Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

Islam and Modern Science: Contemporary Issues • 211dawn, their noon, their late afternoon, and their twilight. If theevolutionist outlook were genuinely ‘scientist’, in the modernsense, it would be assumed that the evolution of the human racewas a phase of waxing that would necessarily be followed by thecomplementary waning phase of devolution; and the questionof whether or not man was already on the downward phasewould be a major feature of all evolutionist literature. The factthat the question is never put, and that if evolutionists could bemade to face up to it most of them would drop their theory asone drops a hot coal, does not say much for their objectivity.(Lings 1988, 24)Whitall N. Perry, another traditionalist, wrote a book on evolution,The Widening Breach: Evolutionism in the Mirror of Cosmology, andchallenges it from a cosmological standpoint. This refutation statesthat evolutionism suffers from a missing link and that there exists“no prerogative, cosmic principle or law by which this inanimate andsubjectless—hence limited—pristine stuff could from its inceptionmaintain over measureless time a perfect self-containment.” Theauthor asks:The point of all this is to ask simply, why should the pairsubject-object alone, on the plane of manifested existence notbe a ‘pair’, but be free from the ‘tyranny’ of interdependence orlinkage to which all the other listed and unlisted terms withoutexception are subjected? (Perry 1995, 3)Using a wide range of traditional sources, Perry attempts toplace the subject/object polarity in its proper frame of reference.He affirms the primordial truth that the Being of all beings is butone Being and that polarities appear only at the manifest plane ofreality. This subject/object relationship is essentially the linchpin forthe whole argument against evolutionism, for there can be no objectwithout a subject. Evolutionists may claim that one pole of a dualitycan exist in the total and unqualified nonexistence of its corollary orcounterpart, but such claims cannot be valid for the simple reasonthat in the whole of the manifest universe not a single example can befound to support this claim. On the other hand, the manifest universeis full of subject/object relationships that are expressed in numerousphenomena—the regularity with which the heavenly objects move,