March 26 , 2010
The Farce of Islamic Creationism
I was helping my daughter with her science homework for 7th grade. She was studying evolution and how that explains the origin of species and how the natural world is organized and ordered. The theory is extremely powerful in its very elegant way of explaining what otherwise is hard to fathom. One of Darwin’s contemporaries remarked, after reading his work, “How incredibly stupid of me not to have thought of that.”
Evolution through natural selection is actually a very simple concept. It relies on the fact that in any group of living things, no two are identical. There is some inherent genetic variation between all the elk in a herd or all the fish in a school. There is also a struggle for survival in nature and successful reproduction. The average squirrel lasts a year in the wild, even though it can live 15 in captivity. Half of all lion cubs die before their first birthday. The vast majority of creatures do not even make it to adulthood and of those who do, not all reproduce. In some studies of bird populations, 20% of the adults provide 80% of the next generation. So who wins this lottery? Darwin said that the best-adapted creatures did, and their adaptations were the result of genetic factors that could be passed on to their children. In addition, new genetic variation is occurring all the time due to mutations. These provide the raw material for evolution. The result, over the passage of long stretches of time, is that a species can change and evolve into something new and different.
More importantly, this theory creates a testable prediction. Species that shared a common recent ancestor should be very similar if we look at their DNA. And species should contain within their DNA or their biology evidence of their past forms. Finally, life should be organized into groups of similar organisms that all radiated out from a common distant ancestor.
When we look at nature we find all these predictions to be true. Think of the hundreds of species of snakes or bats, or thousands of different species of beetle. Look at how the mammalian carnivores are organized into groups like the cats and the dogs and the bears, and among the cats are thirty different species from the lion to the housecat. If we look at their DNA, we see very close similarities. A lion and tiger are so close that they can be mated in a zoo and produce an offspring. Farmers have been able to mate horses and donkeys to make mules for millennia. If we look at our own DNA and compare it to a chimpanzee, we find that it is 98% identical. Only the theory of evolution provides a scientific explanation for these facts.
But deep within us we also see evidence of our ancestry. The presence of the appendix in our gut, which is a useful organ to a cow, but only serves to kill us without an emergency operation, tells a tale. And speaking of tails, occasionally human babies are born with a small appendage extending off their tailbone, in some cases it can be several inches long. A surgeon can easily remove it, but why does our DNA contain the instructions for making a tail? Whales sometimes give birth to a baby that has two tiny hind legs with feet. Are they not clearly a sign of the land-origin of the whale’s distant ancestor?
Darwin’s ideas were denounced early on by religious Christians who saw his view as incompatible with a literal reading of the origin of life and humans as written in the Bible. Fundamentalist Christians have continued to wage a campaign against evolution ever since, and they have put forth a competing notion called “creationism” which simply claims that all current species were created separately by God, and that species do not evolve. For decades this notion was strictly the province of fundamentalist Christians. But in the last 20 or so years, a mimic of Islamic Creationism has sprung to life. Islamic Creationists have essentially adopted the Christian version, even though there is no Genesis story in the Qur’an. I was shocked and appalled to see Islamic Creationist literature for sale in bookstores at mosques. This whole notion is deeply un-Islamic, and totally a derivative of a Christian attack on evolution. It has no place in Islam and is simply polluting our children’s minds. Islam is a rational faith, and many Muslims rightly point out that the Qur’an does not contradict modern science, unlike the Bible. Islam does not speak directly to how the natural world came to be, but rather what our relationship to God is, and what our duty is to Him and to our fellow human beings.
Muslims once led the world in science. We are now hopefully exiting our own Dark Age of ignorance and superstition. The proponents of Islamic Creationism are only delaying that exit.
Comments can reach me at Nali@socal.rr.com
