A couple of months ago, Mohamed Ghilan published a blog post in response to a conference in the UK entitled “Have Muslims Misunderstood Evolution?” I have take issue with his characterizations of atheists, his description of the history of epistemology in Western philosophy, and his depiction of the context and function of evolution in the history of ideas.
We’ll start with his invocation of the trope of the ‘angry atheist.’ This is simply insult, not rational argument. There are, of course, many intellectuals who have taken upon themselves the education of the public about evolutionary theory. They have published many books, given many lectures. The tone of these materials is generally calm and professional. There is sometimes exasperation, but this tends to be caused by the fondness with which Creationists use out of context quotes to attempt to frame a narrative of a ‘theory in crisis.’ One would expect that Ghilan would be the last person to stereotype another group of people as ‘angry.’ As it is, atheists do not hold violent protests outside of the Creation Museum nor do they call for the assassination of those who criticize evolution in the public square. As we all know, the case is quite different when someone violates the ‘sanctity’ of the person of Muhammad.
Towards the beginning of the article, after the slurs, he notes:
“Everyone seems to want to talk about the evidence for or against it. No one is interested in the foundation that it’s built upon, and the subsequent logic and coherence of the theory itself.”
Given that the question is itself (in this particular case) whether it is in fact the case that humans share a common ancestor with all other living species, it is rather obvious that people would want to discuss the evidence for and against the proposition. The problem for Ghilan, as he himself admits is that Muslims:
“proceed to point out whatever holes the theory has and what it doesn’t explain. Well, if history is any guide, those holes will be filled at some point as the theory goes through the normal scientific course of being re-worked, and some clever scientists will come eventually to explain those things that haven’t been explained”
Unable to win a case on the merits (i.e. the evidence), he proceeds to argue the technicalities. He proceeds to give an adequate account of the difference between material and inferred evidence and provides a passable account of the various criteria a theory has to satisfy to be accepted as scientific (although I am a bit put off by his putting the words objective reality in scare quotes).
He assures us that “Material evidence presents no problems for Islam.” Perhaps. But that is primarily because what he calls material evidence (“ the hard data,” “observed phenomena”) does not tell us very much about the world unless it is integrated into an elaborated body of theory.
He begins his discussion of the underlying foundations of evolutionary theory with an overly-simplistic account of the history of epistemology in the Western world. He informs us that
“What the Western intellectual crowd determined for itself was that all that exists is what we can touch, smell, feel, taste, hear, and see.”
This is, of course, completely false. That western intellectual crowd, while holding a great diversity of philosophical views, does generally believe that things such as numbers, logical truths, and the past exist (although we can find exceptions to belief in each of these).
He continues:
“ There’s no such thing as pure reason. To be rational means to make empirically-verifiable statements. “
Again, completely false, as any first year student of philosophy could tell you. He completely ignores the analytic-synthetic distinction. While it is true that deductive arguments do not reveal new truths about the external world, they do organize the truths we do know in new ways and draw out their implications. As A. C. Grayling writes, “There is no logical novelty in the conclusion, though often enough there is psychological novelty” (The God Argument). One cannot be rational if they ignore the results of sound deductive arguments that are relevant to what is being discussed. He also caricatures Descartes skepticism. I think Pierce said it best:
“We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begun with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices cannot be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. Hence this initial skepticism will be mere self-deception, and not real doubt”
Descartes doubt was a thought-experiment through which he attempted to derive indubitable first principles on which he could build up an edifice of knowledge. Once the foundation was set, empirical evidence could be accepted, analyzed, and employed. The other rationalist philosophers thought similarly- a Platonic skepticism towards sense perception as a source of knowledge as such is not a prominent feature of modern rationalism. Conversely, the empiricists did not deny the utility of ‘pure reason’ as exemplified by mathematics and formal logic in analyzing the data of sense perception. They simply rejected the doctrine that the ultimate foundation of knowledge consists of a series of rationally intuited indubitable truths. Instead, they posited the evidence of the senses as the foundation of knowledge. The dispute did not consist of one side rejecting an entire avenue of knowledge that was accepted by the other- it was a debate over the ultimate foundations of or justification for knowledge.
By contrast, Ghilan tells us that “The Muslim approach was never an either/or in this extremist sense.” There was, of course, no Muslim approach as such. There were a diverse array of thinkers in the Muslim world who dealt with epistemology and they reached conclusions that were just as diverse as those in the west. Al-Ghazali, for example, ultimately drew skeptical conclusions concerning both the use of the senses AND demonstrative reason, and was only released from his doubt “by a light that God almighty cast into my breast, which is the key to the greater part of cognizance" (Deliverer from Error). As for western approaches to overcoming this dichotomy, there have been many from Immanuel Kant’s categories of thought, through the American pragmatists such as Pierce and James, to the modern anti-foundationalist thinkers.
Ghilan then takes a card from the deck of the Christian creationists- he decides that the issue is not one of science but of religious worldviews. He cites Dawkin’s oft-quoted (by fundamentalists) passage about Darwin making “it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist” as evidence that “evolutionary theory is meant for” justifying atheism and that “major function of evolutionary theory... is to provide a pacifier for the reader who might have any inclinations to feeling any reverence towards anything metaphysical.” This is belied by the actual historical facts concerning the genesis (if you pardon the pun) of the theory and by the numerous religious scientists who accept the theory because of its scientific merits, such as its fit with the empirical evidence its explanatory power, fruitfulness in generating research projects, and. Darwin himself tells us in his Autobiography that “ Whilst on board the Beagle I was quite orthodox, and I remember being heartily laughed at by several of the officers (though themselves orthodox) for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality.... The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered” (p. 85-87).
Ultimately, the problem for Ghilan, as it is with creationists such as Phillip E. Johnson, is philosophical naturalism, described by the former as the “assumption that there is nothing beyond this physical realm, and “ that “give[s] a context to the combination of your material and inferred evidence.” Once this is assumed, he admits that “you cannot escape having to accept evolutionary theory as an account for where things came from.” Indeed.
Ghilan’s problem is that philosophical naturalism, in its epistemological form, is a necessary precondition for the scientific endeavor. You cannot frame general laws and theories concerning the physical world which invoke entities that are not subject to the laws of that world and that can flout them at will. Once you allow evil genies (ala Descartes) or gods and goddesses fudge the results by speeding up the decay rates of radioactive elements or tweaking the speed of light, you’ve said goodbye to any confidence you can have in general scientific theories concerning the past.
Besides this concern, it deserves mention that the existence of this physical realm is a shared assumption of common sense, scientific investigation, and the Abrahamic religions. To move beyond it and assert the existence of a supernatural realm and to invoke supernatural explanations of natural phenomena is a step that needs to be argued for. It is not basic in the same way as the assertion that the physical world exists. Ghilan is correct that we cannot evaluate evidence without first principles- but not all first principles are created equal.
He makes the claim that:
“If one were to take all the assertions such as “this evolved from that to solve the problem of moving from water to land”, and restrict the material to just describing structure and function and pointing out the similarities without inducing relatedness, and classify based on similarity rather than “relatedness”, it wouldn’t all of a sudden be any less scientific.”
Besides demonstrating an extreme misunderstanding about evolutionary theory (features do not evolve to solve problems ala Lamarck- new features emerge which incidentally allow organisms to exploit new niches), Ghilan is omitting that science is, at heart, a theorizing activity that moves beyond the given evidence to infer explanations for that evidence which can then be tested in some manner or other. It is not, as Taner Edis put it in describing the peculiar view of science held by Muslim creationists, “a set of practical applications and concrete facts to be collected and organized like stamps.”(An Illussion of Harmony)
He proceeds to create a farcical and condescending dialogue intended to show how close-minded and dogmatic atheists are, quotes a passage from two authors who are not actually denying the fact of evolution but rather the explanatory power of natural selection, and then embarks on a rant about “all the problems seeping from evolutionary theory” (which he does not describe), invoking (of course) Kuhn about all theory being data laden and in which he alludes to the “foundations” of “the science-worshipping militant new atheist crowd” being shook (how?), before ending on an appeal for Muslims to take up the study of traditional theology. Yes, I’m sure that will work.
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