In ""Creation AND/OR Evolution: An Islamic Perspective"", T.O. Shanavas describes an Islamic theory of creation that is not incompatible with evolution. He accomplishes this by weaving together insights from modern science, the Qur'an, and pre-Renaissance Muslim history. He proposes that evolution is an intelligent design created by a higher power to manifest His omniscience, supremacy, and grace in a universe constructed with creatures with limited free will. This book is an important contribution to the ongoing debate between creationism and evolution.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
AMAZING, JUST AMAZING,
A Kid's Review
This review is from: Evolution and/or Creation: An Islamic Perspective (Paperback)
As a thirteen year old muslim, I always asked my self, will there ever be an answer to the relation of islam and evolution. T.O. Shanavas has just completely clear and I was able to understand. He comes right to the point and I hope that this book makes a fortune
11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Creation and/or Evolution: An Islamic Perspective (2005),
This review is from: Evolution and/or Creation: An Islamic Perspective (Paperback)
The United States (and other parts of the Western world) is currently experiencing increasing political polarization between followers of religion and practitioners of science. The current battleground for this conflict occurs in the study of the evolution of living organisms, although confusion on the role of scientific and faith-based knowledge can occur just as easily when studying the origin, age and scope of the universe (cosmology), uncertainty in quantum mechanics, and the material nature of the mind (neuroscience).
In Creation and/or Evolution: An Islamic Perspective, T. O. Shanavas challenges this notion of an inherent conflict between scientific knowledge and religious texts, revealing it to be a false dilemma, at least where Islam is concerned. Creation and/or Evolution weaves together several themes. The first is the Quranic theology of time, space, and creation. The second is the history of Islamic science and how its legacy has been forgotten, both by Muslims ready to accept fundamentalist Christian critiques of evolutionary science, and Westerners, quick to disparage Muslims as superstitious and anti-modernity. The third strand, woven within the first two, describes secular scientific understanding of the history of the universe and its inhabitants. Since I am a biologist by training and not a theologian, the following critique will focus mainly on this third strand. Overall, however, Shanavas does a good job describing the bridges between modern and medieval Muslim science and Quranic assertions. His best sections come at the very beginning and the end, where he discusses the role of God the Creator in terms of metaphysics of the future. Briefly, what appears as random chance to a scientist working toward material explanations in linear time may be controlled in a more deterministic fashion by a God who sees all time and space at once. Despite the many things Shanavas does well in this book, there are several issues that prevent me from giving an entirely unqualified recommendation. Most critically, there several major scientific flaws in Creation and/or Evolution that point to, at best, sloppy fact-checking. For one, "amino acid" is used frequently in the section on molecular biology to describe a sub-unit of DNA. This is simply incorrect - amino acids are subunits of proteins, while the word he is looking for is nucleotide as the subunit of DNA or RNA. Shanavas' explanation of evolution is also a sloppy one, and I wonder whether it is deliberately so in order to fit Muslim understandings with scientific ones. He neglects to mention one of the most important corollaries of the modern theory of evolution - that evolution is non-linear and non-directional. All life is continuing to evolve with humans at a branch of a growing tree, not the end of the tree. That is, modern apes and humans share a common ancestor; one did not evolve directly from the other. Shanavas appears to champion an incorrect, outdated view of a "great chain of being" with unicellular organisms giving rise to plants, then animals and then humans. Such an understanding, while in keeping with the Muslim sources he quotes, is anthropocentric and not supported by science. Shanavas' most wild contention, based on a highly original reading of Sura 4:1 (http://islamawakened.org/Quran/4%5C/default.htm), is that the first humans, Adam and Eve, were twins born to a non-human primate mother. He argues that concurrent creation of both a male and a female would be necessary in order to propagate the new species. This betrays a complete lack of understanding of how speciation is thought to occur. In fact, most evolutionary biologists believe that speciation is a gradual process, with no clear cut line between different non inter-breeding species. The primordial Eve (or Adam?) would have been able to breed with the parent population, and the offspring would subsequently have become separated into a different niche, become reproductively isolated, and therefore over many generations, become biologically different from non-human ancestors. This is one of a few instances where Shanavas would have been better off taking the Quran as figurative rather than coming up with a literal explanation which is not only highly statistically improbable, but for which there is no known precedent in nature. Later on, Shanavas explains the origin and diversification of humans with reference to Quranic creation and the Out-of-Africa hypothesis. His explanation for Out-of-Africa migration of modern humans is simplistic and betrays a lack of understanding of the concept of mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosome Adam. Shanavas' haphazard, scientifically inaccurate attempts to mesh Quranic verses or the beliefs of early Muslim scientists with modern science, as in the examples given above, highlight the inherent flaw in arguing that science agrees with religion - or vice versa. Inevitably, such explanations involve twisting understanding of either theology or science in a manner that does proper service to neither. At best, we can conclude that science, while not allowing room for some forms of religious belief (i.e. literal interpretation of Genesis 1 and 2; earth-centric cosmos), cannot disprove the existence of a non-anthropomorphic, and non- time constrained Creator who works with scientific laws to create multiple possibilities for evolutionary trajectory. At its best, this book might prompt the reader to examine their own views of God and how this understanding fits into secular understandings of the nature of the universe. In a climate awash with popular Christian (and sometimes Islamic) rhetoric questioning the compatibility of evolution with belief in God and often attacking the nature of scientific inquiry itself, Shanavas is a fresh spring rain. His book details how the modern scientific approach is consistent with the Quran and Hadith encouraging Muslims to find knowledge, wherever it may take them, as a way of understanding the methodology of Creation. However, finishing Creation and/or Evolution, I felt that this topic needed a practicing Muslim evolutionary biologist to do both the theology and science proper justice. Unfortunately, such individuals are few and far between, though perhaps this book is the first step in encouraging young Muslims to enter science and act to bridge this false divide.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A christian's view,
By
This review is from: Evolution and/or Creation: An Islamic Perspective (Hardcover)
As a Christian that believes in the theory of evolution I wanted to get a perspective of the view of evolution from other faiths. This one in particular caught my attention because I have been doing some independent studying of Islam and I figure that this would be a good way to learn about both the religion and its view of science. This book definitely helped me in both ways.
As a study of evolution there are some definite biases on the part of the author as he attempts to make the theory work with Evolution. This did not bother me that much, and while I personally disagreed with some of his views, they were not to far away from science. For example, in chapter 5 where he attacks various theories of how life began and then arrived at the conclusion that the first cells were polymerized in clay he spends time pointing out flaws in the other theories (primordial soup, deep sea vents) but never mentions the flaws in the one he believes. All of them have strong and weak points and it would have been nice to see him be a little fairer in his representation. This bias appears in several other parts of the book and is used to show how the current understanding of evolution is in-line with Islamic teachings and in almost every case he fails to present the other side of the argument. Although his science is correct throughout, this bias can create conflict for readers of another faith. In quoting Stephen Jay Gould the author points out that "Evolution is a theory. It is also a fact, and facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts." Most people who have studied evolution and the "scientific" view on the origin of life will have no problem is spotting his biases and understanding the alternative views. That being said, this is not a textbook on scientific evolution. This is a book on an Islamic perspective of the theory of evolution. As such, in the areas of debate he is more than free to choose whichever theory most fits his religious views. I would argue that most religious scientists do this in their lives already. By understanding that and understanding why he views evolution the way he does one can gain a deeper insight into the connection between Islamic belief and their world. I was grateful that the author takes time to explain what is meant by certain scriptures contained in the Qur'an as well as other cultural issues that non-believers such as myself might not understand. It makes it easier to understand both the book and the culture of the religion. His first chapters on Islamic metaphysics helped me tremendously when he made it to later chapters. At times I wished I had a better understanding of the Qur'an, such as when he would start quoting scriptures. Without other scriptures to help interpret his meanings, I was left to take his words on faith that what he said was what the Qur'an really meant. For a Muslim this should not create the problems that I had, but it did make certain chapters frustrating. His last two chapters I felt wandered off topic from the rest of the book and could have been left out. They are short and simple, but don't really seem to add anything of value to the debate of evolution. Even so my final verdict would still be that this book is worth buying if you wish to understand evolution from the Islamic point of view. It is short enough and not so overly deep that a person can't follow it without an extensive background in either evolution or Islam, but it is detailed enough to provide the reader with new insights into both. Not a perfect 5 but definitely a 4.
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