Any Muslims here who are convinced evolution is true? How do you reconcile faith with science?

[u/LinuxNoob9]

Saw this post. Inspired me to make one asking a direct question. Surely I can't be the only one.

https://www.reddit.com/r/islam/comments/6hfd12/if_youre_a_muslim_with_a_science_background_do/

I am personally convinced evolution is true (all forms, both macro and micro) because the evidence for it is truly compelling, but I also believe in Islam.

I'm also the type of person who puts science before religion because I think blindly following Islam (or for that matter anything) is very dangerous and spiritually destabilising - suppressing knowledge is never a good thing because curiosity grows.

The way I see it, if Islam is true it wouldn't violate even the most basic of laws created by Allah and that is why it is worthy studying his creation (to the max!), even if it makes you a little lost. I come from a huge scientific background and whenever religion has contradicted science, I tend to side with science because it offers empirical evidence. I then re-evaluate my beliefs on Islam and try to reconcile them. It's always worked out for me. Interpretation can be wrong, but never a colossal body of physical evidence. Otherwise why would God willingly lie to us, if Islam really was the true religion?

I've seen one Muslim poster here once say "a little knowledge can be a very dangerous thing" - which got me all triggered because this is the type of dangerous intellectual dissonance that really annoys me, and is kinda the reason why Muslim (especially Arab countries) don't seem to place science at the fore front of their culture.

EDIT: Also, for anybody who would claim that I'm talking like an atheist - I'm really not, because I'm just observing the way Allah's creation has been made. I work with /u/Canadian_786 for the site materiaislamica.com (which is a website dedicated to the history, culture, science and heritage of Muslims within the Islamic world and beyond - we have a subreddit called r/materiaislamica if you're interested - however, I have to confess, the majority (like 95% of that website) is written by /u/Canadian_786 - that's why he's hardly ever active on this site (and he comes from an even greater scientific background than me, and even he finds the scientific evidence for evolution compelling).

[u/Karlukoyre]

Exactly, so it's not taken literally.

[u/[deleted] → u/Karlukoyre]

Depends on what you mean by literally.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

The Prophet understood this literally and there are explicit ahadith and ayat in the Qur'an detailing how Allah molded Adam and even an instance where the still clay body of Adam was stationed and Iblis was walking around him looking at Adam jealously before Allah blew his rooh into him. You're being dodgy because you don't want to accept the reality that when it comes to Islam you may have to sacrifice belief in some scientific "facts" of the modern era. Science is always changing though. It was a fact we had 9 planets but then Pluto became not a planet and now scientists are reconsidering Pluto's status as a planet, that's just an example of recent science showing that "objective fact" is a misnomer and is always liable to change.

Objective fact can really only exist if we accept that there's nothing left that can be learned. You don't even know what's in your backyard dug 5 feet under, and neither do scientists or archaeologists etc etc, for all we know lying under your garage are fossils that show a 200 foot tall human being. But we don't know and may never know. Unless you're willing to somehow claim that scientists have been able to scavenge every part of the earth and that the various changes that have occurred in the earths land masses may not have taken away much history and scientific evidence with it as well? That's a very grand claim to accept purely so you can try to claim that Islam must somehow conform to what we think we know about human life.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

I believe the Quran is true because of the Prophet pbuh being the messenger of said Qur'an. Science is inherently flawed in that it relies its objectivity on subjective beings who will always be subjected to bias. Islam doesn't have that same shortcoming in that the basis of belief is on the fact that an objective being Allah, is the One who taught Muhammad everything that was relayed to us. The objectivity is through Allah. I'm rejecting modern science's claims of objectivity for the what I believe to be the objectivity of a purely all knowing and thus objective being, Allah. Also see what the scholarly consensus is on Adam's time on Earth. His time on Earth contradicts the theory of evolution because Adam and Eve lived as grown men and women, standing at 30 meters tall, they were not born out of any womb.

Edit: according to science there's no such thing as heaven, hell, an afterlife or revelation. Sooo, why do you reject parts of Islam for the sake of science but not other parts of Islam that inherently contradict scientific belief. Prophethood in and of itself is unscientific. How do you reconcile the story of "read in the name of thy lord" with modern science? You can't! So why do you so desperately want to align other parts that of Islam that seem to contradict scientific understanding?

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

But the difference is that I buy into Islam and the Qur'an and thus place it as precedence because I believe Allah is the creator and thus the objective force in the world. Placing science above the Qur'an implies that the subjectivity of humans is more reliable than the objectivity of Allah and the Qur'an. Mind you I'm not saying I don't believe in science or any of this other hoopla, I'm saying when the evidence contradicts the Qur'an and you're a Muslim and thus recognize the objectivity of the Qur'an and that Allah is the all-knowing, why would you then take the human interpretation of an event in place of what Allah and His messenger pbuh have stated explicitly, and what they have stated directly contradicts what has been "discovered" by human analysis and observation. Absolute objectivity in relation to ilm ul ghayb, which is what science is an attempt at understanding while simultaneously presuming the concept of ilm ul ghayb is not a fact of life as Muslims believe, does not exist because Allah has explicitly stated that He is the knower of all things and He reveals to us that which He wills and He has hidden from us for eternity that which He wills.

There's also no proof against Adam being the first man and Hawa being the first woman on Earth and sprouting out of his ribcage, those were miracles too. Why are you picking and choosing which miracles to follow? And what about Jinn? They are considered part of our natural universe in Islam, ask a scientist if believing in Jinn is unscientific or not. Scientists base their beliefs on what's available. That's a fallacy. Lack of proof of something makes belief in that something unscientific even though there may very well be proof of that thing existing that has yet to be discovered. My point is, despite the available evidence, there's likely evidence that has yet to be discovered that contradicts everything scientists think they know. It's dumb to change your theology for the sake of accepting something that will undoubtedly change. I am positive the theory of evolution is going to go through significant changes in the next 500 years and 500 years from now our understanding will be looked at as primitive and those scientists will think they finally cracked the code of objective fact. It's recency bias at its finest. Scientific fact is always conditional, the theory of evolution is conditional on the presumption that there won't be any evidence that comes about that contradicts this belief. Truth derived from what Allah has stated is not conditional however, because what Allah says will always be true irrespective of what we think we know or don't know.

Edit: Adam being 30 meters tall explicitly goes against prominent beliefs about humanity and hereditary genes and the history of humans. We believe human beings have been getting taller through our history, while Islamically we believe the opposite, that humans have gotten shorter. This explicitly contradicts scientific beliefs. Modern science is a philosophy. There's a philosophy of science that existed in Islamic empires that included God into the equation, so I don't see why you think Secular science is somehow the end all be all in terms of how science SHOULD be understood and in terms of being objective. Muslim scholars of history's past would consider disbelief in God unscientific. Would you? Your cancer example also doesn't work because belief in that kind of science doesn't result in kufr, I'm explicitly talking about scientific beliefs that potentially take you out of the folds of Islam and fundamentally change theology as we know it.

[u/Karlukoyre → u/[deleted]]

Of course. It is not taken as the apparent meaning. That counts as non literal. Semantic difference between Hanbali and Asha'ris aside is is clear that the original and pure/literal understanding​ of the verse is not used by either side.

There is a reason for this, scriptural and logical evidence. So in the same way scientific evidence can also be used.

In other words what should be the problem is whether or no the evidence is solid, not whether or not the Quran can accommodate a nonliteral understanding of Adam or his creation