The Nature of Secular and Religious Sciences and their Criteria in the Views of Ayatollah Mesbah and Ayatollah Javadi Amoli

The problem of religious science and its contrast to secular science is an unending debate. Ayatollah Javadi Amoli and Ayatollah Mesbah, two great figures of the Islamic seminary and two prominent scholars of contemporary Islamic civilization, have theorized about the nature and possibility of religious science and its contrast to secular science. The present paper is a comparative study of the views of these two scholars concerning criteria of religious and secular sciences. While they provide different definitions and criteria of religious science, they present the same definition and instance of secular science. Being secular or anti-religious is not an essential feature of any science. Instead, it is a feature ascribed to a science given its background, philosophy, practitioner, and goals. Ayatollah Javadi categorizes science, with its divine reality, into two types in terms of its practitioner. If the practitioner believes in elements of divine philosophy, then the science will be religious, and if the practitioner is atheist and anti-religious, then the science will be atheist or secular. Ayatollah Mesbah evaluates science as religious or anti-religious in terms of its disposition for value-based descriptions. The latter view considers a science as religious insofar as it does not conflict the religion at any stage from its foundations to its problems and effects..