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Old 03-08-2008, 12:02 PM
Ugur Offline
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Default Evolution according to Islam: Sheikh Nuh Ha Mim Keller

As his personal opinion, Sheikh Keller thinks much like I humbly do: There must have been an evolution governed by Allah, but not in the way most evolutonists believe.

However, he unequivocally states that believing in evolution in the way most evolutonists believe is unbelief per se and makes one go beyond the pale of Islam. Read his own words: (Evolution and Islam)

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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.
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What about accepting the evolutionary story specifically about the "evolution" of the human species: Believing in that story is (normally) kufr. If you do believe in it, may Allah forgive you but come to your senses. Read Sheikh Keller again:

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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.
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Returning to his personal opinion again, he thinks evolution is not scientific, though it may be partly correct:

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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.
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May Allah guide all of us to the right path.


P.S. See the following web page regarding the unfortunately widespread myth that evolution is science and intelligent design is not (it was not written by Harun Yahya): Is Intelligent Design Theory Scientific?
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Last edited by Ugur; 03-08-2008 at 01:15 PM.
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