Muslim William Paley

“The Tradition of Mufaddal” is a Shia Muslim text attributed to the sixth Imam, Jafar al-Sadiq (8th century). In its present form, the text is taken from a 17th century compilation, the vast “Bihar al-Anwar”, edited by Allama Majlisi. I'm not familiar with its exact manuscript history. For instance, one would like to know whether the text really is from the 8th century, or whether it's early modern and retrospectively attributed to Al-Sadiq, who is regarded as one of the most important Shia scholars. Perhaps an expert on the history of science can have some fun with this material…

The text is a polemic against “atheists” and “Manicheans”, the former denying the existence of a Creator altogether, the latter claiming that the material universe cannot be the work of the true god, since it's imperfect and evil. Al-Sadiq's response is a sustained appeal to the argument from design. The closest Western equivalent would be William Paley. “Tawheed al Mufaddal” is essentially a rather long-winding collection of perceived examples of design in nature, the animal world, and the constitution of man. Some things (almost) never change: the peacock is mentioned, although the Imam sees it as an example of perfect artistic design, while Phillip Johnson saw it as a creation of a whimsical god. Much of the biological knowledge in “Tawheed al Mufaddal” is out of date, such as the claim that dolphins kill and eat birds, using dead fish as bait! Since the Shia Imams are supposed to be infallible, this is surely a problem if you are a devout follower of this current. The translation is awkward, since some of the factoids make no sense even on their own (surely it’s an eagle, not a “cloud”, that attacks the pythons?).

Most of the examples mentioned in this little book can be readily explained by modern science through genetics or, ahem, Darwin's theory of evolution. However, the ancient atheists refuted by Al-Sadiq really were “intellectually unfulfilled” (to adapt a phrase from Richard Dawkins), since they seem to have regarded the ordered patterns of the cosmos as the result of pure chance or spontaneous generation. The Imam has little problem pointing out that purposeful organs surely cannot be the result of a chance assemblage of disparate elements. Al-Sadiq sounds less convincing when arguing against the “Manicheans”. What about natural disasters, epidemics or death? Here, the Muslim scholar is forced to resort to the rather silly theological argument (turned into a “philosophical” one by Leibniz) that we really do live in the best of all possible worlds, that God wants to simultaneously punish the wicked and chastise the good through calamities, that evil is a necessary character-builder, etc.

Yeah, sure. That's why everyone wants to go to Heaven and stay there forever, right? With those virgins, to boot!

Al-Sadiq also says that God created locusts to show humans who's *really* in charge. Try and stop my creations! This argument, at least to me, sounds psychologically more convincing since (obviously) the universe wasn't simply “made for man”. Overall, however, the author veers so much towards the design argument that he misses the fact that the world looks *both* designed and chaotic, both good and evil, and sometimes even designed for evil (the Manicheans make the opposite mistake, emphasizing the evil or chaos over the good or designed).

Overall, I must say that I consider the tradition of the Muslim Paley to be rather unconvincing and bad, and I will therefore only give it two stars.