Article 1 : Does science make belief in Allah/God obsolete?
Necessarily, it does - speaks a physicist
If not, we must invent a science-friendly, science-compatible fiction of Allah/God. First, try the pantheon of available fictional creators. Inspect thoroughly. If none fits the bill, invent a new one. The Allah/God of your choice must be a stickler for the so-called divine principles laid down by the priests-the classical inventors of Allah/God over the centuries. Science does not take kindly to the so-called deity who, ignorants suppose, if piqued or euphoric, sets aside seismological or cosmological principles and in wild dreams of many, can causes the moon to shiver, the earth to split asunder, or, as to some stupids, such a deity may even cause the universe to suddenly reverse its expansion. This fictional Allah/God must, among other things, be stoically indifferent to supplications for changing local meteorological conditions, the task already being naturally performed by the discipline of fluid dynamics. Therefore, religious people, even if they pray earnestly with their buutocks elevated in the air, dance with great energy around totem poles, shall not cause even a drop of rain to fall on parched soil. This newly invented, rule-abiding and science respecting Allah/God/Bhagwan equally well dispenses with tearful Christians singing the Book of Job, pious Hindus feverishly reciting the havan yajna, or earnest Muslims performing the « special rain prayers » in hot dry deserts as they face the former abide of idols, the so-called holy Ka'aba.
The fact is that the equations of fluid flow, not the number of earnest supplicants or quality of their prayers, determine weather outcomes. This is grossly irreligious otherwise one could imagine joining the faithful of all religions in a huge simultaneous but vain global prayer that stupids feel would wipe away the pernicious effects of anthropogenic global climate change. Your chosen Allah/God cannot entertain private petitions for good health and longevity, prevent an air crash, or send woe upon demand to the enemy. Mindful of microbiology and physiology, She/He cannot cure leprosy by dipping the afflicted in rivers or have humans remain in unscathed condition after being devoured by a huge fish. Faster-than-light travel is also out of the question, even for the so-called prophets and special messengers. Instead, She/He must stay as the fictional and nominal runner of the world according to the laws and unto the letter, closely following the flow of Nature. A scientific fictional Creator should certainly know an awful lot of science which the formerly invented medieval Allah/God did't need. To differentiate between the countless universes discovered by superstring theory is a headache. Fine-tuning chemistry to generate complex proteins, and then initiating a cascade of mutations that turn microbe to man, is also no trivial matter. But bear in mind that there are definite limits to knowledge, whether by man or by any fictional creator: the fictional Allah/God can supposedly know only the limited, the knowable. Omniscience and science do not go well with each other. The difficulty with omniscience—even with regard to a particle as humble as the electron—has been recognized as an issue since the 1920s. Subatomic particles show a vexing, subtle elusiveness that defeats even the most sophisticated effort to measure certain of their properties even when tried by a fictional Allah/God. Unpredictability is intrinsic to quantum mechanics, the branch of physics which all particles are empirically seen to show. This discovery so disturbed Albert Einstein that he rejected quantum mechanics, pronouncing that the fictional Allah/God could not "play dice with the universe." But it turned out that Einstein's objections were flawed—uncertainty is deeply fundamental. Thus, any science-abiding fictional deity we invent will be incompletely informed on many aspects of nature. Is one being excessively audacious, perhaps impertinent, in setting down terms of reference for a fictional divine and non-existant entity? Really ! Humans have always invented their objects of worship. Smarter humans go for smarter fictional versions of Allah/God. Anthropomorphic representations—such as a Allah/God with octopus arms—are a bit out of fashion today but were enormously popular just a few centuries ago. As well, some people might object to binding fictional Allah/God and the real human to the same rules of logic, or perhaps even sharing the same space-time manifold. But if we drop this essential demand then little shall remain. Reason and evidence would lose meaning and be replaced by fiction, tradition, and the delusion of revelation. It would then be wrong for us to have 2 + 2 = 5, but okay for inventing the fiction of an Allah/God. Centuries of human progress would come to naught.
Let's face it: the day of the mythical Sky God is long gone. In the Age of Science, religion has been re-invented, and the medieval Allah/God of classical religions has lost repute and territory. Today people pay lip service to trusting that rusty Allah/God but they still swallow medicines when sick. Muslim-run airlines start a plane journey with prayers but ask passengers to buckle-up anyway, and most suspect that people who are falsely rumoured to rise miraculously from the dead were probably not quite dead to begin with. These days if you hear a voice telling you to sacrifice your only son, you would probably report it to the authorities instead of taking the poor lad up a mountain, and if you really took your son to an alter for sacrifice, the state will sure put you in a mental asylum, irrespective of whether you call yourself the prophet Abrahim or somebody else. As you can well imagine, the old trust is disappearing.
Nevertheless, there remains the tantalizing fiction of a divine power somewhere "out there" who is blamed to run a mysterious, but scrupulously and rather stupidly, a miracle-free universe. In this universe, the fictional Allah/God may be dishonestly ascribed to act in ingenious ways that seem miraculous. Yet these fictional and "never-actually-verified-miracles" do violate physical laws and seem ridiculous. Ordinary and naturally, no supernatural interventions in the physical world could permit quantum tunneling through cosmic holes. It would be perfectly unfair for a scientific mind to invent a fictional Allah/God to explain the nonlinear dynamics to explain how tiny fluctuations quickly build up to earthshaking results—the famous "butterfly effect" to give a rather dull explaination of the deterministic chaos theory. Nietzsche and the other philosophers were plain right—God was never alive, but always dead. Even as the fiction of divine habitat, the sky, shrinks before the aggressive encroachment of science, the quantum foam of space-time may be ascribed to create a little confused space for the crazy delusion based on the spare universes, offering space both for self-described "deeply and spiritually confused believers". Many eminent practitioners of science have successfully persuaded themselves that there is no logical contradiction between faith and belief, by inventing a science-fiction of Allah/God, or by clothing a traditional fiction in new terminology of science fiction. Unsure of whether they happen to exist at all, humans are likely to scour the miserable delusion of heavens forever in search of some sort of meaning.