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My name is Mona Siddiqui and I'm a professor of Islamic and inter-religious
studies at the University of Edinburgh.
If I woke up ninety years from now
I imagine that the sun will still be shining,
the rain will still fall and the seasons will go on as they do now.
But the world could be divided into two different scenarios.
Either we have become a very techno, streamlined society.
Far more slick in the way we go on about our behaviour.
Or the earth might end up looking like a wasteland,
simply because we didn't take
our environment seriously enough
or we thought nothing really bad would ever happen.
So in my view science and religion are not two separate worlds, even if they use two
separate methodologies.
Maybe the areas in which science and religion will be able to cooperate best,
as they are now, is really in the area of medical ethics.
How do we best alleviate human suffering
in the physical sense, if not in the psychological sense?
I think religion is part of the DNA of society. It's not going to go away
however much we contest
the place of religion in public life,
however much we contest the demise of structural forms of religion.
Death scares us all.
Death and love are the two things that come to us uninvited in life.
And when they come I don't think
any of us are prepared for either of them.
My greatest hope
is that we discover
real life on another planet.
A life which is sympathetic to human life
and which brings to us a sense of security
and perhaps answers the questions which the imagination of this century
has asked for so long,
which is are we alone?