Allah's Univocal Sign

[ابوالوليد المسلم]

Allah's Univocal Sign (1/3)

Abdullah S. Al-Shehri



"And we have not created the heaven and earth and all that is between them without a purpose. That is the thought of those who disbelieve". (Qur’an: Surah Saad, 38:27)

Instances of deliberation and marks of intelligible variety statistically correlate with our propensity to invoke design. Mathematician William A. Dembski developed the complexity-specification criterion which aims at establishing design as an unmistakable feature of countless instances in life and the cosmos. The idea of this principle is simple but very profound. It establishes the fact that complexity, contingency, and specification are inherent qualities in any design, as opposed to fabrication where design is apparent but not inherent or genuine[1]. A jar of ink that drops by accident on a large sheet of paper may leave a hexagonal-looking splash but that does not point to design. Design is the result of a purposeful activity as in the work of a skillful sculptor. We naturally associate design with noticeable patterning. This not only characterizes the labour in human artefacts but also forcefully emanates from any natural event of noticeable complexity and specification.

Atheism is neither reason-friendly nor consonant with the universal dictates of human experience (see 'Appendix Three' at the end of this book). Atheists themselves admit that believers' belief in the Creator grows from the widely, if not universally, common experience that designed entities imply a designer. But atheists quickly turn around and say that analogies from human experience are deceptive and unreliable because the hypothesized Creator is completely unknown to us and to formulate analogical syllogisms from human life in order to prove something which is completely absent from us is, to say the least, a very feeble way of arguing for God's existence. But atheists here too fall into a whirlpool of contradictions for two reasons.

Firstly, we can only pass judgments of any kind, ontological or epistemological, negative or positive, through the medium of human experience. Even atheists find it impossible to speak of God or anything else in isolation of the mediating effect of human experience. Arguments for God's existence, particularly the Anthropic Cosmological argument and those from design, are perfectly consonant with the maxims of human experience.

To further clarify, countless instances from human experience forcefully justify the plausibility of arguments from design but we cannot find a single instance from human experience that cogently shows how design or organized complexity can possibly exist without an intelligent designer/organizer. The next move for the atheist is to invoke evolution in order to demonstrate, as he would contend, how adaptation and natural selection prove the possibility of apparent design without an intelligent designer. But this is a very weak argument for the reason that adaptation and natural selection can easily be conceived as instantiations of exquisite design[2]. Evolutionary atheists, such Stephen J. Gould, Dawkins, and many others, have pronouncedly marvelled at the greatness, magnificence, "and elegance of biological design"[3]. Needless to say, no rational person would marvel at an incomprehensible hodge-podge of loosely related events. This latter assertion also obtains its legitimacy from the truisms of human experience. Secondly, the phrase 'natural selection' is more of a contradiction in terms. Selection is the process of selecting. The adjective 'natural' only performs a cosmetic job and does not even extenuate the fallacious implications of the phrase in question. Natural selection is specious phraseology. It cannot explain the ultimate causes of its referent(s), it does not preclude the involvement of intelligent choice, and, more importantly, it cannot answer the question – “Why is there something rather than nothing?”[4]. As Martin Rees, from the field of astrophysics, has relevantly put it:

"Theorists may, some day, be able to write down fundamental equations governing physical reality. But physics can never explain what 'breathes fire' into the equations, and actualizes them in a real cosmos"[5].

Judging from human experience, the act of selecting, especially where sophisticated and highly complex acts of selection take effect, is a property one would naturally attribute to an intelligent selector. In fact, we human beings perform countless examples of natural selection. A very thirsty person would 'naturally select' a glass of water even if there were several other kinds of drinkable fluids available. But is it rational (or even natural!) to opine that the act of selecting that just happened was not the choice of an intelligent being? The honeycomb is a remarkable piece of 'intelligent' architecture and, for every cell, the bee (by instinct, behold!) naturally selects the right substance, shape, and dimensions. From the moment they existed, bees do this naturally; it's not artificial labour and they didn't wait until it became second nature! So, even in the world of animals, the most natural world of life one can think of, traces of design inevitably follow from some form of intelligence. We no longer need William Paley's 'artificial' example; the bee has done the job for us.

Signs of intelligent design not only point to cosmological order but also accentuate an underlying teleological meaning[6]. "Once we see, however, that the probability of life originating at random is so utterly minuscule as to make the random concept absurd", maintains Hoyle "it becomes sensible to think that the favourable properties of physics on which life depends are in every respect deliberate"[7].

Not very long ago, many evolutionists regarded 'intelligent design' a religious nonsense raised to account for unexplainable gaps in the story of creation, hence the derogatory notion: 'God of the gaps'[8]. But since then, views have changed dramatically and evolutionists today, as evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould once remarked, are on a par with creationists in accepting 'intelligent design' as self-evident fact[9].


(Continued)

[1] Dembski, William A. (2000) The Third Mode of Explanation: Detecting Evidence of Intelligent Design. In Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe, Behe, Michael et al., Proceedings of the Wethersfield Institute, Vol. 9, p. 17-39.

[2] Design in this context is far more complex, dynamic, and diverse than the laws operating in Paley's stationary watch. Arguing from a relevant perspective, Neil Ormerod, Bernard Lonergan, and several philosophers further maintain that "statistical lawfulness does not eliminate the reality of design in the universe. Rather it specifies the mode of such design, a design encompassed in the notion of emergent probability." (Ormerod, Neil (2005) Chance and Necessity, Providence and God, Irish Theological Quarterly; 70; p. 273).

[3] Dawkins, R. (2006) The Blind Watchmaker, Penguin, p. 15.

[4] Flanagan, Owen (2007) The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World, MIT Press, p. 190.

[5] Rees, M. (2000) Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces that Shape the Universe, Basic Books, P. 131.

[6] Gregory Bateson (1904-1980), the renowned anthropologist and social scientist, observed that "even Darwin wrote from time to time about natural selection in phrases which almost ascribed to this process the characteristics of transcendence and purpose" (Bateson, G. (2000) Steps to an Ecology of Mind, University of Chicago Press, p. 472).

[7] Hoyle, F. & Wickramasinehe N.C. (1981) Evolution from Space: A Theory of Cosmic Creationism. Touchstone Book, Simon & Schuster, Inc. New York. 141.

[8] The term was coined to describe "the tendency to postulate divine action simply to fill up the gaps in scientific knowledge, for example in the detail of evolutionary mechanisms". (Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, Simon Blackburn, p. 159, Oxford University Press, 1996). When theists hold on to their belief, they're hastily accused of "wishful thinking, escapism, and hopes for peace of mind”, relates Huston Smith. (Smith, Huston (2000) Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief, HarperCollins, p. 31)

[9] Gould, S. J. (1971) D'Arcy Thompson and the Science of Form, New Literary History, Vol. 2, No. 2, Form and Its Alternatives, (Winter), p. 232, Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press.