[pvaldes]

> Islam accepts scientific discoveries but attributes them to God

So... Who invented computers? god. Who discovered radium? god... Who earned all nobel prices? god? :-) Exams must be really easy then.

This is politics or ideology, not science.

Ideology wearing a fur of dead science is more common that it seems nowadays (and is not exclusive from Islamic schools, it seems)

[throwaway123x2]

The discovery isn't attributed to God, but the existence of the phenomenon. So in your example, God made radium. God made the raw materials to make computers and gave man the intellect to make them.

[hnracer]

This sounds like the God Of The Gaps line of fallacious reasoning. Once we figure out where radium came from then God will be inserted just before that new discovery, ad infinitum, turtles all the way down

[rtkwe]

Sure but it's a way to integrate science and religion and ultimately science doesn't really have an way to answer 'why' for any of this. Even if there's not an actual answer it just happens to be that way and we're a happy little accident of the universe for a lot of people that's kind of unsatisfying. Even if they're wrong to people want to ascribe meaning to their lives, it's why philosophy and religion will probably never leave us.

[jandrese]

The God of the Gaps reasoning always seemed dangerous to me. It creates a system where each scientific discovery diminishes God, pitting religious people against the advancement of science. As the gaps grow smaller so does God. In the long run you're in danger of reducing God to some mathematical constants.

[throwaway123x2]

Sure, that's the Prime Mover theory, which would be extraordinarily hard to prove or disprove. I don't think it's fallacious reasoning.

[hnracer]

It's fallacious to put God one step before everything we don't know (radium, etc), while forgetting the numerous times this was done in the past (rainbows, etc) only to be demonstrated false once science advances. That's quite different to the Prime Mover hypothesis.

[dboreham]

Like system administration: if a task occurs frequently, write a script to automate it.

[pvaldes]

> The discovery isn't attributed to God, but the existence of the phenomenon.

So basically they are frozen in a "Galileo Galilei" period?

This could explain part of the claimed scientific decline

[rtkwe]

No you're misunderstanding, what I think they're saying is that things like evolution, big bang, etc are the mechanisms of god, i.e. god set all this in motion. It's an easy way to integrate science and religion so long as you're not a biblical (or whatever the equivalent in your religion is) literalist. Maybe god did setup this universe like a giant clockwork toy and all we're discovering are the gears and springs of the universe. Discoveries and inventions are still the work of people but the cause of all the natural forces just ultimately trace back to god.

It leaves a little crack open for divinity and it's a lot around a question of why; why'd the big bang happen? why are the physical constants of the universe right in a series of bands such that stars, planets and everything else eventually formed? etc. It's a question parallel to science that has a lot of answers for what happens where this is more of a philosophical question of why.

[eska]

That contradicts with the article. The article states that the Muslim scholar theorized that god actively mutates the animals that want to adapt, i.e. god didn't just invent "the mechanism" of mutation, as you say.

[pvaldes]

> Muslim scholar theorized that god actively mutates the animals that want to adapt,

This theory is a pastiche trying to use the "good parts" from Darwinism and is clearly worse than the original

Anybody claiming this, just don't have a deep understanding of mutations. Mutations are not a god's gift. Maths and science predict that they happen randomly, and most of the time they carry terrible consequences.

Lets take for example the people that inherited the butterfly skin syndrome. With a so fragile skin that it rips from the shoulder to the waistline at the minimum brush. Do this girl or this boy wanted to "adapt" to have a insufferable pain all the days of this life?

I seriously doubt that anybody would have asked for that. Lets be serious.

[throwaway123x2]

I mean it predated Darwin by a lot, we shouldn't be surprised it has its faults.

[rtkwe]

I was talking in a more general sense not about the specific mechanism in the article, more about the general way science and religion can at least coexist somewhat coherently which is something a lot of online athiests perplexed by.