As far as the origin of language is concerned, Abrahamic traditions agree on the fact that language is a gift of God to humanity. To exemplify, the Holy Bible in Genesis 2:20 (King James’ Version) states that: “[20] And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.” Identically, the Holy Qur’an in Surah Al-Baqara (The Cow) voices the following verse: “And He taught Adam the names of all things; then He placed them before the angels, and said: ‘Tell me the names of these if ye are right’?” Both of these divine expressions indicate clearly that mankind was created from the beginning with an innate capacity to use language. Therefore, a theist from any level of society does not have any doubts about the origin of human language; for him the explanation is both simple and persuasive.

However, for those who do not subscribe to such a faith tradition, it is rather nerve-racking to come up with a unanimous answer as to the emergence of language since there are so many competing and contradictory theories and hypotheses. Efforts to explain the origins of language usually sound dubious and are collected under two main hypotheses in linguistics that are based upon human invention and necessity. According to the “pooh-pooh hypothesis,” the first words originated from involuntary exclamations expressing a human’s pleasure, dislike, pain, hunger and so on, which later on led to the expression of more complicated feelings and ideas. Given this, the first human words would have been involuntary “Aa!”  “ouch,” “ha-ha-ha,” etc., which were used to name the actions that resulted in these sounds. Yet, the problem with this thesis is that emotional exclamations not only constitute only a small part of any human language but also that they are highly language specific. Apart from sneezes, tears, and laughter, exclamations show variations among languages. For instance, English people say “ouch,” Russians “ol,” and native Indians “eee” to indicate sudden ache or discomfort. That is, their forms mostly hinge on a specific language that already exists rather than preceding language.

The second is Charles Darwin’s own “ta-ta hypothesis” (which he himself finds rather erroneous) about the origin of language. For him, human speech might have come from a kind of mouth pantomime according to which speech organs were used to imitate different forms of hand signs. That is to say, human language originated from body movements which were soon imitated by speech organs; therefore the first-ever words used to be lip icons of hand movements. However, here again we notice inconsistency because the meaning of human gestures vary from culture to culture, such as the “thumbs-up/thumbs-down” once used by Romans to decide upon the life of a defeated gladiator. While for Western people the “thumps-up” gesture implies a positive remark expressing mainly a task well done, it surprisingly has negative implications in Greece, Russia, Italy, Latin America and West Africa where it instead stands for the middle finger.

These are only two amid various other inconsistent hypotheses (which include the “ding-dong”, “bow-wow”, warning, “yo-he-ho”, and lying hypothesis) offered as an explanation for the origin of language. What is interesting is that in the late 19th century, the Linguistic Society in London and Paris forbade any commentary and debate on the emergence of human language for valuable time was wasted to find a sane thesis.

This reminds me of letters from the Islamic scholar Said Nursi in which he states that just showing the evidence is sufficient to prove the presence of anything; otherwise you have to inquire of the entire world so as to show its non-presence. In Islamic law, two witnesses are enough to resolve any skeptical case; this may be a lawsuit, a dispute, doubt or disagreement between people. For example, if two people testify that they have seen the crescent, which is the harbinger of the holy month Ramadan in Islam, there is no need to ask other people for verification of the same sight. Even if thousands of people oppose the sighting, it is worthless and does not change the truth. Perhaps, what Abrahamic traditions are teaching us on language is the only source to verify its origin.

Indeed, attaching a purpose to everything non-systematically is subjective and seems not to be compatible with the current scientific methodology. For this reason, some people tend to deny religious sources of knowledge, whereas other people tend to accept a dualist viewpoint where they separate the domains of religion and science. Such dualism pushes religion out of people’s lives and restrains it only to particular instances and environments, reframing religion with surrealist subjects.

The path to reviving religious spirituality in daily life, on the same objective domain with science, requires many approaches. One of them is to answer the following question: is it possible to find a systematic way of understanding the purpose of the phenomena that has been observed and discovered by scientific methodology?

Although scientific methodology has evolved throughout history, the common motive that fits all stages is exploring the causal relationship among phenomena and expressing causality with some set of laws and principles. If we traced back to the origins of the scientific approach, we would encounter Aristotle’s definitions. He stated in his book “Metaphysics” that there are four types of causes (Fine, G., 1987):

1. Material cause – i.e. the materials that something is composed of. For example, water, sunshine, soil etc. are necessary to plant a tree. Therefore, these are material causes for the tree that was planted.
2. Formal cause – in his original words, “the form or pattern; that is, the essential formula and the classes which contain it.” For instance, a drug can only be useful if its constituent chemicals are mixed in a certain ratio. Hence the specific ratio is the formal cause of the drug.
3. Efficient (or motive) cause – the prior conditions that lead to the resulting situation. This is what is usually considered as “the cause” in science, especially in physics. An example is the source of new cells, which was unknown until the 19^th century. It was François Raspail (1794–1878) who first stated Omnis cellula e cellula, meaning that every cell is derived from another cell which tells the efficient cause of cell (re)production. (http://www.ohio.edu/chastain/rz/raspail.htm)
4. Final cause – i.e. the purpose or the goal of something. This is also known as telos. In our daily language, we often mean the final cause or telos, when we talk about “whys.” For example, the telos for a seed to germinate is to become a tree.

Considering these different types of causes, which all together become a complete explanation, we can see that the current understanding of science is diverged from this point. These four categories of cause survived in science until the 17^th century. But then, by constraining science on the matter and its motion, as Francis Bacon stated in his Advancement of Learning (1605), only the material and efficient causes are taken into account as the major two subjects of science (Bacon 1605). During those days, Spinoza and Descartes deliberately rejected the final (teleological) cause and claimed that the efficient causes are necessary and sufficient to explain the universe. Thence, Newtonian physics was developed on the basis of the efficient cause. For example, the cause of acceleration is thought of as the force, in a sense that when a force F is applied to a mass m, the acceleration becomes a = F/m.

Causality in science is therefore reduced to the “efficient cause” and effect relationship. However, as we discussed, religions emphasize the purpose of events and accept God as the cause of causes. Therefore, religions use a different language, especially by underlining the telos, in terms of explaining phenomena. For instance, one of the amazing properties of water is that its least absorbing spectrum corresponds to the optical regime (Gedik, N. 2005). To explain this phenomenon, science asserts the efficient cause and searches for the relationship between the absorption spectrum and the natural oscillation frequency of the water molecule. However, disregarding the temporal order, this purpose-based approach says that because it is crucial and vital for living beings to receive sufficient light, and since the atmosphere largely consists of H₂O molecules, then water had to be transparent to the optical frequencies of light to allow creatures that have eyes and photosynthesis systems to get enough light.[1]

We should admit that the latter explanation does not sound strong enough to be generalized and be formulated. Therefore, we usually avoid using the adjective “scientific” for such explanations. But when our subjects or phenomena are chosen in the bio-world, we observe that the “standard” efficient causality does not give a satisfactory explanation, and the teleological causality is necessary. For example, the adaptation concept is teleological, which makes the usage of “final cause” indispensable in biology. Furthermore, in the early 19^th century, in his book The Origin of the Species, Charles Darwin deliberately employed the term “final cause,” as it was noticed by James Lennox (Lennox 1993). Although some people claim the opposite, by carefully investigating Darwin’s works, Asa Gray and James Lennox appreciate Darwin by stating that he is the first scientist who reconciled morphology and teleology. Simply put, every species are equipped with specialized organs so that they can maximally benefit from, or maximally defend against, their environment. The same idea is also valid from the religious point of view and does not necessarily deny natural selection.

We can find more examples of teleological causality in systems biology, which studies biological concepts in a holistic way and therefore utilizes a teleological language. For instance, during mitotic cell division, chromosomes are replicated only once and then separated into two new cells. But note that something, indeed a checkpoint, prevents the cell from replicating its DNA more than once. This situation appeals for attention and can be explained in two ways. First is the teleological, or what biologists sometimes call the “biological explanation.” DNA is replicated once because otherwise it is severely defective or even lethal for the cells. Such a teleological explanation is perfectly compatible with the mechanistic explanation (efficient cause) based on the chemical interactions of some related proteins, which can be modeled by thermodynamic equations. As the system is complex, it is often hard to fully fit into a model using thermodynamic formulations. However, system biology offers another way that mixes the language of teleological and efficient causes by considering the system as a signaling network, on which the signal (or information, as in the information theory) is carried out via specific protein phosphorylations or reactions. If we were to analyze the spectrum of the words used in systems biology, such as commitment, robustness, checkpoint, decision etc., we would see that its language is more similar to our purpose-based daily language. For such irreducibly complex systems, the employment of teleological concepts does not arise as metaphorical; rather, it is indispensable as the whole cannot be purely explained by its parts.

Other sciences also provide teleological examples. Beginning in the early 20^th century, quantum physics emerged, bringing along some very unintuitive experiments. For example, Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen offered a paradox called EPR. This states that measurements on two spatially separate but entangled particles can demonstrate correlations that cannot be simply explained by efficient causes. Later on, this phenomenon, called quantum entanglement, was empirically validated and can be explained by the final causes, introducing a retrocausal relationship.

Theoretical physicist Ken Wharton argues that the process known as frustrated spontaneous emission is naturally explained by such teleological causality. A light-emitting atom stops emitting light when the surrounding atoms are no longer able to absorb light. The decision of the atom whether to decay or not depends on the other atoms’ absorption, which has not happened yet. The idea that “the atom is probing the future” is not only counter intuitive, but also difficult to accept on the basis of the efficient causality, as Wharton states. (G. Musser, 2014).

Although teleological explanations are not always indispensable and can always be accompanied by efficient causality, the urge for the simplest explanation usually brings teleological language to science. Because science has been facing complex systems in various fields, teleological (purpose based) causality has become necessary since the beginning of the 20^th century. As a purpose-orientated understanding of existence is fundamental for almost all religions, it would not be strange to observe the engagement of science and religion in the near future.

Returning back to the initial question, of whether the purpose-oriented view can be reconciled with scientific research, we see that this is already widely evident in the scientific community. But there are still some people who think religions oppose science, owing to their purpose-oriented view. The judgment is left to the reader.

Yusuf Malik holds a PhD in physics. He is a freelance writer based in Boston, USA.

Reference

1. Fine, G.. 1987. “Forms as Causes: Plato and Aristotle,” in A. Graeser (ed.), Mathematics and Metaphysics in Aristotle, Bern: Haupt, pp. 69–112.
2. http://www.ohio.edu/chastain/rz/raspail.htm
3. Bacon, Francis. 1605. “Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Human.” en.wikisource.org.
4. Gedik, N. 2005. “The Miracles of Water,” The Fountain, Issue 49.
5. Lennox, James G. 1993. “Darwin Was a Teleologist.” Biology and Philosophy 8 (4).
6. George Musser. 2015. “The Quantum Mechanics of Fate,” Nautilus, February.

[1] The difference between this explanation and the anthropic principle may seem subtle here, but there is an enormous conceptual gap which extends beyond the scope of this article.  

In order to shed light on this matter, I would like to reference a part of the movie The Truman Show. In this movie, a man’s life is continuously recorded and broadcast worldwide as a TV show. From babyhood on, his life is completely planned, and many of his major life events are designed by the makers of the show. However, all of this is unbeknownst to the main character, Truman. As he grows into his elementary school years, he develops a passion for exploring the world. But this would mean that he would have to leave the movie set, which by now covers a huge area and is deliberately surrounded by water, giving the impression that Truman is living on an island. So, in order to avoid his departure from the movie set and in order not to violate his freedom of choice at the same time, the moviemakers do two things. First, a set-up is made in which Truman’s father drowns in the sea when he and Truman were caught in a storm while sailing. Thus, a negative psychological association is used in order to keep Truman away from the sea. In Truman’s later years, the show’s architects assign a geography teacher who consistently curtails Truman’s passion for exploration. Anytime he expresses interest in exploring a place, his teacher tells him that it has already been done. The plan of the show’s makers works; Truman buries his passion for exploration deep into his heart.

Before returning to our topic, I would also like to mention the main idea of a TEDx talk by Nate Staniforth. Nate is a performing magician from Iowa City, and he visits kids, some of them as young as kindergarteners, for a purpose he believes in: helping people experience awe. At the end of his talk, his advice to the audience is that when you see a trick, instead of quickly going on-line and learning how it is done, take your time and experience the awe for a while. If you don’t, learning the reality behind the trick is going to instantly destroy the feelings of awe and amazement. This is similar to someone telling you a joke, and in the middle of it, another person who already knows the joke revealing the punch line, which ruins all the entertainment.

People are created with different levels of interest in math and science. For a small minority, these subjects are inherently attractive, but for quite a lot of people, they are no more than a school obligation. But these views can change. Sometimes, students develop at different paces, and after a few years of showing no interest, they start to have a passion for math or science. And sooner or later, when they have that passion, suddenly, the life stories of different scientists electrify their imagination. The path leading to an innovation or a theory energizes the blood in their veins. When they get to the moment at which the long-sought explanation is revealed, they feel as if they themselves have found it. And when they are presented with an experiment that includes new and surprising concepts, they imagine themselves at the outset of a great journey. Symphonies start playing their most exhilarating notes in their minds.

Then what happens? Well, we don’t allow them time to experience this feeling of awe and amazement for long. Before they have the opportunity to use their imagination and intellect, we present them with an explanation and a mathematical formula that has been experimentally verified. And in doing this, the language of instruction involves authoritative phrases like, “this phenomenon is known as…,” “the governing equation is…,” “the explanation for the rate of change is controlled by…” For some of the students, these explanations seem more complicated than the phenomena themselves. For others, they mean that there is an explanation as to how something seemingly magical is happening. The more we stress explanations, the stronger the impression that “everything is known, and you can’t touch this.”

For many of them, the story ends here, which means by enriching science education and growing the list of explanations, we are actually channeling students away from science towards the things they can experiment and explore with: smart phones, computer games, etc.

However, this is not the whole story, because there are students, despite being few in number, who still enjoy learning these explanations. Although the original awe loses its strength upon learning the explanation, the existence of an answer, and humanity’s ability to discover it, bring a new kind of awe. This is good, but what is the difference between these people who enjoy learning the explanations and those who don’t?

I am going to use a metaphor to solve this puzzle. When we look upon the night sky, we see only points of light. However, today we know that some of these lights are actually galaxies, containing billions of stars. And we also know that there are other points of light that are invisible to the unaided human eye. How do we know this? We have telescopes that enhance our vision. They work as follows: the larger the mirror of the telescope, the higher the resolution (i.e., the zoom-in capability). With larger telescopes, we can see into galaxies that, from afar, seem like dots in the sky. Also, in order to see some distant bodies, telescopes need a very long exposure time to collect sufficient light from them. These two factors – a larger eye and a longer wait time – determine how deeply we can see into the universe.

Looking back to the issue of science education through these two factors, most students either don’t have a wide enough intellectual perspective to grasp the beauties that are hidden in the big picture or they don’t have enough patience to work on finding the phenomena that are invisible at first glance. But these deficiencies are not just on the student’s side. It is also possible that the teachers themselves cannot see the big picture and the accompanying awe, which leaves the students helpless. Lastly, the curriculums may not be giving enough time for the students to digest the new material and feel the joy of discovery.

In his article, A Rationale for Fiction, which appeared in the 49th issue of The Fountain, Firat Kocol talks about classifying knowledge into two categories: transferable and nontransferable. For example, basic addition would be transferable, but feelings of surprise would be nontransferable. In real life, there is a varying mix of these two types of knowledge. In any event, Kocol claims that nontransferable knowledge can only be evoked in the audience through fiction, be it in the form of art, story, or music.

When we think in terms of science education, it is not difficult to see that all of our efforts are aimed at the transferable aspects of science. The nontransferable side of it, such as the feeling of awe, is ignored. Instead, the feelings of awe and amazement are considered as the job of the entertainment industry, powered by audio-visual technologies. After all, feelings are not scientific, anyway (or so the logic goes!). Hence, as science education has ignored the human soul, the human soul has started ignoring science.

Perhaps it is like Truman’s psychological aversion to sea travel: when we see the feeling of awe drown in a sea of information, we turn away from it, and that information cannot become a part of us. But again: why awe? Why is this feeling of awe and amazement so important for us? Why, when it is absent, do we disconnect ourselves from a subject?

Awe is a reverential feeling we have when faced with something unpredictable. The unknown relationship between the start and the end bewilders our minds. In other words, awe is the attraction of the unknown, not that of the known. Therefore, a body of knowledge that appears to have an answer for all the questions in the mind of the student has no relation to awe! This is even truer if that body of knowledge claims to be unique, and shuts the door of unpredictability.

This is contrary to the image of science in our minds, isn’t it? Why should a complete and consistent theory of everything be repulsive to the human mind, when that mind that has been working on that puzzle for thousands of years?

Luckily, a mathematician from the early 20th century stumbled upon something similar, and his answer, known as Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, perplexed the community of mathematicians. Taking this theory as basis, we can say that it is impossible for a body of knowledge to have a complete and consistent explanation for everything. In other words, science cannot achieve what it wants to ultimately achieve. It’s logical that this failure would trickle down to science education, too.

But how can students feel this fallacy when they are not even capable of understanding it? The answer lies in the nontransferable aspect of the taught material. Just like you don’t need to know the molecular content of a food in order to feel that it is rotten, the inhibition of awe is enough for a student’s mind to disregard a body of knowledge because it feels off.

Just like the existence of light in the outer world and the existence of eyes in our bodies necessitate each other, the existence of incompleteness and inconsistencies in the outer world necessitate the feeling of awe. The feeling of awe wants the door of unpredictability open.

This can lead to only one conclusion: that we must reincorporate awe into our science education, teaching students to feel amazement when faced with extraordinary, or even ordinary, events. If we don’t do this, the status of math and the sciences will continue to deteriorate among newer generations.

Science is the systematic study of the behavior of certain phenomena (that is, regularities, uniformities) in the physical universe. Scientific study is based on observation, experimentation, measurement, and the formulation of universal laws that describe these facts and phenomena in general terms and enable prediction.

The process of describing regularities (i.e. things that happen in a particular way) is incomplete and never exhaustive because regularities are not exact and deterministic. There is actually quite a lot of approximation and simplification involved in this process. If an exact equation is desired, then these scientific laws, which are useful for prediction, must be formulated in mathematical terms; this represents the whole business of science.

The huge popularity of science is due to its practical results, such as the previous technological examples stated previously. Science is about studying regularities in the material world and describing those regularities in order to make predictions and to make possible the technology that we use daily possible.

It is important to stress that describing and making use of science is not about explaining, but rather using it to make sense of something; here, description is not to be confused with explanation. Therefore, science is about describing, not explaining. The moment a scientist talks about the meaning behind a law or regularity in nature and our ability to benefit from it, he is no longer talking science and he is venturing into the realm of metaphysics and the philosophy of science. Just because someone is a great scientist, it does not mean that he has a deeper insight into the meaning of the laws of the physical world and universe.

What science seeks to explain

Science does not answer questions of meaning or questions of agency (like, who is doing what for what reason? What is responsible for a given regularity?) and we cannot criticize science for not dealing with these questions. They may be important questions but it’s not the responsibility of the field of science to answer these questions. For example, consider the Law of Gravity. We drop a pen and it falls. Why did it fall? Because of gravity.

We observe that, without exception, the pen always falls when we lift it and drop it. Then we call the conjunction between performing an action and its regularity the law of gravity. This means that the law of gravity is simply the name we have given to this regularity; however, it does not mean that the pen is falling because of gravity. Gravity is the name given to the process, not an explanation for it, but in our minds both the name and the explanation for the phenomenon have become one and the same.

The question arises: Is it logically justified to explain an experience through a causal law that is derived through the same experience?

In the beginning, when scientists started asking these questions, it was unclear what the difference was between description and explanation. For a long time science was thought to be a venture competing with religion in providing answers for life.

Regarding natural laws, 19th century American philosopher Charles Peirce stresses on the point that natural laws serve as a description of natural events, not as explanations of these very events: “no law of nature makes a stone fall, or a Leyden jar to discharge, or a steam engine to work.”¹

A law of nature left to its self would be quite analogous to a court without a sheriff. A court in that predicament might probably be able to induce some citizen to act as sheriff; but until it had so provided itself with an officer who, unlike itself, could not discourse authoritatively but who could put forth the strong arm, its law might be the perfection of human reason but would remain mere fireworks. Just so, let a law of nature – say the law of gravitation – remain a mere uniformity – a mere formula establishing a relation between terms – and what in the world would induce a stone, which is not a term nor a concept but just a plain thing, to act in conformity to that uniformity?²

The law of gravity is just a formula, just a name. It cannot make a stone act in accordance to it.

It is important to note that the notion of law is closely related to issues of agency and also to the affinity of the human mind to perceive natural phenomena and the possibility of finding patterns in nature beyond science (i.e. how is it that we are so in tune to what is happening in the world that we can pick up all these regularities?). These issues announce the “greatness” of science. When it comes to the affinity of the human mind to realize recurrent patterns in the universe, Peirce says:

. . . the mind of man is strongly adapted to the comprehension of the world; at least, so far as this goes, that certain conceptions, highly important for such a comprehension, naturally arise in the mind; and, without such a tendency, the mind could never have had any development at all.³

Therefore, there would be no science if one could not grasp the regularities.

In our scientific inquiry, it is reasonable for us to be searching out these regularities and hoping that they will remain stable, but we cannot assume that we have explained how or why such regularities or laws are in effect. It may also be reasonable to say that there are regularities and we hope that these regularities and so-called universal laws will come into effect in the future so that technology can be made from predictions. There can only be hope, and not certainty, because science is based on observation and there may be some instances where the same observation may not occur.Even though science is based on exactitude, there is still a measure of hope and faith involved.

A scientific law states a repeated observation about nature. How do we come to the conclusion that we have a scientific law? Several events occur, (not just to the researcher) that hold to certain regularities, according to a certain pattern, and a generalized statement is formed. The process of generalization from a limited number of observations to form a universal statement or law is called the process of induction, or looking at a certain number of events and saying that things are going to happen all the time. The assumption under the process of induction is that the more observations made about a particular phenomenon, the more it will reinforce the law.

There is only one way for such an assumption to be true, and it has nothing to do with the number of observations. We assume a relationship or connection between the object and what occurs, the cause and effect. The assumption is that there is a necessary connection between the cause and the effect. One must be able to explain this connection in a logical way, not as something that depends solely on observation but something that necessitates the event. If this is unable to be done, if it is only based on observations, then induction is a problem. In formulating a scientific law, generalizations made through the method of induction are problematic.

Because of induction, the basic application of our inductive reasoning is twofold: firstly we think we can describe what we have seen by the use of universal laws, and secondly, that we can use these established laws in predicting what we will see. There is, however, a problem with the mechanics of the inductive process. Are we justified in formulating these universal laws simply on the basis of a discrete number of past observations that have been made?

For example, based on the scientific observation of planetary motion, we could suggest that “the sun will rise every day.” However, just because the sun has risen in the past, it does not mean that it will continue to do so either tomorrow or the next day. So the induction based on the number of occurrences of a particular phenomenon is illogical. There is no guarantee that we will ever see the sun rise again. The sense of faith we have in the scientific laws of planetary motions is based on the supposition that some kind of necessity has caused the sun to rise in the past and will therefore continue to cause the sun to rise in the future. We assume that the connection between the cause and the effect are necessarily related. To use another common example, everyone in Europe thought the statement “All swans are white” was true because every swan that they had ever seen was white. However, when travelers came back from Australia and New Zealand, they reported having seen black swans, thus providing a real life example of how induction can falter. This observation negated the previous generalizations.This brings us to the issue of causality.

Causality is the relationship between an event (the cause) and a second event (the effect), where the second event is understood as a consequence of the first. In relation to one another, induction only has to work sometimes whereas causality always has to work. It has little to do with the number of occurrences; it has to work for each cause-effect relationship. The consequence of this model of the world is that empirical knowledge is connected to the causal relations between objects and events. According to this view, the logic of scientific discovery is inductive. In other words, it infers universal laws from particular statements.

The logic of induction proceeds as follows: First, it conjectures that induction is valid, and then concludes that causation is true. Whereas, from the point of view of logic, it is just the other way around; induction can be justified only by proving that causation is logically valid i.e., that the relation between cause and effect is necessary. Induction is therefore logically not a justified method to attain universality. As the Australian-British philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper observes, scientific induction is “logically inadmissible,” that scientific “theories are, therefore, never empirically verifiable.”⁴

Can we count on the laws of nature? It depends. We can have faith in them; we can hope that they will continue to hold in the future but there exists no logical certainty. But we cannot prove that they will remain true because we cannot observe something that will occur in the future (the dogma of the experiment).

The British philosopher Bertrand Russell calls the dogma of induction, the “biggest scandal of philosophy.” He provides the example of a farmer and his chicken. The chicken notices that the farmer comes every day to feed it. It predicts that the farmer would continue to bring food every day. According to the principle of induction, each feeding event added justification to its prediction. Then one day the farmer came and wrung the chicken’s neck. Russell’s point is that induction cannot justify any conclusions!

Critical problems with the method of induction have been in discussion long before the more recent debates, and are often connected with the concept of causality. The same issue was also at the center of a heated debate among Muslim philosophers and theologians as early as the 12th century. This critical problem with the method of induction was also pointed out earlier by the 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume. Hume stated that when we observe two events to be causally related, say a seed (a) resulting in the growth of a shoot or tree (b), what we in fact observe is only a contingent conjunction of two events. That is, the causation that we think we perceive is not actually “out there in the world” for us to observe. When we see two events and judge them to be causally related, it is merely through a habit of the mind, something we project onto the world. A necessary causal link, as such, is not guaranteed. Hume writes:

Were any object presented to us, and were we required to pronounce concerning the effect, which will result from it, without consulting past observation; after what manner, I beseech you, must the mind proceed in this operation? It must invent or imagine some event, which it ascribes to the object as its effect; and it is plain that this invention must be entirely arbitrary. The mind can never possibly find the effect in the supposed cause, by the most accurate scrutiny and examination. For the effect is totally different from the cause, and consequently can never be discovered in it.⁵

This means that causal laws of nature are not true logically and there is no concrete evidence that these will continue to hold in the future. We simply cannot postulate universal laws that tell us the way the world irrefutably is and will always be unless we have some good reason to trust such generalizations. And even if we could trust such universal laws as “the sun will always rise,” it is not clear how many times we would need to see the sun rise in order to justify proposing this law. Scientific observation, although detailed and informative, has no claim to being the irrefutable truth of the matter.

The solution

Sir Karl Popper offered a potential solution to this problem by thinking about the way we do science in a new light. Popper turned science on its head by claiming that we are looking at science in the wrong way. Instead of looking to science to provide us with theories that are definitive and true, Popper said that we should be looking to science to provide us with theories that we have failed to prove false for a very long time. This approach to science is referred to as “Falsificationism.” Less of a solution and more of a shortcut, it is a tool which we are allowed to use in the game of science. He describes the Falsification approach by noting that for the scientific method to be rational, it must make claims to knowledge that is logically sound. That is, science is not about making grand universal laws, but about the examination of individual observations. According to the model of falsification, science is concerned with evaluating and refining. What we commonly think of as scientific claims to knowledge, are only hypotheses that we accept till they are proved wrong.

Fundamentally, Popper accepts that science can never provide us with complete 100% certainty, but he claims that this is not really a problem because it is not actually science’s job. The purpose of science is to provide us with a theory that is likely to be true based on the fact that we haven’t yet managed to prove it wrong. One unfortunate consequence of this, however, is that you can only ever be certain of the things that you have proved wrong. We know, for example, that the world definitely is not flat. The problem with this fact is that, although certain, it is not particularly useful to know that something is definitely false. For Popper, the best we can hope for is that a given claim is corroborated at one instance in time and if we presume otherwise, we are begging the question of the uniformity of nature: that what has always been, will (for apparently no good reason) continue to be.

To recapitulate, science does not deal with explanation; this is the realm of metaphysics. How we explain things depends on our beliefs and world view.

Dr. Yamina Mermer is a member of the Scriptural Reasoning Group based at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, UK.
Dr. Eren Tatari is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Rollins College, Florida.

Footnotes

1. Online Past Masters text, The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, (University of Virginia E-text Center), 1.323. (The online texts is drawn from The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vols. I-VI ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931-1935), Vols. VII-VIII ed. Arthur W. Burks (same publisher, 1958).
2. Ibid., 5.48.
3. Ibid., 6. 417.
4. Popper, Karl. (1959). The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Hutchinson & Co. (Original work published in 1935).
5. Hume, David. (1772). An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Hackett Publishing Co.

A new world

At the end of the nineteenth century the belief was widespread in the scientific world that everything had already been discovered and all that remained was detail. If we look at it from a physicist’s perspective Newtonian mechanics was only one aspect of the explanation of matter. With quantum mechanics at the beginning of the twentieth century our outlook expanded and the existence of other dimensions was unveiled. These developments were indicators that other dimensions could follow.

In 1927 Bohr (1885–1962), Heisenberg (1901 –1976) and Pauli (1900–1958) were looking for answers to questions like “What is an atom? How does it function? What does it resemble?” The philosophical explanations were fairly striking. Studies had shown that truth was not deterministic but statistical (based on probabilities) and that material truths were also based on the observer. In conclusion, quantum truths were colored by objectivity.

Rutherford’s (1871–1937) experiments showed that atoms were not hard and unbreakable but comprised mainly space with little particles roaming about. Quantum theory, on the other hand, showed that the atom was unlike the hard objects in traditional physics, and that matter, rather being comprised of concrete sub-particles, had dual properties (waves/particles). The particles that made up the atom are seen not as being entities with existence in their own right but as going from one form to another like a dance of energy.

The physical aspect of the universe is like the waves produced by TV broadcasts. Just as television broadcast waves may show an apple, a flower, birds or human images the energy waves in the universe similarly take the forms of apples, flowers, birds, humans and, indeed, sound.

On the topic of electrons and light Richard Philip Feynman (1918–1988) argues that the only thing we can say regarding the behavior of tiny things is that they behave differently. An atom acts in a manner which is quite different to what we have seen previously. For Feynman it needs imagination to understand how they behave.

Feynman asserts that not all the conclusions drawn in science are absolute; they are only results or hypotheses on what may happen in the future. For Feynman we cannot know what will happen because we have not carried out countless number of perfect tests.

The truth of oneness

The cosmos is a realm of geometrical rules and operating on the principles of physics in an orderly and organized manner. The small things possess the same properties of bigger things; the former ones are perhaps not more elegant nor are there more wisdom in their makeup than the latter ones; but they do not fall too far behind either. All existence is in a chain of creation from the twine to the quark, from thereon to atoms and molecules, and finally reaching the human. In every thing, every task, every organization there is a perfect ranking and unity from the smallest to the largest.

From the electrons that exist within one millionth of a millionth of a centimeter to galaxies with diameters of one hundred thousand light years everything in the universe is connected. As David Bohm says (1917–1992), Quantum mechanics has proven that things very different from one another are connected to each other without the cause and effect chain. Everything is connected to everything else. Scientists who read the book of the universe in the light of science arrive at the Qur’an’s greatest truth, in other words, the truth of Unity and the reflection of Oneness in the physical world.

In the early days, it was noticed that the four basic forces (electromagnetic force, gravity, nuclear and weak nuclear forces) formed the basis of the atom bringing about one force. This raised the thought that a simpler theory could be made to explain all events and the universe as a whole. “Implicate Order” was a step in this direction. This theory explained that the energy fields light, heat, electricity and magnetism, once considered to be separate entities, could now be seen as “different aspects” of the same thing. The forces and material factors that help all systems to function in a harmonious way were nothing more than a reflection and manifestation of the one absolute truth.

The aim of science

For Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961) the true aim of science should be to find answers to the questions of who we are, where we came from and where we are going. John Eccles (1903–1997), who received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1964, thinks science in its current state can neither bring explanation to the wisdom of our existence nor can it offer answers to basic questions like “Who am I? Why am I here and why do I exist? What will happen to me after I die?” In a similar vein, Robert Jastow thinks that science will never unveil the secrets shrouding creation.

The 1980 winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, neurophysiologist Roger Sperry (1913–1994), in an interview in 1983 stated that science itself is in conflict with materialism. For him there is no explanation of why the science and religion should be conflict. He thinks such a conflict is a remnant of the conditioning produced by the materialist philosophy.

With materialism taking root in the scientific world, life became meaningless, everything seemed banal. In the twentieth century when developments that rocked the very foundation of materialistic philosophy started to change the picture of the universe, it became clearer that there was no differentiation between science and religion. The sciences became more apparent as a way of knowing God. We believe that these developments will carry on to the 21st century in an exceeding manner.

Osman Cakmak is a professor of chemistry at Gaziosmanpasa University, Tokat, Turkey.

References

• Feynman, Richard. The Character of Physical Law, The 1964 Messenger Lectures, MIT Press.
• Schrödinger, Erwin. What Is Life? Cambridge University Press, 1992.

For any observed phenomenon, there can be many possible explanations. A chance-based mechanism could be one explanation. We usually associate chance as being indifferent to purpose, and intelligent design as being with a purpose. When a mechanism appears to be unconcerned with or incognizant of any possible outcome, we term it a chance-based, or random mechanism. In other words, chance is invoked when there appears to be no preference for one particular outcome over another.

While a chance-based mechanism can be one of the possible explanations for a phenomenon, we only consider it seriously when the probability of the proposed mechanism is significant. When the probability is insignificant, we must eliminate this possibility and consider other options. Otherwise, we may fall into what the mathema-tician/philosopher Dembski calls the ‘chance-of-the-gaps’ fallacy:

‘Statistical reasoning must be capable of eliminating chance when the probability of events gets too small. If not, chance can be invoked to explain anything. Scientists rightly resist invoking the supernatural in scientific explanations for fear of committing a god-of-the-gaps fallacy (the fallacy of using God as a stop-gap for ignorance). Yet, without some restriction on the use of chance, scientists are in danger of committing a logically equivalent fallacy’one we may call the ‘chance-of-the-gaps fallacy’. Chance, like God, can become a stop-gap for ignorance.’ [Demski, 98]

To illustrate this principle let us consider three examples. The first is from a movie, related by the same author. The event related concerns the supposed spontaneous combustion of a person.

‘In the movie ‘This is Spinal Tap’, the lead singer remarks that a former drummer in the band died by spontaneously combusting. Any one of us could this instant spontaneously combust if all the most rapidly moving air molecules in our vicinity suddenly converged on us. Such an event, however, is highly improbable, and we don’t give it a second thought.’ [Dembski, 98]

Let us consider two other examples: footprints in the desert and a novel placed next to a typewriter.

Footprints in the Desert

When a bedouin sees camel footprints in the desert, he does not attribute these to chance. He does not think that the wind, by chance, formed those patterns on the sand. Instead, he interprets them as signs that a camel has recently walked along this way. The probability of the chance-based scenario is simply too small. Having seen the patterns characteristic of the wind, the bedouin can be almost sure that the camel explanation is the correct one, even if he has not seen the camel itself.

Novel Placed Next to a Typewriter

Imagine you find a novel left next to a typewriter, next to which sits a monkey. One explanation for who might have written the novel could be that the monkey typed the novel, making words and sentences that make sense, solely by chance. We can view this as a chance-based explanation; up to now we have not witnessed any monkey that can appreciate human literature. To make this explanation more plausible, let us assume that when the monkey completes a page, a human checks the page and if it does not make any sense the page is thrown away. If there were an unlimited supply of paper and ink, and if the monkey were replaced by another monkey when it died, you might expect to see a few lines of meaningful literary work after thousands of generations. In the process you would expect to see mountains of thrown-out pages, containing meaningless sequences of letters. If you knew that the monkey could not live long enough to produce a novel, if you knew that it did not have access to enough paper, or if you could not find any thrown-out pages, you would simply have to eliminate the monkey hypothesis. You would consider other explanations, such as that there was a person who was capable of producing literary work, and this person typed the novel and left it next to the typewriter. The idea that a monkey could produce a novel by typing randomly, without regard to content (i.e. by chance) is simply too small a probability. It is not worthy of serious consideration.

These examples illustrate a general principle; highly improbable and ‘preferred’ (independently specified) patterns cannot be generated by chance-based mechanisms. The footprints in the first example illustrate highly improbable events, and shows us how one arrives at a conclusion by preference or purpose. Since Darwinian evolution relies on chance, there is only one way it can produce the diversity of life found on earth. This can be done by exhausting a significant proportion of the possibilities, producing useless organisms in the process, leaving the remains of the unsuccessful organisms on the way and by eventually producing a useful organism after using up a considerable amount of time, matter and space.

Blind or Not Blind?

Some evolutionists argue that evolutionary algorithms are not the same as a blind search, because they include a fitness function which favors certain outcomes over others. In a way, this imagined ‘fitness function’ evaluates which organisms are the most promising in each generation. To understand the concept of a fitness function, consider the selective breeding of animals. The breeders select the members that have the most desirable properties and continue to breed them. They might breed from only the most fertile chickens or the woolliest sheep and succeed in altering the characteristics of these animals. So, the selection criteria of the breeders can be regarded as a fitness function. However, in the case of selective breeding, the human breeder is the one who defines and applies this function. In the case of Darwinian evolution, there is no room for an intelligent being. So, the imagined fitness function must be a result of the physical laws of the universe. It must be a result of the conditions on earth

What the evolutionary algorithms do is to exploit the information already encoded in the fitness function. So, evolutionary algorithms simply ‘shift’ the problem into a different space. If we assume that this fitness function is a result of the conditions on earth, we have to remember that the conditions on earth are highly improbable and specified. So, if this fitness function is assumed to be capable of design, one must explain how it came to be in the first place. Secondly, this function is ill-defined. Even evolu- tionists themselves have difficulty defining what this function is or how it operates. Various attempts to define this function by evolutionists amount to a tautology in order to justify it. ‘In this formulation, the theory predicts that the fittest organisms will produce the most offspring, and it defines the fittest organisms as the ones which produce the most offspring.’ [Johnson, 91]. Noting this trend, the famous philosopher of science Karl Popper once wrote, ‘some of the greatest contemporary Darwinists themselves formulate the theory in such a way that it amounts to the tautology that those organisms that leave the most offspring leave the most offspring.’ Since the fitness function is not well defined, it is also not possible to demonstrate how this function is capable of producing this diversity of life, neither scientifically nor mathematically. In experiments where evolutionary mechanisms were tested, they tend to favor simplicity, whereas in life we see increasing complexity. Limits of the Universe The famous physicist Carl Sagan once said, in reference to evolutionary processes, given enough time, chance will work miracles. While this statement can be true theoretically, one should also consider that chance, given enough time, will produce a disproportionately high ratio of useless outcomes before coming up with a miracle. Furthermore, the universe, as we have observed, has a limited age and a limited amount of matter. So the amount of time that we can assume chance has is limited. The amount of material to be used by the chance-based pro- cesses is also limited. So the next question is, given the age of the universe, the amount of matter in the universe and all the possible sequences of changes that can take place, what is the likelihood of chance producing a single living cell? The answer to this question is important because it will determine whether the chance hypothesis is worthy of our attention. Dembski explains that within the observed universe any probability below a universal probability bound remains improbable, even if it is assumed that all the resources available were exhausted in order to try out all the possibilities. He calculates this number as 10-150, that is 1 over 10 to the 150th power. The details of this calculation and what it means are explained by him as follows:

“It would take at least 1067 times the current lifetime of the universe for the universe to manage to make all possible proteins of length 200 at least once.”

In the observable universe, probabilistic resources come in very limited supplies. Within the known physical universe there are estimated to be around 1080 elementary particles. Moreover, the properties of matter are such that transitions from one physical state to another cannot occur at a rate faster than 1045 times per second. This frequency corresponds to Planck time, which constitutes the smallest physically meaningful unit of time. Finally, the universe itself is about a billion times younger than 1025 seconds (assuming the universe is between ten and twenty billion years old). If we now assume that any specification of an event within the known physical universe requires at least one elementary particle to specify it and cannot be generated any faster than the Planck time, then these cosmological constraints imply that the total number of specified events throughout cosmic history cannot exceed 1080 x 1045 x 1025 = 10150. It follows that any specified event of probability less than 1 in 10150 will remain improbable even after all conceivable probabilistic resources from the observable universe have been factored in. A probability of 1 in 10150 is therefore a universal probability bound. Implicit in a universal probability bound such as 10-150 is that the universe is too small a place to generate specified complexity by sheer exhaustion of possibilities. Stuart Kauffman develops this theme at length in his book Investigations. In one of his examples (and there are many like it throughout the book), he considers the number of possible proteins of length 200 (i.e., 20200 or approximately 10260) and the maximum number of pairwise collisions of particles throughout the history of the universe (he estimates 10193 total collisions supposing the reaction rate for collisions can be measured in femto seconds). Kauffman concludes: The known universe has not had time since the big bang to create all possible proteins of length 200 [even] once. To emphasize this point, he notes: It would take at least 1067 times the current lifetime of the universe for the universe to manage to make all possible proteins of length 200 at least once. [Dembski, 98] It should be noted that the precise value of this universal probability bound is not critical. Even an approximate value is enough to judge a proposed chance-based explanation for an observed phenomenon. Carl Sagan himself estimated the probability of humans evolving from a single living cell as one chance in 102,000,000,000, [Sagan]. Combining this estimate with the universal probability bound discussed above and using common sense, one can easily dismiss the chance hypothesis for the origin of life or for the diversity of life on earth. The Fossil Record Problem Associated with the chance hypothesis, there is also the problem of fossil record which we have not discussed in detail yet in this article. If the chance hypothesis is correct, the failed attempts of the blind processes should vastly outnumber those that are successful. This would imply that in the fossil record we should have found vast numbers of fossils of dysfunctional species compared with a tiny minority of successful species. Just as failed attempts would vastly outnumber successful ones, the fossils of such attempts should reflect the same ratio. While there are signs of extinct species in the fossil record, we do not find a huge record of the fossils of the kind of wild variation we would expect from blind mutations. While the reasons for the extinction of species like dinosaurs are debated, there is agreement that they were successful living organisms during their lifetimes. Conclusion To summarize, when a mathematician calculates the probability of chance producing life on earth, he or she can easily dismiss this explanation because of the aforementioned problems. Life is too complex and intricate. The lifetime of the universe and the amount of matter in it are insufficient to blindly exhaust all possibilities and arrive at the diverse life forms we see on earth. The fossil record does not reflect the ratio of unsuccessful attempts to successful ones we would expect from chance hypothesis. When presented with the chance-based theory of evolution, an objective mathematician would thus feel obliged to say, Either you have to shut off my intellect or I cannot accept this hypothesis. Life must be the product of an intelligent Designer who is All-Wise, Omniscient, Omnipotent and cognizant of what He is doing. The mathematician would thus come to the same conclusion as an unlettered bedouin, who is nevertheless a careful observer and a solid thinker: Camel droppings point to the existence of a camel. Footprints on the sand tell of a traveler. The heaven with its stars, the earth with its mountains and valleys, and the sea with its waves – do they not all point to the Maker, All-Powerful, Knowing, Wise and Caring?

References

• [Darwin, 93] Charles Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin 8, 1860 Cambridge University Press, 1993.
• [Dembski, 98] William A. Dembski, The Design Inference, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1998.
• [Dembski, 99] William A. Dembski, Intelligent Design, InterVarsity, Downers Grove, Ill., 1999.
• [Johnson, 91] Philip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial, Regnery Gateway, Washington DC, 1991.
• [Khan] Khan, M., trans. Sahih Al-Bukhari: The Translation of the Meanings. Darussalam Publishers: 1997.
• [Sagan] Carl Sagan, F. H. C. Crick, L. M. Muchin in Carl Sagan, ed., Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CETI) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp. 45-46.
• [Siddiqui] Siddiqi, A. H., trans. Sahih Muslim. Kitab Bhavan: 2000.
• [Harf] Harf Information Technology. Hadith Encyclopedia. Egypt: 1996. [Words] Nursi, S. The Words. The Light, Inc.: 1997.

Hibernators are intensely active in summer. A part of that activity is building temporary burrows for summer use only. Ground squirrels, (Spermophilus citellus) for example, can build hundreds of such temporary shelters over a single summer, on average 15 shelters in a 10m2 area of open field. These shelters have only the one nest compartment, usally between 30 and 50cm below ground level. By contrast, their shelters for hibernation, sometimes as much as 3m below ground level, are intended for long, repeated use and contain a number of compartments-one for storing large quantites of food (usally dry seeds), one for use as a ‘toilet’, and a third for sleeping.

Before hibernation, animals prepare themselves for the hardship of the very long period of cold by storing up large amounts of fat in adipose tissue under the skin, up to some 40 % of total body weight. These fats are composed of fatty acids which typically have ten or fewer than ten carbon atoms and are consturcted with some double bonds between the carbon atoms of the chain and their esters with glycerides. These compounds provide the ideal energy source needed during hibernation because lipids yield twice the energy yielded by carbohydrates and proteins. Moreover, these fatty acids need very little oxygen in their degradation/conversion to energy.

Blood circulation and homeostasis during hibernation are not well understood. The animal steadies body temperature at around 2°C to 5°C: in mammals the body temperature remains about 1°C above environmental temperature. Usally, when body temperature falls to this level, metabolic rate is increased or the animal awakes, but during hibernation this does not happen. Metabolic rate at 5°C is usually 2-5% of the rate at normal body temperature. For example, the active heart rate of the genus Myotis of bats is between 500 and 700 beats per minute. During hibernation the rate goes down to 20 beats per minute at 5°C, and 8 beats at -7°C. Two consistent and characteristic changes are found in blood during hibernation: an increased production of herapin, which may be contributing to a reduction in the risk of blood clotting during very slow circulation, and an increase in serum magnesium, for which there is no explanation as yet.

Many different types of respiratory patterns have been observed during the state of hibernation. We will mention only one example here: The hedgehog, at a body temperature of 5°C, does not breathe at all for an amazing 56 minutes.

In controlled observations, it has been found that animals which hibernate show improved retention of learned behaviour compared to non-hibernating animals. Again, it is not at all clear why this should be so.

Hibernation is not a prolonged period of constant torpor. There are periodic arousals during winter caused by the accumulation of metabolic end products or having a full bladder. The awakening process is often assisted by shivering, especially when the body temperature is very low. Awakening is a costly process because it takes as much energy to wake up as it does to stay in hibernation for ten days. The ground squirrel, Spermophilus citellus gains around 150-200 g of fat before hibernation. That is more than enough for the energy being used up during sleep; the excess is needed for the wakening up intervals which occur fortnightly.

A number of hypotheses have sought to explain how hibernation is triggered-changes in weather and climate, temperature, humidity and change of diet are among the suggestions. Apart from these causes, a protein was isolated from the blood of a hibernator bear in the USA in the 1980s which, when injected into rats appeared to induce sleeping behaviour in summer. Today it remains uncertain if this protein is the only stimulator of hibernation. If it is, we still need to know what other conditions are related to the protein level and its effect and how the level of protein is maintained at the right level during the animal’s life cycle.

What is already securely known about hibernation establishes it as a truly amazing physiological phenomenon. It tells us that the body temperature of some hibernators will passively adjust ambient tempeature from between 2°C to 32°C without causing awakening. The inevitable question is what advantage such behaviour affords the hibernating animals. Some small animals, because of their high metabolic rates are faced with an acute need for a continuously available supply of food and water. Controlled investigations show that dormant animals at cool temperatures lose much less weight than the non-dormant ones. It has also been shown that small animals can survive for at least a hundred days on the energy derived from ten grams of fat. Hibernation is, in other words, a survival technique, an adaptation to the conditions of poor or non-existent food supply during the winter months.

That is, however, something of a mechanical explanation which, even as a mechanical explanation, is far from satisfactory. The secondary question immediately arises of why this particular adaptation and not another-why not migration, for example, to areas where winter does not affect food supply so drastically? There are many birds and other animals which take this option.

A more satisfying explanation must surely consider what adaptability itself is, how it relates to the variety of life-forms, to the individuation of species and kinds, and to the overwhelming intution (which must touch any truly objective observer) that, at levels of subtlety and intricacy which defy comprehension, the survival and provision of each and every living form is minutely arranged and co-ordinated to create a whole that is thoroughly interconnected. The value of that whole is manifested in many different aspects-beauty, variety, efficiency, the rich warmth of life. Is it not impossible to resist the impression of a wonderful generosity within and behind the world of living forms?

But does religion, as the atheists claim, really conflict with science? We can tackle the question in the context of biology. Out of all sciences biology would appear to have the nearest contact with religion because it concerns ‘life’.

Man is, of all living creatures, the most complex and perfect organism. It is man who discovered science and knowledge and it is he who advances it. The first thing that even the earliest man must have been curious about is his own existence as a living creature. There is a something – which we do not know the nature of which distinguishes all living creatures from other existing entities like minerals, rocks, water etc. But all living creatures – men, animals, plants – have this something in common.

It seems reasonable to believe that all living beings are therefore subject to the same law. The Ruler who enforces this law, manifests His power among the living creatures distinctively through His different attributes or names. He who has introduced Himself to us by His personal name, Allah, also reveals His many other names. Among these, Hayy probably has a certain priority; it means the ‘life-giver’. Then, names like Rezzaq – the provider of needs – Musavvir who depicts, shapes and forms – Hafiz the protector, keeper – Mucemmil who creates perfectly and designs beautifully, and so on.

Many non-believers have tried to offer a rational, ‘scientific’ explanation for the original transition form inorganic matter to organic life form. But science is also subject to relativity. Philosophers, scientists – from ancient Greece to today’s biology theorists – have written hundreds of books and contrived many theories about how life began, but that is all they have ever been able to do – offer theories and speculations. They have taken a roundabout route because, up to now no-one has come up with an explanation contrary to the reality of the Qur’an.

The act of creation and giving life belongs only to God. It has not been and will not be explained otherwise. Qur’an, the last holy book, unlike the other holy books, has preserved and protected its originality. One evidence of its superiority to all philosophies and theories is that not one of the accepted hypotheses conflicts with the realities of the Qur’an.

It is encouraging that today many scientists believe that religion has the main role in explaining creation. The biology theorists in particular are trying to build new explanations for the origin of life in accordance with religion.

Despite the great developments in fields like genetic engineering, molecular biology, DNA and immunology, scientists have still not been able to close the immense gap between organic and inorganic matter. ‘Life’ remains the biggest miracle in the universe. False theories like Darwinism and other evolution theories that refuse to accept the miracle of creation are collapsing one after another.

Heinsberg’s theory of ‘indeterminism’ in quantum mechanics, smashed materialism completely, in particular the stubborn notion of ‘cause’ and ‘result’. Later the American philosopher Thomas S. Kuhn, put forward the argument that there are not, and cannot be, any final scientific theories. This is true as, throughout history, we have witnessed that almost all theories have lost their ‘truth’ and been replaced by new theories.

A paradigm, as Kuhn calls it, or a way of seeing, dominates every branch of science for a certain period and then gives way to a new one. According to Kuhn, there is no perfect paradigm in any branch of science. For example a group of researchers begin to work in a certain field within their own paradigm, using their own special methods. In time, an explanation in this field becomes accepted by most or all scientists. Then, the researchers who believe strongly in this paradigm try to develop it as far as they can. Then begins a period of solving problems and riddles, in which the researchers proceed to new discoveries within the boundaries of the paradigm. Kuhn says that this is a stage in which scientific progress is made without cuts. After a while, however, the researchers come face to face with new data which conflict with their paradigm, precisely because all paradigms have certain boundaries. For this reason, there is no paradigm into which you can fit the whole of scientific knowledge at any one time. Arguments amongst the scientists about the data that do not fit the paradigm continue until someone comes up with a new paradigm that can cope with the new data.

So far, all theories, put forward as paradigms, have only explained part of the reality or facts. These paradigms have not all been completely wrong, but they have never been completely right either. For example, certain natural phenomena can still be explained with the physics of Aristotle, while most of the time we use Newton’s laws or, in some situations, Einstein’s theory of relativity. And as regards biology, there are some cases where even Darwin was right.

However, man cannot close his eyes to the reality of creation, as a whole and like an ostrich bury his head in the sand.

The famous philosopher of science, Karl Popper, has a different view on the matter. He measures the health of a theory by checking whether it has too many gaps or missing links, or not. On this ground he states emphatically that ‘Darwinism is not a scientific theory’.

What we can derive from Popper’s ideas or Kuhn’s theory of paradigms is that reality cannot be fully explained by scientific knowledge. Science can only shine a light on some few of the hidden facts of the universe.

Nicholas Maxwell thinks that science will not advance only by increasing the number of experiments for each theory. To explain the purity and the beauty of nature, scientists have to offer theories as pure and as perfect as nature itself. Is it possible to come up with a theory like this? Does man have to push the reality of creation aside – which brings an explanation of everything – to get lost in the mazes of the theories?

The Qur’an explains the origin of life, the ecological balance in nature, the development of the embryo and many other facts so perfectly, that any biologist who reads it must place his head on the ground to worship God.

We expect all scientists to read and respect the Qur’an, because, up to now, no one has proved the knowledge it contains to be wrong. The Qur’an is the word of God and cannot he wrong.