Evolution Theory And Islam
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Posted in:
Books
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| Atif Imtiaz | Nov. 20, 2008 | 2:08 AM |
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People of no faith are either agnostic or atheist. Agnostics suggest that they don’t know (or don’t care) and atheists argue with firm conviction for their position of disbelief. A central plank of the atheist argument is the theory of evolution. It is commonly and mistakenly assumed to have disproved the existence of a Creator (an Observer subtitle asserted as such only recently). It did not of course. It merely provided an alternative (and highly improbable) explanation as to the origin of man. Providing an alternative explanation does not count as disproof.
This important booklet contains the answer of Nuh Ha Mim Keller to a question about the Islamic response to the theory of evolution. It contains philosophical considerations as to the nature of theory and belief (and their inter-relation) and includes the Islamic perspective on natural selection. Atheism is not so much a belief as an anti-belief. It combines common criticisms of religious behavior (such as wars based upon religious differences and corruption within organized forms of religion) with a commonsensical approach to the nature of reality —a naïve materialism—to form a whole which upon reflection does not stand well to scrutiny.
One such example is the conflation of religious belief with scientific theory (some Muslims incline towards this also). A point made clearly within this booklet. If one takes philosophers of science such as Popper seriously (Popper is by far the most pro-science of the philosophers of science), then it becomes quite difficult to understand how the basics of his philosophy can be translated from theory and methodology towards belief. For example, Popper makes the point that any scientific theory has to be falsifiable—it should not be able to provide explanations against all forms of counter-evidence (this is a common charge against psychoanalysis). This may be all well and good for a scientific theory (in fact this booklet discusses the falsifiability of the theory of evolution) but to then move from this point to believing in a certain theory is to confuse the two forms of human activity: science and religion. If one were to believe in any theory one would have to simultaneously be prepared to believe in its falsifiability at any moment in time—a paradox of simultaneously believing and being in a perpetual preparedness for unbelief—a psychological state that would not contribute to stability of mind. It would be necessary to those who advocate such an approach to suggest from here onwards that one should believe in all current scientific theories and then change such beliefs as and when scientific communities switch from theory to theory. This leads onto a second influential post-war philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, who stated that science moves through paradigms of research that are built up depending upon evidence base and then left behind if sufficient anomalies are found. Again, his work highlights the problem of confusing believing with scientific theory.
But what if there is a mass of evidence against certain Islamic beliefs? Specifically, how to respond to the evidence base for natural selection? The author here suggests that believing in natural selection for animals and plants is not problematic according to the Sunni creed as long as one attributes the Cause and Effect to the Divine Majesty and not to the process of natural selection itself. The belief in man evolving through such a process is however a separate matter. To believe in this is forbidden, though scientists are still searching for a substantial evidence base for this claim. To those who wish to force the point, we could do worse than point to the verses in the Qur’an on embryology and cosmology—some of which contradicted the scientific knowledge of the era and preceded the discovery of such knowledge by about a thousand years. If they truly believe in science, we trust then that they will not suggest that this discrepancy was the result of random occurrences.
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