Hello Sharvy
This is a shallow mischaracterization of what I’ve told you.
Not really. True, you have named two ijaazahs and two scholars, but saying something like "I have an ijaazah in usool al-fiqh" is like saying "I've studied biology" - it doesn't help very much since I've pointed out that they are not all the same.
As for his reasons you just denied them being sociopolitical you didn't really give me any details. And saying they were intellectual doesn't help because Salim had the same intellect before and after he moved to America. What in his education of science would cause someone with 100% certainty to toss it all in the trash? And look at what you just wrote in your most recent post:
His own reasons for leaving Islam were personal, complex, and unique.
That's essentially the same as the meaning of the statement I attributed to you. You're raising a null case - since you don't know his personal and complex reasons why are you using them as evidence? And you write:
Salim's case ultimately proves nothing which is one of the principal points I was trying to get across to Ansar.
I beg your pardon? Are you not the one who raised Salim's case as an example
to challenge my claim, or am I speaking to a different Sharvy? Haven't I been the one all along saying that the argument over Salim was pointless and null and didn't prove anything?
he gave up the Islamic conception of science
No such thing. Islam is not interested in defining or analyzing science.
Contemporary evolutionary science is claiming that all humans alive today shared a common ancestor with chimps.
Again, you need to distinguish between what scientific evidence states and how we interpret the evidence. We need to examine the interpretations themselves to see which is stronger. I gave you the example of the arab practices and how non-muslims look at them as having been adopted by Muslims and Muslims look at them as having some remnants of the practices of prophet abraham and consequently confirmed by the Prophet pbuh.
Salim and I are both convinced that the evidence for human speciation is just as strong as the evidence for chimp speciation – which is considerable indeed.
When I mentioned speciation I was speaking about observed speciation.
There is another issue that I am interested in: if Salim comes forth and identifies himself publicly or privately to you Ansar, would you then have a religious obligation to notify his family in Egypt of his apostasy, if you are so able?
First of all, how could I notify his family? Why would he give me their contact information? Secondly, I probably would not since I can't see any benefit in it.
Who is the "we" here: some scientists, most scientists, a consensus?
The entire scientific community. Everyone is looking for an answer.
Isn't it a fact that scientists do reach consensus on some issues (though there may be still be stray defectors), thereby justifying a general claim to "know" something to be true?
There was a general consensus on the corpuscular theory. There was a general consensus on homosexuality being a psychological disorder. And there have been hundreds of other examples like these as well.
Also, if the scientific "we" can conclude that Newton was wrong, that same "we" has concluded that Aristotle and Ptolemy were wrong, but has also concluded that Galileo was right about the motion of the earth. We are not still searching "for a better answer" than this.
Because this is now observable. If we had a time machine then the existence of Adam and Eve would be observable too. We don't.
So if 100 years ago, I asked an educated person why they are sure the earth spins, on your view what should their answer have been?
His answer should have been to cithe scientific theories and describe what the scientific community believed at that point. It seems you are still under the false impression that I reject science or belittle the views of the scientific community, and that's not true at all. I am all for productivity and research in science, but I also emphasize that laymen should understand scientific methodology.
There is much confusion over the word "theory" which is used different ways by different people.
Yes there is, but I have never made such mistakes so this is a strawman.
Theories are systems of explanations which are strongly supported by factual observations and which explain whole sets of facts and experimental results.
Yes; they are the most parsimonious explanation in accordance with experimental evidence.
While many working scientists do in fact use the word "prove" and "proof", most contemporary philosophers of science avoid this language.
Not my argument again.
So while you or science cannot "prove" you had a headache last week. You and other sources (e.g. a hidden video camera) can certainly provide people with evidence that would make it, all things considered, reasonable to believe that you in fact really did have a headache last week.
Exactly! Yet we do not have a hidden video camera to provide evidence that I had a headache last week, nor do we have a hidden video camera to provide evidence that Adam and Eve existed millions of years ago. This is precisely the point. If one makes an assertion about such a period of time, that assertion can neither be verified nor falsified by scientific evidence, since we have none from that time.
That issue aside, evolutionary science can bring plenty of evidence to bear that that doctrine is probably mistaken.
This is the fallacy I have been mentioning. What evidence makes it less likely that Adam and Eve existed?
Nothing of this nature exists. You're speaking about probability here but the truth of the matter is that we have no way of assesing on the basis of scientific evidence the probability of such an assertion.
No I mean much more than "so far there is no scientific evidence that contradicts" the evolution of humans. Your Fibonacci analogy is flawed. Suppose I have a barrel that I know contains a million marbles that are either red or black – but cannot know the color before I choose a marble. Suppose I turn the barrel multiple times before and after each pick completely randomizing the pick of each marble. Mathematically if the first 100 marbles I pick are black, the odds go up the next marble I pick will be black. If I pick 1000 straight black marbles, the odds are much stronger that the next marble I pick will be black – and it becomes more probable (not certain) that all the marbles in the barrel are black. And supposed I picked 990,000 straight black marbles.
The flaws in such an example should be obvious:
1. The reason why it is foolish to suggest that the next marble would be red is because it is massively improbable for a red marble not to show up in the first 990 000 outcomes if there are any red marbles in the barrel. but what does that correspond to when we come back to the case of Adam and Eve?? That if they existed there is almost 100% probability that we should have discovered their bones or something by now? That's just nonsense. People who claim that Adam and Eve existed are not clinging to a remote probability that out of a 'barrel' of scientific evidence we have nearly exhausted there must be a single piece establishing the existed of Adam and Eve - on the contrary we're making an assertion about a time period for which we have no scientific evidence.
2. The other problem with your analogy is that, as I alluded to in the first point, you are hinting that there is a finite quantity of ALL scientific evidence which we have almost exhausted. If there are a billion marble in the barrel then we haven't even scratched the surface of a single one. It's like if someone asserts that there was a unique golden fish somewhere in the world a million years ago, and a fisherman says, "I go fishing everyday and I haven't come across anything like that".
3. There is also the implict notion in your analogy that scientists never cling to remote probabilities. That's also incorrect. Just consider the project of the University of California, called Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI); they attempt to analyze the radio telescope data coming in from space to detect signals from extraterrestrial life forms. The probability of detecting such signals out of the massive, vast universe of signals is next to nothing, and yet they engage in this project. How about a more familiar example? Evolutionists agree that the mathematical probabilities involved in abiogenesis are also next to nothing, yet most assert that it happened.
4. Lastly, you've provided me with an example of probability whereas it doesn't apply at all to the case of belief in Adam and Eve. Is there any conceivable way for us to assess the probability of their existence? No, there is not. There are an infinite number of possibilities, we have no way of knowing what is the reality solely on the basis of scientific evidence. In this regard especially, my example was a dozen times more accurate as there is no way for us to asses the probability of whether the sequence we have been presented with is the fibonacci sequence or an arithmetic sequence or perhaps any of a number of more complex sequences or series. Here's another: {1, 2, 3, 3.75, 4.21875, 4.482421875...}. This is a much better analogy because for each piece of evidence (numerical term) there are an infinite number of possibilties as opposed to two (red and black) and there are a number of possible patterns, in science we would incline towards the most parsimonious of them.
The slim extract of the Fibonacci sequence you gave me was an extremely weak inductive sample and any extrapolation of the sequence would be highly risky.
Would it make a difference if you knew 1000 terms of a sequence and yet there were still dozens of possibilties? Consider this example:
If I say that the expression n^2 +n + 41 generates a prime number when n is the set of positive integers, you could start testing the formula out and you woud find out that it works flawlessly.. until you get to 41, at which point it fails. One might be inclined to think that if an expression works for forty terms it is most probable that it will continue to work, but that's not applicable here since this isn't an issue of probability.
And that is why the example I gave with the fibonacci sequence was a suitable example. And consider that compared to the ocean of scientific evidence awaiting us, we have barely scratched the surface - comparable to knowing three terms out of a sequence.
In the case of evolution, the evidence goes well beyond merely claiming, "there is no evidence to contradict" human evolution. If one compares the genetic profile of humans and other primates – especially the random genetic flaws passed down from the ancestors of our respective species - one develops a very clear picture of human evolution that INDEPENDENTLY corroborates the rather considerable fossil data. The evidence renders the case for human evolution highly probable.
Do genetic simmilarities mean that it is any more probable that creation is false? No they do not. What then is the position on the theory of evolution? Consider another example; Suppose we know that the following ordered pairs are generated by a function: (1,1), (9,1), (13,1), (17,1), (29,1), (41,1), (101,1). One may make a fair conclusion that the function in question is simply f(x)=1. We would find numerous more points to support this and it would seem to work very well, but the reality of the matter might be that the function is f(x)=sin(90x) [degrees]. Just like the first function, the theory of evolution can be very helpful to explain many aspects of biology and allow us to analyse others with greater precision. It should be taken for what it is - a scientific tool, not a statement in the interest of truth. Scientists know now that classical physics is flawed and contradicts experimental evidence - but it is still used everywhere and still taught in the education system. We trust it enough for the construction of all modern architecture, the design of all new innovative technologies, the latest plans for space exploration, and so on. Why? because on the macroscopic level
it works. It is a scientific tool. Currently scientists are racing to discover a 'grand unifying theory' which will put all these tools together in a coherent fashion.
Of course there is good and bad science. The flat-earthers and psychics practice bad science all the time, making fundamental errors in experimental design and statistical inference.
I would refer to that as misapplication and misunderstanding of science, but if that is what you meant, then we agree.
I sincerely believe you are mistaken, and I think the discussion above shows that unfortunately you have flawed understanding of science and scientific evidence.
Ditto.
In your subsequent posts you've repeated things that I feel I have answered before and in this post.
Peace
