Sameer Yousuf

Been catching up on Google Reader today and came across these nice and diametrically opposed pieces.

You Are Perfectly Created – MuslimMatters.org

vs.

What a shoddy piece of work is man – Nature

Thought I’d compare and contrast these opposing views. It is quite interesting to see how one is willing to interpret/process new information in light of previously accepted information (beliefs).

From the muzzy folks:

“We have indeed created humankind in the best of molds.”

Quran 95:4 (Surat At-Tin, The Fig)

and also this

“The work of Allah who has perfected everything (He created).

Qur’an 27:88 (An-Naml, The Ant)

But then the Nature guys says this:

Whether or not that is so, the human body is certainly no masterpiece of intelligent planning. The eye’s retina, for instance, is wired back to front so that the wiring has to pass back through the screen of light receptors, imposing a blind spot.

sigh, it continues…..

From the Muslim site:

Aren’t we Muslim? Don’t we believe in Allah, and in the Quran? Yes? Then we must believe that we were created perfectly. We were created by the Master Creator who does not make errors.

But then Ball adds this:

And in the early twentieth century, the physician Archibald Garrod pointed out how many human ailments are the result not of God’s wrath or the malice of demons but of “inborn errors” in our biochemistry.

Back to the muzzy article:

Your spirit is perfect, your soul is perfect, your mind is perfect, your heart is perfect, and even your body is perfect.

Then Ball makes an interesting point:

And numerous regulatory mechanisms are needed to patch up problems in gene activity; for example, by silencing or destroying imperfectly transcribed mRNA — the template for protein synthesis. Regulatory breakdowns may cause disease.

……..

Why design a genome so poorly that it needs all this surveillance? Why are there so many wasteful repetitions of genes and gene fragments, all of which have to be redundantly replicated in cell division.

So what should I take away from this discussion? Does science have the right to ask why or is it just a descriptive tool? Are “errors” due to scientific ignorance or incomplete data? I think the point is that anyone will see what they want to see regardless of contradicting information. A scientist thinks he is seeing errors in God’s design and the believer thinks that God has a purpose for things to be the way they are and that humans will either never discover it or are not meant to know.  God didn’t make an error in the design of the genome, humans just are too limited in their knowledge to understand the elegance of his design.

At the end of the day, these are probably useless debates but it is still interesting to me that I can come across such diversity in beliefs in light of all the evidence and information present in the world. Oh the power of the confirmation bias.

Just a few things from the muzzy article bothered me. For one, all the talk about perfection is a bit non-inclusive.  For example this line:

…..were all created perfect in every way. It’s hard to wrap our minds around that. But we must accept it as an article of faith.

Hmm, perhaps your audience is well off, perfectly healthy, educated Muslims but anyone working in a hospital or knows anyone who has had to go to one that not everyone is perfect in every way. Children die of sudden infant death syndrome, some are born with multiple sclerosis, some are born blind, others have missing chromosomes that results in mental retardation.  Are we supposed to assume these are all part of the perfection God meant for humanity? If these are perfections, why are we treating them? Being rhetorical but you may see what I am getting at. The world is full of imperfection, or so it would seem.

Another line that bothers me:

You were created without flaw, with a pure soul imbued with fitra, a powerful mind, and a body whose magic is still not understood by modern science.

This is a slippery position for religion if it adopts the God-in-the-Gap approach. Science is not static, its fluid and always progressing as we are learning new things, discarding wrong ideas we previously had and learning new ways to study the world around us. Just because science hasn’t figured out everything yet doesn’t mean God and religion must exist by necessity to explain the supposed “mystery” and “magic”. The world was once thought to be flat. Because there was no evidence at the time that the world was in fact spherical, does that mean that the world was actually flat and then became spherical when we figured out how to test for such a thing? Of course not! In the same sense, because science hasn’t explained away the magic of the body (yet), doesn’t mean there is a.) magic and b.)that God is responsible for this magic.

Anyway.

Continuing from the other post. A look at another one of Mr. Tzortzis arguments against Dr. Dawkin’s conclusion for Atheism. Let me say, many of his arguments seem very reasonable and logically posited. I agree with quite a few, I am really only discussing the ones I have issues with or that I don’t really understand.

Next up is the fine-tuning of the universe argument. Mr. Tzortzis states:

The existence of a life permitting universe is due to conditions that must have been fined-tuned to a degree that is literally incalculable.

I never understand this argument. It makes God look like a reverse engineer. What is life to begin with? It is just some criteria-man made I might mention-that gives a name to something that has certain characteristics we have decided upon. But who is to say “that is life” and “that over there” isn’t? We can’t even decide if viruses are “alive”, how can we be sure there aren’t lifeforms out there beyond our imaginations? How do we know metal is not meant by God to be a life form? I think it may have something to do with the old human desire to be the center of the universe. If I count myself as a life form, then all other things that are to be considered lifeforms have to share some of my characteristics at some level. Life, at a very esoteric level, could be just about anything: we can’t necessarily be sure what it constitutes all the time.

Now if we say the universe necessitates a Creator because its so fined tuned,  aren’t we limiting God’s power? It makes it sound like humans could have only be created in one way (if you think so, how can we be sure?). Once God decided what this human would be like, he worked backwards to design everything up through the start of the universe to be perfectly fine-tuned for humans to live and survive. Isn’t that putting the horse before the cart? When you are God starting from scratch, and you happen to be all-knowing and all-powerful you are making SOMETHING from NOTHING, which means it could result in ANYTHING.  Do we have to have gravity? Do we have to have a sun? Do we have to have eyes? NO, it’s just what God decided to come up with, they aren’t here by necessity. Unless of course you think God is limited to following the laws of nature he created. Then such a sufficiently knowledgeable God could learn to create life that could operate within the confines of universal laws. But still, those life forms would be fine-tuned to the universe, not the other way around.  I guess my point is, that if anything could be, then any explanation is possible.

I understand the point is probably to show that its statistically impossible for all these things to have fallen into place the way they did for us to be here. For example, the unlikelihood that if dark matter wasn’t doing what it does we may not have the power of gravity to be what it is in our particular spot of the solar system which means we wouldn’t have the right size star that is our sun which wouldn’t have been the right distance away to create the climate that we need to form the basic building blocks of life that are needed for living organisms to be here.  But couldn’t explanations such has multiverses and infinite possibilities giving rise to our particular universe which happens to have some life in it also plausible? Could there be infinite amount of different universes and we just so happen to exist in the one particular one that  had all the forces and constants that happen to allow us to exist? In this case though, Tzortzis’ argument works because a supernatural designer is the simplest and probably best explanation for this unlikelhood (from our vantage point) to have come to be.

The final point is that it probably makes more sense to believe in a supernatural designer than to believe that chance was enough for this universe to turn out the way it did. Tough to swallow but could be if you are in the right state of mind.

Which brings me to another point about Science and religion. The whole argument that Science can “never” explain this or that seems a little lame to me. Unfortunately, science is not static. It’s constantly changing and progressing. That is to say there is a possibility we will know more about the universe in the future than we do know. It’s also possible that we may not learn anything new in the future. But that doesn’t make religion true just because we don’t have alternative hypothesis or haven’t figured out certain things yet. As long as we are alive and doing science, we may learn many more things.  Believing gods made love to humans was true position a long time ago, but like many things, it was true to a specific place in time, not universally, just like evolution is true in the time frame of the beginning of the earth to present day, but we don’t necessarily know how basic lifeforms came to be for evolution to act on them.  This we may find out, but that doesn’t mean there is a flaw in evolution just because we haven’t discovered everything.

I really don’t like to get involved in these debates since they almost always  go nowhere or serve no real purpose other than to get people emotional but this article had me thinking. I myself am a believer of sorts but I am extremely weary of co-opting Science as proof of God.  How someone can examine the digestive system of a rabbit and attribute it to the intelligence of a designer not only demonstrates the immense power of suggestion/bias, but the brain’s part time gig as a delusion factory. I think religion is better served sticking to what has worked the last 3,000 years than playing with the fire of Science.

So this article, written by a gentleman named Hamza Andreas Tzortzis, goes about debunking the arguments put forth by Dr. Richard Dawkins in his book the God Delusion.  I haven’t read Dr. Dawkins book myself so I can only frame my talking points with respect to  what Mr. Tzortzis has interpreted Dr. Dawkins’ ideas to be.  Though I like Dr. Dawkins for his wily British style and wit, and his courage to fight the good fight (as I imagine he sees it),  I have yet to see the proof for his conclusion, Atheism.  As many people have already stated, Dr. Dawkins should probably know better that God is an untestable hypothesis and so is outside the realm of the scientific method (Gould’s non-overlapping magistria) let alone take heed from the late cosmologist Carl Sagan, who once said “absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence” (I believe Sagan was an atheist, though a much quieter one than Dawkins).

Anyway, on to his arguments and my take on them. Up first:

Statement #1: One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.

I believe that it is only a challenge if you wish to take God out of the picture. It is indeed a challenge if you presume atheism to be true. However for someone who is reflective and thinks deeply about things, I think the simplest and the best explanation – with the greatest explanatory power – is that there is a supernatural designer. The next point will address why God makes sense of the design in the universe.

OK, I am all for the position that Science tells us “how, what, when, where,” but not “why”. The “why” is the job of religion, for better or worse. My beef with this statement is that assigning a supernatural explanation for the design of the universe doesn’t add to our understanding of it all that much. Steven Pinker gives a good parallel analogy. Humans are still trying to understand what consciousness is through a vast array of techniques and methods. Some just want to slap the word “soul” to this phenomenon, pat themselves on the back for a job well done, and tell everyone they have solved the riddle.  But does this really give us any extra understanding of consciousness at all? Such an explanation may help us organize it in our mental map but it adds nothing more to better describing it. Similarly, a designer of the universe is nice simple answer that passes Occam’s razor but I am left with no new understanding of the universe at all.  Should I really need any other understanding other than God created it? I guess you could argue no and that would work on a rhetorical level. Do supernatural explanations give meaning of life for some people? Heck yah! But so did explaining lighting and thunder via human-like God’s in the sky throwing the stuff down. How come lots of people aren’t supporting that supernatural explanation? Have better explanations come along? What criteria have we used to dismiss human like Gods are creating the natural phenomenon we see?  Seems to me there maybe a gulf between the “best” and the “truest” explanation.

I’ll take a look at the other arguments in bits and pieces.  If you check out the article, there is plenty of fodder.

I’ve been to school at two other institutions but neither felt as different as GMU does. Even if they have increased on campus residents, which I commend them immensely for, GMU still feels like a commuter school. This is not necessarily a bad thing. If you are student living on campus, then yes, it must be frustrating when many of the students you have class with go home at the end of the day. It must be more difficult to build friendships and a sense of community. If you are an older student or working professional, then the school is perfect for the no nonsense, here to study types. I am definitely in the latter group so it works for me because I just want to focus on doing my school work without the other distractions that come with living on campus.

Teachers at Mason are much more interested in their students than other schools I’ve been to. They seem on average to be younger and thus have yet to develop a quiet distaste for students like their older curmudgeon colleagues. Many are more helpful and like you showing up to their offices to talk.

I don’t know where to find the data but Mason seems to have a noticeably higher population of women that other schools. Maybe because I’m used to engineering where few women venture, but it just seems like there are a lot of women going to GMU.

I have never seen such diversity at one campus. Then again UVA and JMU aren’t known for their diversity so I may be biased, but still. In fact, I think white people are the minority here, seriously. It also seems like this majority of minorities have quite a bit of influence on campus. Food at the Johnson Center is Halal and the bathrooms even have places for Muslim folk to wash their feet without having to stretch up into the sink. That’s clout.

While Mason is growing both in size and academic notoriety, the sense of competition isn’t the same here as it was at UVA. Here it’s still competitive but not at the cost of being a decent human being. People work together here and help each other out more than I saw at other schools.

Man this school has come a long way. Growing up next to it I’ve seen the changes over the years. And if this school can keep it up, it’s definitely going to be a force in Virginia and nationally. Research buildings are going up all over the place and many cool projects are ahead. The thing I notice is that GMU may have difficultly growing its endowment because loyalty isn’t as sticky at a commuter school. I hope that doesn’t hinder them too much because they seem to be very efficient with the money they are bringing in (using it on research and bringing in good professors).

So far I’m pretty impressed with the school. They are quietly working becoming a traditional university but without abandoning the niche they have created and flourish in. Hopefully they continue to find a way to balance becoming a school like UVA while continuing to serve the Northern Virginia area as they have been so well in the past.