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.

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://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/2005_08_07_time.html

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.

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.

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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.

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.