Thursday thread: Creationism or evolution? Intelligent design or Darwinism?
(apropos of this classic post)
Islam News @ NYT- Women’s Rights in Mideast:
- Driving Miss Saudi: Young women in Riyadh try to balance Islam and modernity as the stunted desert kingdom makes progress in “Saudi Time.”
- Swedish Artist Says Sketch of Prophet Aimed to Mock All Religions: A man who prosecutors say was the target of a murder plot says his caricature of the Prophet Muhammad was intended to poke fun at all sacred symbols.
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aziz 12:46 pm on April 24, 2008 Permalink |
personally I think the two questions posed are two separate issues. I personally believe, to some extent, in all four things. So my answers: “both, and both”.
Designed evolution? Intelligent darwinism?
sophister 1:36 pm on April 24, 2008 Permalink |
I believe for muslims these predefined terms pose a problem in that they directly correspond to a value system which we don’t share. Also, it is probably not so black and white, and nor would it have to be. Do we think that God can do all? If so, then we must believe God is capable of creating the evolutionary process. The only thing left to do then is to see if the texts speak to this issue.
Zack 1:46 pm on April 24, 2008 Permalink |
Evolution is a scientific theory used to explain a scientific question. Creationism is a religious belief which conflicts with scientific evidence. Intelligent design is pseudo-scientific.
So of course I think evolution is correct. I don’t use evolution to try to answer religious or theological questions.
Willow 1:49 pm on April 24, 2008 Permalink |
Intelligent design assumes a diety that sets something in motion and then steps back–God the Watchmaker. (Which I find terribly inaesthetic.) What if the design *is* the intelligence? The name Al Ahad assumes a diety that is fully present everywhere, and thus could participate in a process rather than simply set it in motion. (God the watchmaker is problematic in that a watchmaker is not omniscient or omnipotent–as soon as he ’steps back’ from his creation it is no longer under his purview.)
I wrote an article for Science and Spirit about this once, years ago.
aziz 2:43 pm on April 24, 2008 Permalink |
Willow, drag out that link!
sophister, part of my reason for asking is admittedly to see if we can come to it on our own terms rather than using the lexicon from the ID-evolution debate (which Harun Yahya has embraced). As far as whether the text (Qur’an) speaks on the issue, I think there are only a sparse handful of verses. So theres as much room for our individual interpretation as there is on the Western side. Does changing the definitions and terminology really give any clarity?
Zack, agreed that these are separate issues to some extent, but they do overlap in a big way. There has to be a single Truth about human origins at the root of it all.
manas 11:22 pm on April 24, 2008 Permalink |
I would rather not take sides until the problem is fully solved. It seems to me in view of current developments, it is designed evolution. But I am not sure.
For example I used to think that the story of Adam and Eve is, well, a metaphor. Turns out- it’s actually true that all of us come from a single father and a single mom. It remains to be proven, however, that they lived at the same time.
razib 12:54 am on April 25, 2008 Permalink |
people can believe whatever they want and call it whatever they want. if they contradict the scientific consensus then they’re asking to not be taken seriously. most creationists & intelligent design proponents regularly make things up, so if you want to use those labels don’t be surprised if most people throw you into the tard-bin. but since questions of ultimate causation are more philosophical semantics really matters….
thabet 1:41 am on April 25, 2008 Permalink |
I agree with Geert, above.
Avoid intelligent design. It is bad science.
aziz 5:30 am on April 25, 2008 Permalink |
I think that embracing the Intelligent Design movement is clearly an embrace of nonsense, as far as methodology and shoddy thinking goes. Its really just an articulation of a religious belief wrapped in some scientific terminology to try and leech some validation off.
But at the same time, if you reduce ID to a single broad concept and discard all the rest of the nonsense, you come up with the single statement, “the human being was designed by God.” That statement seems a natural inference from an Islamic perspective, though of course theres nothing in it to justify the antiscience fervor of the ID crowd. That statement is Godelian, it cannot be proved, but believeing it doesnt necessitate throwing evolution out the window.
matoko 6:16 am on April 25, 2008 Permalink |
Not a problem for the Sufi.
Why would the Creator of Worlds, He Who Pastures the Stars, be muckin around at the cell biology/lifespark level?
matoko 6:56 am on April 25, 2008 Permalink |
the idea of faana is essentially the same as the Turing heresy.
That is how i fight my nafs…every thing i am capable of is only tribute to the Divine Beloved.
matoko 8:02 am on April 25, 2008 Permalink |
i have to go to work…..but in my universe razib khan himself is a believer.
he told me once that we would become as gods thru transhumanism.
not so different from wat i belive.
razib 10:26 am on April 25, 2008 Permalink |
“That statement seems a natural inference from an Islamic perspective”
there isn’t a conflict with science if you say it is an *islamic* perspective. but it is a conflict with current consensus if you say it is *necessarily* the scientific perspective (which is what ID claims). at one point it was the scientific consensus, so i don’t believe that such assertions are ipso facto unscientific, but the issue needs to be framed well.
“he told me once that we would become as gods thru transhumanism.”
inshallah.
aziz 11:48 am on April 25, 2008 Permalink |
ah, transhumanism, the singularity, et al. Color me skeptical there, too.
matoko 1:16 pm on April 25, 2008 Permalink |
you do not have to believe in the singularity, ‘ziz.
it is just that Sufism is a natural complement to transhumanism.
we believe…some are born open channel…others can achieve it.
like the First Obligation of the Mu’tazhili….it is a duty to use reason, science, etc. to approach Allah.
have u thot, ‘ziz, that if we had lived 800 years ago, razib would have been ibn Rushd, and i would have been ibn Arabi?
matoko 1:24 pm on April 25, 2008 Permalink |
and, IDT as posed contra to ToE is a non-starter.
in Science, we already had that argument.
just as geo-centric was the orthodoxy, and helio-centric the heresy, IDT was the orthodoxy, and ToE the heresy that supplanted it.
we are not goin to go backwards.
pretty soon we will build synthetic life in nanoscale.
the true argument is, i think, what is the nature of god/allah/hashem?
ned 2:01 pm on April 25, 2008 Permalink |
Transhumanism in my opinion is a metaphor for our spiritual destiny as a species. Some of you might be interested in William Irwin Thompson. Here is an article of his, “Reflections on Machine Consciousness”:
http://www.sciy.org/blog/_archives/2007/1/16/2657488.html
Quote:
“Technologists are closer to paranoids than they are to mystics in the sense that they are literalists given to perceptions of misplaced concreteness; they always see spiritual experiences as the products of technology — as emergent domains that are caused by technological innovations, such as LSD or computer networks. The ‘difference that makes a difference — in the famous phrase of Gregory Bateson — between the mystic and the paranoid is that the mystic is in a state of wild cognitive and creative joy, the satchitananda of the yogi, but the paranoid is in a condition of anxiety and a cosmic sense of fixation on literalism and the control of reality through machines. Rather than saying her spiritual intuition has inspired her to see a pattern of connectedness to a world of higher dimensions, s/he claims to have been abducted by flying saucers who have implanted microchips into her head and are beaming directly into her brain from the mother ship.
“Mystics flip this literalism over to see technology as a system of externalized metaphors that derive from pre-existing ontological modes at play and at large in the universe. For them, technology is like the Catholic Baltimore Catechism’s definition of a sacrament: ‘an outward sign of an inward state’. For the mystic — be she Cabbalist or Sufi — an angel is a ‘Celestial Intelligence’ — a form of cosmic noetic organization that does not require a detour through animal evolution. So when Kurzweil claims that by 2030 implanted nanobots in the bloodstream will enable humans to turn off to the outside world to attune to a virtual reality, the mystic would recognize a literalist rendering of the process of meditation. Kurzweil’s vision of the world in 2030 reminds me of Borges’s ‘Library of Babel’. ‘I suspect that the human species — the unique species — is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, useless, incorruptible, secret’. And here we need to be sensitive to the full force of Borges’s use of the word ‘Babel’.
The mystics, starting with Teilhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo in the first half of the twentieth century, also prophesied that we were at a new stage in evolution, but they saw consciousness surrounding technology, and compressing and miniaturizing it into an antique fossil of intermediate cultural evolution as we passed on into a poshuman or ‘Supramental’ era in which we were welcomed back into the cosmic play.”
As far as ID goes, I am skeptical of it — it’s bad science and it’s bad spirituality/religion as well. There are lots of people who are legitimately challenging the neo-Darwinian orthodoxy. Here is an anthology of fantastic legitimate sources doing this:
http://www.naturalgenesis.net/
I mean there are plenty of people without a political agenda who are challenging neo-Darwinism (not evolution though). It would be better to look to those sources than the ID crowd which seems to really lack integrity.
ned 3:22 pm on April 25, 2008 Permalink |
Here’s an interesting article by the transhumanist writer John Smart:
http://www.accelerationwatch.com/#evdev1
Why ‘Design’ (A Universe Tuned for Life and Intelligence) Does Not Require a Designer, and Teleology (a Theory of Destiny) is Not a Theology — Understanding the Paradigm of Evolutionary Development
matoko 9:23 pm on April 25, 2008 Permalink |
What if the design *is* the intelligence?
or..a process…or an energy field…
the Sufi often use apotheosis, literally “speaking away” to describe Allah.
He is unknowable and indescribable.
so when aziz says…“the human being was designed by God.”
designed is problematical
i think…caused
“the human being was caused by God.”
designed is such anthropomorphism.
aziz 9:40 pm on April 25, 2008 Permalink |
I disagree that designed is an anthropomorphism. After all, we are told that we are here for a reason. Hence we have purpose, to our existence. This is the very definition of design.
I think that mixing metaphysics and religion is unwise – these are separate things and each hae their place (both apart from science itself). I find that atempting to reinterpret Creation from a nano/transhuman/etc metaphor only muddles things where there should be clarity. Even the most sublime transhumanist vision would still be insufficient to attain oneness with the supreme being.
There was a fantastic novel written by Rene Daumal, Mount Analogue. The summit of Mount Analouge was the ultimate asymptotic point, towards which each climber strove to reach, but none could ever attain. I will have to do a post on Mount Analouge later as we are veering quite far from the thread topic of evolution, but here is an essay written by a climber on Mount Everest, reflecting on Daumal’s wondrous slim novel, in the context of his own failed expedition to the summit.
matoko 9:12 am on April 26, 2008 Permalink |
designed
it just eems anthropomorphic to me.
wat do we know about the divine reasoning process?
a plan?
how can we know that?
I think that mixing metaphysics and religion is unwise
that is why you are not a Sufi.
do you know what i think about sometimes ‘ziz?
an infinite hyperplane..the fabric of spacetime. it is formed into a tube of enormous diameter, diameter so huge that our perception of the curvature from our view point is almost flat (penrose’s reduced curvature of spacetime)
unseen, imperceptible to us, far over our microcosmic mindss the inner surface of the rolled hyperplane curves back to make a surface with no begining and no end.
Allah’s carpet.
evolution is just part of the process.
matoko 9:17 am on April 26, 2008 Permalink |
i mean…if you are goin to anthropomorphize….
do it to scale.
lolz
matoko 9:18 am on April 26, 2008 Permalink |
and…
are u just talking about biological evolution?
what about the cosmic landscape?
matoko 9:33 am on April 26, 2008 Permalink |
Even the most sublime transhumanist vision would still be insufficient to attain oneness with the supreme being.
the path to faana or hallejean annihilation?
physical and mental/spiritual exercises…the accumulation of knowledge…the supression of ego…all to achieve that openchannel that some lucky few are born with. i think i can use both methods.
why couldn’t i use neurohormones or genetic engineering to attain a meditative state?
yah haqq!
aziz 1:27 pm on April 26, 2008 Permalink |
are u just talking about biological evolution?
for the purposes of this thread, yeah i was really only focused on the biological origins question.
I may be understanding faana wrongly, but it seemed an intellectual enlightenment, not a physical one. Transhumanism is very much concerned with the “crude matter” (to quote Yoda).
matoko 2:06 pm on April 26, 2008 Permalink |
didn’t i tell you we are metaphysicians?
/grins
Sharif 1:56 pm on May 29, 2008 Permalink |
I think the confirmed existence of jinn neatly offers a part of the solution, because jinn, being supernatural beings, have no scientific explanation, yet regardless of one’s religious or ideological affiliation, one would have to be absurd to deny the existence of jinn if they were shown the evidence, or if they were to have some kind of accidental experience with a jinn.
My suggestion: read “Jinn & Human Sickness” by Darussalam publishers. It’s very convincing, very informative, and it’s a great eman boost as well
.
aziz 1:59 pm on May 29, 2008 Permalink |
Sharif, while I do believe in Jinn, I think I would be pretty skeptical that their existence has been “confirmed”. I think that seeking proof for things of faith only serves to undermine faith. We can and should believe without proof.
Sharif 1:53 pm on May 30, 2008 Permalink |
Well, think about it…
People being possessed by jinn such as here (not for the faint at heart):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTEshwPppFM&feature=related
and here:
http://muslimmatters.org/2008/02/11/a-conversation-with-a-jinn-the-exorcism-experience/
Someone *could* still be skeptical. But my point is that their have been so many overlapping, reliable ( and of course, some unreliable) reports of such experiences, what reason could there be to deny it?
My father was telling me of a man (a non-practicing Muslim, borderline agnostic) who read the book I mentioned above, and he became completely convinced about it.
I don’t feel that there is a need to “prove” jinn (and I don’t feel that their existence is shrouded in that much mystery anyway), I do find it to be a good boost of eman. It’s just my two cents, take it or leave it…
Also, for further reading, one could also read Bilal Philip’s book on Exorcism in Islam.