Oct
25
Evolution
October 25, 2007 |
As humans, we have surely had an evolution in the cultural sense. After our ancestors lived by hunting and gathering for a long period of time, they started to cultivate the land, and eventually we moved to a new mode of production with the industrial revolution. During this process, the technology that we use, as well as our culture, literature and our level of knowledge made much progress. This was the cultural evolution.
Based on this, can we think that a biological evolution in which there has been no place for God’s intervention makes sense too? No, the cultural evolution does not provide any foundation for a godless biological evolution at all. Cultural evolution is a process that has developed under the control of human consciousness and reason. However, the assertion of the contemporary evolutionist thought is that evolution has happened without a consciousness and reason in charge and therefore without God.
Is it then possible that a biological evolution under the control of Allah did materialize? Yes, but it is more reasonable to think that it happened through very different mechanisms from the mechanisms that modern irreligious biologists suggest.
However much humans may be similar to the apes and other mammals apparently, we cannot agree from an Islamic viewpoint that they have evolved from them. Allah must have created man based on a biological model similar to that of the animals under consideration, but I think the Qur’an and the literature of hadith is clear that man did not descend from another species but was created literally out of clay. I appreciate that this argument might convince only a Muslim, then what can we say to a non-Muslim whose view on the matter is based on the current scientific literature on evolution? The holes in that literature that some scientists point out are part of the evidence for my point.
So, Allah might have created many species out of the stock of other species that are similar to them. But this creation, or “evolution”, could not have happened through random mutations, as such mutations cannot do this no matter how hard the spiritually blind would have us believe so. If we proceed under this assumption that there was a process of evolution governed by God, God consciously designed a new species and then created it in its perfect form out of the other one species. No imperfect intermediary forms were needed. Even the intermediary forms that the evolutionists claim to exist can only be intermediary forms in the ongoing design process by God and not intermediary forms in a random, unconscious process.
Sublime is the glory of Allah, the only God, the possessor of the primordial and ultimate consciousness, who brought us into existence out of nothingness and who will bring us to life again after our deaths for an eternal life.
Comments
1 Comment so far
A favourite quote from the great Spanish Sufi, Ibn al-Arabi:
God sleeps in the rock
dreams in the plant,
stirs in the animal
and awakens in man.
Now that is evolution :)
Ya Haqq!