By Cyril Anderson

Part 1 of 2

Many Muslims perceive that there is some sort of threat to be feared from the idea of evolution.  A number of Islamic websites, seemingly following the example of many American Evangelical Christian organizations or websites, feature sections or articles devoted to challenging this theory.  However, in my opinion, these fears are misplaced.

 There is nothing wrong with a religious person digging into the evidence on evolution in a scientific, objective manner, and concluding, based on this honest inquiry, that he does not find the evidence satisfactory.  This should be every intellectual’s right and freedom.  But what I think is mistaken is the belief among some religious people, both Christian and Muslim, that there is some a priori, theological reason to reject in advance the very idea of evolution, aside from any honest examination of the evidence.  My objection is not disagreement per se with evolutionary theory, but rather an uninformed sort of objection based on the assumption that the idea of evolution is “irreligious.”

There is no inherent problem with the idea of evolution in itself.  The idea of evolution, in the broad sense, being that the variety of life appeared from natural laws operating in the domain of living beings.   Some Muslims take evolutionary theory as some sort of “replacement for God.”  But this is misconception, a lack of full perspective.  For, according to religious people, who created the universe?  Who created the laws of nature?  The simple answer is God.  Religion says that God created the universe.  It answers “Who” and “Why” questions.  Science, through the theory of evolution, attempts to give its best answer of How.  Combining the two perspectives, we get the theory that God acts on the universe as Creator, creating through laws of cause and effect via the laws of nature working on the domain of living things.  And in fact, for a truly religious individual, increased knowledge actually increases love of the Creator, because as we gain more knowledge, we gain greater understanding of the complexity of things, and of the limits of our knowledge, and greater appreciation of the Infinite in knowledge represented by God.  The Vatican recently, under the leadership of the late Pope John Paul II took the bold step of accepting that there is no inherent problem theologically in the idea of God creating the variety of life on earth through an evolutionary process.   It has also been reported that in Qum, Iran, now the major global center for study in Shia Islam, similar lines of thinking are becoming more common.

 The point is that evolutionary theory, properly understood, poses no threat to religious belief about the origins of life.  True, in many science textbooks published today, due to atheistic or agnostic trends amongst the leadership of the scientific community, the causes will only be traced back as far as the physical laws of nature.  But a religious believer knows that on a metaphysical level, the laws of nature and nature itself come from, and are sustained by God, so that even evolution can easily be understood as originating in God.

Another misconception of evolution unfortunately originates in the misspeaking of scientists, who use the term “random mutations.”  The problem is that random is typically understood as without any sort of order.  However, scientifically and mathematically, random means simply a sort of unpredictability due to complexity.  That is, it is nearly impossible with our finite knowledge to predict what will happen exactly with the system, but there is an order beneath the surface, and theoretically, it is deterministic.  For a Being, such as God, possessing infinite knowledge (and God is so envisioned in virtually every major religion) this complexity does not pose a problem, and we see that there is no ultimate inconsistency between the religious view that such an All-powerful, All-knowing Creator is controlling the direction and details of this evolutionary process (through control of the natural laws and the biosphere on which they act) and the scientific view that says that it would have been impossible for a finite intellect to have predicted in advance the course that evolution would have taken, given the complexity.

With this fact established that there is no fundamental conflict between evolutionary theory and Islam, the tone of the discussion can become more calm and scientific, focused less on ill-informed rhetoric and more on the scientific merit of the theory.  To repeat a point that evolutionary scientists repeatedly mention, seemingly to deaf ears, I will note the particular meaning of theory in science.  In science, a theory is not simply some wacky idea that someone has thought up without evidence.  Such a preliminary idea is called a hypothesis, and even a hypothesis usually rests on some substantial basis, even if preliminary.  A theory, on the other hand, is a hypothesis that has achieved widespread acceptance amongst knowledgeable scientists based on deep support by evidence and on the theory’s explanatory power.  Evolutionary theory fits both criteria.  Is it necessarily the last word on the development of life forms?  Not necessarily, but it is an effective way to explain a number of phenomena until something better comes along.  This is how science works.

                                            Part One   Part Two