Which Islam? Dear Mr. Gill and bjkumar, it`s only sad that it happened again. My question was not how spiritual or materialistic you and I are, or whether we are happy with our life or not, but how do we define progress so we can inteliigently talk about these things. To this question both responses are silent. In fact I am not happy that my comments were taken personally by both of you. I was attacking certain ideas, not you and me or any human being for that matter. I hope we don`t identify ourselves with the idea where objection to one is naturally but quite mistakenly associated with the other as well. That is a logical fallacy but a much prevalent one. So question remains: what is progress?

Which Islam? Dear Mr. Gill and friends,

A few remarks:

``They became successful when they stopped Islam from invading their creative engagements in philosophy and science. Islam did inspire them to spread out in the world but their real success was due to their unequalled progress in science and philosophy...I empathized with him and was equally pained to see the Muslim world factually as one of the most confused and backward societies of the world.``

First we need to define what ``success`` means here. Success, progress, development etc refer to a frame of reference, a criterion, or analogically speaking, destiny vis a vis the journey. Now within the discourse I have seen here, it seems we all have a materialistic model in mind, i.e., success would mean material well-being and having a luxurious life. I will happy if you had something different in mind. On my part I will dissent that there is such a thing as progress (in the Darwinian/survival of the fittest etc kind) The only progress is spiritual and moral and we are only progressing when we are able to increase the number of good (moral and spiritual) human beings in our society, and not when we have an increased number of professional scientists, engineers, and so on. I am not opposed to the idea of having these specialists (some people quickly assume this is what the argument is, which it`s not), but they are important insofar as the material well-being of the society is at stake.

The notion of progress itself is a new idea, rising from specific sociological circumstances and thus has a history (see The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth by Prof. Bury). I am only suggesting that progress needs to be defined in clear terms. I have laid out the definition which makes sense to me. It`s a definition that`s put forth by all religions, something like humans beings should `progress` towards their spiritual and moral well-being, sometimes even at the expense of material well-being (e.g., asceticism).

Same applies to your use of terms backward etc. Backward from what perspective, what it means to be forward, or forward-looking? etc. And if you think the ``Western success`` (which I am not sure what you would really mean by this term, given that you have not defined the terms and are using cliches primarily) is moral and spiritual, then all you need to do is survey the works written in pointing out the deep spiritual, moral and environmental crisis in the West. See Macintyre, Charles Taylor, E. F. Schumacher, and Neil Postman plus the Marxist critique of the capitalistic society (it is still largely valid), and people like Adorno, CLR James and Cornel West. And how about knowledge itself? The huge debates of realism-anti-realism in philosophy and philosophy of science, the complete bafflement as to what quantum physics imply for the nature of reality and our understanding of it (see Bohr, Heisenburg, Polkinghorne, Bohm etc and making other competing theories - not to mention the derivation of quantum logic), shows the strong epistemological crisis to make sense of the world. And lets peek at the debates on aesthetics and ethics. Relativism there is too obvious to call any explanation here.

In midst of this all, people come and tell us that there is only one science but many Islams? True, science is standardized in practice; on the theoretical side however, there are so many issues, discussions, debates.

But please note these are just side remarks, not central to what I intend to say here. I have only tried to highlight that the articles rests on the assumption of progress which is not valid, at least not from the Islamic point of view. Mind you, for Muslims the best is not yet to come but is in our past. In other words, we are not progressing towards the best but have only regressed from early Umma onwards. For Muslims the best people were in Prophet`s time. The most illumined people were in our history, a source of inspiration at all times. Please note that such a claim is true for all religious traditions. From the Hindu point of view we are in Kalyug (the Dark Age). The Golden age is long over. And so on and so forth. We have only regressed in time. (Reminds me of Sura al-Asr)

Modern thought assumes otherwise. It turns the story upside down: progress and not regress in history. People in history were irrational, non-scientific, myth-loving, ill-mannered, primitive, stagnant etc. We are all on the path of progress, moving forward. We are forward looking, `progressive` people. Of course I think this is all false but I am not here to argue about it but only to show that how the two modes of thinking are quite different and their respective implications.

Finally do you think progress is a scientific fact? Of course not. It`s a theoretical assumption. Can you scientifically prove it? No. It will depend on the criteria you lay out to gauge it. My question to you is about the criteria you have in mind in assessing it. What have you in mind? Material well-being, spiritual and moral well-being or something else?

As to your claims of inherent conflict between religion and science, and religion an enemy of science, I am not sure where you are getting it from. These were initial hunches of 19th century historians but have been challenged big time recently. Recent research in the field of History of Science has made clear claims as to the role of religion and religious institutions in the development of science. See David Lindberg`s many works including When Science and Christianity Meet. Finally in the case of Islam, you just need to look at Science and Civilization in Islam by Nasr (a major scholarly work and still one of its kind in the way it takes the subject-matter seriously) and recent studies by people like Howard Turner, and the journal of Islam and Science. Let us talk about sound scholarly research and not ages-old slogans transferred to us by imperial orientalists.

I have found many other claims severely over-generalized and simplistic but I will leave it here.

May God guide us all to truth and virtue.

Rizwan

Decline of Science in the Muslim World There is an interesting saying that humans cannot help worshipping something, be it God, gods, nature, pop idols, celebrities, an ideology, one`s own self, almost anything, and at least something. We cannot not have an idol to prostrate before it.

Gill, I liked your `religious` homage to the new `scientific` deity, if you know what I mean.

What is Secularism? Re: # 129 Gill, I have tried to systematically respond to some of the questions and criticisms you have rasied here: See parathesis.

``...it is the idea of state that has become our reality today that forces all of us to come up with same laws for every one..`` This is not only a present day reality, it has always been like that.

(I don’t think this is historically accurate. The idea of nation-state/state is quite modern.)

In a multireligious society, the state should implement laws, for the purpose of the day to day governance, which are secular, i.e., which do not belong to any particular religion and do not discriminate on religious grounds. We, the Muslims, find it difficult to accept it because in our conception, religion is part of the state or the other way round, i.e., the state is (or ought to be) part of religion. We then can grant concessions to the followers of other religions and claim to be just and fair.

(In the light of history this argument does not hold. State is not the only way to govern and was not for the most part in global (and not just western) history, as I mentioned earlier. I can cite the inception of statehood in western history if you like. I really think this question needs to be explored in history and hardly anyone would contend on it with me)

Will you like a Christian government to rule in the U.S. which can (and will) delimit your, and of the other non-Christian citizens), freedom? My rights to me are given by the constitution of a secular government in the U.S. I am not beholden to anybody for these rights.

(As I have said earlier, the idea of nation-state has made it imperative to make one generalized law for ``all citizens of the state``. A little bit scrutiny of Andalusia (Muslim Spain) would reflect how one can have different laws governing different religious communities according to their own religion. Again, Spain is just one among many examples that can be cited. Our very own Mughal history provides numerous other examples. The important point to notice is that these examples are not that of a state as you might think)

A religious government is frequently unfair even to its own people. Sharia (Hudood laws), for instance, is unfair to the Muslim women.

(This argument applies equally to non-religious governments. The slavery issue in US history for which unfairness would be a reductive term is not result of religious discrimation but happened in a secular state. Same can be said about Auschwitz.)

I do not need to belabor this point too much because it is so obvious. I am suggesting that a secular government is fairer than a religious government because it does not discriminate on religious grounds. A religous government, on the other hand, does, otherwise it need not be religious. As far as practicing a religion is concerned, secular government doesn`t prevent you from it.

(In the light of arguments made above these claims do not hold.)

I had also mentioned that a democracy coupled with constitutional liberty and secularism can work to the `common good.` We in Pakistan are neither secular nor theocratic. We need to have a secular democracy in Pakistan to end the political game of musical chairs currently going on there. How can it be done? I don`t have any idea. First important thing is for the common people, you and I, to realize that a secular democracy is a benevolent form of government.

(I don’t think this argument holds either given what I have already mentioned above.)

A secular democracy is not divine, we can make changes and modifications to improve it, all the time., in a constitutional way. A religious government is rigid and inflexible.

(Again these claims are complete misconstrual of historical facts and is a big overstatement.)

Based on my personal experience, I can say that whenever you try to solve a problem on religious grounds, the solution becomes impossible. Think of:

1. Is music allowed in Islam? It`s still controversial, yet it has become a fact of our life. I hope you listen to the music and do not feel bad about it.
2. Is photography (and TV) allowed by Islam? For theoretical discussion, it is not allowed, yet we cannot live without it. The same goes for painting and fine arts.
3. There is no `religious ban` on poetry but it is disparaged. There is a whole sura on poets.

(This way of phrasing these questions to elicit certain conclusions is ‘simplistic’ to say the least. These issues have been widely discussed in various intellectual disciplines in Islamic thought and there are varieties of perspectives one finds there. For example, philosophers, mystics, jurists, theologians, traditionalists and so on. I can cite references if you prefer.)

I can go on and on. If you want to live peacefully, better stay away from these issues. Let them be personal affairs and not communal.

I have no problem with what you believe and don`t believe because it is your personal business. I don`t pass fatwas of kufr on my brother Muslims because ``I know what I am``, ``munn a`anam keh munn da`anam.`` Generally religion makes people arrogant. (I`m not suggesting that you`re arrogant. You seem to be a liberal person willing to discuss issues with open mind)

(In light of all this, these conclusions are ill-founded. I think we need to be intellectually very diligent in our scrutiny of such important issues especially when we made our opinions public on forums like chowk.com. Throwing in generalized statements, exaggerated facts and conclusions based upon our individual penchants will not be very helpful.)

(I hope you will be able to see my good intent here.

Finally you said that “Generally religion makes people arrogant.”

Arrogance has little to do with religion. It is basic human psyche of raising oneself above everything, even God. In my academic career I have found most arrogance in Business schools and in scientists themselves. If it’s a question of our personal experiences alone then I am afraid mine are radically different from yours. Arrogance is an issue of human ego which religion precisely intends to overcome. What probably you want to say is that some belief-systems make one arrogant and this is true for scientific belief-systems as well.

I will close with one example: Richard Dawkins, the famous protagonist of Darwinism once said: “IT IS ABSOLUTELY SAFE TO SAY THAT IF YOU MEET SOMEONE WHO CLAIMS NOT TO BELIEVE IN EVOLUTION, THAT PERSON IS IGNORANT, STUPID OR INSANE (OR WICKED BUT I WILL RATHER NOT CONSIDER THAT). - This is a scientist`s way of labelling someone kafir - a term you avoid to use. For a scientist it is the reason which holds the ultimate value as in contradistinction with faith in the case of a religion. Therefore a heresy is labelled accordingly - not being unfaithful but being stupid and insane. So humble indeed!

Salams

Intelligent Design versus Natural Selection Dear Mr. Gill and friends, This is a must read article for the issues that have been raised here. Perhaps the best defense offered from an aesthetic point of view - I would buttress this critique by citing numerous works which have demonstrated quite well (from biological inconsistencies to philosophical absurdities that evolutionism entails) that the debate is far from being over and the evolutionists still have a huge burden of proof, perhaps more than what they can carry.

I would love to hear people`s comments especially Mr. Gill himself whose descriptive analysis inadmittedly seem to favor evolutionist stance but I would insist on specific counterargumets etc. to the specific critique of the arguments made by Jonathan, not some general remarks based on misconstrual of his position.

The Gods Must Be Tidy!
Is the Cosmos a Work of Poor Engineering or the Gift of an Artistic Designer?
By: Jonathan Witt
Touchstone Magazine
August 1, 2004


Original Article

When as a boy I read “The Scouring of the Shire” near the end of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, I could not understand why Tolkien felt the need to tack on such an anti-climactic and shabby bit of evil. Only later, as I began to notice modernity’s penchant for ugliness in the world beyond Middle Earth, did I understand that the scouring of the Shire bespoke a present evil, a malevolence insidious precisely because it lacked the stark drama of the trenches or the gas chambers.

I came to understand that the demolition of the hobbits’ lovely village possessed the striking lines of caricature not because it was unrealistic but rather because the depiction is so sharp and trenchant. Familiarity may breed contempt, but it can also breed cataracts, an incapacity to see a thing vividly, truly.

God of the Nazis

The twentieth century was, in its darkest moments, an arresting illustration of the will to power, but it also exhibited a less imposing if somewhat more curious urge: what could be aptly termed the will to ugliness. The perversely drab “pre-fabs” of postwar England, the American slum projects constructed by a later generation, the willfully dissonant monstrosities of much modern high architecture, the willfully tortured, obscure, and graceless prose of the deconstructionists, even the black-eyed and anorexic grotesques of the Paris catwalks—all bespeak an age driven to throw up trappings repulsive in their embrace of detachment and death.

The cultural pedigree of this modern predilection for ugliness is old, various, and to some degree mysterious. But here I want to suggest that Darwinism—in which I include its DNA-inspired mutation, neo-Darwinism—has contributed to this will to ugliness not merely by underwriting a vision of the world as a godless accident, but also in the very way it critiques and thereby dismisses the idea of an Author and Designer of life.

What I call the a-teleological macroevolutionists—those who argue that the cosmos is the product of chance and has no intrinsic end or purpose—argue that life emerged by natural selection without design from single-celled organisms, and they claim to use strictly scientific methods to support their position. In truth, however, they often slip into what is essentially an aesthetic and theological argument against a designer.1 Others have noted this, but what has not been fully explored is the dubious nature of the evolutionists’ aesthetic argument.

Consider one especially prominent example, evolutionist Richard Dawkins’s critique of the mammalian eye in his The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design:

Each photocell is, in effect, wired in backwards, with its wire sticking out on the side nearest the light. . . . This means that the light, instead of being granted an unrestricted passage to the photocells, has to pass through a forest of connecting wires, presumably suffering at least some attenuation and distortion (actually probably not much but, still, it is the principle of the thing that would offend any tidy-minded engineer!)2

Never mind for the moment that it has been clearly demonstrated that the backward wiring of the mammalian eye actually confers a distinct advantage by dramatically increasing the flow of oxygen to the eye.3 Let us ignore that brilliant bit of engineering and look at Dawkins’s intriguing obsession with neatness. O brave new world whose supreme designer distinguishes himself first and foremost by his tidy-mindedness! Aldous Huxley has ably dramatized the horror of a society so engineered.

Do we really wish to substitute the exuberantly imaginative, even whimsical designer of our actual universe for a cosmic neat freak? Such a deity might serve nicely as the national God of the Nazis, matching Hitler stroke for stroke: Hitler in his disdain for humanity’s sprawling diversity; the tidy cosmic engineer in his distaste for an ecosystem choked and sullied by a grotesque menagerie of strange and apparently substandard species. Out with that great big prodigal Gothic cathedral we call the world; in with a modern and minimalist blueprint for a new and neater cosmos.

Bye, Panda

One of the first things that would have to go is the panda—if not the whole bear, then certainly his two thumbs. In Stephen Jay Gould’s book The Panda’s Thumb, the late Harvard paleontologist has this criticism for his title character:

An engineer’s best solution is debarred by history. The panda’s true thumb is committed to another role, too specialized for a different function to become an opposable, manipulating digit. So the panda must use parts on hand and settle for an enlarged wrist bone and a somewhat clumsy, but quite workable, solution. The sesamoid thumb wins no prize in an engineer’s derby. It is, to use Michael Ghiselin’s phrase, a contraption, not a lovely contrivance.

Now one might take the usual defend-the-engineer tack here, and any design advocate trained in such matters certainly should scrutinize Gould’s assumptions as to the inferiority of the panda’s thumb. Gould even provides a small opening when he concedes that the sesamoid thumb is “quite workable” and “does its job.” Indeed, when he finally witnessed a panda firsthand, he “was amazed by their dexterity and wondered how the scion of a stock adapted for running could use its hands so adroitly.”

By Gould’s account, the panda’s thumb makes a fine peeler for bamboo, the panda’s principal food, and investigation may demonstrate that it is actually superior to an opposable thumb for such work.4

However, do not hold your breath waiting for pandas to take up fly-fishing or needlepoint. For versatility, the opposable thumb is the clear blue ribbon winner. Which raises the obvious question: If an intelligent designer designed the world, did he not think of the opposable thumb until after he designed the panda? And was he too tired to go back and upgrade that poor panda?

To such a question the Darwinian community collectively responds thus: “Obviously not. If there’s a designer out there running the show, he’s a real bumbler, a second-rate engineer who could not get a job in a third-rate Swiss watch factory. Since the idea of a second-rate designer is patently ridiculous, there is no designer.”

This argument is rife with problems already underscored by design thinkers like William Dembski in his book The Design Revolution. The most basic failing of this line of reasoning is that even if the panda’s thumb is proven to be less useful than it could be, that doesn’t negate the evidence that the whole panda has the mark of design. It’s a creature dependent upon an architecturally marvelous cathedral of complex, specified information, the sort we know from experience is fashioned only by intelligent agents.
Indeed, the panda would remain so even if it had no thumbs at all. The Yugo, I’m told, was a badly designed automobile, but no sane person would argue that with all its problems, it wasn’t designed. The same logic applies to a panda or a duck-billed platypus or an ostrich.

But the point here is that these anti-design arguments by Dawkins, Gould, and other Darwinists are not scientific ones. They are aesthetic arguments, expressing an idea of what the universe should look like--that is, that it should satisfy the tidy-minded engineer. But who is to say that the Darwinists’ taste is that of the cosmic designer, if there is one? Who is to say that the designer should value tidiness over, say, whimsy?

Bad Art

Recently, something else struck me about this effort to call attention to the apparently jury-rigged quality of certain elements of the cosmic “watch” and then declare that such things could not have been designed: Critics of intelligent design tuck some idiosyncratic and highly dubious aesthetic presuppositions into the metaphor of the cosmos as watch. These include an overemphasis on tidiness, a de-emphasis on beauty, and a dismissal of any possibility that the creator might wish to commune with his creation. Surely a perfect watchmaker would wind up his perfect (tidy, efficient, functional) watch and step away, freed by the perfection of his instrument from the need to tinker any further with it.

We can see how Enlightenment thinkers arrived at this metaphor of the watch, confronted as they were with fresh insights into the orderly, mathematically precise nature of the cosmos. And contemporary astrophysicists, even those who resist the idea of a cosmic design, now tell us that the laws and constants of the cosmos are, in fact, finely tuned to an almost unimaginable degree, such that even very small changes in a few of them would render complex life utterly impossible. So at least in one sense, the universe is watch-like.

But all metaphors break down if pressed far enough, and this one breaks down pretty quickly. Where a single metaphor crowds out all others in a matter as complex as our living world, it produces an intellectually impoverished and very misleading stick-figure rendering of the subject. Thus, the thinking person is wise to ask, to what extent is the universe watch-like? To what extent should it be watch-like?

To cling to the watch analogy in a critique of the notion of a wise cosmic designer fails to face an obvious (and theological) question: Is this an adequate way to speak of the hypothetical designer? Is his satisfying the aesthetic demands of the Darwinists a sufficient test of his existence? To put it another way, if there is a cosmic designer, what does he need a watch for? He doesn’t. One would be hard-pressed to name a major religion that posits a transcendent god who uses the universe primarily as a tool.

Not even the god articulated by the orderly minds of Plato and Aristotle fits the bill. Whether we think of the morally compromised gods of Mount Olympus meddling in the affairs of their various mortal offspring; or of Plato’s “the One” (what he also called “the Good” or “Father of that Captain and Cause”); or the holy God of the Bible, father and shepherd and husband of his people, the deity is not construed as one interested in the world primarily as a tool for himself. Indeed, whenever he is construed as a personality, and not merely as some sort of non-sentient organizing First Principle, he is depicted as one interested in the world itself, as a creator who delights in the work of his hands.

The Lover’s Watch

Dare we use the word “love” in this context? Dare one suggest that the designer loves his creation in a way the watchmaker does not love the watch he makes, that the Creator would no more think of his creation as a tool than would a bridegroom his bride or a father his children? The fact that such terms as love and bridegroom strike many as inappropriate to the evolution/design debate merely testifies to how thoroughly the utilitarian assumption behind the metaphor of the watch has permeated Western thinking.

Certainly, we could try to discuss the matter without considering the designer’s attitude toward his creation (that is, whether he is a watchmaker or a bridegroom or father). But the evolutionists have already smuggled this issue into the debate by assuming that, if there were a designer, he would be some sort of disinterested and hyper-tidy watchmaker. Having smuggled in this highly questionable point, they then regard as beneath consideration any idea of a designer who (as they put it) “meddles in his creation.”

Or they dismiss the notion that an omnipotent and omniscient designer might fashion a creature short of an optimal design. Here they not only make a theological claim but ignore a key question at once practical and aesthetic: How do concerns about ecological balance impinge upon a critique of animal structures?

Must the cosmic designer’s primary concern for pandas be that they are the most dexterous bears divinely imaginable? From a purely practical standpoint, might opposable-thumbed über-pandas wreak havoc on their ecosystem? From a purely aesthetic standpoint, might not those charming pandas up in their bamboo trees with their unopposing but quite workable thumbs be just the sort of humorous supporting character this great cosmic drama needs to lighten things up a bit? If Shakespeare could do it in his tragedies, why not God?

Pandas as comic relief? To spurn the notion as if it were patently ridiculous and beneath consideration is merely to expose one’s utilitarian presuppositions. Why, after all, should the designer’s world read like a dreary high-school science textbook, its style humorless, homogenous, and suffocating under the dead weight of a supposedly detached passive voice? Why should not the designer’s world entertain, amuse, and fascinate, as well as “work”?

In summary, virtually the entire bad-design versus good-design discussion is framed by an engineer’s perspective, not an artist’s or mystic’s. When I mentioned this to the philosopher Jay W. Richards a few years ago, he responded in a letter: “After all, why do we assume that God created the universe to be a watch, in which a self-winding mechanism makes it ‘better’? Maybe the universe is like a piano, or a novel with the author as a character, or a garden for other beings with whom God wants to interact. It’s amazing how a simple image can highjack a discussion for a century and a half.”

What is worse, Darwinists like Gould and Dawkins commit the error called atomism: the idea that, in Gould’s own words, “wholes should be understood by decomposition into ‘basic’ units.” In other words, they assume not only that nature is a kind of watch but that each individual design is its own watch--its own machine--meant to be judged in relative isolation. They evaluate the panda’s thumb by how well it works as a thumb, not by how well it fits into the whole life of the panda, including its place in its own environment.
This is, at the most practical level, to misunderstand pandas. At the aesthetic level, it is to declare that an artist who might have created pandas could not have been thinking (as artists do) of the whole work.

Unaesthetic Shakespeare

Interestingly, the god of the English canon, William Shakespeare, came in for much the same criticism by the tidier-minded among his neoclassical critics as the God of the cosmos has come in for from the tidier-minded scientists. This actor turned playwright lacked classical restraint, the argument went.

In 1726 Lewis Theobald perhaps initiated the century’s long criticism of Hamlet’s coarse speech when he commented on a particularly bawdy line spoken by Hamlet to Ophelia: “If ever the Poet deserved Whipping for low and indecent Ribaldry, it was for this Passage.”5

Another regarded Shakespeare’s general habit of mingling the low with the high, the comic with the tragic as a “wholly monstrous, unnatural mixture.”6 With only a little more restraint, a third lamented the bard’s tragedies: “How inattentive to propriety and order, how deficient in grouping, how fond of exposing disgusting as well as beautiful figures!”, how often he compels the audience “to grovel in dirt and ordure.”7

Happily, most neoclassical Shakespearean critics were enthusiastic, and yet, as one modern critic noted, even the admiration of the more sympathetic critics was always “modified and tempered . . . by regrets that Shakespeare had elected, either through ignorance or by design, to embrace a method that discarded all classical rules.”8

What do we make of such criticism today? To use Freud’s language, itself rude and vulgar, such criticism strikes us as anal-retentive. What emotionally whole and thoroughly sane admirer of Renaissance drama would want to substitute for the works of the “myriad minded” Shakespeare, the relatively impoverished fare left over after unsympathetic neoclassical critics tidied him up?

Perhaps the relevance of the analogy is becoming clear. The criticism of Shakespeare is akin to the evolutionists’ criticisms of the cosmic designer. In each case the critic believes the respective artist in question should build all of his characters according to some rigid set of criteria that ignores broader concerns, be they ecological, aesthetic, or otherwise. Proponents of this line of argument value tidiness over other and often more vital aesthetic criteria like intricacy, harmony, variety, imaginative exuberance, freedom, even moral complexity.

A Queer Assumption

The Darwinists’ aesthetic criticism moves from the unconvincing to the positively odd in a further and even queerer assumption: the conviction that no all-knowing and all-powerful designer would restrict himself to the materials at hand, even when such designs are clearly superb. Darwinists are quite fond of this argument, apparently considering it irresistibly persuasive to all but the most irrational mind.

I saw an especially brazen instance of this strange aesthetic dogma at a debate at Texas Tech University between Darwinist James Carr and intelligent design microbiologist Michael Behe. Arguing against Behe, Carr used the similarities in the genetic code of chimps and humans as a bad-design argument. What all-powerful creator would need to recycle his materials like this, he argued. It was almost as if he considered it unmanly of the Fellow Upstairs.

Gould leveled essentially the same criticism against a would-be cosmic designer in his description of Charles Darwin’s study of orchids:
Orchids manufacture their intricate devices from the common components of ordinary flowers, parts usually fitted for very different functions. If God had designed a beautiful machine to reflect his wisdom and power, surely he would not have used a collection of parts generally fashioned for other purposes. Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components.9
Or as one writer Gould quoted put it, nature is a superb tinkerer, not a divine artificer.10

The argument that no cosmic designer would so often recycle his creative material is a common tactic, one Darwin himself employed. In a letter to Asa Gray around 1861 Darwin wrote, “Your question what would convince me of Design is a poser. . . . If man was made of brass or iron and no way connected with any other organism which had ever lived, I should perhaps be convinced.”11

Certainly humans made of iron or brass would create enormous difficulties for a Darwinian explanation of humankind’s existence. But the tenor of this comment fits Darwin’s attitude to the similarities among the species. His unstated assumption seems to be that the similarities are not merely one missed opportunity for the natural world to reveal its design and thus falsify his theory, but a positive argument against a cosmic designer.

Darwin’s Design

Most of us would respond, “But why?” The only logical way to use the similarities as an argument against a designer is to take as an aesthetic premise the assumption that no omniscient and omnipotent designer would design in such a way. In other words, one would have to assume that using the ho-hum materials at hand instead of consistently elevating higher works of art with newer and “better” materials violates some pre-established and widely accepted aesthetic principle. “Why,” Darwin asked in The Origin of Species, “should the sepals, petals, stamens, and pistils in any individual flower, though fitted for such widely different purposes, be all constructed on the same pattern?”12

Ironically, Darwin unwittingly suggested a very un-Darwinian answer in a letter to his sister. Expressing his admiration for the Duke of Northumberland’s home, Darwin wrote, “His house was very grand; much more so than the other great nobility, and in much better taste.” The young biologist did not attribute the house’s nobility and beauty to a prodigal use of variously distinct materials or motifs--quite the contrary. “Every window in his house was full of straight lines of brilliant lights, and from their extreme regularity and number had a beautiful effect. The paucity of invention [emphasis mine] was very striking, crowns, anchors, and ‘W.R.’s’ were repeated in endless succession.”13

So why should Darwin be surprised that an intelligent designer of the world would proceed in the same way? Conventional wisdom in the field of aesthetics all but demands such an artistic method. Pattern and variation are interdependent concepts fundamental to art. Where would Schubert’s “Theme and Variations” be without the theme? The point is so basic one feels silly making it.

Should the later movements of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony be censured for continuing to build off an original motif? Do we exclaim with the woman at the first performance of Bolero that Ravel must be mad for building on his central motif? Do we not instead admire the way he built so exquisitely and powerfully on the central motif till the climactic grandeur of the finale? Ought we to demote Monet from the first rank of the impressionists because he had the bad taste to paint poplars and haystacks over and over again? Do we not instead marvel at the fecundity of his imagination, at the subtly of his observation and insight?

No one, not even his harshest eighteenth-century critics, accuses Shakespeare of bad art on the grounds that Much Ado About Nothing and Othello share virtually the same plot, creatively altered to produce radically different plays. Few if any object to Shakespeare’s repetition of motherless girls as heroines, or to his girls-disguised-as-boys theme, or to his repetitive use of the sonnet form for his poetry.

Unimaginable Genius

Where the atomist or reductionist regards elements in isolation (and properly so within certain intellectual disciplines), the artist seeks variety within unity, rhythm, and harmony, qualities fundamental to the creation of beauty. Notice I am not claiming a seat of honor for some culturally narrow artistic practice—say, the English sonnet—but rather appealing to principles broad and fundamental in the history of the world’s art.

If there is an intelligent designer behind this astonishingly complex work of art we call the world, it’s quite sensible to suppose he would be at least as artistically savvy as the artistically gifted among his creatures, that he would cultivate harmony and unity through the creative reuse of common materials. Now, the Darwinist might complain, “What is all this artistic, aesthetic balderdash? We are scientists, not poets or starry-eyed mystics. Leave the artists to their pattern-making and let us get back to our hard-nosed, empirical science.” Fine, but if they wish to avoid an argument about aesthetic principles, they should not assume within their arguments aesthetic principles that are at best highly debatable, and at worst contrary to the canons of art.

In the meantime, those who reject such dubious reasoning, who understand that the world is the handiwork of unimaginable genius, could do worse than to follow the aesthetic lead of those humble and beautiful hobbits who returned to their desecrated Shire carrying elven soil: We can take a soil richer than the dead ground of materialism and sprinkle it wherever we can, honoring the miracle of creation’s growth even as we tend to our proper role as stewards and gardeners of a world between Heaven and Hell, a place we might aptly call Middle Earth.

Notes:

1. See, for instance, Paul Nelson’s “The Role of Theology in Current Evolutionary Reasoning,” Biology and Philosophy 11 (1996), pp. 493–517; William Dembski’s Intelligent Design (InterVarsity Press, 1999) and The Design Revolution (InterVarsity Press, 2004); and Cornelius G. Hunter’s Darwin’s God (Brazos Press, 2001).
2. W. W. Norton, 1996, p. 93.
3. Excerpts from “The Inverted Retina: Maladaptation or Pre-adaptation?” Origins and Design 19.2 (2000): 14 June 2000 http://www.arn.org/docs/odesign/od192/invertedretina192.htm.
4. W. W. Norton, 1980, pp. 21, 22, 24.
5. Quoted in Paul S. Conklin, A History of Hamlet Criticism: 1601–1821 (Humanities Press, 1968), p. 53.
6. Charles Gildon, quoted in Herbert Spencer Robinson, English Shakespearian Criticism in the Eighteenth Century (Gordian Press, 1968), pp. 26–27.
7. Edward Taylor, “From Cursory Remarks . . .”, in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, 1774–1801, edited by Brian Vickers (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 130–132. This Taylor is not to be confused with the wonderful American poet Edward Taylor, the last of the metaphysical poets, who spent a great deal of time in the “dirt and ordure” exploring the mysteries of the divine and the human.
8. Robinson, English Shakespearian Criticism, p. xii.
9. The Panda’s Thumb, p. 20.
10. François Jacob, quoted ibid., p. 26.
11. “To Asa Gray,” 17 September 1861(?), volume 2 of Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, edited by Francis Darwin, ftp://sailor.gutenberg.org/pub/gutenberg/etext00/2llcd10.txt.
12. Sixth London Edition (1872), ftp://sailor.gutenberg.org/pub/gutenberg/etext99/otoos610.txt.
13. 9 September 1831, volume 1 of Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ftp://sailor.gutenberg.org/pub/gutenberg/etext00/1llcd10.txt.

What is Secularism? Re: # 126 Well, to your statement ``In a secular system, you can cherish your religion as much as you like but you will not impose sharia on non-Muslims`` I would like to make amendments by introducing the underlying idea of State: i.e., It is not Shariah that makes it universal implementation necessary but rather it is the idea of state that has become our reality today that forces all of us to come-up with same laws for everyone, JEws, Christians, Muslims, agnostics and so on. The idea of state implies one law, one government, one system and so on and so forth for everyone. It thus implies ubiquitous implementation of law, religious or secular. What I imply in this argument is that the problem is not with Shariah or law but with the idea of state, no matter how inevitable it has become in the modern world. With a monarchy for example, there was no such problem of imposition of one law on all; in theory as well as in historical practices sometimes. Muslims have allowed Jews to live by their Halakah. I can cite historical examples if need be. The question of secularism cannot be understood or tackled without bringing in the idea of state or nation which I think goes hand in hand with secularism. (Nation, an arbitrary identity with no ontological content whatsoever) One reinforces the other and both complement each other by making each other inevitable. Maybe they are inevitable in the modern world but to accept something (the idea of state and secularism) as necessary evil and to `cherish` something are two radically different ways of approaching these questions. With the former one would always seek alternatives; with the latter one would be complacent with the system in place.
Two more things: What is your potential audience for this argument? Pakistan or the West? Are you making a case for secular Pakistan? You think Pakistan should become a secular state to protect rights of minorities? Secondly, you have not responded to my concerns about democracy. I am curious to know what you think.
Salam!

What is Secularism? Re: # 89 Thank you for this encouragement. I just hope that the objectives of our interactions are to be clear in our thinking, to puruse sincerely these burning issues and to resolve the complicated puzzles of the strange world we all dwell in.

What is Secularism? Dear Gill, ``Secularism doesn`t rob the space of a religion; it recognizes religion and avoids, in principle, clashing with it.`` Lets think about it for a second. What is the space of religion? or especially the space of Islam as understood traditionally. I think Islam makes no distinction between public and private, worldy and spiritual and in a way attempts to sanctify the wordly life as well. This means making money, working, fighting when needed, raising family etc etc (all within the prescribed limits as defined in Shariah) and I don`t think I need to elaborate on it. In this sense there is no space that Islam won`t call its own. Shariah legislates everything in life, not just what you are calling religious as opposed to secular, private as opposed to public. Unless you say that Prophetic mission was just spiritual and had nothing to do with worldy and he was just a spiritual leader - which of course you won`t be the first one to say, Ali abd-al Raziq has blatantly made a case for it - we will have to denounce such dichotomization.

Salam

What is Secularism? Re: # 82 not sure what you mean and not sure if you understood what I meant.

Planting Democracy in the World – A Mantra for Freedom A few comments again:
You said that ``Democracy is practically one of the best forms of governance; in theory, it is the government of the people, by the people and for the people`` Well, this is a strange comment.

Jamhuriat wo tarz-ehakumat hay kay jis main
Afraad ko gina kartay hain tola nahin kartay

This couplet of Iqbal is in coformity of Quranic common sensical question: Do those who know equal those who do not? If they do not, as I presume Quranic meaning to be, then how could their opinion be equal. A system of government or for that matter any other domain of life that fails to distinguish between the opinions of the learned and that of a lay man - yani afrad ko ginta hay tolta nahin - where the opinion of Socrates and that of a lay person is the same, I find it funny that people have been arguing for it forever. Empirically, and knowing that you are a scientist, I find it interesting that we don`t deliberate on democracy which is such a new system of governance, hardly goes back to 300 years whereas it were monarchies and tribal systems that dominated the major part of world history and in fact, not locally but cross-culturally, from Native Americans to Chinese and East Asian dynasties.

Now unless we extend the claim of primitiveness implying now we are more intelligent and more knowledgeable, as the white men did to justify many of his actions, and still do though in a more tacit way, we have to be careful to ask ourselves what we are propagating. An interesting story: Amir Abd al-Kader the Algerian Sufi master when arrested by French colonialists commented to French in jail: To have a sound body you need a head; French response was, don`t worry we have 5 heads to which the Shaykh responded; I am worried that you might not have 5 but 5 million heads.

In summary all I am saying is that calling democracy the best system has been accepted as a given whereas it should be counter-intuitive and we can hardly support it from history unless we change our assumptions as I mentioned above. I am not against democracy per se, but consensus of the learned e.g., early Islamic times, and that of unlearned is not the same. When the vote of a professor of history about a historical issue equals that of an accountant having no knowledge of history and is seen as a perfectly fine, even the best thing...then I fear common sense loose any meaning. Interstingly, all the discussions on democracy evade these fundamental issues.

What is Secularism? Salam Dr. Gill,

A few comments: The move from descriptive secularism (what it is) to normative secularism (defensible, plausible, inevitable, ougth-to-be) in your article is not very clear and you did not present any argumets for it. Iqbal`s own understanding of this issue could be questionable and indeed is after at least 83 years of Ataturk`s usurp of power in Turkey. Iqbal did not live long to deliberate on the consequences of secularism. I know of one girl here who had to leave Turkey to wear Hijab. The birth of secularism and its eventual embracement as a state religion - read Chirac`s speech on why wearing religious symbols cannot be accomodated in France - and you might see the potential conflict between Islam and secularism. Furthermore, your comment on religious equality goes against the Islamic legal understanding of `dhimmis` which accepts no egalitarianism and treats non-Muslims as secondary class citizens while taking into account their human dignity. This of course is a complicated matter and I won`t extend any straightforward claims about it. Saying that secularism is inevitable in the modern world and is a necessary evil is a different claim from commending it. I have a hunch that you are arguing for the latter and in doing that not paying enough attention to how and in what sense it contradicts traditional Islamic understanding of religion and politics, which as you yourself noted were not separate spheres.

A Critique of Philosophical Thought in Pakistan Dear Mohammad,

Honestly, you have completely missed the point. I repeat again, I never challenged your background in philosophy and what we are doing here, insofar as I understand it, is healthy discussion on issues that we all think about. I am sorry but you did not respond to a single question that I raised and I don`t know what to say now. I made my questions quite specific. Perhaps you chose not to. Wallahu `alam. It does not matter whether we are eastern, western or Islamic. What I was pointing out were ideas, assumptions and all you have dealt with in your response in cliches, labels and euphesims.

At the least please do not think I was attacking you or questioning your knowledge. We all have limitations to what we know, I might have more than you and perhaps I do. I wanted to contribute to this important question that you have raised but perhaps ended up upsetting you. Astaghfurullah.

A Critique of Philosophical Thought in Pakistan Gill, few comments. It is interesting for me to see that we have interests in the same issues yet our analysis differ sometimes:

1. Many issues you have pointed out especially vis a vis the west are embedded in certain philosophical and cultural boxes, the very notion you have objected to:

- I have a feeling that throughout your paper you have equated Western Philosophy with Philosophy ignoring completely not only the Islamic Philosophical tradition but all the other traditions as well, religious and otherwise. Though you make reference to other religious traditions the philosophical schools you have mentioned are exclusively Western. Why western philosophy alone? You might want to clarify this point.

- Your usage of the word `science` also presupposes as if there is only one science or maybe there is only one valid science. Either way the word scientia which means `to know` does not have a connotation of a particular kind of knowledge and a particular method, namely empirical. The modern notion of science presupposed and explicated in your article again has a western bias. There is more to this point but I just wanted to highlight your assumptions.

- The categories of modern, post-modern and medieval Islam again have western origins and you might want to contemplate over their meaning in the Islamic context. It seems your sources of learning are predominantly western, which is fine, but this poses few problems. I leave it here too.

- The category of `secular philosophy` and of `philosophy of religion` both having western and modern origins are again presupposed. It just seems that you are also working from within a box, the box of western intellectual tradition extending claims and labels to the whole Islamic tradition. The comment: Philosophical thinking in Pakistan, by and large, is boxed in Islamic container; there is hardly any meaningful discussion of the realities that are outside the box`` applies equally to western philosophy where the dominant discourse is secular. I can again go on and on to elaborate on this point.

- The comment: ``I wonder why the whole entire vast field of philosophy was left for the west`` in the light of what I have said above is such an over-generalization that it seems - and I will be explicit in my judgement - completely absurd to me. You are exactly implying what West has been trying to prove.. that it`s only the people in the west who are thinking and rest of the world does not think at all (good old Social Darwinistic claim). In the case of Islam, philosophy died with Averroes (this is what Western historians of philosophy wrote and what you are buying into).

- The advances of western science should be acknowledged but your comment ``Occasionally, a few admit and recognize the advances that the philosophical thought has made in the west`` is definitely questionable. I would relate one personal experience. While the US started bombing Iraq, we were in a Phlosopphy seminar unsuccessfully trying to deal with skeptics and antirealists attempting to prove that yes there is an objective reality out there. Now this is definitely progress of thought!!!

- In view of above, the long quote again from a westerner ``Thus philosophy in the East came to a dead end because it did not get the material of philosophy which could nourish it and keep it alive” is just your view seeking endoresement of an authority of a big name in the discourse, the very notion you are not very comfortable with. Just quoting someone does not prove the point and you yourself made reference to this argument.

- Finally an equally important question is why break-up from a tradition unless we are claiming that tradition lacks which needs to be proven before we embark on such a project.

I do agree about the general claim that thought is stagnat in Pakistan, but my opinion about what stagnation means, what are its causes, how it could be overcome and what needs to be done differs radically from yours.

Again, so long we are sincere in our quest for knowledge and truth every difference in opinion is valuable. Salams.

Why Am I An Agnostic Muslim? Are you still looking? If so..best of luck...like everything else we need to keep trying.

You might wanna try Buddhism, a religion without God. I will be curious to know if it speaks to your heart.


Best

What is Islamization of Science? Dear Mohammad Gill,

Whether you or I understand western science and its philosophical foundation is not the question here and I did not intend to say that you are not familiar with the field. Of course your article reflects how much you know. The question is whether we are able to apply this knowledge to elicit soultions to the problems we all face together.

The important thing to note is that no science, medieval, modern, chinese, hindu, Muslim, agnostic or atheistic is devoid of certain philosophical/theological assumptions. This is precisely the case with the modern science as well, just like any other science. Scholastic, Baconian, Galilean, Cartesian, Kantian, Newtonian or Einsteinian whichever science we want to talk about we need to comprehend the philosophical assumptions that form its basis. When we think about a question we should also pay attention to why one question dominates the discourse and not the other. What intellectual penchants emphasize one question over another. Are our questions philosophically neutral? From the philosophical/theological specualtion on Nature as the window to knowledge of the Ultimate Reality (say God) to make use of it for our needs and wants (these are two different things, one legitimate and the other illegitimate that caused the environmental crisis we all face today) it is important to note why this change of attitude towards nature occured. Answer might be found in Bacon`s works but I hope we see the relevance of this point. At the expense of repeating myself, I want to emphasize that even our questions are never neutral of our assumptions. So is the case with technology which is nothing but application of a science that sees itself morally neutral and of a philosophy of science that is materialistic in its worldview. I would recommend those interested to read Technopoly by Neil Postman who convincingly argues against any notion of ``technology is philosophically neutral.`` No physics could be done without a metaphysics that holds it.

Islamization means to be able to evaluate whether the underlying metaphysical worldview of contemporary science could be reconciled with and `successfully` integrated into the Islamic universe and if so to what extent. In what we refer to as Middle ages, Muslims were able to integrate sciences as diverse as Greek, Hindu, Zorostrian and Chinese and yet what resulted from it was thoroughly Islamic view of science. This process could be called Islamization of Greek Science or of Hindu science and so on. Nasr makes an interesting analogy of this process with the process of Digestion of food, where some food is digested and becomes part of the body and some is ejected out because it does not belong to the body (or would be harmful for it). A proper understanding of Islamic worldview and its philosophy of science and that of western science would enable us to properly digest a science that though claims to be agnostic or areligious, yet both explicitly and implicitly holds materialistic worldview (in its most technical sense). Scientism and Logical Poistivism all bear witness to this fact. Furthermore, the encounter of Western Science with Christianity and what resulted from it - we all know that it is precisley scientific revolution that played a huge part in taking people away from the religion - provides us with a lesson to be conscious of what is at stake here.

On a different note I am glad to have seen you and other people taking interest in these questions which are of immense import for us. Disagreement is fine so long we are sincere in our quest to confront the questions we all face today. Salams.

PS: Just curious to know if you are familiar with the works of Wolfgang Smith?

What is Islamization of Science? There are few things that I would like to share:

1. The question of Islamization of science does not start with the islamization of hard sciences but a philosophy that works behind it and supports it. Commonly this field is called the ``Philosophy of Science`` in regards to what there is no paucity of sources. To understand the debate properly, one needs to read the western philosophy of science and how it unfolded in history. The dilemma of Muslim intellectuals has been that though they became great scientists, doctors and competent engineers, they never paid attention to the worldview that dominates these sciences. Get hold of Crombie`s Medieval and Early Modern Science, or Alexander Koyre`s numerous works to understand these worldviews and see if they can be reconciled with Islam. Nasr`s Religion and the Order of Nature and Man and Nature are also important works. Pervez Hoodbhoy`s Islam and Science is also a good source though it lacks deeper understanding of western/modern philosophy of science.

2. The author`s comment ``Science in itself is not good or bad. The humans who use it make it good or bad`` , so popular among Muslims has long been discarded buy historians and philosophers of science. If you need sources, please write me an email. There is no science without an underlying vision of the world. Science is not without its own assumptions. I can elaborate more on this point if anyone is interested.

3. I will repeat if someone is really interested to know what science is, one needs to familiarize oneself with the history of modern/western science. Then and only then we will be able to do some comparative stuff. A starighforward introduction to this very important debate is Nasr`s speech delievered at Harvard: http://web.mit.edu/mitmsa/www/NewSite/libstuff/nasr/nasrspeech1.html

I will be happy to provide more sources as this has been my area of interest for quite sometime now and right now I am taking a graduate level course in the Philosophy of Science.