User:Hamza Alaoui/sandbox

The theory of evolution
As Nasr recalls in an interview with Islam & Science, the scientific study of the origins of existence includes on the one hand the origin of life as such and, on the other hand, the origin of human being. As for Judy D. Saltzman, she recalls in an article dedicated to Nasr, that the vast majority of post-Darwinian scientists claim that life appeared after matter, while for Nasr no inert matter can transform into living matter in the absence of a pre-existing life energy, just as it is impossible, according to mathematical theory of information, to extract more information from a system than it contains. For Nasr:

"Metaphysically, life comes before matter, the subtle world before life, the Spirit before the subtle world, and the Ultimate Reality before everything else [...]. Intellectual intuition which enables man to know scientia sacra provides this absolute certitude of the primacy of consciousness over both life and matter."

The opinion which has prevailed in the West for two centuries with regard to the origin of species, maintains that the first signs of life appeared in simple cells which, from evolution to evolution, became more and more complex through random processes in which only the fittest forms survived, until the advent of today's human being. Trained at Harvard in history of science, physics, geophysics and geology, Nasr rejects this theory for the following reasons:

•	the sudden appearance, noted by scientists, of new species in various geological periods and over very extended areas, such as some unrelated vertebrate groups, which contradicts an evolution in the direction of progressive complexity;

•	the almost total absence, in the stratigraphic records, of fossils that should exist as intermediates between the major groups;

•	the lack of the trace of life in the Precambrian and its sudden appearance in the following geological periods;

•	the impossibility of the appearance of sight in a blind animal or a pair of wings in an insect or a fish which, moreover, would have to practice flying;

•	the impossibility, starting from an animal intelligence, of developing a capacity of reasoning as sophisticated as that which characterizes the human being, whose consciousness is able to reflect on itself, to be conscious of being conscious;

•	the variations which are presented by advocates of evolution as "buds" of a new species are only variants within the framework of a single species, each species possessing a potential for development which can only manifest itself within the species in question; this micro-evolution is the only possible evolution;

•	the testimony of biologists and paleontologists who, while accepting the theory of evolution in the absence of a plausible scientific alternative, remain "fully aware of the fantastic and even surrealistic character" of this theory;

•	finally, the impossibility, on a qualitative level, that the "less" can generate the "more".

As Marietta Stepaniants notes, for Nasr, "the absurdity of that theory" is revealed in its desire to appeal only to "horizontal and material causes in a unidimensional world, to explain effects whose causes belong to other levels of reality". Nasr maintains that biology has provided no scientific proof for this theory, but it has however provided numerous elements that contradict it and that can only be overcome by a "leap of faith". This theory, which emerges more from philosophy than from science and which is so fervently defended by its followers, is the only one, observes Nasr, which can be accepted by the materialist and reductionist vision currently dominant in the West.

For Nasr, the modern scientific world is incapable of conceiving that each species emanates from the "immutable world of archetypes", – a subtle world beyond the material world –, by "crystallizing" on earth at "a particular moment in the history of the material cosmos", in accordance to the divine will. Thus, the human being, for example, appeared on earth as a human being, as sacred scriptures indicate.

Along with revelation, intellectual intuition "provides a knowledge of that hierarchy which issues from the Source in which all things are eternally present and to which all things return. It sees the existents in gradation and their appearance on the temporal plane as elaborations of possibilities belonging to that vertical dimension or gradation". Intellection, which opens up to the "metaphysical vision" of "the immutable form or essence of things", also leads to "the absolute certainty of the primacy of consciousness over both life and matter".

For Nasr, "few issues today are as important for discussion and as insidious in its implications as this theory of evolution" and its intrusion into various philosophies and even into theology, as shown by the example of a Teilhard de Chardin within Catholicism and, elsewhere, that of Sri Aurobindo and the various New Age currents. This theory was "brought into being in the atmosphere of nineteenth-century secularism in order to compensate for the loss of the vision of God and the intuition of the everabiding presence of the archetypal realities in the physical world".

"It has therefore survived to this day not as a theory but as a dogma among many scientists as well as nonscientists whose worldview would crumble if they were but to take evolution for what it is, namely a convenient philosophical and rationalistic scheme to enable man to create the illusion of a purely closed universe around himself. That is also why logical and scientific arguments against it have been often treated by its defenders not at all rationally and scientifically but with a violence and passion that reveals the pseudo-religious role played by the theory of evolution among its exponents."

Be that as it may, for Nasr, science is just as incapable of proving the existence of an evolution of species as of proving the non-existence of a "vertical causation" at the appearance of species.