Before discussing any scientific theory from a Muslim perspective, a basic axiom of the Muslim attitude toward knowledge should be understood. The same God Who created the physical universe also revealed scripture as a guidance for human beings. Although the main purpose of revelation is not to describe the physical universe, it uses such descriptions to develop arguments about the existence and attributes of God and life after death. Since God is the Creator of the physical universe and the source of revelation, there should be no contradiction between the two. If there appears to be, then we are either misinterpreting physical reality or misinterpreting revelation.
The Theory of Evolution, as proposed by Darwin and refined with insights derived from genetics, is objectionable from a Muslim point of view because it elevates ‘chance’ to the level of a deity. An example of this point of view is summed up in the title of Richard Dawson’s book, The Blind Watchmaker. In The Meaning of Evolution, George Gaylord Simpson repeats the “official” dogma of the contemporary scientific guild: “Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.”
The evolutionary process is, according to them, controlled by two basic principles. The creative process is a matter of chance. Genes are randomly distributed when chromosomes unzip to form reproductive cells. A new combination is created in the union of sperm and egg. Occasional copying errors and mutations introduce new information. “Nature” then edits the creative process by causing weaker members of a species to die before reproducing, a process known as ‘natural selection.’ According to Darwin, gradual changes accumulate by this process until the descendants of the original organism become so different from their ancestor that they constitute a different species.
A. D. Eddington, a proponent of evolution from the early twentieth century, appealed to the creative power of chance by stating that if you chained a bunch of monkeys to typewriters and gave them enough time, they would eventually type out the collected works of Shakespeare. But if one gives this thought problem more than the most cursory thought, the absurdity of his proposition is glaringly clear. Let’s say you check in on the monkeys after an hour. You see something like this:
Occasionally you will find a word embedded in a string of characters. More occasionally you will find a word standing alone. Very rarely you might find a pair of words. To find a sentence would be astonishing. To find a sentence free of spelling and grammatical errors would be more improbable. After years of gibberish, one day you find the following:
Consider the amount of genetic information in the body of one human being. At the moment of conception, a fertilized human egg is about the size of a pinhead. Yet, it contains information equivalent to about six billion “chemical letters.” This is enough information to fill 1000 books, each 500 pages thick. A computer operating system would represent only a fraction of that amount of information. Consider the impact of random change on the operating system of your computer. How likely would it be to cause an improvement in the system?
At a conference of evolutionary biologists and mathematicians, the mathematicians infuriated the biologists by pointing out that there simply would not be enough time in the universe for life to evolve by chance. The analogy given by one scientist critical of the theory is that of a tornado passing through a junkyard and leaving a jet fighter assembled in its wake.
Proponents of blind chance as a creative force also have a major difficulty dealing with a “chicken and egg” problem associated with the parallel development of DNA and the mechanisms for translating this information into actual proteins. Consider a compact disk digitally encoded with a song. For you to convert that information to music you would need some sophisticated electronic equipment. If you don’t have it, the CD is not good for much more than an ornament dangling from your rearview mirror. Likewise, the information encoded in DNA is useless without the sophisticated cellular machinery that reads it and converts it into the proteins necessary for the body’s functioning. How did the information system and the decoding machinery both evolve independently by chance?
Darwin mentioned two major tests for the feasibility of his theory. The first was the fossil record. He stated that because only a handful of fossils had been discovered at the time that he proposed his theory, the intermediate forms that would indicate gradual evolution remained to be found. By the 1970’s Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Etheridge, two Young Turks in the biological science establishment, admitted that the fossil record was characterized by the sudden appearance of species and their continuation unchanged for eons, followed by their abrupt disappearance. Intermediate forms were far too scarce in the fossil record to validate Darwin’s theory as originally proposed. To answer the objections raised by this fact they proposed the Theory of Punctuated Equilibrium. According to them, evolutionary change occurs when a small population of a species becomes isolated from the main branch. Cataclysmic environmental stress then radically selects for new traits in the isolated gene pool, driving change in a virtual blink of the eye in geological time. According to them, the fossils that would record such change will not be found because of the nature of the process. The time is too short and the number of individuals involved is too small. This ingenious solution moves the Theory of Evolution out of the realm of science, which declares that a theory must be falsifiable in order to be subject to objective verification. ‘Falsifiability’ means that one must be able to propose certain detectable facts, which, if they are found, would cause one to conclude that the theory one has proposed is false. If one proposes that the process took place in a way that would leave no traces, then the theory is not falsifiable. If it is not falsifiable, then it is also not scientifically verifiable. Those who believe in it do so by taking a leap of faith.
A second test of falsifiability that Darwin proposed was related to the gradual evolution of organs. In The Origin of Species, p.154, Darwin stated: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” The problem with Darwin’s theory is that every slight modification of an organism has to give that organism a selective advantage over creatures that don’t have the modification. Organs are like machines that carry out specific functions an organism needs to stay alive. Consider a mousetrap, a rather simple machine. To work, it needs a base, a spring, a means of attaching the spring to the base, a trigger mechanism and other parts. Unless all the parts are present the mousetrap will not catch mice. Michael Behe [Reference] has demonstrated that on the molecular level, even the simplest organs, such as the flagellum, the whiplike tail that allows certain single-celled organisms to move through water, are more complex than a mousetrap. How could such mechanisms develop gradually when all the parts must be present for the organ to fulfill its function?
Although Muslims reject Darwinian evolution, it is worth noting that we also differ from Christian proponents of Creationism on a number of points. Creationists uphold a literal interpretation of Biblical accounts of early events in the history of the earth. Therefore, they propose that the earth is roughly six thousand years old. The texts of the Qur’an and the Sunnah do not mention or imply any figures for the age of the earth. Creationists also believe that every animal alive today is descended from animals aboard Noah’s ark. Although Muslims believe that Noah existed and that he carried animals aboard his ship to escape a flood, there is no evidence I am aware of in the authentic Islamic texts that would make us conclude that that flood covered the entire earth.
A major conflict between Islamic texts and Darwinian orthodoxy is over the evolution of human beings. The Qur’an tells the story of Adam and Eve and their fall from Paradise in a number of passages. It states: “O Children of Adam, do not let Satan seduce you as he caused your two parents to go forth from the Garden…” The Qur’an also refers repeatedly to the fact that humanity was created from a single soul and that Allah then created its mate from that soul: “O mankind, be careful of your duty to your Lord, Who created you from a single soul, and from it created its mate, and from the two of them has spread forth a multitude of men and women.”Prophet Muhammad ( pbuh) also stated, “All of you are Children of Adam, and Adam was created from dust.” Although these statements could possibly be construed to carry metaphorical meanings, the basic rule for interpreting speech is that it should be understood according to the obvious meaning unless evidence arises to indicate that the obvious meaning was not intended.
In discussing the physical evidence upon which the theories of anthropology rest, it is important to distinguish between the physical facts and the explanations people devised for those facts. No one denies the existence of primate fossils such as the finds of the Leakeys in Olduvai Gorge, etc. The question is: what do we make of these remains? Do they represent transitional forms between a common ancestor of apes and human beings, or are they extinct ape species or, in some cases, extinct races of human beings? Proving that these specimens eventually developed into human beings will be very difficult except for those who are already convinced. As one man said, “I wouldn’t have seen it if I didn’t believe it.”
The Theory of Evolution, as proposed by Darwin and refined with insights derived from genetics, is objectionable from a Muslim point of view because it elevates ‘chance’ to the level of a deity. An example of this point of view is summed up in the title of Richard Dawson’s book, The Blind Watchmaker. In The Meaning of Evolution, George Gaylord Simpson repeats the “official” dogma of the contemporary scientific guild: “Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.”
The evolutionary process is, according to them, controlled by two basic principles. The creative process is a matter of chance. Genes are randomly distributed when chromosomes unzip to form reproductive cells. A new combination is created in the union of sperm and egg. Occasional copying errors and mutations introduce new information. “Nature” then edits the creative process by causing weaker members of a species to die before reproducing, a process known as ‘natural selection.’ According to Darwin, gradual changes accumulate by this process until the descendants of the original organism become so different from their ancestor that they constitute a different species.
A. D. Eddington, a proponent of evolution from the early twentieth century, appealed to the creative power of chance by stating that if you chained a bunch of monkeys to typewriters and gave them enough time, they would eventually type out the collected works of Shakespeare. But if one gives this thought problem more than the most cursory thought, the absurdity of his proposition is glaringly clear. Let’s say you check in on the monkeys after an hour. You see something like this:
Qqqqe jjjlllll ljcvcvdf dfidof jffjf fjdmvivoirr j4 rofjvc v if [
‘‘’vvskjgfqpjp apsif askfdf ldkf’fa’’’q3409344lmvmvlsdjgfu3pqfklamdsc’paiefp
0t pejlmdvliajrgpqcm,c,m
‘‘’vvskjgfqpjp apsif askfdf ldkf’fa’’’q3409344lmvmvlsdjgfu3pqfklamdsc’paiefp
0t pejlmdvliajrgpqcm,c,m
Egeon
Proceed, Solinus, to procure my fall,
And by the doom of death end woes and all.
Proceed, Solinus, to procure my fall,
And by the doom of death end woes and all.
Duke
Merchant of Syracusa, plead no more.
I am not partial to infringe our laws…
And for page after page you find the entire Comedy of Errors, followed by several hundred pages of Shakespeare’s other plays. If you determined that the monkeys really did type it without visible outside help, would it not be logical to conclude that some unseen intelligence was guiding the monkeys’ hands?Merchant of Syracusa, plead no more.
I am not partial to infringe our laws…
Consider the amount of genetic information in the body of one human being. At the moment of conception, a fertilized human egg is about the size of a pinhead. Yet, it contains information equivalent to about six billion “chemical letters.” This is enough information to fill 1000 books, each 500 pages thick. A computer operating system would represent only a fraction of that amount of information. Consider the impact of random change on the operating system of your computer. How likely would it be to cause an improvement in the system?
At a conference of evolutionary biologists and mathematicians, the mathematicians infuriated the biologists by pointing out that there simply would not be enough time in the universe for life to evolve by chance. The analogy given by one scientist critical of the theory is that of a tornado passing through a junkyard and leaving a jet fighter assembled in its wake.
Proponents of blind chance as a creative force also have a major difficulty dealing with a “chicken and egg” problem associated with the parallel development of DNA and the mechanisms for translating this information into actual proteins. Consider a compact disk digitally encoded with a song. For you to convert that information to music you would need some sophisticated electronic equipment. If you don’t have it, the CD is not good for much more than an ornament dangling from your rearview mirror. Likewise, the information encoded in DNA is useless without the sophisticated cellular machinery that reads it and converts it into the proteins necessary for the body’s functioning. How did the information system and the decoding machinery both evolve independently by chance?
Darwin mentioned two major tests for the feasibility of his theory. The first was the fossil record. He stated that because only a handful of fossils had been discovered at the time that he proposed his theory, the intermediate forms that would indicate gradual evolution remained to be found. By the 1970’s Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Etheridge, two Young Turks in the biological science establishment, admitted that the fossil record was characterized by the sudden appearance of species and their continuation unchanged for eons, followed by their abrupt disappearance. Intermediate forms were far too scarce in the fossil record to validate Darwin’s theory as originally proposed. To answer the objections raised by this fact they proposed the Theory of Punctuated Equilibrium. According to them, evolutionary change occurs when a small population of a species becomes isolated from the main branch. Cataclysmic environmental stress then radically selects for new traits in the isolated gene pool, driving change in a virtual blink of the eye in geological time. According to them, the fossils that would record such change will not be found because of the nature of the process. The time is too short and the number of individuals involved is too small. This ingenious solution moves the Theory of Evolution out of the realm of science, which declares that a theory must be falsifiable in order to be subject to objective verification. ‘Falsifiability’ means that one must be able to propose certain detectable facts, which, if they are found, would cause one to conclude that the theory one has proposed is false. If one proposes that the process took place in a way that would leave no traces, then the theory is not falsifiable. If it is not falsifiable, then it is also not scientifically verifiable. Those who believe in it do so by taking a leap of faith.
A second test of falsifiability that Darwin proposed was related to the gradual evolution of organs. In The Origin of Species, p.154, Darwin stated: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” The problem with Darwin’s theory is that every slight modification of an organism has to give that organism a selective advantage over creatures that don’t have the modification. Organs are like machines that carry out specific functions an organism needs to stay alive. Consider a mousetrap, a rather simple machine. To work, it needs a base, a spring, a means of attaching the spring to the base, a trigger mechanism and other parts. Unless all the parts are present the mousetrap will not catch mice. Michael Behe [Reference] has demonstrated that on the molecular level, even the simplest organs, such as the flagellum, the whiplike tail that allows certain single-celled organisms to move through water, are more complex than a mousetrap. How could such mechanisms develop gradually when all the parts must be present for the organ to fulfill its function?
Although Muslims reject Darwinian evolution, it is worth noting that we also differ from Christian proponents of Creationism on a number of points. Creationists uphold a literal interpretation of Biblical accounts of early events in the history of the earth. Therefore, they propose that the earth is roughly six thousand years old. The texts of the Qur’an and the Sunnah do not mention or imply any figures for the age of the earth. Creationists also believe that every animal alive today is descended from animals aboard Noah’s ark. Although Muslims believe that Noah existed and that he carried animals aboard his ship to escape a flood, there is no evidence I am aware of in the authentic Islamic texts that would make us conclude that that flood covered the entire earth.
A major conflict between Islamic texts and Darwinian orthodoxy is over the evolution of human beings. The Qur’an tells the story of Adam and Eve and their fall from Paradise in a number of passages. It states: “O Children of Adam, do not let Satan seduce you as he caused your two parents to go forth from the Garden…” The Qur’an also refers repeatedly to the fact that humanity was created from a single soul and that Allah then created its mate from that soul: “O mankind, be careful of your duty to your Lord, Who created you from a single soul, and from it created its mate, and from the two of them has spread forth a multitude of men and women.”Prophet Muhammad ( pbuh) also stated, “All of you are Children of Adam, and Adam was created from dust.” Although these statements could possibly be construed to carry metaphorical meanings, the basic rule for interpreting speech is that it should be understood according to the obvious meaning unless evidence arises to indicate that the obvious meaning was not intended.
In discussing the physical evidence upon which the theories of anthropology rest, it is important to distinguish between the physical facts and the explanations people devised for those facts. No one denies the existence of primate fossils such as the finds of the Leakeys in Olduvai Gorge, etc. The question is: what do we make of these remains? Do they represent transitional forms between a common ancestor of apes and human beings, or are they extinct ape species or, in some cases, extinct races of human beings? Proving that these specimens eventually developed into human beings will be very difficult except for those who are already convinced. As one man said, “I wouldn’t have seen it if I didn’t believe it.”
