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Comment by eska | Hacker News Reader

I was excited to hear about this due to the golden age of science in the Arabic world, which was a high point of Arabic culture that has since then unfortunately declined. But wondering how the scholar was able to do this research despite Islam, it turns out that he made god responsible for the mutation, the animals just have a desire to adapt. The article makes it sound like that's a trivial difference to Darwin, but I think there are worlds in between.

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Here's a blog post laying out in detail the gulf from Darwin:

https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/10/07/did-arabs-come-up-...

I grew up in a Muslim country, unlike Christianity, Islam accepts scientific discoveries but attributes them to God instead. For instance, we were taught about the Big Bang in an Islamic Thinking class but the trick was that "God was responsible for it".

To be fair a lot of Christians do the same and explain away contradictions in the bible as being simply "metaphors".

As more people become scientifically literate hopefully it will push religions to adopt a more rational interpretation of their beliefs.

I have had some success speaking with those who devoutly believe in God by stating that while the Universe is governed by the rules of physics and math, science doesn't address where those rules come from, and therefore they can be justified in believing that God created them. Put another way, God isn't the musician playing the symphony, God is the composer of the notes.

I’ve had some success speaking with those who don’t believe by stating that my faith is based on subjective personal experience, and therefore it would be unreasonable for me to expect them to believe based upon my testimony alone.

Instead, I only ask that they be open to the idea that the Holy Spirit exists and pay attention if and when they feel His presence in their life.

Coming from apparently very different perspectives, I’m struck by the beautiful symmetry of our approaches. It makes me happy :)

This is indeed a beautiful symmetry. Thanks for adding your perspective.

Proponents of other religions experience that same energy.

Alongside those that have used psychedelics.

Given that, it seems more likely that we have a vestigial sense or an additional state our mind can be in that is either tricking us (our other senses patch and filter erroneous information, tricking us in a fairly uniform way to create our shared reality), or allowing us to perceive an always-there presence or energy. Perhaps other life forces exist in this state alongside us - just like the Bible and other belief systems say - and we are unable to perceive them, or perhaps not. Perhaps a combination of shared reality filtering and an energy/entity(s) operating at a different frequency than we can normally perceive. Or not at all.

Although I’m not religious don’t subscribe to exalting the renditions of this energy, I am open to all outcomes about what the expanded reality really is, what is there, what is our symbiotic relationship with it and knowing what it can be.

One important thing is not symmetrical in your analogy: for scientists, the truth is approximated by coming up with hypothesis, making experiments and then observing the evidence. If the evidence, as collected by multiple experimenters, is strong for the hypothesis, then that hypothesis is accepted, otherwise it is rejected. Anyone with enough skill and equipment can reproduce the results. If someone can't, the results lose weight and more research is needed.

In your subjective personal experience, nearly all of this is missing. You only have a hypothesis: there's a God that is causing this personal experience. There's no experiment we can make, as you say yourself, that would convince us that you do feel something magical, and that that feeling is coming from something supernatural, not from your brain (which is known to be prone to illusions and hallucinations).

Even if I felt such experience, I would be convinced that it was a brain illusion and I don't know of anything that could be used to convince me otherwise, except perhaps something real, tangible (say, God tells me what black matter is in a way that I could not have possibly come up with by my own means, or explains why he doesn't just show up and tell everyone he's real, or give me some power to alter reality and prove to everyone I've met Him!).

There's no symmetry here at all.

Accept the evolution of man from primates.

Accept or except?

> unlike Christianity, Islam accepts scientific discoveries but attributes them to God instead

This seems like a very narrow concept of Christianity.

While there are certainly Christian sects that reject well-established concepts it’s far from the norm.

Doubt.

But I guess that just has to do with what you were exposed to and seen as normal.

From my experience, I just find Islam to be 700 years newer, the Quran is a newer book and has some updates to human enlightenment south of the Mediterranean and out of necessity, for example it requires a round earth to get the shortest path to Mecca.

Just as a point of reference that may be surprising to some used to USA religious positions: the Catholic Church fully embraces evolution.

> Islam accepts scientific discoveries but attributes them to God

So... Who invented computers? god. Who discovered radium? god... Who earned all nobel prices? god? :-) Exams must be really easy then.

This is politics or ideology, not science.

Ideology wearing a fur of dead science is more common that it seems nowadays (and is not exclusive from Islamic schools, it seems)

The discovery isn't attributed to God, but the existence of the phenomenon. So in your example, God made radium. God made the raw materials to make computers and gave man the intellect to make them.

This sounds like the God Of The Gaps line of fallacious reasoning. Once we figure out where radium came from then God will be inserted just before that new discovery, ad infinitum, turtles all the way down

Sure but it's a way to integrate science and religion and ultimately science doesn't really have an way to answer 'why' for any of this. Even if there's not an actual answer it just happens to be that way and we're a happy little accident of the universe for a lot of people that's kind of unsatisfying. Even if they're wrong to people want to ascribe meaning to their lives, it's why philosophy and religion will probably never leave us.

Sure, that's the Prime Mover theory, which would be extraordinarily hard to prove or disprove. I don't think it's fallacious reasoning.

It's fallacious to put God one step before everything we don't know (radium, etc), while forgetting the numerous times this was done in the past (rainbows, etc) only to be demonstrated false once science advances. That's quite different to the Prime Mover hypothesis.

The God of the Gaps reasoning always seemed dangerous to me. It creates a system where each scientific discovery diminishes God, pitting religious people against the advancement of science. As the gaps grow smaller so does God. In the long run you're in danger of reducing God to some mathematical constants.

> The discovery isn't attributed to God, but the existence of the phenomenon.

So basically they are frozen in a "Galileo Galilei" period?

This could explain part of the claimed scientific decline

Like system administration: if a task occurs frequently, write a script to automate it.

No you're misunderstanding, what I think they're saying is that things like evolution, big bang, etc are the mechanisms of god, i.e. god set all this in motion. It's an easy way to integrate science and religion so long as you're not a biblical (or whatever the equivalent in your religion is) literalist. Maybe god did setup this universe like a giant clockwork toy and all we're discovering are the gears and springs of the universe. Discoveries and inventions are still the work of people but the cause of all the natural forces just ultimately trace back to god.

It leaves a little crack open for divinity and it's a lot around a question of why; why'd the big bang happen? why are the physical constants of the universe right in a series of bands such that stars, planets and everything else eventually formed? etc. It's a question parallel to science that has a lot of answers for what happens where this is more of a philosophical question of why.

That contradicts with the article. The article states that the Muslim scholar theorized that god actively mutates the animals that want to adapt, i.e. god didn't just invent "the mechanism" of mutation, as you say.

> Muslim scholar theorized that god actively mutates the animals that want to adapt,

This theory is a pastiche trying to use the "good parts" from Darwinism and is clearly worse than the original

Anybody claiming this, just don't have a deep understanding of mutations. Mutations are not a god's gift. Maths and science predict that they happen randomly, and most of the time they carry terrible consequences.

Lets take for example the people that inherited the butterfly skin syndrome. With a so fragile skin that it rips from the shoulder to the waistline at the minimum brush. Do this girl or this boy wanted to "adapt" to have a insufferable pain all the days of this life?

I seriously doubt that anybody would have asked for that. Lets be serious.

I mean it predated Darwin by a lot, we shouldn't be surprised it has its faults.

I was talking in a more general sense not about the specific mechanism in the article, more about the general way science and religion can at least coexist somewhat coherently which is something a lot of online athiests perplexed by.

The creator of the Big Bang theory, george lemaitre, was a roman catholic priest

Interesting, are you aware that the big bang theory originated from a Belgian priest?

And Mendel was a catholic monk.

If you are attributing scientific discoveries to God, then that's not exactly accepting the discoveries - it's just pushing God further to the gaps. Christianity does the same thing.

> unlike Christianity

Whew. That's definitely NOT something you can say generally of Christians. The ones saying crazy stuff get all the attention, but it's not as mainstream as you might have been led to believe.

For example, current (I think) Catholic doctrine is similar to the Islamic position you describe:

Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth. ... Consequently, methodical research in all branches of knowledge provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God. The humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God despite himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are.

So that's a rather large fraction of Christians. (I was raised Catholic, and, "truth cannot contradict truth" -- obviously a reference to the same thing as this catechism -- was what I was told on this question. So from my perspective, this wasn't just an obscure position, but something actively taught.)

If you're interested, here's a link to the wikipedia article, which has links to other sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_the_Catholic_Churc...

That is completely different then what my Muslim friends from collage said they were taught. They said that at home they had classes that explained how these were "tricks" put in place by God to mislead non-believers.

This isn't far from what I heard from some of my Christian friends, which just makes all the worlds religions more much more alike then they differ.

Yeah I mean, it probably depends on how deep a thinker you are. Religious folks integrate religion with modernity in all sorts of ways, from "God's trick/test" to "God signalled this in my scriptures."

unlike Christianity, Islam accepts scientific discoveries

Ever heard of the Jesuits?

You must be kidding right? If not how do you explain the overwhelming rejection of evolution in countries with a majority Muslim population like Saudi Arabia [1], Turkey [0] or even "moderate" ones like Malaysia?

I come from Malaysia and I see how evolution as a topic is studiously avoided in school curriculum.

[0]: https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/08/20/540965889/... [1]: http://blogs.nature.com/houseofwisdom/2011/05/saudi_arabia_l...

> I was excited to hear about this due to the golden age of science in the Arabic world, which was a high point of Arabic culture that has since then unfortunately declined.

Nitpick, but much of the golden age of science in the Islamic world was not performed by Arabs, but by other Muslims (central Asians, etc).

Your nitpick is inaccurate, e.g.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Islamic_scholars_descr...

Your reference does not refute my claim. For one thing, a page listing only the "fathers" of fields doesn't speak much to whether the majority of scientists are of the same background.

And even then, your page lists 19 people, 10 of which are clearly not Arab, with one other person of unknown origin. Only 8 of the ones in the list were Arab.

A bigger list is here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_in_medieval...

But it would take me too long to categorize each. I did click a bunch, and again - the majority were not Arabs.

Edit: I see my original comment was imprecise. Saying "much of the golden age of science in the Islamic world was not performed by Arabs", does not mean there were no Arabs involved, but that a lot of it was by non-Arabs. However, I wouldn't be surprised if the majority were non-Arabs.

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