The teaching of the Qur'an that life is a process of progressive creation necessitates that each generation, guided but unhampered by the work of its predecessors, should be permitted to solve its own problems.

(The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam)

EVOLUTION OF MANKIND

“I cannot believe that our existence in this universe is a mere quirk of fate, an accident of history, an incidental blip in the great cosmic drama. … I do, however, believe that we human beings are built into the scheme of things in a very basic way.” (Paul Davies)

“Man in whom egohood has reached its relative perfection, occupies a genuine place in the heart of Divine creative energy, and thus possesses much higher degree of reality than things around him. Of all the creation of God he lone is capable of consciously participating in the creative life of his Maker.” (Iqbal)

To start with we quote below an interesting theory of evolution expressing how Man came into being, as described by Mike Poole in his essay ‘God and the Big Bang and other Arguments about Science and Faith.’

On current scientific thinking that the chemicals we are made of were cooked up in giant nuclear furnaces  - stars – bigger than our sun. Because gravity is a weak force, these stars took thousands of millions of years to form and to make these elements. Then the stars exploded scattering the atoms into space. Objects near the edge of universe are still  moving away at nearly the speed of light today, so if that has been happening since the Big Bang, it’s easy to see why the universe is now so enormous. Some of the scattered atoms eventually became human flesh and bones. Our bodies are the ashes of long-dead stars. So it seems that if the universe was not ancient and vast, the atoms of our bodies would not have been made.
 
 The most famous and talked about is Darwin’s evolution theory. Darwin, Charles Robert (1809-1882) was a British biologist. His theory of evolution, set out in the Origin of Species (1859) and the Descent of Man (1871),stated that all kinds of living things developed from, at most, very few simple forms through natural selection among variations. Darwin denied that the evolution of man as a biological species was governed by forces fundamentally different from those influencing other forms of life. His theory underlined beliefs about Man being the supreme product of God’s design. This theory has been facing severe criticism not only by religious people but also from a large group of scientists. We can say that it is an open contempt of mankind and a clear degrading of Man, the superb creation and the most beautiful of all creations of the Great Creator. It has been totally disproved scientifically as well as historically that the forefathers of Man were apes or monkeys. However, in the history of mankind, a group of persons was once converted into apes, but never did an ape become a Man. The conversion of monkies into human beings seems ridiculous besides being a clear humiliation of the best creation of God.

The Darwinian theory of evolution has already been rejected by a number of scientists of our age also who maintain that the life could not have developed through random natural processes. In America The Science of Intelligent Design has been working to disprove Darwinism. It is not run by any religious group and does not claim that God is the Intelligent Designer. But, they say, that there is clear evidence of intelligent design in Nature, they hypothesise that this could be God, but it could also be an extraterrestrial race or some other natural force. They do not recognise the possibility of one species evolving from another nor the chance of highly complex biological systems resulting from natural selection.

The goal of ID (The Science of Intelligent Design) is to disprove Darwinism and to prove Design in Nature. Among the scientists of ID, engaged in this research, the following names are worth mentioning as major players in ID Science:

Michael J. Behe, Ph.D.
Ph.D. in biochemistry, Professor of biological sciences, Lehigh University, Senior fellow of Discovery Institute’s Centre for Sciences and Culture.

William A. Dembski, Ph.D.
Ph.D. in mathematics, philosophy, Master of Divinity in theology, Associate Research Professor in the conceptual foundations of science, Baylor University, Senior Fellow of Discovery Institute’s Centre for Sciences and Culture.

Jonathan Wells, Ph.D.
Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology, religious studies, Senior fellow of Discovery Institute’s Centre for Sciences and Culture.

Michael Behe says that Irreducible complexity essentially states that there are biological structures that could not have evolved from a simpler state. A cell, for example, is composed of hundreds of complex molecular machines. Without any one of those machines, the cell would not work. So the cell is irreducibly complex. It could not have evolved from a simpler state because it could not have worked in a simpler state, and natural selection can only choose among traits that are already functioning.
 
William Dembski has been working on Specified complexity. He says that Specified complexity in a system means it could not have occurred by chance and it is not the result of any natural law that says it must be the way it is. A biological system exhibits specified complexity if it meets three criteria:

-Its makeup is not merely the result of a natural law.
-Its makeup is complex.
-Its makeup reflects an “independently given pattern or specification.”  

According to him a biological system is clearly ‘designed’ if it exhibits specified complexity. William Dembski’s Law of Conservation of Information states that nature cannot create new information (as in information contained in DNA); it can only work with the information it already has. His law contains some very detailed and complex mathematical equations. He offers a fool-proof method of detecting Design. This method is a process of elimination that asks three questions of anything found in Nature. They are:

1. Does a law explain it?
2. Does chance explain it?
3. Does design explain it?

Dembski says that we actually use this method all the time, probably without knowing it. All he has does is quantified the process in order to make it scientific instead of merely instinctive. In its quantitative form – the Explanatory Filter – can be applied to scientific questions as successfully as it is applied to questions that arise in everyday life.

In the foregoing paragraphs I have quoted extracts from the pages of “How Intelligent Design Works” as displayed on the Internet. Their campaign to prove Design in Nature and disprove Darwinism has gained considerable success. According to them in 1999 the Kansas Board of Education voted to remove evolutionary theory from the Kansas school’s science curriculum and the decision was widely attributed to campaigning by proponents of Intelligent Design. In 2005, the Dover Area School Board in Pennsylvania introduced the requirement that all public schools in the district teach ID alongside evolution in science classes.

There has been clear evidence that the human race is far older than evident from Darwinian theory. Boucher de Perthes, a well known geologist, reported in 1849 and again in 1857 “unequivocal evidence of fossil men with extinct animals, but nobody was convinced … Even Darwin was forced to admit in 1963, ‘I am ashamed to think that I concluded the whole was rubbish.’”

The theory of evolution (Darwinism) creates despair and anxiety in the minds of right thinking people. Man is the supreme creature of God, Who has made everything on earth for him. Addressing human beings God says:

“It is He Who has created all things for you; All things that are on earth.”

It has been assumed in the modern age that the present structure of man, ‘mental as well as physiological, is the last word in the biological evolution, and that death, regarded as a biological event has no constructive meaning’. It means that death is the end of everything for a person. This is the result of modern Man’s materialistic attitude towards life. No doubt science has given him partial control over the forces of Nature, but it has robbed him of faith in his own future. Iqbal says that ‘the modern world stands in need of biological renewal. And religion, which in its higher manifestation is neither dogma, nor priesthood, nor ritual, can alone ethically prepare the modern man for the burden of the great responsibility which the advancement of modern science necessarily involves, and restore to him that attitude of faith which makes him capable of winning a personality here and retaining it hereafter.’ To Iqbal the world of today needs a Rumi to create an attitude of hope (instead of despair), and to kindle the fire of enthusiasm for life. We quote here Rumi’s inimitable Persian verses on the theme of ‘biological future of Man’ translated in English by Thandani. I am sure that no one can read the following passages without a thrill and joy. At the end of his verses on the biological journey of man Rumi tells us his destiny in the most beautiful and striking poetic language:

               And then my goal,
               Beyond the clouds, beyond the sky,
               In realms, where none may change or die
               In angel form, and then away
               Beyond the bounds of night and day,
               And Life and Death, unseen and seen,
               Where all that is hath ever been,
               As One and Whole.
                                             (Rumi: Thadani’s translation)

Henri Bergson, in the last two sentences of Chapter III of his book Creative Evolution,writes: ‘All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.’

PS: In the footnotes at two places only abbreviations are given: The detail of the two books is given below:

DTO – A Dictionary of Philosophy, second revised edition published in 1983 by Macmillan Press, reprinted and published in 1984 by Pan Books Ltd., London.

DTE – Darwin to Einstein, Edited by Collin Chant and John Fauvel, published by Longman Inc. New York in 1980.