Scientific antirealism and its use in da'wah

How antirealism got so popular in da'wah, and how to benefit from it today

One of the central issues in philosophy of science is the realism-antirealism debate - roughly, whether scientific theories are meant to be true or at least approximately true portrayals of reality. Antirealist views of science, corresponding to (again, being very simplistic here) the idea that scientific theories are meant to be neat descriptions of observations, as opposed to approximating truth, are very popular in Muslim da’wah and apologetics discourse. The strategy is primarily adopted to undermine the challenge posed by the scientific consensus on human evolution to the Islamic view of human origins. The most readable summary of the debate I’ve seen so far is the second section of James Ladyman’s book Understanding Philosophy of Science.

I think this emphasis on scientific antirealism is somewhat unique among Muslims, as popular science-religion reconciliation projects undertaken by other faith communities - like the large tent of Young Earth Creationists, Old Earth Creationists like the Reasons to Believe ministry, or the Intelligent Design movement (although they don’t associate with religions) - do not really opt for antirealist views of science. Or at least, it’s not as front and center. I was always curious as to why Muslims in particular ended up adopting this view.

On one hand, the motivation isn’t hard to understand. For any faith community, there must exist a way to navigate potential conflicts between science and religion. Even for a religion revealed by God, it’s inevitable that the human knowledge-seeking enterprise might mistakenly stumble into conclusions that contradict God’s word. In these situations, the believers need a strategy to resolve these tensions. Perhaps the most plausible immediate impulse on part of the believer is - well, human knowledge-seeking tools have inherent limitations, but God has the full picture, so we shouldn’t be perturbed by potential conflicts. This sentiment is extremely common among the masses. Popular preachers often sloganeer about the limitations, unstability and fragility of scientific knowledge, and how believers shouldn’t bat an eye when scientists contradict scripture. One might argue that a philosophically literate scientific antirealism is just a sophisticated “fleshing out” of that impulse.

On the other hand, it’s still interesting that this approach has been so singularly influential in Muslim da’wah, to the extent of effectively sidelining approaches to science-religion reconciliation other faith communities make use of. This is even more interesting given just 15-20 years ago, da’wah was very science-forward. A lot of positive apologetics was based on putative claims of scientific prescience in the Qur’an and hadiths, and claims of science-religion contradiction were taken seriously and evaluated at a case-by-case basis. So what caused this shift in approach?

I suspect this might have been the result of a bottleneck effect. There are only a handful of large da’wah/apologetics institutes catering to the English speaking world, and they have an outsize role in shaping the Muslim discourse. About a decade ago when discussions of Islam-evolution reconciliation broke out in the west, IERA’s Hamza Tzortzis published an essay opting for a thoroughgoing scientific antirealism to respond to the challenge of evolution. I think that essay, and subsequent material published by IERA and other prominent da’wah organizations, shaped evolution-adjacent religious discourse for the years to come. Subboor Ahmed, one of the prominent voices in this niche, seems to support this hypothesis in the beginning of this interview.

This essay is not about whether scientific antirealism is good or bad for da’wah - that is a complex topic better shelved for another day. That said, I think few would deny that scientific antirealism is an unintuitive way of thinking about science. At least some scientific observations seem continuous with, and systematized versions of, our everyday modes of reasoning. So whatever warrant we grant to such everyday reasoning must, to some extent, transfer to scientific reasoning as well. I think this shows that scientific antirealism is something of a skeptical maneuver, and the antirealist bears the burden of proof to give us positive reasons for accepting his view.

For now, I want to make a distinction between adopting an antirealist attitude to scientific theories in general, vs. adopting antirealist construals of particular scientific theories (general vs. specific antirealism). In case of the former, the antirealist is skeptical of features ubiquitous in any scientific reasoning - induction, simplicity as truth-tacking, underdetermination of theory by data, what have you. However, there is a more moderate form of antirealism, where one refuses to accept realist construals of certain theories only in certain cases, and that too because of issues particular to that theory. On this view, we take realism as our point of departure, and then evaluate each scientific theory at a case-by-case basis to figure out whether the relevant data justifies a realist construal or not.

In their book Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, philosophers William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland suggest these tentative criteria by which realist vs. antirealist construals of particular theories are to be evaluated:

[O]ne should interpret a scientific theory in realist terms unless one or more of the following obtain:

1. A realist interpretation conflicts with a rationally well-established internal or external conceptual problem, but an antirealist view does not.

2. The history of theories in this area of study has exhibited a large proportion of theory replacements versus refinements, and thus there is no clear progress in converging on a widely shared theory in the area of study.

3. Nonrational factors can account for much of the theory’s acceptance by the scientific community.

4. The main virtue of the theory is its empirical adequacy, and its more metaphysical, theoretical aspects can be understood as unnecessary, excess metaphysical baggage in our attempt to explain the success of the theory.

5. The theory has continued to be accepted largely through the use of inappropriate, ad hoc adjustments. [p. 343]

Despite my reservations about the more radical versions of scientific antirealism and its use in da’wah, criteria like this strike me as altogether reasonable. This also opens up room for conversation between realists and antirealists in how we reconcile science and religion, should substantive conflicts arise. Finally, such an approach also seems to cohere with how reason-religion conflicts were traditionally handled by Muslim scholars - instead of thinking of “reason” or “science” as one big source of knowledge with uniform epistemic status, their prescription was to evaluate pieces of this enterprise at a case-by-case basis.