Intelligent Design (ID) is the assertion that features of the universe and living things suggest a level of complexity which could most reasonably be answered by a ‘designing intelligence’. Most of ID’s most well known proponents are born-again Evangelist Christians who have some background in areas of science. A few Muslim writers and lecturers have examined the Intelligent Design ‘movement’, and it seems a few conclusions have been made. Br. Mustafa Akyol, of IslamOnline.net writes in his article, “Why Muslims Should Support Intelligent Design”,
“Intelligent Design (ID) is a term that implies creation. The universe and life are not products of blind forces of nature, ID holds, but show evidence that they were designed by an intelligence. The ID Movement has deliberately chosen not to specify the identity of the Designer. Through science you can demonstrate convincingly that there is a designer, but you can’t go further without invoking theology. Everybody has the right to believe in a Designer according his own theology. What makes the movement effective is its emphasis on solid scientific evidence. “
Evolution and Causality
To continue the conversation it is essential to examine what current Muslim thought on the theory of evolution. The first thing to recognize, as Shaykh Nuh Ha Mim Keller does in “Evolution and Islam”, is that Muslims believe Allah is the only source of causality in this world. While this is somewhat of an advanced topic of Islamic doctrine, it is important to precede any conversation about “Why?” and the nature of the question within Islam with this doctrinal response. When Muslims say “such-and-such did this”, Muslims recognize that at the heart of the matter God allowed and caused such thing to occur in both cause and effect.
In other words, from a doctrinal point of view, physics or other sciences are simply the study of the pattern of cause and effect which Allah has followed thus far. That being said, Muslims are able to figuratively speak regarding most things in life, so that when saying something such as “my knife cut the apple”, it should be interpreted with the general understanding that God is the ultimate source of all causality. Evolution, which ascribes much of its final causality to randomness and chance (without any figurative interpretation), is therefore considered anti-Islamic at it’s fundamental level.
However, Shaykh Nuh considers that one could accept evolution as an Islamic concept if one suggested that evolutions causality is sourced in God, but only in those cases where Divine revelation has not contradicted it. While the creation of the wide range of beasts and creatures on earth could therefore be accounted for, Islamically, with this adjusted form of evolution, would the same apply to mankind? The answer is not in favor of the the evolutionists. Due to the specific account of the creation of man in the Quran it would be considered a matter of unbelief to hold that evolution is the source of man’s creation. So, it seems that Muslims won’t be found in the evolutionary camp anytime soon.
Intelligent Design, an alternative?
Where evolution stops short, Intelligent Design may pick up the pieces. Intelligent Design however, does not solve the issue with the direct creation of man, rather it simply implies that some designer might have been involved anywhere along line, either an evolutionary method or in direct creation.
ID certainly does seem appealing on the forefront to the average Muslim as an idea to begin to introduce the concept of God, but it is important to remember that Intelligent Design itself has been very intelligently designed. Carefully crafted by Christian evangelists such as Phillip E. Johnson, Intelligent Design’s specific goal is to create doors of opportunity for further Christian preaching:
“Intelligent Design is an intellectual movement, and the Wedge strategy stops working when we are seen as just another way of packaging the Christian evangelical message. … The evangelists do what they do very well, and I hope our work opens up for them some doors that have been closed.” Phillip Johnson. “Keeping the Darwinists Honest”, an interview with Phillip Johnson. In Citizen Magazine. April 1999.
Due to the extreme congruency between the evangelical church and the vocal proponents of the Intelligent Design message, ID is having great difficulty holding water in the scientific community. This evanglical relationship makes this complicated for Muslims as well, as evangelical Christians have generally been openly hostile to Muslims and Islam.
The second problem with ID, within the scientific community, is that it seems to be a formalization of existing teleological-type (”the complexity of the watch implies a watchmaker”) arguments that have been used by philosophers for hundreds of years. As noted in Br. Akyol’s article, the Quran also uses what may be understood as teleological arguments as to why humanity should worship God.
However, I believe the brother needs to be reminded that this is not the only argument that is used in the Quran for matters of belief.
In Islam, the true understanding of belief and faith is that belief comes from God as something innate within human beings, and that belief is -from- Allah, Most High. According to Islam those whom God wills to remain unguided will remain in that state, and those whom God chooses to guide, nothing will be able to stop their belief. So do Muslims need the help of ID in schools to firm their children’s belief? If this is the goal, then it seems the answer is a definitive “No!”. The ID movement’s goal to introduce itself into schools and as such, it is really just the doorway into bringing the very hostile evangelical message into schools. Such a confusing message of creationism and science is not what our children need to learn to become firm believers.
Discussing whether Islam supports “irreducible complexity” or other Intelligent Design concepts, is really another way of Muslims conceding again to be classified as into neatly defined Western categories. What Muslim proponents of Intelligent Design need to remember is that, while Muslims of course support the fact that we are a matter of creation, we do not necessarily fall neatly into the “evolutionists” and “ID” camps that exist in the West. As Muslims, our examination of our belief should be sufficient for our children to realize that we are neither evolutionists nor creationists nor “ID’ists” in the Western understanding of the terms. We have our own complex understanding of the natural processes, and therefore we are unbounded by the restrictions of either ‘camp’, but rather bounded by the understanding of the Quran and Hadith on the subject.
While Muslims can concede that some level of evolution may be possible for parts of creation, Christians in their ‘Intelligent Design’ packaging do not. Furthermore, opening the door for the Christian doctrine of creation which involves intricate beliefs about man and dinosaurs living during the same time, the age of man, and original sin (a concept totally foreign to Muslims) is not at all helpful in raising of our children.
And as far as Intelligent Design, Muslims believe in qadr (destiny). That fact alone means that we believe all aspects of our life have been designed by Allah Most High, not just our beginning. We cannot look to Intelligent Design to teach that.
Don’t have time to leave a detailed reply (researching Brazilian sugar exports right now), but I will offer my thoughts on what I think is a well-written and very relevant blog entry.
I agree that although Intelligent Design presents an attractive area of thought for Muslims to pursue, it is at its core a movement of Christian Evangelicals who stop short of outright denial of evolution simply through calculated pragmatism. Unfortunately, this pragmatism leaves their theory at a halfway point of sorts, and the result is that they fail to contribute any meaningful explanation to the discussion.
I took a Philosophy course last year and during the first couple of months we studied numerous classical proofs of the existence of God, and the Professor proceeded summarily to defeat each and every one of them. What frightened me most was the fact that although all of them were from Christian scholars, mostly from the Middle Ages (post-Aquinas…although we didn’t do any Aquinas proofs), they resembled very closely the “proofs” we Muslims generally put forth for the existence of God.
The bottom line that I came to understand as I consulted with a scholar is that the Qur’an emphasizes eman-bil-ghaib for a reason. Fundamentally speaking, this is where we draw our faith from. All other explanations exist only as aids for understanding, and should not be confused as being perfect and logically rigorous demonstrations of the existence of God – they were never meant to be.
We cannot claim to truly understand the nature of Allah (swt) beyond that which he has revealed to us. Everyone is tempted to try – what kind of Muslim doesn’t want to know just a little bit more about his or her beloved Creator? And if the effort to achieve greater understanding increases our emaan, then we are the better off for it, even if the effort itself fails to produce the desired understanding. Often, however, such speculation leads us down dangerous paths, and for that reason I personally try to avoid it. Allahu a’lam (God knows best).
As far as evolution is concerned…I apply the same approach that I do to all religion-science debates – I keep the both of them separate. Why? Because as Immanuel Kant stated in his Critique of Pure Reason, it is impossible for us to discern whether what we have come to observe and to understand is the absolute and universal truth – and nor does it matter to the sciences whether it is or not. As long as we can develop models to explain why things happen the way they do, and to predict (based on these models) on a daily-basis how things will happen in the future, we are happy. In the sciences, we make no ostentatious claims of understanding life, the universe, and everything as it exists truly – all we care about is whether or not we can explain the events that occur as we perceive them. Science claims not the knowledge of universal truth, but rather as it appears to our senses and intellect (which we have reason to believe are finite and limited). There is a critical difference here, and I think I’m not articulating it well enough (partly because my mind is full of statistics regarding Brazilian production and export of sugar to the United States and Argentina, and the politics associated with Brazilian external debt).
Religion, on the other hand, as a product of revelation, claims to offer exactly that which science declines to provide – the universal truth. But unlike science, whose discoveries are multiplicable and seemingly endless, the amount of information presented to us by religion is limited to a certain topic (the religion itself). We can’t use religion to explain things about which Allah (swt) hasn’t informed us. We also can’t mix what we’ve discovered through use of our own intellect (provided by Allah, of course) and that which Allah (swt) has directly told us. Where there is overlap, the religious revelation will take precedence, but you still can’t throw the scientific conclusions out the window because science is ever-changing, and in order to change it refers back on itself. As I said earlier, science offers an explanation of things how they appear to us, and such explanations are still valuable (because they can be CHANGED and EXPANDED upon) even if they are contradicted by divine revelation.
Anyway, it seems that I’ve been largely inarticulate. Sorry for the awful post – but hopefully you can dig through and figure out what I mean. If not, I’ll come back and fix it later.
Back to work on Brazil.
as-salamu’alaikum saad,
If this is not a detailed reply then I’m afraid of what might have been!
I think you would find it interesting then that today’s scholars have found dramatic parallels in the works of Thomas Aquinas and those of Imam Ghazali (r), some areas seem to be word-for-word plagiarism.
The interesting point is that much speculation over the nature of Allah Most High has already occurred, hence we had the Mutazallia and other sects which held vastly different views of the nature of God. It is always useful to learn about some of the details of the results of those arguments, and for that purpose I recommend the SunniPath class:
http://course.sunnipath.com/ProductInfo.aspx?productid=BE100
It delves into the schools of aqeedah which dealt with exactly those philosophical issues.
-
As far as science and religion, I can’t see how they can be completely isolated within Islam. Islam has laid down certain foundations about the reality of our nature and our creation. For example, studying evolution going forward is not at all anti-islamic, however using evolution or other various means to determine the nature of our creation is something that should be avoided by any Muslim scientist.
Asak wr wb bro,
Great post, alhamdulillah.
I’m not sure I agree with you, on the matter of a teleological argument for ID being problematic. Teleology asks questions which empiricism does not – and in this matter, the objective is apparently the same. If it’s problematic because it’s gotten ‘bad press’ thanks to unscrupulous evangelists, that’s still not a logical argument against teleogical endeavors.
Alija Izetbegovic (rh), the former late Bosnian president, wrote compellingly against the naivete of evolution/darwinian assumptions in his “Islam between East & West.” This is not to say he had the answers all along, but he philosophically takes us on journeys of inquiry which we fail to ask ourselves even today.
It appears that we’ve cowered intellectually, in the midst of all this sophisticated jargon by the ‘new priesthood’ of evolutionists/neo-darwinists. That because of the continuous onslaught of dogma pushed forth by Dawkins, Gould, and other defenders of evolution-ism (make no mistake, it is an ideology), we feel that we have no choice but to accept it passively, or apologetically make compromises with it to restore our credibility as believers, lest we join the ranks of “foolish Kansas.”
Sh Nuh does have a measured position on the matter, but I don’t feel his answers would satisfy a more demanding intellectual.
My personal view is that we must define our terms clearly – evolution, speciation, natural selection, genetic drift, whatever they may be.
If we make a distinction between evolution and speciation – the former being “any adaptive change of an organism to its environment,” and speciation as “an evolutionairy change that results in the forming of a new species over time” – I’d say the Islamic position favors evolution (since it is observable and reproducable – e.g. the development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria, moths changing wing colors in polluted environments).
But it does not favor speciation to the extent where birds were former dinosaurs, or that humans came from chimps. Science at this juncture is more speculative and hopeful, than concretely empirical. The evidence (and its gathering) here is very sketchy, but I feel it gets propagandized so well by illogical modes of argumentation, we all feel the need to swallow it whole.
Just my two cents.
Alhamdulillah, I found a relevant URL to this thread. It includes the opinions of Steven Pinker.
http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/2005_08_07_time.html
as-salamu’alaikum Br. Abu Dharr,
Thanks for the comment. As far as the problem I mentioned with ID using teleogical arguments, I was referencing one of the problems that the scientific community is having with them. I agree that the teleogical are something that should be considered.
Alhumdulillah, you pointed that out and I went back in to clarify that and fix a number of other grammatical errors. Although I probably have not caught them all.
[...] http://www.yursil.com/blog/2005/09/intelligent-design-and-islam/ • • • [...]
I think a clear separation of theory and fact (empirical) would be good for muslims. Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a good starting point, especially as background reading.
Also, in terms of terminology, I don’t see why we should call adaptive change as ‘evolution’. Why not just call it adaptation since that is what it is? Good to see that muslims are discussing this intelligently and without being cowed.
asalamu alaikum brother
please visit http://www.islamstudy.blogspot.com