THE QURʾĀN AND ZYGON

Abstract

This issue of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, the last one published with Wiley, contains three thematic sections: on “The Qur’ān and Science” (see below), on “AI Relationality and Personhood,” and on this year's Boyle Lecture. For background articles pertaining to the latter two sections, I refer the reader to the articles written by Fraser Watts and Marius Dorobantu (AI Relationality and Personhood) and by Fraser Watts (Boyle Lecture 2023). The thematic section on “The Qur’ān and Science,” which contains a three-part series of articles by Majid Daneshgar, explores the formation, development, and future of the scientific interpretation and scientific miraculousness of the Qurʾān with reference to the work of major and lesser known authors across the world in various languages. It examines the historical and social process through which the “scientific interpretation” of the Qurʾān turned into “scientific miraculousness,” in particular, the deep methodological differences between the two. The first part describes how science is situated and defined in Islamic literature. The second part discusses the scientific interpretation of the Qurʾān both inside and outside the Muslim world. The third part discusses the creation and development of the scientific miraculousness of the Qurʾān, which claims that the Qurʾān contains scientific findings and has particular scientific features. The “Articles” section contains six articles. In the first article, Di Di, Stephen Cranney, Brandon Vaidyanathan, and Caitlin Anne Fitzgerald, using representative survey data for India, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States, show that also scientists—like the general population—feature positive associations between religiosity/spirituality and mental health outcomes; they draw out implications from their study for studying this relationship for other professions. In the second article, Abdullah Ansar and Shahbaz Haider explore the essence of the human (insān) as it is understood in Twelver Shīʿī philosophy and mysticism; it presents a Shīʿī philosophical elucidation regarding the possible existence of extraterrestrial intelligent lifeforms and what their relationship with “humanhood” might be. In the third article, Robert Elliot brings comparative and developmental psychology to bear on Christian theological anthropology; he shows how the phenomenon of “joint attention” sheds new light upon the Christian doctrine that human beings are created in the image of the Trinity (imago Trinitatis). In the fourth article, Deborah Mackay, a scientist-minister, explores the biological metaphor of the open-ended processes of life vis-à-vis the New Testament metaphor of the Body of Christ; she draws several implications for the life of the church. In the fifth article, John Henry offers a historical lens on science and the “general resurrection”; discussing leading early modern natural philosophers from England he highlights how the general resurrection played less of a role than the doctrine of the immortality of the soul and tentatively offers some reasons for why this might be the case. Finally, in the sixth article, Mark Graves, independently from the thematic section on AI relationality and personhood later in the issue, addresses the same topic; drawing upon developmental psychology and systems theory he discusses the progressively larger engagement of AI with society and defines a mediating structure for AI proto-personhood. The issue ends with three book reviews. Mladen Turk reviews Elizabeth Pérez's The Gut: A Black Alimentary Tract, Goran Ðermanovic' reviews Meghan O'Gieblyn's God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning, and Jonathan Chappell reviews Carmody Grey's Theology, Science and Life. As has been announced here multiple times, this issue will be the last issue that is published with Wiley. Since 1990, 34 volumes have been published with them (this includes the period that we were with Blackwell, which later became Wiley). We deeply appreciate and are grateful for Wiley's many efforts and critical contributions to Zygon’s success. From January 1, 2024, Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, however, will be published with diamond open access from the Open Library of Humanities (please visit zygonjournal.org for our present one-stop website). In the new setup, I am also making two Editorial changes: the “Editorials” that used to follow the frontmatter for each issue will now become news items on our website and our “Book Review Editor” (Mladen Turk) will become our “Book Symposium Editor,” renewing our emphasis on publishing Book Symposia and ceasing the publication of short book reviews. In this way, we aim to provide an improved service to the science-and-religion community with respect to important new books that are published in the field. On the journal's website, we will flag short book reviews published elsewhere.