Title: The Theory of Natural Selection and the Existence of God Question: Athiest philosophers and scientists argue that the theory of natural selection and adaptation of a species to its environment and genetic inheritance of newly acquired features, renders the need for a God to be obsolete. They argue that it is enough to believe that natural processes can bring about the magnificient design that we see in nature as a result of natural selection. What is the argument against this argument of the atheists? Is natural selection really that powerful to be able to bring forth such an amazing design and complexity in life? I personally believe in the existence of Allah SWT. I just want to know the answer to this, so I can answer those who disbelieve. Fi Amanillah. Answer: With regard to the significance of natural selection, in " Why is Evolution Considered a Lie ?" I have written: It is a common misconception that evolution, and its driving process known as natural selection, operates purely on the basis of blind chance. While it is true that no clear direction or goal can be ascertained from the dynamics of evolutionary processes and that genetic variation is random, there remain nonrandom aspects to evolution, such as the determinism of survival selection, sexual selection, and nonrandom mate choice. The basic themes of evolution—survival of the fittest and reproductive success—might be viewed as "laws" built into an otherwise goal-lacking process. Nevertheless, even if we humans cannot discern any clear purpose or direction to the evolutionary process, we cannot conclude that God cannot be guiding the path of evolution. Even if [we] do not know which animal or plant species will prevail at the next moment, we can easily see that, at every moment, something new and beautiful is being produced by evolution, something so exquisite that it naturally impels us to infer that it must have been designed. For the naturalist, such an inference appears to be an exercise of "puerile intuition," but is evolution not, after all, a process rather than the ultimate "origin" of any living thing. Natural selection is a process of elimination and acts on already existing forms of life. This forces us to raise the question of the origin of life or, more specifically, the origin of the materials that came together to produce life on earth billions of years ago. For the religious believer, it makes little sense to think that these materials just happened to exist and just happened to coalesce into the chemical factories for life. The idea that life should fortuitously emerge from something lifeless seems absurd. We therefore seek an explanation outside the bubbling soup of the once lifeless earth; the mere fact that conditions had to be just right for life to emerge at all leads us to posit design and purpose acting from outside the natural world. For the naturalistic scientist, however, explanations for physical phenomena can only make reference to the world itself, so "a lengthy span of time for life to gradually emerge" becomes a sufficient substitute for purposeful design. The main idea that I would like to emphasize in the foregoing excerpt is that natural selection is an elimination process which acts on already existing species in order to mold and shape new ones. This fact, as I point out, forces us to discuss the origin of life, the materials that accumulated to produce the chemical factories of life four billion years ago, prior to which natural selection had nothing on which to act. In my opinion, there is abundant evidence that throughout the evolution of the whole universe, various physical constants had to be fine-tuned to a narrow range of values in order for life on earth to emerge at all. In other words, the conditions for the possibility of life bespeak purposefulness and design (which, naturally, indicates a designer). This really implies that even if we were to admit that the development of life since its beginning was entirely the result of blind, directionless processes, we would never be able to ignore the question of the myriad fine-tuned conditions that allowed for "messy" evolutionary processes to produce living species. Dr. Hugh Ross, a Christian astronomer, lists some of the physical constants that constitute such fine-tuned conditions in his work, "The Creator and the Cosmos." These include strong nuclear force constant, weak nuclear force constant, gravitational force constant, electromagnetic force constant, ratio of gravitational force constant to electromagnetic force constant, ratio of proton to electron mass, ratio of number of protons to number of electrons, expansion rate of the universe, mass density of the universe, Baryon (proton and neutron) density of the universe, space energy density of the universe, and so forth (please visit http://www.reasons.org/resources/apologetics/design_evidences/20020502_universe_design.shtml). (The list continues to list a total of at least 47 physical constants). Ross even makes a disparate argument for the fine-tuning of our particular solar system for the production of life. The thought here is that had the universe evolved in such a way that it violated any one or a number of the delineated physical constants, the conditions requisite to the possibility of life would have been absent; as such, life would never have existed. Thus, the sheer improbability of all such precise conditions being fulfilled in such a way that life could exist is, on its own, powerful evidence for design, which consequently points to a designer. As I am not a scientist, I cannot elaborate on this argument beyond what I have provided in this reply, and would strongly encourage readers to study Ross' work carefully. The only alternative interpretation of this data, it seems to me, is that what appears to be fine-tuned and designed is, in fact, as deceptive, blind, and purposeless as the evolutionary processes that have effected life on earth, that our inclination to perceive design has more to do with our wish to believe in a designer and with our inability to view highly complex and ordered objects as anything but engineered. Our natural tendency is to assume design where design is ostensible based on loose and, according to this interpretation, weak analogies to architects and buildings, artists and paintings, and so on. I think Moiz Amjad's response to this alternative interpretation is telling: we may freely admit the constraints on our reasoning abilities, in general, and on our perception, in particular, but this should not prevent us from drawing conclusions and making inferences about our surroundings, irrespective of the scope and scale of our objects of investigation. Our experience, exposure, and perception are inherently limited, but this does not prevent us from trusting our faculty of reason, whether we are deciding to cross a street without getting hit by a vehicle or are inquiring into the beginning of the universe in real time. In the face of the data before us, we can either accuse our faculty of reason of deceiving us (interestingly, ONLY when the possibility of the existence of a creator of the universe is being scrutinized—I wonder, why?) or trust rationality and allow it to lead us to a sound inference. I ought to advance my view on the agenda of what may properly be referred to as "scientism," which I think is the real source of the deeply impoverished worldview that resists notions of pre-ordained purpose in the universe. "Scientism," in short, is the ideology that (arrogantly) grants full explanatory power to the scientific method of hypothesis, testing, and experimentation to natural science alone. The current debate in the United States between the majority of scientists which advocate the theory of evolution and a minority of scientists which claims that the "irreducible complexity" of the basic machinery of life evidences intelligent design really exemplifies a trend in the history of western thought, which has tended to keep science and religion in separate, watertight compartments, as if they were competing and conflicting theses on existence as we know it. To this day, many people—scientists and laypeople alike—assume that one must choose between science and religion, evolution and God, chance and design, and so forth. The idea, for instance, that human beings might be the epiphenomenal products of natural selection seems for many people educated in the West to be incompatible with the idea that a deity purposefully created human beings. Moreover, science tends to be seen as a discipline that wields far more objectivity than religion; whereas our religious beliefs and practices are perhaps too diverse (and too "mystical") to be fully accounted for, we can all supposedly agree on the information provided in our science textbooks. Fortunately, however, philosophers, religionists, and scientists have done much work, at least since Darwin's time, to demonstrate that science and religion, though distinct disciplines that generally address distinct sets of questions and issues, are consistent worldviews. They have compellingly argued not only that science and religion are in harmony, but also that either discipline taken alone as an explanation for the world is glaringly insufficient. In the same vein, it can be convincingly argued, I think, that scientism fails to be able to address certain non-scientific, albeit crucial questions and issues; that some of these questions and issues, such as how humans ought to live, why we exist, and why the universe exists, not only cannot possibly be explained by science, but are best explained by belief in the existence of a Creator for the world; and that we can come to know this Creator through revelation and consequently through the religion it prescribes. This article shall not be the occasion for a full treatment of this argument—indeed, discourse concerning the validity of revelation and religion in part forms the very purpose of "Understanding Islam." I would, nevertheless, like to offer my view regarding the inadequacy of science for explanations about how humans ought to live, why we exist, and why the universe exists; this view, I hope, demolishes the monopoly on knowledge that scientism seeks to maintain. My intention is to offer the condition for the possibility of revelation and religion as valid sources of knowledge generally concerning existence and, specifically, human existence. It should be abundantly clear from common human experience that there are questions that deeply matter to us but that fail to satisfy the conditions of the scientific method (i.e. hypothesis, testing, experimentation, and reproducibility). For example, questions such as "How ought I/we to live?" and "Why does the universe go to the bother of existing?" cannot possibly explained away by simplistic references to the natural world, the laws of physics and chemistry, or bare psychological tendency. One of the most important insights that scientism fails to appreciate is that moral properties are as much a part of the furniture of the world as mountains, trees, goats, and electrons but remain properties that cannot be countenanced by natural science because it is impossible to test or experiment on human subjects in order to form a theory on what humans ought to do. The most any experiment could show is, for example, the region(s) of the brain that become(s) active during mental, moral-decision making processes. The results might be reproducible, but the conclusion in any event would tell us nothing about what we ought to do or how we ought to live; they would remain descriptive rather than prescriptive. Similarly, no experiment could demonstrate why the universe exists and no amount of testing could confirm a hypothesis about why (not how) the universe exists. After all, what would the scientist experiment upon? The entire universe? Thus, some of the questions about ourselves and about the world that we consider deeply important are outside the bounds of the scientific method. According to scientism, these questions are not only unanswerable, but "unaskable" in the first place, and if they are unaskable, then they could hardly be significant questions. Yet no one who has lived in civilization can deny that we are forced to make moral judgments and decisions (and hence are forced to ask ourselves, "What ought I to do?") or deny that we have always wondered why the universe that science takes such pains to study ever went to the bother of existing. Our only hope for finding possible answers to these questions is to look outside science into other spheres of knowledge, such as philosophy, metaphysics, and religion. This does not imply that we do away with science; on the contrary, my argument maintains that science and religion are incomplete without mutual illumination. Science ought to devote its energy to discovering the "whats," "whens," "wheres," and "hows" of existence while religion ought to devote its effort to discovering and explaining the "whys" of existence. Neither can usurp the duty of the other. I believe that the foregoing argument creates epistemic space for revelation and religion to compete with atheistic or agnostic moral philosophies in explaining the purpose(s) of existence. While I shall not pursue such a project in this essay, I hope that I have cast some light on the difficult queries on design, complexity, and purpose in the universe. Allah (SWT) knows best. Omar Sarwar February 19th, 2005