Criticising ID without denying design

In some Muslim discussions, criticising the modern Intelligent Design (ID) movement is treated as if it were the same as denying that God created the world, or that creation is full of signs. This paper argues that this does not follow. ID is one specific modern argument; the Qur'an's teaching about purposeful creation is a much broader claim.

ID, associated with Michael Behe's idea of “irreducible complexity”, reasons from selected biological structures that seem hard to explain by gradual evolution to an intelligent cause. The paper points out two limits. Even if that inference were granted, it would not show that the designer is God: one, eternal, all-powerful and the creator of everything. And because it depends on what science cannot yet explain, it runs into the “God of the gaps” problem: when a natural explanation is found, the argument loses its force.

The Qur'an's approach is different. It presents the heavens and the earth, the alternation of night and day, rain, lightning and mountains as signs to reflect on (3:190–191, 30:24, 31:10, 88:17–20), and they remain signs even when science explains how they work. Drawing on kalam, the classical Islamic tradition of rational theology, and on Ibn Sina's distinction between what is necessary and what is contingent, the paper argues that everything that exists contingently depends on God: simple things and complex ones, natural laws and miracles alike. A cell is not more created because it is complicated, and a law of physics is not less created because it is regular. Science asks how things happen within nature; metaphysics asks why a dependent natural order exists at all. Accepting evolution as a scientific account of biological change, the authors note, does not by itself prove that nature is all there is.

The authors conclude that ID can be judged on its merits, and well-supported science accepted, without weakening the Qur'anic view of purposeful creation. They are careful about the limits of their claim: questions about Adam, human uniqueness and particular verses need separate study.