Video reviewed by Zia H Shah MD, Chief Editor of the Muslim Times

In the very beginning of the above video the participants come swinging against Darwin. I am not opining about his proposed mechanism or whether there is a Creator or not. But, I am absolutely certain that all life forms on the planet earth are coming from a common ancestor.

My theology, as a Muslim demands that God operates through natural mechanisms. So, in a manner of speaking, my God is like the materialist scientists, who believe in methodological naturalism. God is active in our universe, but, we cannot see His hand at any given moment. The interface of the Infinite God, with our finite minds or our finite world, is always hidden in mystery and not open to our examination.

Methodological naturalism is the label for the required assumption of philosophical naturalism when working with the scientific method. Methodological naturalists limit their scientific research to the study of natural causes, because any attempts to define causal relationships with the supernatural are never fruitful, and result in the creation of scientific “dead ends” and God of the gaps-type hypotheses. To avoid these traps, scientists assume that all causes are empirical and naturalistic, which means they can be measured, quantified and studied methodically.

However, this assumption of naturalism need not extend beyond an assumption of methodology. This is what separates methodological naturalism from philosophical naturalism — the former is merely a tool and makes no truth claim, while the latter makes the philosophical — essentially atheistic — claim that only natural causes exist.

Gene Norman Weingarten, who is an American journalist, and former syndicated humor columnist for The Washington Post writes:

If a philosopher or social scientist were to try to encapsulate a single principle that yoked together the intellectual process of [civilization], it would be a gradual dismantling of presumptions of magic. Brick by brick, century by century, with occasional burps and hiccups, the wall of superstition has been coming down. Science and medicine and political philosophy have been on a relentless march in one direction only — sometimes slow, sometimes at a gallop, but never reversing course. Never has an empirical scientific discovery been deemed wrong and replaced by a more convincing mystical explanation. (“Holy cow, Dr. Pasteur! I’ve examined the pancreas of a diabetic dog, and darned if it’s NOT an insulin deficiency, but a little evil goblin dwelling inside. And he seems really pissed!”) Some magical presumptions have stubbornly persisted way longer than others, but have eventually, inexorably fallen to logic, reason and enlightenment, such as the assumption of the divine right of kings and the entitlement of aristocracy. That one took five millennia, but fall it did.

Given this principle of methodological naturalism, even if God was guiding the course of evolution, and I do favor that, what the human examination can see is only the natural causes and the supernatural or Divine interventions are beyond our examinations.

So, the mere fact that all the present 8-9 million species that are extant, are populating the planet earth and they have been shown to have common ancestry through molecular biology, prove that Darwin has made enough contributions to our knowledge base to be celebrated.

The esteemed scholars in the above video may be right in some aspects but they are definitely wrong if they are implying that all the life forms on our planet are not connected to each other, as Charles Darwin suggested.

May be they have been mislead by their theology or ideology and possibly their insistence on the Christian dogma.

May I suggest some of the following information for their kind review:

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