Islam and Evolution
©Nuh Ha Mim Keller 1996
In
the name of Allah, Most Merciful and Compassionate
14 July 1995
Dear Suleman 'Ali:
Thank
you for your fax of 27 June 1995 which said, in part:
"Recently a pamphlet has been
circulated around Oxford saying that evolution is synonymous with
kufr and shirk. I myself am a biologist and am
convinced by the evidence which supports the theory of evolution. I
am writing to ask whether the Quranic account of Creation is
incompatible with man having evolved. Are there any books which you
would recommend on the subject?"
During my "logic of
scientific explanation" period at the University of Chicago, I
used to think that scientific theories had to have coherence,
logicality, applicability, and adequacy, and I was accustomed to
examine theory statements by looking at these things in turn. Perhaps
they furnish a reasonable point of departure to give your question an
answer which, if cursory and somewhat personal, may yet shed some
light on the issues you are asking about.
Coherence
------------
It
seems to me that the very absoluteness of the theory's conclusions
tends to compromise its "objective" character. It is all
very well to speak of the "evidence of evolution," but if
the theory is thorough- going, then human consciousness itself is
also governed by evolution. This means that the categories that allow
observation statements to arise as "facts", categories such
as number, space, time, event, measurement, logic, causality, and so
forth are mere physiological accidents of random mutation and natural
selection in a particular species, Homo sapiens. They have not come
from any scientific considerations, but rather have arbitrarily
arisen in man by blind and fortuitous evolution for the purpose of
preserving the species. They need not reflect external reality, "the
way nature is", objectively, but only to the degree useful in
preserving the species. That is, nothing guarantees the primacy, the
objectivity, of these categories over others that would have
presumably have arisen had our consciousness evolved along different
lines, such as those of more distant, say, aquatic or subterranean
species. The cognitive basis of every statement within the theory
thus proceeds from the unreflective, unexamined historical forces
that produced "consciousness" in one species, a cognitive
basis that the theory nevertheless generalizes to the whole universe
of theory statements (the explanation of the origin of species)
without explaining what permits this generalization. The pretences of
the theory to correspond to an objective order of reality, applicable
in an absolute sense to all species, are simply not compatible with
the consequences of a thoroughly evolutionary viewpoint, which
entails that the human cognitive categories that underpin the theory
are purely relative and species-specific. The absolutism of random
mutation and natural selection as explanative principles ends in
eating the theory. With all its statements simultaneously absolute
and relative, objective and subjective, generalizable and
ungeneralizable, scientific and species-specific, the theory runs up
on a reef of methodological incoherence.
Logicality
-----------
Speaking
for myself, I was convinced that the evolution of man was an
unchallengeable "given" of modern knowledge until I read
Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species". The ninth
chapter (The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection,
or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
Ed. J.W. Burrow. London: Penguin Books, 1979, 291-317) made it clear,
from what Darwin modestly calls the "great imperfection of the
geological record" that the theory was not in principle
falsifiable, though the possibility that some kind of evidence or
another should be able in principle to disprove a theory is a
condition (if we can believe logicians like Karl Popper) for it to be
considered scientific. By its nature, fossil evidence of intermediate
forms that could prove or disprove the theory remained unfound and
unfindable. When I read this, it was not clear to me how such an
theory could be called "scientific".
If
evolution is not scientific, then what is it? It seems to me that it
is a human interpretation, an endeavor, an industry, a literature,
based on what the American philosopher Charles Peirce called
abductive reasoning, which functions in the following way:
(1) Suprising fact A.
(2)
If theory B were the case, then A would naturally follow.
(3)
Therefore B.
Here, (1) alone is certain, (2) is merely
probable (as it explains the facts, though does not preclude other
possible theories), while (3) has only the same probability as (2).
If you want to see how ironclad the case for the evolution of man is,
make a list of all the fossils discovered so far that "prove"
the evolution of man from lower life forms, date them, and then ask
yourself if abductive reasoning is not what urges it, and if it
really precludes the possibility of quite a different (2) in place of
the theory of evolution.
Is the analogy from
micro-evolution within a species (which is fairly well-attested to by
breeding horses, pigeons, useful plant hybrids, and so on) applicable
to macro-evolution, from one species to another? That is, is there a
single example of one species actually evolving into another, with
the intermediate forms represented in the fossil record?
In
the 1970s, Peter Williamson of Harvard University, under the
direction of Richard Leakey, examined 3,300 fossils from digs around
Lake Turkana, Kenya, spanning several million years of the history of
thirteen species of mollusks, that seemed to provide clear evidence
of evolution from one species to another. He published his findings
five years later in Nature magazine, and Newsweek picked up the
story:
Without dwelling on the facticity
of scientific hypotheses raised under logic above, or that 3,300
fossils of thirteen species only "cover" several million
years if we already acknowledge that evolution is happening and are
merely trying to see where the fossils fit in, or that we are back to
Peirce's abductive reasoning here, although with a more probable
minor premise because of the fuller geological record--that is, even
if we grant that evolution is the "given" which the fossils
prove, an interesting point about the fossils (for a theist) is that
the change was much more rapid than the traditional Darwinian
mechanisms of random mutation and natural selection would warrant:
What the
record indicated was that the animals stayed much the same for
immensely long stretches of time. But twice, about 2 million years
ago and and then again 700,000 years ago, the pool of life seemed to
explode--set off, apparently, by a drop in the lake's water level. In
an instant of geologic time, as the changing lake environment allowed
new types of mollusks to win the race for survival, all of the
species evolved into varieties sharply different from their
ancestors. Such sudden evolution had been observed before. What made
the Lake Turkana fossil record unique, says Williamson, is that "for
the first time we see intermediate forms" between the old
species and the new.
That
intermediate forms appeared so quickly, with new species suddenly
evolving in 5,000 to 50,000 years after millions of years of
constancy, challenges the traditional theories of Darwin's disciples.
Most scientists describe evolution as a gradual process, in which
random genetic mutations slowly produce new species. But the fossils
of Lake Turkana don't record any gradual change; rather, they seem to
reflect eons of stasis interrupted by brief evolutionary
"revolutions" (ibid.).
Of
what significance is this to Muslims? In point of religion, if we put
our scientific scruples aside for a moment and grant that evolution
is applicable to something in the real world; namely, the mollusks of
Lake Turkana, does this constitute unbelief (kufr) by the standards
of Islam? I don't think so. Classic works of Islamic 'aqida or
"tenets of faith" such as al-Matan al-Sanusiyya tell us,
"As for what is possible in relation to Allah, it consists of
His doing or not doing anything that is possible" (al-Sanusi,
Hashiya al-Dasuqi 'ala Umm al-barahin. Cairo n.d. Reprint. Beirut:
Dar al-Fikr, n.d, 145-46). That is, the omnipotent power of Allah can
do anything that is not impossible, meaning either:
With respect to evolution, the
knowledge claim that Allah has brought one sort of being out of
another is not intrinsically impossible ((a) above) because it is not
self-contradictory. And as to whether it is (b), "impossible
because of Allah having informed us that it cannot occur", it
would seem to me that we have two different cases, that of man, and
that of the rest of creation.
Man
Regarding your question whether the Qur'anic account of creation is incompatible with man having evolved; if evolution entails, as Darwin believed, that "probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from one primordial form, into which life was first breathed" (The Origin of Species, 455), I apprehend that this is incompatible with the Qur'anic account of creation. Our first ancestor was the prophet Adam (upon whom be peace), who was created by Allah in janna, or "paradise" and not on earth, but also created in a particular way that He describes to us:
Now, the God of Islam is
transcendently above any suggestion of anthropomorphism, and Qur'anic
exegetes like Fakhr al-Din al-Razi explain the above words created
with My two hands as a figurative statement of Allah's special
concern for this particular creation, the first human, since a
sovereign of immense majesty does not undertake any work "with
his two hands" unless it is of the greatest importance (Tafsir
al-Fakhr al-Razi. 32 vols. Beirut 1401/1981. Reprint (32 vols. in
16). Beirut: Dar al-Fikr, 1405/1985, 26.231-32). I say "the
first human," because the Arabic term bashar used in the verse
"Truly, I will create a man from clay" means precisely a
human being and has no other lexical significance.
The
same interpretive considerations (of Allah's transcendance above the
attributes of created things) apply to the words and breathed into
him of My spirit. Because the Qur'an unequivocally establishes that
Allah is Ahad or "One," not an entity divisible into parts,
exegetes say this "spirit" was a created one, and that its
attribution to Allah ("My spirit") is what is called in
Arabic idafat al-tashrif "an attribution of honor," showing
that the ruh or "spirit" within this first human being and
his descendants was "a sacred, exalted, and noble substance"
(ibid., 228)--not that there was a "part of Allah" such as
could enter into Adam's body, which is unbelief. Similar attributions
are not infrequent in Arabic, just as the Kaaba is called bayt Allah,
or "the House of Allah," meaning "Allah's honored
house," not that it is His address; or such as the she-camel
sent to the people of Thamud, which was called naqat Allah, or "the
she-camel of Allah," meaning "Allah's honored she-camel,"
signifying its inviolability in the shari'a of the time, not that He
rode it; and so on.
All
of which shows that, according to the Qur'an, human beings are
intrinsically--by their celestial provenance in janna, by their
specially created nature, and by the ruh or soul within them--at a
quite different level in Allah's eyes than other terrestrial life,
whether or not their bodies have certain physiological affinities
with it, which are the prerogative of their Maker to create. Darwin
says:
Indeed it may. It is the nature of
the place in which Allah has created us, this world (dunya), that the
possibility exists to deny the existence of Allah, His angels, His
Books, His messengers, the Last Day, and destiny, its good and evil.
If these things were not hidden by a veil, there would be no point in
Allah's making us responsible for believing them. Belief would be
involuntary, like the belief, say, that France is in Europe.
But
what He has made us responsible for is precisely belief in the
unseen. Why? In order that the divine names--such as al-Rafi' or "He
Who Raises," al-Khafidh "He Who Abases," al-Mu'ti "He
Who Gives," al-Mani' "He Who Withholds," al-Rahim "the
Merciful," al-Muntaqim "the Avenger," al-Latif "the
Subtlely Kind," and so on--may be manifest.
How
are they manifest? Only through the levels of human felicity and
perdition, of salvation and damnation, by the disparity of human
spiritual attainment in all its degrees: from the profound certitude
of the prophets (upon whom be peace), to the faith of the ordinary
believer, to the doubts of the waverer or hypocrite, to the denials
of the damned. Also, the veil for its part has a seamless quality. To
some, it is a seamless veil of light manifesting the Divine through
the perfection of creation; while to others, it is a seamless veil of
darkness, a perfect nexus of interpenetrating causal relations in
which there is no place for anything that is not material. Allah
says,
The last time I checked, the university scene was an atheistic subculture, of professors and students actively or passively convinced that God was created by man. In bastions of liberalism like the University of California at Berkeley, for example, which still forbids the establishment of a Religions Department, only this attitude will do; anything else is immature, is primitivism. The reduction of human behavior to evolutionary biology is a major journalistic missionary outreach of this movement. I am pleased with this, in as much as Allah has created it to try us, to distinguish the good from the bad, the bad from the worse. But I don't see why Muslims should accept it as an explanation of the origin of man, especially when it contradicts what we know from the Creator of Man.
As for other cases, change from one sort of thing to another does not seem to contradict revelation, for Allah says,
and also says, concerning the metamorphosis of a disobedient group of Bani Isra'il into apes,
and in a hadith, "There shall
be groups of people from my community who shall consider fornication,
silk, wine, and musical instruments to be lawful: groups shall camp
beside a high mountain, whom a shepherd returning to in the evening
with one of their herds shall approach for something he needs, and
they shall tell him, 'Come back tomorrow.' Allah shall destroy them
in the night, bringing down the mountain upon them, and transforming
others into apes and swine until the Day of Judgement." (Sahih
al-Bukhari. 9 vols. Cairo 1313/1895. Reprint (9 vols. in 3). Beirut:
Dar al-Jil, n.d., 7.138: 5590). Most Islamic scholars have understood
these transformations literally, which shows that Allah's changing
one thing into another (again, in other than the origin of man) has
not been traditionally considered to be contrary to the teachings of
Islam. Indeed, the daily miracle of nutrition, the sustenance Allah
provides for His creatures, in which one creature is transformed into
another by being eaten, may be seen in the food chains that make up
the economy of our natural world, as well as our own plates.
If,
as in the theory of evolution, we conjoin with this possibility the
factors of causality, gradualism, mutation, and adaptation, it does
not seem to me to add anything radically different to these other
forms of change. For Islamic tenets of faith do not deny causal
relations as such, but rather that causes have effects in and of
themselves, for to believe this is to ascribe a co-sharer to Allah in
His actions. Whoever believes in this latter causality (as virtually
all evolutionists do) is an unbeliever (kafir) without any doubt, as
"whoever denies the existence of ordinary causes has made the
Wisdom of Allah Most High inoperative, while whoever attributes
effects to them has associated co-sharers (shirk) to Allah Most High"
(al-Hashimi: Miftah al-janna fi sharh 'aqida Ahl al-Sunna. Damascus:
Matba'a al-taraqi, 1379/1960, 33). As for Muslims, they believe that
Allah alone creates causes, Allah alone creates effects, and Allah
alone conjoins the two. In the words of the Qur'an, "Allah is
the Creator of everything" (Qur'an 13:16).
A
Muslim should pay careful attention to this point, and distance
himself from believing either that causes (a) bring about effects in
and of themselves; or (b) bring about effects in and of themselves
through a capacity Allah has placed in them. Both of these negate the
oneness and soleness (wahdaniyya) of Allah, which entails that Allah
has no co-sharer in:
This third point is negated by both
(a) and (b) above, and perhaps this is what your pamphleteer at
Oxford had in mind when he spoke about the shirk (ascribing a
co-sharer to Allah) of evolution.
In
this connection, evolution as a knowledge claim about a causal
relation does not seem to me intrinsically different from other
similar knowledge claims, such as the statement "The president
died from an assassin's bullet." Here, though in reality Allah
alone gives life or makes to die, we find a dispensation in Sacred
Law to speak in this way, provided that we know and believe that
Allah alone brought about this effect. As for someone who literally
believes that the bullet gave the president death, such a person is a
kafir. In reality he knows no more about the world than a man taking
a bath who, when the water is cut off from the municipality, gets
angry at the tap.
To
summarize the answer to your question thus far, belief in
macro-evolutionary transformation and variation of non-human species
does not seem to me to entail kufr (unbelief) or shirk (ascribing
co-sharers to Allah) unless one also believes that such
transformation came about by random mutation and natural selection,
understanding these adjectives as meaning causal independence from
the will of Allah. You have to look in your heart and ask yourself
what you believe. From the point of view of tawhid, Islamic theism,
nothing happens "at random," there is no "autonomous
nature," and anyone who believes in either of these is
necessarily beyond the pale of Islam.
Unfortunately,
this seems to be exactly what most evolutionists think. In America
and England, they are the ones who write the textbooks, which raises
weighty moral questions about sending Muslim students to schools to
be taught these atheistic premises as if they were "givens of
modern science." Teaching unbelief (kufr) to Muslims as though
it were a fact is unquestionably unlawful. Is this unlawfulness
mitigated (made legally permissible by shari'a standards) by the need
(darura) of upcoming generations of Muslims for scientific education?
If so, the absence of textbooks and teachers in most schools who are
conversant and concerned enough with the difficulties of the theory
of evolution to accurately present its hypothetical character, places
a moral obligation upon all Muslim parents. They are obliged to
monitor their children's Islamic beliefs and to explain to them (by
means of themselves, or someone else who can) the divine revelation
of Islam, together with the difficulties of the theory of evolution
that will enable the children to make sense of it from an Islamic
perspective and understand which aspects of the theory are rejected
by Islamic theism (tawhid) and which are acceptable. The question of
the theory's adequacy, meaning its generalizability to all species,
will necessarily be one of the important aspects of this explanation.
Of all the premises of
evolution, the two that we have characterized above as unbelief
(kufr); namely, random mutation and natural selection,
interpreted in a materialistic sense, are what most strongly urge its
generalization to man. Why must we accept that man came from a common
ancestor with animal primates, particularly since a fossil record of
intermediate forms is not there? The answer of our age seems to be:
"Where else should he have come from?"
It
is only if we accept the premise that there is no God that this
answer acquires any cogency. The Qur'an answers this premise in
detail and with authority. But evolutionary theory is not only
ungeneralizable because of Allah informing us of His own existence
and man's special creation, but because of what we discern in
ourselves of the uniqueness of man, as the Qur'an says,
Among the greatest of these signs
in man's self is his birthright as Khalifat al-Rahman, "the
successor of the All-merciful." If it be wondered what this
successorship consists in, the ulama of tasawwuf, the scholars of
Islamic spirituality, have traditionally answered that it is to be
looked for in the ma'rifa bi Llah or "knowledge of Allah"
that is the prerogative of no other being in creation besides the
believer, and which is attained through following the path of inward
purification, of strengthening the heart's attachment to Allah
through acts of obedience specified by Sacred Law, particularly that
of dhikr.
The
locus of this attachment and this knowledge is not the mind, but
rather the subtle faculty within one that is sometimes called the
heart, sometimes the ruh or spirit. Allah's special creation of this
faculty has been mentioned above in connection with the Qur'anic
words and breathed into him of My spirit. According to masters of the
spiritual path, this subtle body is knowledgeable, aware, and
cognizant, and when fully awakened, capable of transcending the
opacity of the created universe to know Allah. The Qur'an says about
it, by way of exalting its true nature through its very
unfathomability:
How does it know Allah? I once asked this question of one of the ulama of tasawwuf in Damascus, and recorded his answer in an unpublished manuscript. He told me:
[I wrote of the above:] If it be
observed that the term heart as used above does not seem to conform
to its customary usage among speakers of the language, I must grant
this. In the context, the term denotes not the mind, but rather the
faculty that perceives what is beyond created things, in the world of
the spirit, which is a realm unto itself. If one demands that the
existence of this faculty be demonstrated, the answer--however
legitimate the request--cannot exceed, "Go to masters of the
discipline, train, and you will be shown." Unsatisfying though
this reply may be, it does not seem to me to differ in principle from
answers that would be given, for example, to a non-specialist
regarding the proof for a particular proposition in theoretical
physics or symbolic logic. Nor are such answers an objection to the
in-principle "publicly observable" character of observation
statements in these disciplines, but rather a limitation pertaining
to the nature of the case and the questioner, one that he may accept,
reject, or do something about (Keller, Interpreter's Log. Manuscript
Draft, 1993, 1-2).
Mere imagination? On the contrary,
everything besides this knowledge is imagination, for the object of
this knowledge is Allah, true reality, which cannot be transient but
is unchanging, while other facts are precisely imaginary. The child
you used to be, for example, exists now only in your imagination; the
person who ate your breakfast this morning no longer exists except in
your imagination; your yesterday, your tomorrow, your today (except,
perhaps, for the moment you are presently in, which has now fled):
all is imaginary, and only hypostatized as phenomenal reality, as
unity, as facticity, as real--through imagination. Every moment that
comes is different, winking in and out of existence, preserved in its
relational continuum by pure imagination, which constitutes it as
"world." What we notice of this world is thus imaginary,
like what a sleeper sees. In this connection, Ali ibn Abi Talib
(Allah ennoble his countenance) has said, "People are asleep,
and when they die, they awaken" (al-Sakhawi, al-Maqasid
al-hasana. Cairo 1375/1956. Reprint. Beirut: Dar al-kutub
al-'ilmiyya, 1399/1979, 442: 1240).
This
is not to denigrate the power of imagination; indeed, if not for
imagination, we could not believe in the truths of the afterlife,
paradise, hell, and everything that our eternal salvation depends
upon. Rather, I mention this in the context of the question of
evolution as a cautionary note against a sort of "fallacy of
misplaced concrescence," an unwarranted epistemological
overconfidence, that exists in many people who work in what they term
"the hard sciences."
As
someone from the West, I was raised from early school years as a
believer not only in science, the practical project of discovery that
aims at exploiting more and more of the universe by identification,
classification, and description of micro- and macro-causal relations;
but also in scientism, the belief that this enterprise constitutes
absolute knowledge. As one philosopher whom I read at the University
of Chicago put it,
Scientism
is science's belief in itself: that is, the conviction that we can no
longer understand science as one form of possible knowledge, but
rather must identify knowledge with science" (Habermas,
Knowledge and Human Interests. Tr. Jeremy J. Shapiro. Boston: Beacon
Press, 1971, 4).
It
seems to me that this view, in respect to evolution but also in
respect to the nature of science as a contemporary religion,
represents a sort of defeat of knowledge by an absolutism of pure
methodology. As I mentioned at the outset, the categories of
understanding that underly every observation statement in the theory
of evolution arise from human consciousness, and as such cannot be
distinguished by the theory from other transient survival devices:
its explanative method, from first to last, is necessarily only
another survival mechanism that has evolved in the animal kingdom. By
its own measure, it is not necessary that it be true, but only
necessary that it be powerful in the struggle for survival.
Presumably, any other theory--even if illusory--that had better
implications for survival could displace evolution as a mode of
explanation. Or perhaps the theory itself is an illusion.
These
considerations went through my mind at the University of Chicago
during my "logic of scientific explanation" days. They made
me realize that my faith in scientism and evolutionism had something
magical as its basis, the magic of an influential interpretation
supported by a vast human enterprise. I do not propose that science
should seriously try to comprehend itself, which it is not equipped
to do anyway, but I have come to think that, for the sake of its
consumers, it might have the epistemological modesty to "get
back," from its current scientistic pretentions to its true
nature, as one area of human interpretation among others. From being
the "grand balance scale" on which one may weigh and judge
the "reality" of all matters, large and small--subsuming
"the concept of God," for example, under the study of
religions, religions under anthropology, anthropology under human
behavioral institutions, human behavioral institutions under
evolutionary biology, evolutionary biology under organic chemistry,
organic chemistry (ultimately) under cosmology, cosmology under chaos
theory, and so on--I have hopes that science will someday get back to
its true role, the production of technically exploitable knowledge
for human life. That is, from pretentions to 'ilm or "knowledge,"
to its true role as "fann" or "technique."
In
view of the above considerations of its coherence, logicality,
applicability, and adequacy, the theory of the evolution of man from
lower forms does not seem to show enough scientific rigor to raise it
from being merely an influential interpretation. To show the
evolution's adequacy, for everything it is trying to explain would be
to give valid grounds to generalize it to man. In this respect, it is
a little like Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, in which he
describes examples of dreams that are wish fulfillments, and then
concludes that "all dreams are wish fulfillments." We still
wait to be convinced.
Allah alone is Master of Existence. He alone causes all that is to
be and not to be. Causes are without effect in themselves, but rather
both cause and effect are created by Him. The causes and the effects
of all processes, including those through which plant and animal
species are individuated, are His work alone. To ascribe efficacy to
anything but His action, whether believing that causes (a) bring
about effects in and of themselves; or (b) bring about effects in and
of themselves through a capacity Allah has placed in them, is to
ascribe associates to Allah (shirk). Such beliefs seem to be entailed
in the literal understanding of "natural selection" and
"random mutation," and other evolutionary concepts, unless
we understand these processes as figurative causes, while realizing
that Allah alone is the agent. This is apart from the consideration
of whether they are true or not.
As
for claim that man has evolved from a non-human species, this is
unbelief (kufr) no matter if we ascribe the process to Allah or to
"nature," because it negates the truth of Adam's special
creation that Allah has revealed in the Qur'an. Man is of special
origin, attested to not only by revelation, but also by the divine
secret within him, the capacity for ma'rifa or knowledge of the
Divine that he alone of all things possesses. By his God-given
nature, man stands before a door opening onto infinitude that no
other creature in the universe can aspire to. Man is something else.
I realized after writing the above that I had not talked much about the literature on the theory of evolution. Books that have been recommended to me are:
Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. Michael Denton. Bethesda, Maryland: Adler and Adler Publishers, 1986. Originally published in Great Britain by Burnett Books Ltd. This would probably be the most interesting to you as a biologist, as it discusses molecular genetics and other scientific aspects not examined above.
Enclyclopedia of Ignorance. Ed. Duncan Roland. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1978.
Thinking About God (Exact title?). Ruqaiyyah Waris Maqsood. Bloomington, Indiana. American Trust Publications.
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