Between Progress & Stability, Awakening & slumber By Hossam Badrawi

“Dare to Think” series

Between
Progress & Stability,
Awakening & slumber.

By
Hossam Badrawi

I attended a discussion
about the theory of evolution vs the constant religious concept throughout history, and the confusion between the interpretations of the holy books in the past, and , the rational interpretation of their sentences and words after the enlightenment of our minds with knowledge and the dares to think.

The point of this discussion is to draw attention to the importance of understanding that the interpretation of what God has revealed changes over time with the development of the collective maturity of the human mind. Otherwise, the Quran would not be suitable for every era as it says. What the human mind could comprehend more than a thousand years ago is not what we comprehend now, and even what the human mind could understand just a hundred years ago does not compare to what it can today.

The cycle of civilization, which spanned millions of years, has become thousands of years after the discovery of agriculture, and hundreds of years after the industrial revolution. It evolved into decades after the advent of technology and has now become two to three years with the entry into the age of artificial intelligence and the advancement of digital knowledge.

Our ancestors were born and died in a single human life cycle, while we have lived four life cycles in the past seventy years. Our children and grandchildren, with an average lifespan of eighty years, will live through more than forty life cycles, during which living conditions will change and science will develop in an unprecedented manner, possibly beyond imagination.

I imagine that self-awareness with the mind is the capability that distinguishes humans the most from the rest of creation; the mind and thinking are the miracle of creation in us.

I believe that religion, especially Islam, (in contrast of what Islamic predigests r saying )encourages us to use the mind, to think, to research, and to pursue knowledge.

When “Darwin” proposed his hypothesis of the evolution of creatures over billions of years, the scientific theory clashed with the beliefs of Christian and Jewish religious men and their interpretations of the content of their religious books at that time, as did Muslims who followed the same approach. The same wall of denial that the Earth is not the center of the universe, or that we are a planet orbiting the sun, and other scientific proofs…
Interpretations are human and not sacred, and humanity must mature and regard the accumulation of knowledge in its understanding and not stop at the stage of the collective mind’s infancy of our great ancestors’ interpretation of the content of the divine books.

The scientific, philosophical, and religious question is whether the beginning of creation, symbolized by religions with the name “Adam,” was created as we see now, complete. It implies whether the Creator took a lump of clay, molded it in His hand, and breathed into it, and there was Adam! This is what the conservatives, who adhere to the ancient interpretations, claim, “that Adam was created in His image,” and they assert that the theory of evolution contradicts the heavenly books outright, leaving no room for discussion, nor can it be believed that humans are the result of evolution from a lower-ranked animal…
, I understand science and am convinced by its methodology, but with help from others, I tried to find where this certainty among religious scholars comes from. Upon returning to reason, I found that their argument contradicts even what is stated in the Quran, which affirms that humans were not created without evolution, and I marvel at the clarity that the interpreters throughout history have avoided.

The Quran narrates a completely different story about the creation of humans, a story in which creation happens in stages and phases over a lengthy divine time. The Quran says that humans did not emerge directly from clay but came from a lineage that came from clay:
“Indeed, We created man from a lineage of clay.”
And that, in the beginning, humans were not something significant:
“Has there not come upon man a period of time when he was not a thing even mentioned?”
And that their creation came in phases:
“What is [the matter] with you that you do not attribute to Allah [due] grandeur while He has created you in stages?”

This means that there are stages that began with creation, then fashioning… then proportioning, then breathing the soul… and “then” in divine time means millions of years:
“And indeed, a day with your Lord is like a thousand years of what you count.”
So, Adam is then the end of a series of phases and not an absolute beginning in the manner of direct creation as if, in the simple belief, God made a statue from clay and then breathed into it, and it became the human as he is now.

I said to myself: Why then is this outright rejection from the interpreters of religions, and does that differ from what modern science says in theories of evolution…?
In truth, no.

In Adam’s story itself, we must also think and reformulate our understanding. According to religious belief, when God created Adam to inhabit the Earth as His vicegerent, and told the angels to prostrate before His creation, they wondered why create one who would spread corruption and shed blood as if they had seen the scene before. (Could there be other worlds and universes as science now says, or could the cycle of creation be renewed? Hence, the angels described the matter because they had witnessed it before) However, God taught him the names and endowed him with the intellect and the ability to distinguish and choose, to make him different from His other creations. This means that humanity’s distinction in this time and universe is its capacity to think and choose right and wrong.

When God admitted him and Eve into paradise and forbade them from eating from the forbidden tree, He placed before them temptation and choice in contrast to obedience.

The essence is when Adam and Eve decided to use their right to choose and ate from the forbidden tree, their creation was completed, and God sent them down to Earth as originally intended.

The value of a person lies in their ability to choose, even if it is wrong. If they had not made this choice, they would not have descended, and human creation would not have been completed, nor would they have been able to reproduce and populate the Earth.

Therefore, the descent of Adam and Eve to Earth was a completion of their creation that sets them apart from other creatures whose decisions are determined by genetic directions set in their being, and they have no choice like the angels, and it wasn’t a punishment for them as many interpretations suggest.

The truth is that many people today see the Genesis narrative of Adam and Eve as nothing more than a symbolic story, and even some Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim scholars agree with this view. Although most explanations by interpreters according to their times for the religions clash with history and science, creating a conflict between philosophy, science, and religion throughout the ages, increasing knowledge could explain much with science and proof.
These studies demonstrate that the genetic diversity present in modern humans could be greater than what could be provided by just two individuals. The energy source of billions of human body cells, essential for life’s existence, originates from mitochondria (a very tiny particle next to the nucleus of every living cell), which serves as the energy factory for humans and is only inherited from the mother. This means that women are not only the origin of life but also the reason for its continuation.

Adding to your knowledge and sharing my astonishment, if we were to condense the known history of the universe, approximately fourteen billion years, into a “cosmic year,” the Big Bang would have occurred in the very first second of this cosmic year, the formation of the solar system and Earth would have happened in September, the emergence of single-celled life in October, and the appearance of humans in the last minute of December 31st. We are now in the last second of this hour. If we were to reduce the universe and compress it into a single painting measuring one square kilometer, Earth would be a point invisible to the naked eye except under a microscope, and yet we humans on it claim that the universe was created for us and is our own. So let’s close our eyes, imagine time and distances, and understand the greatness of the Creator.

If we leave the universe in its vastness and delve into the composition of the human body, its cells, genes, and quarks (a quark is an elementary particle and one of the two basic constituents of matter, the other being leptons), which have mass but infinitesimally small zero dimensions, observed during extreme collisions between a proton and an electron, and are the seed of matter’s construction, billions of times smaller than any imagination.

We must therefore believe that our human disputes are trivial despite the evils they cause, stemming from an arrogance that does not align with our cosmic value.

And the arrogance of humanity, which has existed for less than a second in Earth’s lifespan and occupies nothing of the universe’s volume, requires that if humans dare to think, they must be humbled