This is a response by Ahmed Alhasan to some of the Shia scholars about evolution. This excerpt is taken from the book Atheism Delusion.
In his book Al-Manahij al-Tafsiriyya [Interpretive Methods], Sheikh Jafar Sobhani¹ says
Charles Darwin published his book The Transformation of Species in 1908. Based on his investigations, he proved that the human being is the last in the evolutionary chain of species, with his chain tracing back to an animal resembling an ape. He referenced his fathers and forefathers in a special tree, reciting a poem that says:
Those are my fathers, so show me their likes . . .
When this theory was published, it was poorly received within religious circles among the Christians, Muslims, and Jews. They had agreed that the human is a unique creature and that his chain traces back to Adam, the father of humankind, who was created in this form without any link to other animals.
Furthermore, some naive people use that same hypothesis as an argument for the contradiction between science and religion, and to separate them from one another. They claim that the path of religion is different than that of science, sometimes intersecting with it, and at other times diverging from it.
There were those who did not believe in separating science from religion, and they tried to subject the Holy Quran to that hypothesis. They started to interpret various Quranic verses that refer to the creation of the human being in a way that applied to it.
The debate was intense between those in favor of taking the religious scripture literally and those in favor of interpretation. With time, the above mentioned hypothesis—and that concerning the creation of the human being that followed it—were proven to be false (Sobhani 2005, 46. Arabic source, translated)
It seems that Sheikh Jafar, may God guide him to the truth, loves to jest. He wrote, “Those are my fathers, so show me their likes,” without recognizing that those “fathers”, as Sheikh Jafar called them, are physical ancestors that he undoubtedly shares with the biologist Charles Darwin. If they are proven to be Darwin’s ancestors, then they are Jafar Sobhani’s ancestors, as well as the ancestors of every other human being on Earth. On the other hand, if they are not proven to be Sheikh Jafar Sobhani’s ancestors, or “fathers”, then they are definitely not Darwin’s either. Proving or disproving this is a matter of science that I doubt Sheikh Jafar and his fellow Shia authorities (marja) capable of delving into and discussing scientifically. This is especially true considering that his statement about Darwin’s theory is riddled with errors. He said that Charles Darwin published his book The Transformation of Species in 1908, but Darwin actually died in 1882 and never wrote a book titled The Transformation of Species. He did, however, write The Origin of Species, which was published in 1859, but it didn’t deal with the origin of man. He addressed the origin of man and his relationship to the great apes in another book, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex.
I truly don’t know what to say. It’s better that I leave it to the reader to comment.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ja%27far_Sobhani
The excerpt is taken from Atheism Delusion by Ahmed Alhasan احمد الحسن
Click here to read similar glaring delusions of men of religion.
