Rebuttal to Zakir Naik – I

by Awais Masood

I always believed that there are limits to credulity and ignorance but I was proven wrong when I watched Zakir Naik presenting ‘arguments’ against evolution. [1]

It was difficult for me to digest that a large number of people present in the live audience and watching on screens could buy into such third grade arguments. Moreover one can raise strong questions regarding the credibility of such a (pseudo) scholar. It is understandable – in the context of low literacy rates, much lower rates of scientific education and suppression of rational inquiry in our region – that general public could misunderstand science and take things for granted but it is criminally ignorant to let people like Zakir Naik churn out rubbish in the name of science.

In this series of rebuttals, I intend to take on Naik’s arguments, statement by statement and debunk those claims and expose what I perceive as either abject ignorance or criminal trickery.

Argument : Zakir Naik claims that evolution is a theory and not a fact [1]

It is perhaps the most popular and actually the most ridiculous argument presented by creationists. It actually exhibits a complete ignorance of science and scientific method and raises serious questions regarding the academic credentials of Naik who claims to be a doctor of medicine.

Anybody who has gone through elementary courses in science knows that there are other ‘theories’ of science such as ‘Theory of Gravitation’ and ‘Electromagnetic Theory’ but nobody declares gravity to be theory and jumps of a thirty storey building in a hope that he/she will start floating in mid-air rather than falling downwards.

The reality is that in scientific jargon, the terms ‘theory’ and ‘fact’ carry very different meanings. The colloquial usage of term ‘theory’ which stands for unsubstantiated claims is not valid for the scientific theories of Evolution, Electromagnetism and Gravity.

What is then a scientific theory? Biochemist, Science Fiction writer and popularizer of science, Isaac Asimov explains:

Creationists frequently stress the fact that evolution is “only a theory,” giving the impression that a theory is an idle guess. A scientist, one gathers, arising one morning with nothing particular to do, decided that perhaps the moon is made of Roquefort cheese and instantly advances the Roquefort-cheese theory.

A theory (as the word is used by scientists) is a detailed description of some facet of the universe’s workings that is based on long observation and, where possible, experiment. It is the result of careful reasoning from these observations and experiments that has survived the critical study of scientists generally.

For example, we have the description of the cellular nature of living organisms (the “cell theory”); of objects attracting each other according to fixed rule (the “theory of gravitation”); of energy behaving in discrete bits (the “quantum theory”); of light traveling through a vacuum at a fixed measurable velocity (the “theory of relativity”), and so on.
All are theories; all are firmly founded; all are accepted as valid descriptions of this or that aspect of the universe. They are neither guesses nor speculations. And no theory is better founded, more closely examined, more critically argued and more thoroughly accepted, than the theory of evolution. If it is “only” a theory, that is all it has to be. [2]

Similarly, Paleontologist Stephen J. Gould states:

If the vernacular word FACT has any currency in science, it can only be defined as “confirmed to so high a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.”   By this definition, evolution – the observation that all organisms are connected by unbroken ties of genealogy – is as much a fact as anything discovered by science – as well confirmed as Copernicus’s claim that the Earth moves around the sun.[3]

Gould states at another place:

Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world’s data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein’s theory of gravitation replaced Newton’s, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin’s proposed mechanism or by some other, yet to be discovered.

Moreover, “fact” does not mean “absolute certainty.” The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science, “fact” can only mean “confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.” I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms. [4]

Skeptic, Psychologist and historian of science Michael Shermer comment on scientific thinking:

Scientists agree that the following elements are involved in thinking scientifically:

Induction: Forming a hypothesis by drawing general conclusions from existing data.

Deduction: Making specific predictions based on the hypotheses.

Observation: Gathering data, driven by hypotheses that tell us what to
look for in nature.

Verification: Testing the predictions against further observations to confirm or falsify the initial hypotheses.

Science, of course, is not this rigid; and no scientist consciously goes through “steps.” The process is a constant interaction of making observations, drawing conclusions, making predictions, and checking them against evidence. [5]

Shermer further explains:

Through the scientific method, we may form the following generalizations:

Hypothesis: A testable statement accounting for a set of observations.

Theory: A well-supported and well-tested hypothesis or set of
hypotheses.

Fact: A conclusion confirmed to such an extent that it would be
reasonable to offer provisional agreement.

A theory may be contrasted with a construct: a nontestable statement to
account for a set of observations.The living organisms on Earth may be
accounted for by the statement “God made them” or the statement “They evolved.” The first statement is a construct, the second a theory. Most biologists would even call evolution a fact.

Through the scientific method, we aim for objectivity: basing conclusions on external validation. And we avoid mysticism: basing conclusions on personal insights that elude external validation.[5]

Conclusion

I consider the above arguments enough to explain why Naik’s statement holds no ground. It may seem wasteful to spend so much time refuting a single statement (rest of them will be refuted too in future) but I find it important as it leads us to another important question. Is he totally ignorant of the scientific method or he deliberately uses false statements  in front of his audience. In first scenario he comes out to be a totally ignorant speaker who holds no credibility to take part in debates regarding science. His shameless arrogance is appalling in this regard. How could he stand in front of millions of people in audience and argue regarding things, he is totally ignorant of? Is such a man worth listening to? If he is deliberately lying, the case becomes more severe. He is charlatan who cheats and deceives his audience with verbal trickery and false arguments and all that in the name of religion!

References

1. Zakir Naik on Evolution, Video

2. Asimov, Isaac, The “Threat of Creationism”, New York Times Magazine, 14 June 1981

3. Gould, Stephen J,  ‘Creation Science ‘ is an Oxymoron, Skeptical Inquirer Vol. XI, no. 2 / Winter 1986-87

4. Gould, Stephen J, Evolution as Fact and Theory, Discover 2 (May 1981): 34-37

5. Shermer, Michael, Why people believe weird things: pseudoscience, superstition, and other confusions of our time, 2002

Creationism and Science

Editor’s Note:

Zakir Naik aka The Ignorant

As the world moves forward, our society still faces the twin curses of ignorance and superstition. Science serves as a tool for expanding our knowledge of the natural world and it is the best tool we have. Only a scientific outlook based upon the the urge to learn and reason can take us out of the misery we find ourselves in. It is a tragedy that education of masses has been deliberately neglected by our ruling elite. Science is a special target of the oppressors as it can free minds from obscurantism, superstition and ignorance which in itself can endanger the very rule of these oppressors.

We suffer from a double tragedy when our educated youth falls victim to ignorant idiots such as Zakir Naik who do not know anything about science and scientific method but are readily available to malign, distort and destroy science. The basic underlying values of science such as Empiricism, Skepticism and Rational Inquiry are absent from the skewed worldview of Zakir Naik and his blind followers who shamelessly indulge in ridiculous retrospective evidentialism.

I present here a brief by renowned paleontologist late Stephen Jay Gould that puts light on scientific methodology and explains why Creation Science (a pseudo-science invented by fundamentalist Christians in USA) is a threat to science. The arguments, though mainly deal with US education system, are quite valid in Pakistan where creationism is still a holy truth for the majority.

Stephen J. Gould

‘Creation Science’ is an Oxymoron

By Stephen Jay Gould

Skeptical Inquirer
Vol. XI, no. 2 / Winter 1986-87
p 152-153

Science, above all, is a methodology for acquiring testable knowledge about the natural world – “the art of the soluble,” in Sir Peter Medawar’s apt phrase.  It is not, and cannot be, a compendium of certain knowledge. If the vernacular word FACT has any currency in science, it can only be defined as “confirmed to so high a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.”   By this definition, evolution – the observation that all organisms are connected by unbroken ties of genealogy – is as much a fact as anything discovered by science – as well confirmed as Copernicus’s claim that the Earth moves around the sun. Evolutionary biologists argue intensely about mechanisms of evolutionary change – and such meaty debates are the soul of exciting science, the chief sign of its good health – but we all accept the fundamental fact of genealogical connection.

As a methodology of research, science adopts as its cardinal postulate – proved fruitful by its enormous success since the time of Galileo, Newton, and Descartes – the commitment to explain empirical phenomena by reference to invariant laws of nature and to avoid appeals to the miraculous, defined as suspension of those laws, for particular events. The notion of “abrupt appearance” – the origin of complex somethings from previous nothings – resides in this domain of miracle and is not part of science.  Punctuated equilibrium, catastrophic theories of mass extinction, hopeful monsters, and a variety of hypotheses about rapid rates of change in continuous sequences – not about unintelligible abrupt appearances – are part of scientific debate and bear no relationship to the nonscientific notion of abrupt appearance, despite pernicious and wishful attempts by many creationists to distort such claims and misquote and half-quote to their alien purposes.  Punctuated equilibrium, in particular, is a claim that evolutionary trends have a geometry that resembles a climb up a staircase, rather than a slide up an inclined plane.  It is, in other words, an alternative theory about the nature of intermediate stages in evolutionary trends, not, as creationists have claimed, a denial of those stages.

As a term, CREATION SCIENCE is an oxymoron – a self-contradictory and meaningless phrase – a whitewash for a specific, particular, and minority religious view in America, biblical literalism. As a religious idea, it differs sharply from the tenets of most other faiths – from the enormously lengthy cycles of repetition in Hindu thought, from the usual interpretation of origins in my own Jewish faith, and the allegorical readings of the Bible accepted by Catholics since the time of St. Augustine.  Biblical literalism, like all notions in the diverse array of faiths professed by Americans, belongs in the homes and churches – not in legislatively mandated curricula of science courses in public schools.

It is particularly tragic that public understanding of science should be so threatened just when science has become so central and crucial in all our lives.  This battle is for science itself, not only for the right of teachers to teach a fact of nature unimpeded by state commands. How can Americans hope to understand the nature of science if a partisan and minority religious doctrine, completely outside the norms and procedures of science, be taught as science, against the conscience and convictions of trained teachers, in the nation’s schools.

Great Design?

Excerpted from Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion by David Hume (1711-1776 AD)

David Hume

Look round this universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organised, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these living existences, the only beings worth regarding. How hostile and destructive to each other! How insufficient all of them for their own happiness! How contemptible or odious to the spectator! The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind Nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children!

It must be acknowledged, that there are few parts of the universe, which seem not to serve some purpose, and whose removal would not produce a visible defect and disorder in the whole. The parts hang all together; nor can one be touched without affecting the rest, in a greater or less degree. But at the same time, it must be observed, that none of these parts or principles, however useful, are so accurately adjusted, as to keep precisely within those bounds in which their utility consists; but they are, all of them, apt, on every occasion, to run into the one extreme or the other. One would imagine, that this grand production had not received the last hand of the maker; so little finished is ev

ery part, and so coarse are the strokes with which it is executed. Thus, the winds are requisite to convey the vapours along the surface of the globe, and to assist men in navigation: but how oft, rising up to tempests and hurricanes, do they become pernicious? Rains are necessary to nourish all the plants and animals of the earth: but how often are they defective? how often excessive? Heat is requisite to all life and vegetation; but is not always found in the due proportion. On the mixture and secretion of the humours and juices of the body depend the health and prosperity of the animal: but the parts perform not regularly their proper function. What more useful than all the passions of the mind, ambition, vanity, love, anger? But how oft do they break their bounds, and cause the greatest convulsions in society? There is nothing so advantageous in the universe, but what frequently becomes pernicious, by its excess or defect; nor has Nature guarded, with the requisite accuracy, against all disorder or confusion. The irregularity is never perhaps so great as to destroy any species; but is often sufficient to involve the individuals in ruin and misery.

Roots of Fundamentalism

by Karen Armstrong

Excerpt from The Battle for God (published 2000) by Karen Armstrong.

Evangelical Christianity, Zionism and Radical Islam

There have always been people, in every age and in each tradition, who have fought the modernity of their day. But the fundamentalism that we shall be considering is an essentially twentieth-century movement. It is a reaction against the scientific and secular culture that first appeared in the West, but which has since taken root in other parts of the world. The West has developed an entirely unprecedented and wholly different type of civilization, so the religious response to it has been unique. The fundamentalist movements that have evolved in our own day have a symbiotic relationship with modernity. They may reject the scientific rationalism of the West, but they cannot escape it. Western civilization has changed the world. Nothing — including religion — can ever be the same again. All over the globe, people have been struggling with these new conditions and have been forced to reassess their religious traditions, which were designed for an entirely different type of society.

There was a similar transitional period in the ancient world, lasting roughly from 700 to 200 BCE, which historians have called the Axial Age because it was pivotal to the spiritual development of humanity. This age was itself the product and fruition of thousands of years of economic, and therefore social and cultural, evolution, beginning in Sumer in what is now Iraq, and in ancient Egypt. People in the fourth and third millennia BCE, instead of simply growing enough crops to satisfy their immediate needs, became capable of producing an agricultural surplus with which they could trade and thereby acquire additional income. This enabled them to build the first civilizations, develop the arts, and create increasingly powerful polities: cities, city-states, and, eventually, empires. In agrarian society, power no longer lay exclusively with the local king or priest; its locus shifted at least partly to the marketplace, the source of each culture’s wealth. In these altered circumstances, people ultimately began to find that the old paganism, which had served their ancestors well, no longer spoke fully to their condition.

In the cities and empires of the Axial Age, citizens were acquiring a wider perspective and broader horizons, which made the old local cults seem limited and parochial. Instead of seeing the divine as embodied in a number of different deities, people increasingly began to worship a single, universal transcendence and source of sacredness. They had more leisure and were thus able to develop a richer interior life; accordingly, they came to desire a spirituality which did not depend entirely upon external forms. The most sensitive were troubled by the social injustice that seemed built into this agrarian society, depending as it did on the labor of peasants who never had the chance to benefit from the high culture. Consequently, prophets and reformers arose who insisted that the virtue of compassion was crucial to the spiritual life: an ability to see sacredness in every single human being, and a willingness to take practical care of the more vulnerable members of society, became the test of authentic piety. In this way, during the Axial Age, the great confessional faiths that have continued to guide human beings sprang up in the civilized world: Buddhism and Hinduism in India, Confucianism and Taoism in the Far East; monotheism in the Middle East; and rationalism in Europe. Despite their major differences, these Axial Age religions had much in common: they all built on the old traditions to evolve the idea of a single, universal transcendence; they cultivated an internalized spirituality, and stressed the importance of practical compassion.

Today, as noted, we are undergoing a similar period of transition.Its roots lie in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the modern era, when the people of Western Europe began to evolve a different type of society, one based not on an agricultural surplus but on a technology that enabled them to reproduce their resources indefinitely. The economic changes over the last four hundred years have been accompanied by immense social, political, and intellectual revolutions, with the development of an entirely different, scientific and rational, concept of the nature of truth; and, once again, a radical religious change has become necessary. All over the world, people are finding that in their dramatically transformed circumstances, the old forms of faith no longer work for them: they cannot provide the enlightenment and consolation that human beings seem to need. As a result, men and women are trying to find new ways of being religious; like the reformers and prophets of the Axial Age, they are attempting to build upon the insights of the past in a way that will take human beings forward into the new world they have created for themselves. One of these modern experiments — however paradoxical it may superficially seem to say so — is fundamentalism.

Members, One of Another: Gender Equality and Justice in Islam

By Riffat Hassan

Department of Religious Studies
University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky

[Dr. Riffat Hassan is a theologian and a leading Islamic feminist scholar of Quran. She has taught at Punjab University, Oklahoma State University and Harvard University. This article (source) is being presented for its feminist message.]

Introduction

What I will say may surprise both Muslims who “know” women’s place and non-Muslims who “know” what Islam means for women. It is this: I am a Muslim, a theologian, and a women’s rights activist, and while I am critical in a number of ways of the life that most Muslim societies offer to women, twenty years of theological study, as well as my own deepest faith, convince me that in real Islam, the Islam of the Qur’an, women and men are equals. Liberating ideas lie at the heart of most enduring faiths, and Islam shares in these. Two themes in particular strike me as being of the highest importance. The first is the fundamental equality of humans before God. The other is religion’s revolutionary aim of human liberation. From religion should come freedom to seek understanding of the will of God and life’s purpose, and freedom to honor God’s creation through self-development and striving toward God’s ends.

Unfortunately, most Muslim societies also mirror a fault that has been noted by feminist theologians in cultures shaped by other religions: the gap between rhetoric of equality and the reality of profound inequality between the lives of women and men. While Muslim women continuously hear the refrain that Islam has given women more rights than any other religious tradition, they continue to be subjected to grossly unequal treatment.

Most Muslims — women and men — consider it self-evident that men are superior to women. Going further, they justify many manifestations of inequality as inherent in Islam. In fact, women are regarded in a number of contemporary Muslim societies as less than fully human because it is widely believed that in some contexts (such as inheritance or witnessing to contracts), one man is equal to two women. Most Muslim females, learning their culture’s assumptions even before they learn language, and denied the opportunity to become educated, also internalize this belief.