpretations made by Gülen in this issue. There are also some circles who never tire of spouting their biased discourse, manifested by slogans such as, “Islam is the religion of the sword,” “Islam is an oppressive and coercive religion,” or “either Islam or death.”

In contrast, it is very clear in Gülen’s message that no war can be fought in order to communicate one’s faith. A war can be fought when faith, Islam in this case, is prevented from teaching its message “in peaceful ways.”

In my opinion, restriction of the communication of any religion is a violation of a birthright and rights agreed upon in international human rights declarations. In other words, the prohibition in question, if one indeed exists, is a sheer atrocity that has been imposed on people living in a particular social system. Living in the West, where such debates have occurred, I have two alternatives: either to investigate the written and oral literature of Fethullah Gülen in order to examine the accuracy of this approach, or to ask him directly. I preferred to take the easier way and directly asked him my question: Here I give you his reply:

“It is possible to categorize all the battles the Prophet fought, when analyzed thoroughly with their basic characteristics, within the concept of defense. If there is an attack by an enemy, or if there is evidence acquired by a very reliable intelligence that there is going to be an attack, then war will be necessary. The Qur’anic evidence that supports this is Baqara 2:191: “fight against them, if they fight you.'”

Another remark by Gülen, made at another time, confirms this:

“Take a close look at his battles at Badr, Uhud, and the Trench. All of them took place in the vicinity of Medina, while the enemy, the polytheists of Mecca, were living 500 kilometers away. What could the Muslims do? Should they welcome the enemy forces, who had come to the front line and inside the town, trying to kill them? The Battle of Haybar, on the other hand, was fought because previously signed treaties were violated, and these treaties stipulated violation as a cause for war. While emphasizing the fact that the Prophet only fought defensive battles, there is no need to claim “there is no war in Islam by any means,” evoking some kind of an inferiority complex. On the other hand, Islam does not give the right to any nation to clamp on another nation for no reason, or just for the sake of her national sovereignty. This critical balance was maintained in the eras of the Prophet and the Four Rightly-Guided Caliphs. But it is not possible to state that the same sensitivity has been preserved by some Islamic states after the Abbasids until today-the Ottomans included. Several wars were waged for the sake of gains, or to extend territory. They treated their enemies with justice during and after the war; but this is a different issue.”

The issue is crystal clear: war is the very last thing to do, when other solutions are exhausted, in order to eliminate an injustice that restricts the freedom of communication and guidance for teaching one’s religion. Thus, from where does this confusion stem? There are two reasons for this. The first is the inability to delineate the Prophet’s actions as the Messenger of God-which bind all Muslims until the Day of Judgment-from some of his actions as a statesman, which were basically formed in keeping with the policies of the day according to the prevalent context.

The second reason is that some concepts that pertain to war are predicated in their religious rather than political connotations, arising from the fact that war is a sphere where religion and politics intermingle; in other words, the “literalist” approach is adopted.

These two reasons, in the final analysis, give rise to misinterpretation of some of the concepts in a far distant meaning than what they were originally constructed for. Take the concept of “fi sabilillah,” as an example. This concept, which is repeated many times in the Holy Qur’an and the sayings of the Prophet, literally means “in the way of God.” However, the role that this concept plays in the field of religion differs from that which it plays in politics in the Arabic language. “Fi sabilillah” in the field of religion covers all the good deeds aiming to acquire merit, whereas it signifies to ensure the rule of law in the field of politics.

In conclusion, fundamental rights and freedoms are not issues that are open to question. All people are free to choose their religion. No state should be able to revoke this right from her citizens. The ordinances of the Qur’an and the Sunnah which pertain to this issue are clear enough. Regulations and applications that inhibit these freedoms should not be allowed. Restrictions may be exercised by the authority of a legitimate state only if an encroachment of the rights of other people is in question, particularly in the fields of public security, common order, public decency, and health. As regards the case of war, a war can only be declared in keeping with the will of the legitimate political authority. The fact that people prefer to believe in a religion other than Islam is not considered to be a cause of war. On the other hand, if a state does not allow its citizens the freedom to choose their religion, whichever religion that may be, this is oppression. To prevent this kind of atrocity is a legitimate cause of war if all possible means of peaceful settlement have been tried and failed.

Introduction

Human beings have wrestled with questions about the origin of our existence and the fabric of our universe for thousands of years. This questioning formed the discipline of cosmology. Dr. Natarajan explores the nature of our world and shares her perspectives about how new scientific discoveries are reshaping our understanding of the universe and our place in it. Until very recently, the universe had been considered a vast empty space. But the Dark matter theory states that the universe is not empty, but rather filled with an invisible matter. As new mysteries unfold, Dr. Natarajan points out that it is our fundamental human curiosity that leaves us no choice but to explore the universe and how we fit into its grand picture.

M&B: Dr. Natarajan, you work on dark matter in the universe. What is the theory?

It turns out that the bulk of the matter in the universe is not made of ordinary atoms that you and I or the universe that we know and experience is made of, but instead made of this mysterious particle. Ninety percent of all the matter in the universe is dark matter, and we believe this is a set of particles that was created very early in the universe. These particles do not have charge, but they have mass. Since they dominate the mass of the universe, it turns out that they really form the scaffolding in the universe around which all galaxies, stars, and so on, form. They are sort of the basis or the framework within which normal atoms actually cool to form star galaxies, and then have generated us.

M&B: What is the evidence for their existence?

The reason dark matter remains a mystery, – although there is incontrovertible evidence for the existence of dark matter – is the fact that you only detect it indirectly. What I mean by that is you detect its presence because it has mass, and since it doesn’t have any charge it doesn’t couple to any radiation. So you don’t see radiation in any wavelength in the electromagnetic spectrum: no X-rays, no gamma rays, no visible light, nothing. But since dark matter has mass, it aggregates gravitationally, so they feel gravitational pull towards each other and they cluster. It’s the clustering of the dark matter, the fact that it gets compact, that we detect the effects of dark matter.

M&B: What happens near the regions where dark matter clusters? In your research papers you use the bending of the light rays. How do you observe it?

The primary evidence is the gravitational bending of light produced by these aggregates of dark matter. The universe is really composed of a smooth distribution of dark matter, with a lot of clump regions where this dark matter has aggregated, and then enabled the formation of galaxies. The presence of these large amounts of dark matter causes light from background galaxies coming towards us to bend. The actual shapes of galaxies that are behind a big clump of dark matter, which is along our line of sight, are actually distorted when we see it. The dark matter in general is smoothly distributed everywhere in the universe. But there are these particular regions that are denser. So we can look at regions in which the dark matter is not so densely distributed, look at the shapes of undistorted shapes of galaxies, and then use that to infer how much distortion we’re actually seeing when we see a lump, and infer its existence from the distortion. Because the strength of the distortion is directly proportional to the mass, you can directly infer how much mass there is between us and those objects.

M&B: Is there evidence other than the bending of the light rays?

The other evidence eludes to the fact that dark matter actually gives the basis for the formation of stars and galaxies. If you look at the motions of stars and galaxies, you find that, unlike the solar system, if you look at the velocities of the planets in the solar system as a function of distance from the sun you find that it’s falling. So the planets in the inner regions are moving very fast; they feel the gravity of the sun much more strongly than the outer planets, which are not actually moving as fast. So if you plot the velocity from the center or from the sun outwards in the solar system, the velocities are falling. Whereas if you go to a galaxy and you do the same experiment, you look at stars at different radii and you try to see what their speeds look like. They are speeding up as you go outwards. And the only way they can do that is there is something that is sitting outside the galaxy that holds it up as it were, and has gravity. And it turns out that our current picture is that most galaxies have very extended dark matter halos. The key point is that there’s a lot of dark matter sitting outside the galaxy well beyond where we see the stars.

The other compelling lines of evidence for the existence of dark matter come from larger scale observations of the universe. One of the leftovers of the big bang or relic of the big bang is this microwave background radiation that is detected today in the universe. It was a very hot radiation that has cooled with the expansion of the universe, and we are bathed in it. I mean it’s everywhere, in every direction, and measurements of the directional dependence of the microwave background shows that it’s very uniform. But in one part it’s anisotropic, so there are cool zones and hot zones in the sky. On very small scales we see these cold and hot spots. And these and isotropy’s in the microwave background are exactly predicted by this model, the cold dark matter model, which I said you know is postulated on the very early generation of the universe and these dark matter particles.

M&B: So we know that they exist. But what is their essence? What are their properties?

This is still a mysterious kind of beast. In fact, we don’t know the nature, but it appears that it’s collisionless. It’s very counterintuitive. That’s one of the things I find fascinating about the fact that it is so counterintuitive. These particles are actually collisionless. What that means is that when two dark matter particles approach each other, they pass through each other, they don’t actually bounce off of each other, so these particles don’t collide, which means they don’t have pressure, because pressure is generated by collision. So they are pressureless particles that have mass. Gravity holds them together, but they don’t actually collide.

So a current understanding of dark matter is that it’s definitely generated very early in the universe and that it clusters very strongly and it’s distributed on very different scales in the universe, so there’s like a smooth background and there are lots of clumps on top of it and so on.

M&B: As far as the mass of Dark Matter how much mass are we talking about? If there is no clustering, something like in the volume of the earth, for example, how much total dark matter mass do we have?

Well I guess the thing is at the position of the earth and at the position of the sun from the center of our galaxy. We are not really dominated by dark matter anymore, so dark matter at that radius doesn’t constitute significant portion of the mass. We are bathed in it, but the density is quite low. It’s at the innermost part of our galaxy where the density is very, very high, so we actually expect that the inner most regions of our galaxy is a very complicated, violent place where not only do you have a black hole which we know exists. This is a black hole that is not made of dark matter. This is a black hole that has gobbled gas and grown to about a million times the mass of the sun, and which is sitting at the center and it creates a very violent place for stars because it can rip them apart and so on. And this whole system is sort of embedded in this very, very dense region full of dark matter.

M&B: How is your everyday work? Where do you get data about the light rays coming near the regions with high Dark matter density?

A: I’m a theoretical person and what that means is that I actually build models but models that are guided by observations. The theory has transformed in the past 10 to 15 years because of the amount of data that technological progress has given us.

For example, the Hubbell space telescope has really transformed the kind of modeling that can be done. So I actually use data that other people have procured. They’ve cleaned it up and they give it to me. These are very distorted images of background galaxies whose shape has been distorted because of the huge amounts of dark matter that is contained in a cluster of galaxies.

M&B: The bending of the light rays is predicted by the general relativity theory. Is it what you use for your calculations?

A: It’s a beautiful theory. I think that people really have understood the iconic status of Einstein. What is most fascinating about him for me is the profound insights that he had of such despaired phenomenon. There was a way in which he was able to see connections and synthesize. You know the whole understanding that the geometry, the fate and the contents of the universe ought to be linked is a profound insight. And I think you know it’s incredible that he enabled, you know, his mind enabled him to formulate it in the way that he did, which has allowed people like me to use general relativity and the sort of elegance of general relativity because of how simple it is in fact to apply and test.

M&B: This looks like an intriguing line of work?

I want to stress that this is a particularly wonderful time for cosmology. It’s a particularly special time. I don’t want to use the sort of often abused golden age as it were, but it’s the confluence of technological progress with the kind of data that we can obtain and the level of understanding that we have built up. This is a very special time to be doing this kind of work. And while the mystery of what dark matter might be made of, you know, it may or may not get solved in my lifetime.

M&B: If you want to describe your work, what term would you use?

In a more descriptive way, I guess. What I really do is I build a story line. I build a story line for the universe. I mean, I build a story of the sequence of events of how a structure forms and assembles. The key there is that you are guided, you have a few snapshots, so you have a bit of data, but then you have to extrapolate and you make some predictions. The goal of the kind of work that I do is to make predictions, and have them be taken seriously, to either be falsified or shown to be true, and what’s exciting about this particular time is that people can falsify your theories or your models in a very short time.

M&B: Isn’t it interesting that we can actually make a story out of universe?

Well, I mean, I think that what is fascinating, and this is a personal view, what is fascinating about cosmology is the… you know it’s mystical and it’s mysterious at the same time and it’s highly abstract. It’s not intuitive because the scale that I’m working with in terms of distances, masses, and energy are just unfathomable. So there’s a real irresistible pull for certain kinds of people to do this kind of work. And I think the universe is a pretty good subject for a narrative because of the range of phenomena that occur in it. This is possibly why in all ancient civilizations there is some notion of cosmogony and this idea of fascination with where we came from. I don’t want to sound arrogant by saying that it’s the fundamental question, but you know it’s an inescapable question for anybody to ponder where we came from.

M&B: Is there a sense of awe that motivates you in your studies?

There is a sense of wonder that the universe generates and I think that you know personally for me I’m a bit of an adventurist, and I think if I can imagine myself, if I had been born 200, 300 years ago I would have been one of those explorers. And I think there are people like that amongst us always, who want to explore in different ways. I mean, there are some people who want to explore via music. And there are frontiers that they want to break through in music, and they have the creativity to do that. And I think that for a lot of us who are doing science, and cosmology in particular, there is a sense of exploration, there’s a sense of examining or grappling with things that are really at the limits of our capabilities in a way.

M&B: In some ways one of the most important fruits of the process and coming along it’s our imagination. And the human imagination is also a part of the universe.

Absolutely. It is an inescapable part of the universe and what is fascinating is the idea that we have the capability to even contemplate the origin of the universe given that we are a part of the universe.

M&B: Many people approach science in a utilitarian way and this is not what you are doing.

I think that the fact that it is not utilitarian is precisely what attracts me to it. I think it is the other side of the coin of this, which is why we probably aren’t as well funded and we ought to be better funded than we are, because this is such a fundamental human curiosity. There is enormous public interest in what we do and the level of funding that we have does not reflect that. For instance, obviously medicine is very critical. It’s critical to our existence. But the disparity in how they are funded and how the pure sciences are funded is sort of disturbing. Because I think as a culture, as a world, we can afford to indulge in understanding basic sciences partly because there are spinoffs from all the work that we do. It is unpredictable, and I think that is what’s fascinating. There are no guaranteed benefits to human kind and society today that cosmologists can bring. However, they satisfy this hunger for knowing and going beyond, you know, satisfying your hunger and thirst on a day to day basis.

Mustafa Tabanli is a producer at Ebru TV. He conducted this interview for Emmy Award winning television series Matter&Beyond.

Bio

Dr. Priya Natarajan is a Professor of Astronomy and Physics at Yale University, and an Associate at the Dark Cosmology Center, which is part of the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Her research interests include cosmology, gravitational lensing, and black hole physics. She earned a B.A. degree in physics and mathematics at M.I.T. and her doctorate at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge in England, where she was a member of Trinity College and elected to a Title A Research Fellowship that she held from 1997 to 2003. She is currently on leave from Yale to take up her Guggenheim Fellowship. She is deeply invested in the public dissemination of science and is currently a member of the Science Advisory Board for the public television series NOVA.

http://www.astro.yale.edu/priya/

Dr. Andrew Newberg is Director of Research at the Myrna Brind Center for Integrative Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and Medical College. He is also Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of 5 books on this topic: Principles of Neurotheology, Why We Believe What We Believe, How God Changes Your Brain, Why God Won’t Go Away, and The Mystical Mind. He is considered a pioneer in the neuroscientific study of religious and spiritual experiences.

Dr. Newberg’s research utilizes the many recent advances in brain imaging to comprehend the nature of human consciousness and to determine how we, as humans, understand reality and interact with it. His studies now focus primarily on how brain function is associated with various mental states, and in particular, the relationship between brain function and religious experiences.

Matter&Beyond: What aspect of religions interests you personally?

I think the part of religion and spirituality that really interests me the most is its focus on that which is ultimate. Teilhard de Chardin used to tell that religion is related to questions of the ultimate. And that’s something that I guess I’ve always been focused on in my own thinking, trying to understand the ultimate questions about the Universe, about reality, about how we as human beings can interact with that reality and understand that reality, and I think that to me religions have always tried to find those answers.

M&B: You obtain brain scans of people while praying and meditating. What is the focus of those studies?

I think one of the parts of religion that has become very interesting to me is the profound experiences that people can actually have, particularly the mystical experiences where people really feel like they get outside of themselves and they begin to see the world in a whole different way. These transformative mystical kinds of experiences, depending on how you define them, those to me are the most interesting experiences in many ways and certainly worthy of looking at from lots of different perspectives.

M&B: But each religion brings its own perspective. Are you looking for commonalities, do you accept varieties, what is your take on the diversity of such answers?

I don’t always agree with those specific answers, but to me there’s always that pursuit of trying to find the answers of how we understand reality. And I think that is so ultimately, and while this doesn’t always come out in the practice of religions, there is that goal of having human beings attain a higher level of existence, becoming a better person, becoming something more than what we are and feeling more connected with our world than we normally do.

M&B: Certainly, world religions bring thousands of years of accumulated resources and historical notes about those intense spiritual experiences to the table. When you look at them, what are the common elements that catch your eyes?

When we look at the spiritual literature we see when people have had mystical experiences, we frequently see a description in which people feel that they get beyond the self, they get beyond their own ego problems like selfishness, their way of looking at the world from their own self perspective, and they look at the world in a whole different way. They look at the world in a much more holistic way, in a very interconnected way, they have a deeper understanding of what that world is all about, so from a subjective experience, people have the description where they really can get beyond the ego, get beyond the self, and see the world in a very different way. Now the question is, are they really doing that? And that’s something that is certainly open for debate both philosophically as well as spiritually.

M&B: These experiences and what they mean theologically as well as philosophically were debated for centuries. But with the advances of technology, now science has something to say about that too. The study of moment to moment reactions of the brain, that’s what you are doing, was not possible fifteen years ago.

We try to bring the science along with us so that we can then use the science in that new perspective as well and understand the world in a deeper way from both sides. That to me is really where we’re ultimately headed, and hopefully the research that I do and some of the other individuals around the world who are looking at these questions; this is what I hope the world’s going to lead to.

M&B: Let’s go to particular experiences. What would be an example for an intense spiritual state?

In the work that I have been doing over the last decade, I’ve spoken a lot about a state called absolute unitary being where everything is just undifferentiated oneness. Now, theoretically and from a philosophical perspective, that should be a very similar state regardless of how one ultimately gets to it, whether one comes from an eastern or western tradition, if you are in a completely undifferentiated state of oneness, then there really can’t be other perspectives on that. On the other hand, one still has to try to make some sense out of that so that after somebody has that experience, do they then interpret it through the lens of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, what have you, and then try to make some sense out of that.

M&B: About the spiritual states that you are talking about, there’s intense fulfillment related to those states. Sometimes people get the feeling that they reached the ultimate reality, all there is and all there was and all there will ever be. And in history there are some figures who claim that they became like God.

When one talks about the highest levels of mystical states and mystical experiences, it’s always very difficult to know how to respond to people who say that they have had them. On one hand they are, or should be at least, totally indescribable to the human mind and the human brain. On the other hand, when one has any kind of experience that’s a natural tendency that one wants to do is try to explain it and express it to other people. It really creates a conflict for the person who has that experience. Most of the people I have spoken to who have had mystical experiences of one form or another generally acknowledge that while “here’s the description that I’ll give you, but it’s really very far from what that experience was all about,” and I think that’s part of the humility that comes along with those experiences of realizing in many ways that experience was so much bigger than anything that that person really can get a hold of and understand and describe, and we sort of stand before those experiences and say “Wow, this is just something which is so much bigger than me and so much bigger than the world in many ways as I understand it, that there’s just no way for me to really understand it in its totality.”

M&B: What is your scientific goal in studying these intense experiences of oneness?

I think one of the interesting things from a research perspective is to ask “are these experiences the same, are they different, are the people different, is it the interpretation of those experiences that is different”? And that is something that we don’t really know yet. I guess it depends a little bit on the kind of experience that a person has, so I think that the question is, is that experience really the same for all those individual people? Is it not quite the same? Or if people think they did get that experience but feel something a little differently, could they have gotten to another state, another mystical state that isn’t exactly there and hopefully by the study of the biology as well as the phenomenology of these experiences, we might be able to understand them that much more and understand when they’re similar, when they’re different and how people ultimately interpret those experiences to be similar or different.

M&B: On the other side there are everyday religious experiences which are not so intense however more common.

Of course, intense experiences are not the only kinds of religious experiences, and for many people religion and spirituality is a way of life. And I think that it’s equally important for us to understand what that means for a person, so that they don’t necessarily have to have a mystical experience to have a deep understanding of what their religion or what their spiritual tradition actually means to them. And I think we need to look at both. What are the similarities and what are differences.

M&B: In religions there are some rituals related to spiritual states.

A lot of the research that I’ve been pursuing over the last decade or so have looked not just at religion, but at the specific rituals that people take part in that helps you induce various types of experiences and states. One of the things that we can look at when we look at rituals is that there is a very wide variety of rituals and they can have an impact on us in lots of different ways. To that end, a lot of rituals include visual stimulation, hearing or auditory stimulation, different types of body movements and so forth. Some can be very rhythmic, some can be very frenzied, and some can be very slow and methodical. And each of these different aspects of ritual can have a different kind of impact on us as a person, the things that we feel, the experiences that we have, and how they ultimately relate to whatever concepts that those rituals are looking at and helping us to understand in a deeper way.

M&B: What would be the resulting experience after a slow ritual?

So when we look at some of the slow rituals, for example, the ones that may be like a glory and chant which is a very slow rhythmic kind of music, or a very slow physical kind of process where a person may just be doing some kind of bowing or prostration, in a rhythmic way, those are the kinds of practices that can result in very deep feelings of calmness, acquiescence, and they may feel the sense of oceanic blissfulness. We can look also at the biology of that, the different parts of the brain and body that respond to that, so when we talk about slow rituals, we’re usually talking about what’s called the parasympathetic system in the body, or what I sometimes refer to as the quiescent system in body that helps the body relax, it helps the body rejuvenate its energy stores, for example, and this ultimately plays out in the brain because these experiences are associated with emotions such as contentment, happiness, joy, and blissfulness, and we can start to see all the different changes about how the practice itself starts, how it ultimately is played out in the behaviors and the rituals that the person takes part in, and then what happens in the brain in response to the kinds of experiences that they ultimately can have.

M&B: Are there any differences between man and women in terms of spiritual experience?

When we talk about different genders and the kinds of experiences that people have, on one level we certainly have some brain data that suggests that there is a difference between men and women’s brains and how they work, although they’re fairly subtle differences. When we talk about religious and spiritual experiences, obviously both genders can have very profound and compelling kinds of experiences, and to a certain extent when one looks at the literature, they are not fundamentally distinct kinds of experiences, there is probably a different kind of emphasis and we might see that women might focus a little bit more on the emotional aspects, more on the holistic aspects, but that’s a very subtle distinction and in the brain imaging studies that we’ve done as an example, again there are some very minor subtle differences between men and women, but in general, most of the changes that we’ve seen in one gender, we also see in the other. It might be to a slightly different degree in a few different structures, but in general, what we tend to see, especially as you get to the more profound and compelling kinds of experiences, is that there are a lot of similarities between men and women.

M&B: In what way do those mystical experiences transform an individual?

I think, as we look at different kinds of mystical experiences and different kinds of spiritual states, we do see kind of a continuum of these experiences and what myself and what my colleagues have argued for is that when one gets into the real high level of mystical states where that sense of getting beyond the self and the sense of connectedness extends not just to a particular group, but to the entire universe, to all of humanity, to the whole world, than there really is a much deeper level of compassion, a level of realization of where each of us is and the various issues each of us faces knowing that we’re doing the best that we can, but that we’re very limited in that ability, so I think its very correct to say that when people achieve deeper and deeper levels of connection and mystical experiences that they tend to feel deeper levels of compassion and love and humility in the face of other types of belief systems.

M&B: Although you are doing important studies about this topic, there are limitations too. You often talk about the limitations in both the scientific quest and religious understanding.

I think most religious belief systems feel that God is something which is infinite and all powerful and all knowing, and therefore as a human person, it’s very difficult, we’re very limited, and we really can only look at one very small aspect of what God or religion is all about. Therefore, we have to be aware of that limitation and recognize that all of us have limitations. So we’re all, in many ways, doing the best that we can with the belief systems that we have. But we also have to respect, I think, the other belief systems that other people may have because they may be looking at the same thing, but they may just be seeing it a little bit differently.

M&B: Would you give us an example?

I always liked the analogy of having different flies on an elephant, and then you ask each fly to describe an elephant. Well, the fly that is on the trunk is going to say something different than the one that’s on the tail, and different than one that’s on the tusk. And they’re all right, but they’re also all limited in how they’re looking at it. They’re not seeing the whole thing, and I think when we talk about ultimate reality, when we talk about God, these are such huge concepts that I think people really have to be very aware of and careful about the limitations that they are putting on those ideas, on the ideas as they understand them, and also recognize that everybody else is working with very similar kinds of limitations. Hopefully this will give us a little bit more sense of compassion for each other to realize that we’re really all kind of in the same boat, and we’re all kind of dealing with the same problems of trying to understand our world the best that we can.

M&B: There is also the limit of sensory experience.

Certainly, the biology of our brain speaks to that very issue. We miss so much of what comes into the brain, what gets up into our consciousness, and what we are aware of is so small relative to all the other things that are going on around us, that it really is very sobering I think. We think that we see the whole world and that we see it so clearly, and a lot of the research that has been done over the last 10 or 20 years shows that our view of the world is really very limited, and I think when you extent that to religion and spirituality it really makes, at least me, pause and say well maybe we really need to be a little bit more aware of what those limitations are about. On one hand it’s great that we can have a spiritual or religious view about our world, but lets keep it in the understanding of what the limitations that our own mind, our own brain, impose upon that ability to think about that and to act upon it and understand it in the right way.

M&B: To summarize, what would be the role of science and spirituality in understanding the ultimate reality?

On one hand, science offers these wonderful tools to try to get at what is out there. On the other hand, religion and spirituality offer a path towards getting beyond the self. I think we really need to look at those experiences in which the person feels that they get beyond the subjective and objective nature of what the world is all about and look at it from a whole different perspective. However, our sense of religion, spirituality, and God, that is ultimately processed through the functions of the human brain. In that regard, the human brain actually in some ways constricts our ability because the universe and God are very, very big concepts, and we as human beings are very finite and very mortal in terms of how we think about the world. We can’t look at the whole world. We can’t look at the entire universe, and we can’t look at all of God. We can look at a very specific aspect of them. Therefore, the human brain actually constrains how we think about religion, how we think about God, and how we make sense of that.

M&B: So in a sense, we get a glimpse of the unlimited in our limitedness.

We really are trapped within our own mind, we’re trapped within our own consciousness, and we have a long way to go, I think, to be able to get beyond the human brain and in many ways, to have the brain get outside of itself to take a look at and really be able to know what is out there in reality.

Many people think of supernatural phenomena as miracles or as divine signs. However, through his studies in biology, the immune system and DNA, Dr. Denis Alexander concludes that what is called natural is nothing less than miraculous. Dr. Alexander, a renowned molecular biologist, is constantly amazed by the extraordinariness of the human immune system. He explores the relationship between science and religion as the director of the Faraday Institute at Cambridge University. Dr. Alexander writes, lectures and broadcasts widely in the field of science and religion. Since 1992 he has been Editor of the journal Science and Christian Belief, and currently serves on the National Committee of Christians in Science and as a member of the International Society for Science and Religion.

M&B: Let’s talk a little bit about your research on the immune system and cancer. Specifically regarding regulatory T-Cells.

Actually, I’m working on the very early stages of T-cell development in the thymus. T-cells, which are the white blood cells that defend us against viruses and bacteria, all have to be “educated” in the thymus. They have this very strict program of education, and then only a very small percentage graduate, so only about 1 or 2 percent of all the T-cells will actually graduate. If you had that sort of system in our own educational system, I think we would look on it as not very successful. If 98 percent of all our undergraduates die, we wouldn’t think that was a very good system. But in the thymus it actually works very well. So what happens is your T-cells learn to only recognize foreign antigens like viruses and bacteria – things that are going to invade your body – and they won’t attack your own tissues. That’s the kind of education that the thymus gives. It’s really a wonderful, amazing system.

M&B: What is the specific role of the T-cells and how is it related to the functioning of other elements within the immune system?

Well, basically the whole immune system is highly complex, so T-cells are not the only cells around. You have B-cells, you have natural killer cells, you have whole sets of different types of cells, and they’re all doing different jobs. They all have to cooperate together.

Then you have killer cells, or K-cells. These natural killer cells are those which are involved in the immediate reaction of the immune system to antigens once they attack your body. So the body is set up so you have an immediate response system, whereby-it’s like mobilization of an army-you can mobilize small bits of your army in the first 24 hours. That’s the natural killer cells. They will give you immediate defense. You have helper T-cells that help the B-cells in order to develop and to make antibodies. B-cells give you your acquired immune system, which is the immune system that only comes into action after about 10 to 14 days. So, that’s the mobilization of the full resources of your army. Thinking of it in terms of a kind of defense system is actually quite useful. T-cells are involved in wiping out virally infected cells, and so they all coordinate together in a rather delicately controlled, complex balance, but they all have to coordinate with each other to make sure the system works properly. It’s amazing how it works; actually, I think, it’s remarkable.

M&B: The natural killer cells attack the cells which are not supposed to be there. But how can they recognize cells that are part of us, how do they define the “self.” Would you give us a parable about how the natural killer cells work?

In the natural killer cell system, there is also the idea of the missing self, which is the idea that when there’s a certain molecule which is not there, natural killer cells won’t attack. Therefore, they don’t recognize our own tissues. This is the idea of the missing self hypothesis. They will only attack things which they perceive to be foreign. It’s like the foreign thing is coming in and waving a flag which says, you know, I want to be attacked, I should be attacked. And that’s set up by a very carefully balanced system, between activating receptors and inhibiting receptors which operate together in order to bring that to pass. It’s quite a complex molecular system, in fact.

M&B: But it still doesn’t provide 100% support. Obviously we are not totally immune to disease.

Now, once the T-cells get out in the periphery, that’s to say the blood stream and the spleen and the other places, in the gut and so forth, then there are other mechanisms in place to keep them under control and to make sure that they don’t actually start attacking your own body. And of course, now and again, very sadly, that does happen. There are mistakes made, and so you get things like diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis and these sorts of auto-immune diseases, and that’s where the T-cells start attacking the tissues of your own body. It’s amazing, most of the time that doesn’t happen, and that’s all up to the thymus, since it educates the T-cells.

M&B: In what way do these cause cancer?

We’re actually working on a mouse model of the human cancer called Lymphoma. It happens when T-cells don’t stop dividing, and so if you look at all the immune cell types of cancers, they’re all very similar kinds of things. Certain cells of the immune system actually undergo errors in the early part of their development, and instead of moving on to the next stage of development they get stuck. Then, they carry on dividing and proliferating, filling up the whole of your bone marrow or your blood stream, and so you end up with white blood cell leukemia.

I could just tell you one example, the one that we’re working on. Basically, what happens is that when normal T-cells get DNA damage, they die. So as a program, when you get any kind of DNA damage, there’s a trigger that happens, and those cells will be wiped out by a process called apoptosis, which is programmed cell death. All of our cells, actually, have the ability to do that. But now and again something happens, an acrogenic change takes place, which is a change in a gene which causes cancer, and that prevents the cells from dying by apoptosis. And so, the cells that have this DNA damage are left to proliferate, and once you get DNA damage, then the chromosomes become unstable, and you get more DNA damage. It’s like a kind of downward spiral. Then all kinds of things happen that cause that cell to become a cancer cells, which will carry on dividing and dividing and eventually kill the mouse, or kill the patient. We’ve just recently identified one of the mechanisms whereby those cells that should die are kept alive, and it’s a very, very subtle mechanism, which is one particular protein, one particular stage of development to t-cells in the thymus.

M&B: We think that dying is a bad thing. But to give an example at the cellular molecular level, “not dying” is actually a bad thing.

Yes, I mean, death is built into our genomes, essentially. You know, we will die eventually because of all kinds of mechanisms, including the shortening of our chromosomes. The cells will only go through a certain number of divisions before they come to the end of their life. There’s a sort of internally clock. Now, of course, it’s possible that we can patch up all these things, we can use stem cells, we can use transplants. If someone needs a new heart or a liver, we give them a new heart or a liver. So clearly we can extend life by years, by decades, and that process is obviously already happening. In fact, I would say that the priority in that way is not to give wealthy people just a few more decades of life, but to try and help those people in lower income countries where what they need is better food and better water, a good water supply, basic medical care, and therefore their average life will then go from 35 up to 65 or 70 years old and so on. So, I slightly worry about this huge activity in the wealthy world to try and make ourselves immortal, and try to extend our life by another decade or so, when such big slices of the world’s population are still lacking even the very basic medical care that I think they should be given. We can extend life by potentially quite a lot, but to become immortal, I don’t think so. I think mortality is written into our genes.

M&B: As a scientist you study the immune system, as well as life and death. But as a person, what do you feel about them? Would you comment on the purpose behind of all these processes?

Well, I suppose that as someone who believes in God, I would see all of these processes that we describe as biologists, as scientists, as part of God’s processes, that part of His intentions is to bring about His own particular ends and purposes on this earth. And clearly, I think one of those purposes is transience. You know, if you have life and death, you have things in process, you also have transience. We’re not immortal-not in our present bodies at least-we don’t display the qualities of immortality. So therefore, I think that fits with the idea of a God who wants to bring in processes which involve life, and they also involve death, and they involve moving on. So we have dynamic systems. We’re not static, we’re not little puppets, you know, who always have the same kind of characteristics. We are in motion, we’re always changing, we’re always moving on. That’s what we see in human society as well as in the whole world of biological diversity. It’s a dynamic process of things, changing processes, which come into being and which go out again, and life and death go together. You know, you can’t have life without death.

M&B: But there is a sense of awe when you think about the tiniest T-cells getting educated. For some people, it would seem amazing and even miraculous as splitting the water with a simple rod, if you don’t mind me saying this.

It is amazing, and I’m constantly amazed and when I look at the immune system, and when I look at the way cells work, when I look at the way, indeed, biochemical signaling pathways operate together. I think that fact is quite remarkable, actually, and should arouse our awe and our wonder, and indeed many people look to God as a natural overall explanation. Not in the sense of replacing God in the gaps of our knowledge, but as our knowledge increases, then our understanding of God’s power and wisdom in creation increases along with that, and to me is real natural theology. Natural theology is not looking for the gaps in our knowledge, but as our knowledge increases coming to a greater appreciation of what God can do. It’s interesting. Actually, just a couple of days ago, I was listening to the account of a Chinese student in Cambridge in the UK, where I come from, and she was telling us about how she had come to have faith in God. What she said was that she was in her biochemistry lectures in the university, and the lecture was about how DNA in each cell, if you stretch it all out, it actually comes to two meters long. You know, if you take the DNA from any one cell, the packing of the DNA is so amazing that when you pull it out, it is two yards long. And she was so amazed by that, she suddenly thought, in the middle of the lecture, there’s got to be a God. There must be a God. It’s so wonderful, you know, she was amazed by this wonderful thing, and she’s moved to belief in God, and I thought that was really quite interesting.

M&B: Do you think arriving to this conclusion has to do with having an open mind, in many ways?

Yes, I think it does. I think the problem is that people brought up in a scientific culture can so often think that the scientific story is the only one that matters. They’re like people reading a book, but they see it and they only look at the black ink on the page, but when they look at the structure of the words they miss the whole message. And I think that’s always a danger in the reductionist approach. Now I’m a reductionist in the methods I use in analyzing the immune system or looking at cancer mechanisms, and that sort of reductionism is very important for us as a methodology we use in our science. But, of course, we shouldn’t then move from that into thinking that reductionism gives us the final story. It just gives us one slice of the story, one little layer of the overall story. I think we then have to take a step backwards and start looking at the message as a whole. That’s terribly important, and it’s always a temptation for people who are deeply imbedded in the scientific community or living in a scientific culture of some kind just to think the scientific story is the only one that matters, but clearly that’s not the case.

M&B: You talked about a sense of awe that surpasses the mind. But when we attribute unexplained things to God, some people tend to think that God is the God of mystery. God is the God of miracles, God of the unknown and the God of the gaps. Would you please comment on this idea?

I think the idea of the God of the gaps is a very unfortunate idea; that has a very long history. Actually, it goes back many centuries. I’m not quite sure when the idea first began. But I think it’s always been tempting as science got going, especially in the nineteenth century when science was less developed than it was now.. It was a temptation for people to try and locate their God within the present gaps of the scientific knowledge. So obviously, as the gaps are closed, so one’s understanding of God will shrink. God is then located in smaller and smaller mysteries.

Now, I think that’s very unfortunate from a theological point of view, because certainly as a Christian I believe in a God who is the author of creation, and who is the author of everything that exists. Therefore, the author writes everything, the author writes the whole book. And it would be very odd if you were looking in the book, if you went to chapter 9 and you went to the second paragraph and you said, “Ah-ha! Now I’ve located the mystery of the author in the second paragraph in chapter 9.” That would be a silly kind of argument. And I think that’s the same kind of argument that the God of the gaps people use. They try and locate bits of the book, forgetting that either the book has an author, or it doesn’t. There’s either someone who is writing the text or there isn’t. So, I think God is in charge of all the processes of the world, upholding and sustaining the whole of the book of creation, if you’d like to use that analogy. So whether we have current gaps in our knowledge now has no theological significance as far as I’m concerned. It doesn’t matter. It’s of no particular interest, so theology has no hidden investments in gaps in our knowledge. It really doesn’t matter. It simply says we’re ignorant about many things. Which is good, because otherwise I would be out of a job.

Interview conducted by Mustafa Tabanli for Ebru TV for the Emmy Award winning television series Matter and Beyond.

M&B: Would you please tell us a little bit about the current status of poverty and lack of development in the world?

The world today is very divided. There are more people than at any time in human history who have a decent life, who have wealth and prosperity. There’s also a large group of people in the middle, but there are about a billion people, a sixth of the world’s population that lives in great misery and maybe half the world’s population that lives at levels that are far less than they could be. When you look you can see good news and bad news. The good news is that there are fewer people who are poor than ever. It’s worth remembering that through most of the world’s history, most people have lived short lives, a quarter of children have died before they were five, very few people had education, very few people even were able to travel more than ten kilometers from where they were born. So today’s world is a very different world. It’s a world where vastly more people have opportunities and even in the last 50 years more people have a chance for a decent life than at any time in the past, and we have to remember that there has been extraordinary progress. Second, I think that there is an awakening of the moral conscience of the world that we see in the millennium development goals, in speeches of leaders all over the world that the situation, the historic reality that most of the world’s people were poor is no longer acceptable and is no longer necessary. The bad news is, today we know that this poverty is unacceptable. We know the kinds of lives that people live. We have images, we have data, we have knowledge, and we know that it doesn’t need to be. We know that we have the resources to change it.

M&B: How are the millennium development goals related to moral awakening?

Around the turn of the millennium, there was a great deal of reflection about what had come before and what should come in the future. One of the frustrations that many people had is that there had been meeting after meeting about the environment, about women, about health, about transportation, about every subject that you could imagine, and at each meeting there were promises made. Wonderful speeches given, wonderful texts written, declarations … but when you looked back the promises had very rarely been kept. So that when the United Nations organized a meeting of world leaders in September 2000 to mark the transformation to the new millennium there was an agreement that things should look different in the future. And so there was a historic moment, a historic declaration when all the leaders of the world, every one of them agreed to sign on to a millennium declaration to end poverty. But they also decided to use some of the tools that came from business. So they decided to set deadlines, they decided that if you can’t measure it nobody cares, nobody will look back, and so the millennium development goals that emerged were first of all just a few, just eight millennium development goals, so that people would not forget them. They all have numbers associated with them and there’s a date (the year 2015), and there’s an accountability structure – who’s responsible, who’s going to be held to account for the achievement of these goals. So these goals are a very exciting departure. In some ways they’re a very minimal. For example, they want to reduce poverty by half by the year 2015. How can you tell that to a group of poor people that only half of you will be out of poverty? It only says that all children will receive primary education. It barely looks at equality between men and women. It’s a very simple set of goals, but what it represents is a historic change and first a very clear determination to end poverty in our lifetime.

M&B: How can or should technology facilitate the transition from poverty to wealth? What role do you think technology should play in this process?

Technology plays roles in many ways. Perhaps the most dramatic is health. Many of the diseases that killed billions of people throughout human history now can be cured or prevented. Remember how many children through most of history have died of respiratory diseases, have died of diarrhea, those are important.

The changes in educational technology are also a huge advance, as are the changes in the understanding of how economies work, in the production of food, transportation, the ability to communicate. For example, when there is a disaster, the knowledge of it is transmitted within hours. Through most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there were famines in Cape Verde where literally hundreds of millions of people died, and no one knew until long after the fact. Today that doesn’t happen anymore. So many different threads of the progress of science and technology, engineering, and communications really have transformed the outlook of what we know and therefore what we can do.

M&B: Technology has an important role and surely change requires the investment of capital. But today economists are considering non-traditional capitals such as human capital, social capital, and spiritual capital in order to achieve social change. What do they mean? Are they interchangeable or related in some way?

One of the most important realizations of the development in the world over the past twenty years is that there is nothing more important than investing in human beings. The term that’s used is human development, human capital. It can be used in a narrow sense such as investing in education, investing in healthcare, making sure that when a young person finishes school, the whole investment is not lost when they cannot find a job. But human capital has a new meaning today. It means developing the potential of human beings to the fullest.

There’s a new dimension that’s been added more recently, and it goes perhaps in some circles under the name of spiritual capital, and it grows I think from a realization that living life without meaning, just living life to earn a living, eat, work, and sleep is a futile exercise. There has to be an appreciation of what the purpose of life is, and that’s what spirituality means for most people. That means looking for this meaning both individually for their own spiritual paths, but also for the spiritual life of the community. It is the virtues of compassion, caring, helping your neighbors. It is perhaps the most common theme through all the world religions-do unto others as you would have them do unto you. So people are starting to study what kind of investment goes into spiritual development.

M&B: There are also some important spiritual elements that have direct impact on the economy, such as trust and compassion.

The ideal of how traditional communities operate is this: people take care of each other, they know each other, and they’re compassionate. If someone is ill, the neighbors come and take care of them. The villagers or the community trust each other, they trust their religious leader. They trust their political leader. Sadly the realities in the past, but also in the present, are often very different. There are people in almost any community who are left aside. So the ideal of a community is not the reality. But the ideals, the ideals of compassion and the ideals of trust of believing in human nature are a very important spiritual heritage of human kind today.

Now faced with modernization, the ideals of traditional societies are much harder to practice. Today more than half the world’s people live in cities, and the projections are that this number will rise. In cities of tens of millions of people, trust takes on a very different meaning. People are often anonymous, and communities and individuals can be completely lost in the sea of humanity. No one knows your name, no one knows who you are. So in today’s world we need to build new kinds of trust, and new kinds of trust come in strange ways. I think it’s fascinating that young people today find trust in Facebook, in MySpace, and social networking, but they also find trust in a new found belief in a spirituality that they choose, that they have discovered in their adult life.

M&B: Today you lead Berkley Center’s program on Religion and Global Development at Georgetown University. But you also led the World Bank’s faith and ethics work 2000-06. How did you get involved with that?

In the 1980s there was a period when the World Bank and the British Development Aid were at odds with many leaders and organizations from the world of religion. Religious people were demonstrating in the streets, and the development organizations closed their doors and ignored what was happening. But gradually there was in awareness that this made no sense because these were natural allies who should be working together, who were both inspired by a vision to poverty. So some leaders got together and started to have a dialogue, and their first conclusion was that they knew very little about each other and that there were tremendous misunderstandings. Second, they found out that there was a great common interest, a passion, and a commitment to dealing with the issues of poverty. And third, there were some very difficult issues. Different ways of looking at economic growth, different ways of looking at the meaning of wealth, different ways of looking at models. Therefore a dialogue about these complex issues was needed.

I worked for many decades on development, mostly on Africa but also on East Asia, on Latin America, and many different parts of the world, and one day the President of the World Bank, Jim Wolfenson asked me to help him with a project to bridge the worlds of religion and development, and so I was reluctantly drafted. This was in about 1999. I knew very little about the world of religion, but I knew quite a lot about issues of poverty and was very interested in the social dimensions and in the anthropological, social, historical approach, which I believed in very strongly. So I saw it as an opportunity to learn and to move into a whole new world.

M&B: Based on your experience, what can you say about the role of religions in progress and development?

I started to work the links and the overlap and the disjunctions between religion and development in about 1999. At first it seemed like a logical, relatively straightforward challenge because religious organizations, the Catholic Church, Muslim organizations, Buddhists, and Hindus play such active roles in providing social services, and they are so obviously important for poor people as well as for rich people in most parts of the world. We were surprised by how controversial this proposition has been to try to link religion and development. What it showed is that for many people there are many levels of hesitation about the role that religion plays in today’s world. For some people, there has been an assumption that with modernization and scientific progress, religion would simply die out or become an option for perhaps an occasional Sunday or Friday and that it would no longer play a significant role in people’s lives because they were at a different stage of development. Now that assumption has been very clearly proved to be quite false because today, if anything, religion is becoming more important in societies, rich and poor, than it ever was before, in a much more varied plural form, but it still is very clear that this hypothesis has been proved to be wrong. But people also have other concerns about the role that religion plays. For many, religion is seen as very political and divisive, particularly in societies where there are different religious traditions and some history of tension. Some people are still very nervous about the role that religion plays, and they sometimes forget the role that religion plays in social peace as well as in giving meaning to life.

Also in religious traditions as well as in politics, it is completely untenable that the poor people in the world would be expected to sacrifice so that the rich world can continue their consumption and that they would need to continue to live at a much lower resource level. For most people, the answer is first trying to curtail unnecessary use of resources, so much more conservation. And the second is there needs to be a much more energy put into the new technological developments so that people can benefit from the good of modernization without destruction of the earth. But I think there is a subject that needs much more attention which is the meaning of equity. The meaning of a kind of society where there is much more balance and where there is much more fairness. For me, it is impossible to imagine a future where we do not have a much more balanced world, much less divides between rich and poor, where we benefit from creativity, where we benefit from human development, but where these ideas are shared across all societies in the world.

M&B: What is the most efficient way to achieve the results?

In social change, people working together at the community level, those who know the situation, who know their realities, and who know their world are absolutely necessary to make change. That’s true in Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and the United States as well as in Europe. Communities really make the difference. On the other hand, there are also a million wasted efforts where communities start something, and then it fails because they’re frustrated by some kind of an obstacle that’s outside of their control. So we need also to recognize that leadership is an essential ingredient in change. Political leadership, having a vision of what’s happening in other places, and having ideas that cross boundaries are absolutely essential to change as well. So my formula, the formula that I believe in very strongly, is that to see the kind of changes that we’re looking for in the world you need the fire from above. You need the leadership, you need the inspiration, you need the policy framework, as boring as policy may seem. You must have the economic and social policy that’s from above. But you also have to have the drive that comes from the community, the fire from below, the organization, the ideas, and the knowledge. And the key, the place where you see transformation is when you have the two working and coming together.

M&B: Would you please give us an example where a problem is brought to the table and a community helps in planning? Can you give us some examples?

The easiest example where you see that is when a community has a wonderful set of ideas for marketing crops or for bringing new land under cultivation or for building a set of schools, but they don’t have the resources locally and someone from outside – whether it’s a foundation or a government or an organization like the World Bank – brings the resources and magically it’s transformed into some kind of change. Reality is usually more complex, and it’s a process of give-and-take because one thing we know is that money alone does not solve all problems. So that what you will see is an idea that comes from a community. Let’s take an idea for building a new school and from outside someone will raise the question: why are the girls in the community not going to school? The first answer that may come is that there are practical obstacles. The girls are needed at home or the girls are not safe when they go to school, and so an idea might be offered from another community in another place or from another country to solve those problems, and then perhaps the girls do go to school but they don’t succeed because the expectations in the community are that girls really are going to be married and so they shouldn’t go to school anyway. And then a political leader or a religious leader will give an inspiring speech or a woman leader will come to visit the village and will show the girls what is possible, that it’s possible to be a doctor or a political leader or an engineer and slowly through the alchemy of different ideas coming from different places, the understanding of what success is will change, and the resources will multiply, and we’ll transform the visions of what a good life is from a rather narrow traditional view to one that takes the genius of the community and builds it with other ideas that come from outside.

So the coming together of the practical technical side of benefitting from the advantages of modern technology with a revival of some of the best traditions of spirituality I think is part of the magic that we might look to in today’s world.

Interview conducted by Mustafa Tabanli for Ebru TV for the Emmy Award winning television series Matter and Beyond.

Though tremendous technical efforts are being spent on solving the problem of privacy concerns in RFID usage, this is only one side of the story. The problems human beings encounter cannot be solved solely by technical means because humans are not products of engineering. They have hearts, minds, and consciences, which constitute their metaphysical dimension.

Technology brings a great many novelties into our lives, but usually at high cost. Driven by the economic expansion resulting from advances in manufacturing, climate change has been one of the biggest threats facing humanity for the last couple of decades. Mass production has led to excessive consumption, which is seen as one reason for obesity around the world. While nuclear energy plants feed hundreds of cities with electricity, weapons of mass destruction threaten human existence. Not only our bodily health and environment are under threat; new technology leaves almost no room for our privacy. Surrounded by wireless networks, computers, and cell phones, it is easy to gain access to the personal information of others. Although some sincere efforts have been made to improve the civil law to protect privacy, there is much confusion, and the boundaries of private life cannot be determined; at this point the prescriptions of the heavenly religions, especially of Islam, are worth consideration.

We usually underestimate these high-tech intrusions into our lives, for we tend to enjoy, and thus are blinded by the countless, fascinating benefits of technology. Imagine the following scenario: let us say you are just about to leave your workplace for home when you receive a message from your kitchen on your cell phone. In the message you find the shopping list that you need to buy from the grocery store. You go to the grocery store, put all the items in your shopping cart, and drive the cart through the checkout without stopping. All the items are scanned simultaneously and the total amount is deducted from your credit account automatically. When you arrive home, on the small LCD screen in your kitchen you see a list of all the food items past their expiry date in the refrigerator, and you throw them out. When you put all your laundry in the washing machine, you do not bother to choose a program; the machine does it automatically by recognizing each item of clothing separately.

This kind of story could be routine for most of us in the near future if Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) becomes part of our daily lives. Many of us already use RFID tags routinely. Examples include the ignitions of many millions of automobiles, proximity cards, automatic toll payments, and payment tokens. So, what is RFID exactly? RFID is technology for the automated identification of objects and people. An RFID device-frequently just called an RFID tag-is a small chip designed for wireless transmission. It is generally attached to an antenna in a package that resembles an ordinary adhesive sticker. An RFID tag transmits data over the air in response to interrogation by an RFID reader. In general, small RFID tags are passive. They have no on-board power source; they derive their transmission power from the signal of an interrogating reader. Some RFID tags contain batteries. There are two such types: semi-passive tags, whose batteries power their circuitry when they are interrogated and active tags, whose batteries power their transmission.¹

Although RFID promises such advances in our lives and there is intensive research going on in both engineering and business management areas as to how and when RFID can be implemented in a broader sense in daily life-medication, business, military, and so on-there are also some concerns being raised by civil rights circles, consumer rights groups, and some individuals about the implementation of RFID. The main issue is potential personal and corporate privacy threats. RFID technology poses unique privacy and security concerns because the human eye cannot detect whether RFID tags are being read, and RFID tags do not hold a history of their past readings. As a result, tags are promiscuous: they can be read by entities other than their owners and without their owners’ knowledge. Further, both tags and readers can be covertly embedded in the environment; short-range readers can be small enough to fit into a cell phone.²

Threats can be put into two groups: threats affecting corporations, and threats affecting individuals. For example, an agent who has an RFID reader capable of interrogating a competitor’s products can walk through the aisles of a store and get information about the inventory level, data about customer preferences, turnover rate of specific products (each item with RFID tag becomes uniquely identifiable), supply chain data, and so on. From the perspective of individuals, their private lives might be investigated without their approval by third parties. Their tastes as to what kind of clothing they choose to buy, what kind of specific medication they are on, what kind of valuable items they possess are susceptible to unauthorized disclosure. Because each tag is uniquely identifiable, when tags move from one person to another, the relations between the individuals can be determined. As an extreme case, if a tag is not removed from an item after purchase is completed (most of the time tags will be kept on items for customer service requirements), a thief with an RFID reader which can transmit signals powerful enough to detect items in houses can easily choose his next victim.

These are all possibilities which can be thought of as a threat for now. As technology advances, some of these threats will be eliminated by novel technical measures, but then new threats will emerge.

As technology adds new and enriching dimensions to our lives, it also introduces new problems for its adopters. Most of the scenarios mentioned above might not become real threats. However, people’s fear of their privacy being violated has increased tremendously with huge developments in telecommunications, the sudden invasion of our lives by the Internet and finally the appearance of RFID on the horizon. Are we going to feel that we are under constant surveillance in our personal lives, at home, at school, in the office, on the road? While numerous researchers are trying to find answers to calm the unease about RFID in the public, they still cannot give satisfactory responses to some of the concerns.

RFID-Privacy and moral issues

Though tremendous technical efforts are being spent on solving the problem of privacy concerns in RFID usage, this is only one side of the story. The problems human beings encounter cannot be solved solely by technical means because humans are not products of engineering. They have hearts, minds, and consciences, which constitute their metaphysical dimension. Anybody who attempts to solve a social problem while ignoring this dimension of the human being is bound to fail in the attempt.

A person cannot be isolated from the rest of society as isolation contradicts human nature. Since human beings need to live within society, it is vital that everybody has an understanding of some basic common moral values which sustain peace and security among people. Most religions try to establish a moral system that advises individuals to be merciful and kind to each other and to refrain from attitudes or actions which disturb others. Islam also promotes such moral values.

Humankind holds a position above all other creations such that it is apparent that God Almighty values humans more than they value themselves or each other. Just as every individual is valuable in the eyes of God, so is his or her honor, character and dignity. No matter what the circumstances, it is strictly forbidden to insult, condemn, investigate or publicize the faults, deficiencies or private state of an individual. The secrecy of the private life is untouchable.

The Qur’an decisively prohibits spying into and disclosing the secrets and private lives of people, and orders keeping secret any detect and sinful act which one has seen in a person: O you believe! Avoid much suspicion, for some suspicion is a grave sin (liable to God’s punishment); and do not spy (on one another) (Qur’an 49:12). Neither can a Muslim government spy on people to see whether they are committing a sin or crime unless there is decisive proof that they are committing something against the public peace. Likewise, spying into homes, opening and reading letters that belong to others, and listening to the conversations of other people are all wrong.³

The second caliph of Islam, Umar ibn al-Khattab, was once walking on the streets of Medina, the capital, at night. Suddenly he heard noise coming from one of the houses, a noise indicating that somebody was drunk and singing loudly. Umar climbed over the wall, entered the house, and witnessed a very disappointing situation. He complained of the situation to the man inside, and said, “Did you think that God would allow you to hide this fault of yours?” The man replied, “O Caliph of the Muslims, stop and don’t rush. I committed one sin in the eyes of God; however, you have made three mistakes here. First of all, God says, Do not spy on one another (Qur’an 49:12), but you spied on me. Second, God says, Come to dwellings (in the normal way) by their doors (Qur’an 2:189), but you climbed over my wall, and finally God says, O you who believe! Do not enter dwellings other than your own until you have ascertained the permission of their residents and have greeted them with peace (Qur’an 24:27), but you entered my house without getting my permission and you did not greet me with peace.”

Umar was very upset with himself and replied, “If I forgive you, will you forgive me?” The man said, “Yes.” Then Umar said, “I forgive you,” and left the house.⁴

It is possible that only a small fraction of society has suffered violation of its privacy; however, most of us fear being the next in line. Here I have tried to introduce the concerns surrounding the implementation of RFID in daily life. Those concerns are a subset of a bigger problem, which is the misuse of technology and violation of others’ rights by intruding into their privacy. Every technical precaution taken to ease those concerns will no doubt be followed by new technical challenges posed by the violators. It is almost impossible to stop this wave of fears just by adhering to technological advances. Moral values must always be promoted at the individual level and also at societal level. Until the day that our values lead our technical advances, none of us will have the luxury of having a private corner in this life.

Yasin Ceran is a math teacher in Houston, Texas.

Notes

1. Juels, Ari. “RFID Security and Privacy: A Research Survey”, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication, Vol. 24 , No. 2, February 2006.
2. Garfinkel, Simson L., Ari Juels, Ravi Pappu. “RFID Privacy: An Overview of Problems and Proposed Solutions,” IEEE Security and Privacy published by IEEE Computer Society.
3. Ünal, Ali, The Qur’an with Annotated Interpretation in Modern English, New Jersey, Tughra Books, 2007.
4. Kanzu’l-Ummâl, 3/808 hadith number; 8827.

In my view, with its wonderful people, welcoming nature, and geographical features, this realm is no different than a hallway to the heavens. Once upon a time in its golden age this realm used to be perceived as a trajectory to the highest gardens of Paradise, and its value was worth the entire world. In those days, travelers from faraway lands would visit this realm, and once they sipped its dazzling flavor and felt inside the heavenliness in its aura their spirits were raised, and on departure they comforted their hearts with a promise of a revisit.

The inhabitants of this realm were more intimately connected with physical phenomena than we are today; they were in close embrace with all existence, and were like brothers and sisters to nature. Their homes, villages, and towns were in harmony with nature from all aspects; they were spacious and heart-expanding, and their surroundings were like a botanic garden. With their celestial horizons, crystal-clear sentiments, and otherworldly spirits these homes, villages, and towns made people living there feel as if Paradise was only one step away. This was why people considered their graves an important station on this journey of a single step. They decorated their cemeteries with the colors and patterns of their angelic horizons, for they believed the cemetery was the first point of arrival in the Afterlife. They transformed this splendid area, which appears horrific to the materialistic mind’s eye, into a pleasant resort.

When we were ourselves, our homes, streets, and walkways exchanged warm glances with their inhabitants; their demeanor was so meaningful that those who could observe them from the angle of their spirit could feel as if these places were intoning things that were unique to our realm. Almost everyone in this realm was intoxicated with a kind of music originating in their heart and refined in their beliefs, dreams, and subconscious. Every moment thrilled them with a different breeze of meanings and they were overjoyed.

There were occasional occurrences of frustration and sorrow, but they did not last for long. Such moments were immediately followed by the victory of this realm’s unique character, texture, and ever-enchanting nature that would overcome all the tumult in people’s conscience and convert the darkest autumns into the brightest springs. Our days and nights were always cordial, our months and years were all resplendent.

Every day started with a new beauty as the cries of spring were heard everywhere; the morning breeze brought the scent of Prophet Joseph’s shirt and rivers overflowed from the life-giving spring of Prophet Job . . . a kind of joy from the afterlife was being tasted in this realm. As the days were illumined with the rays from the sun, so were our hearts lit with the light from beyond the heavens. Like sunflowers, the eyes of the heart were vigilant for this light, our souls lived on a schedule adjusted according to the prayer times-the propitious times of the day-and hearts would beat with its excitement. Each portion of the day would then become like a new festival; each week, month, and year would come and pass in unique colors, caressing the heads of these fortunate people and reminding them every season that they were strolling on the walkways of Paradise. Every morning in the lands of this privileged community was like a kind of Resurrection; every noon rose with a new touch of heat; a cool breeze was felt everywhere in the afternoon; the music of silence was heard in the depths of the heart every evening . . . the entire day offered a feast of scenery through its windows opened to the beyond. Enchanted by this profundity and color, even the ones with hearts harder than rocks would soften like silk.

The generations of those days were blessed with glowing hearts and an affectionate setting. Unyielding security and peace ruled everywhere. Mobs, anarchy, tyranny, deep state, unsolved murders . . . these crimes that we experience so much today were unknown to those generations. They were foreign words, for order, harmony, justice, and mercy prevailed in their realm.

Ambition, jealousy, ill-gotten gains, illegal hoards, bribery, nepotism, swindling, cheating, embezzlement . . . these crimes were out of the question. Indeed, some of them only existed in the dictionary, for the auspicious people of those days were exceptionally contented with what they possessed, stayed away from what was forbidden, and fixed on what was lawful, and they pursued a life in justice.

Occurrences of enmity, feelings of murder and revenge, mischief and corrupt plots, passion for authority were the rarest things, for the people’s mindset was directed towards a serious dialogue effort, a philosophy of tolerance, an ethics based on love and compassion.

Autocratic rule was regarded as tyranny from ancient times; for them, despots were no different than pharaohs and were mentioned with imprecations; defaming and classifying others were works of despicable ones. People maintained a life in humility, munificence, and generosity-they acted on forgiveness and courage, breathed with sacrifice and sincerity.

In that bright era, alcoholism, drug abuse, smuggling were never as frequently committed as today. You would not see modern problems like “homeless children” or “addictions to various substances” even as entries in dictionaries. For people then behaved with their hearts, spirits, and minds in control; there were people who made intellectual efforts, sincere hearts that beat for their country and humankind.

They were the prototype people of virtue, and in their abode neither filthy affairs such as those listed above nor corruptions like sinfulness, prostitution, impertinence, and bohemian lifestyles that bring disgrace on being human, could exist. Above all, avoiding sin, and maintaining chastity, virtue, divine ethics, and accountability were their most distinct attributes and natural state of being. They were on a straight track with a clear road map in their hands; they were blessed with a humane profundity that prepared them to walk on such a broad road. They lived straight, walked straight, and became a blissful memory for the generations to come. I wonder where we are on this road.