Insight Spring 2020

Theistic Evolutionism in Islam: Syncretizing Darwinism & Qur’anic Ontology Areeq Hasan ’20 The quest to establish an ontological narrative that wholly explains the natural phenomena of the observable universe has long driven intellectual development across many cultures. In this epistemological endeavor, however, the notions of inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning are frequently conflated as means to resolve questions of the same nature. This fallacy has driven many to adopt scientific theory, as an alternative to philosophical frameworks and religious paradigms to ineffectively derive meaning by inductive, objective means despite the notion that meaning can only be assigned deductively. This issue of conflation manifests in the centuries of controversy surrounding the philosophical implications of accepting the Darwinist paradigm, as it seemingly conflicts with various religious ideologies such as those of Christianity and Islam. Despite increasing creationist and anti-Darwinist sentiment present in contemporary Islamic thought, the Qur’an establishes a theistic evolutionary framework by which Darwinian evolution can be syncretized with the Islamic ontological narrative.

In order to determine the means by which the Darwinist paradigm and Islamic ontology intersect, it is necessary to establish the assumptions of each ideology. Darwin’s argument posits the Lamarckian notion of a zerosum limitation of resources in an ecosystem in his definition of the carrying capacity, the maximum population size for a species in its environment.

Such limitations lead to a “struggle for existence,” (Darwin 54) or competition among the members of a population. In addition, Darwin claims the existence of hereditary variations among the characteristics of the members of a population, the laws of which, he argues, are “infinitely complex and diversified,” (21) which we now ascribe to genetic mutations arising out of random, chance processes that may be advantageous or disadvantageous to an organism’s reproductive success in the context of its environment. The combination of limited resources and hereditary variations results in the “preservation of favourable variations and the destruction of injurious variations,” a mechanism Darwin refers to as natural selection (78). This process of selection causes a gradual divergence of a species from its common parent that eventually becomes significant enough for humans to classify as a distinct species out of convenience. Thus, it logically follows that life originated from “one” or “a few forms,” regardless of whether the origin 24