"This book attempts to equip the reader with a holistic and accessible account of Islam and evolution. It guides the reader through the different variables that have played a part in the ongoing ...dialogue between Muslim creationists and evolutionists. This work views the discussion through the lens of al-Ghazālī (1058-1111), a widely-known and well-respected Islamic intellectual from the medieval period. By understanding al-Ghazālī as an Ash’arite theologian, a particular strand of Sunni theology, his metaphysical and hermeneutic ideas are taken to explore if and how much Neo-Darwinian evolution can be accepted. It is shown that his ideas can be used to reach an alignment between Islam and Neo-Darwinian evolution. This book offers a detailed examination that seeks to offer clarity if not agreement in the midst of an intense intellectual conflict and polarity amongst Muslims. As such, it will be of great interest to scholars of Science and Religion, Theology, Philosophy of Religion, Islamic Studies, and Religious Studies more generally. "
In the nascent discourse of Islam and science, the discussion of how to reconcile evolution with Islam is one of the most, if not the most, pressing concerns. This article reviews the various studies ...that have looked at the reception of evolution in multiple contexts to highlight the pedagogical challenges that materialise for Muslim students and teachers. It argues that, while recognising the obstacles and challenges mentioned in other studies, the crucial subject matter of Islamic theology (ʿaqīda) is not fully appreciated in those analyses. How and why theology is a vital discussion matter is examined, along with the benefits that it can offer. These insights could provide fodder for teachers and students when discussing the thorny topic of Islam and evolution in classroom settings. This paper’s deliberations could also be of interest to researchers examining the pedagogy and reception of evolution in Muslim contexts.
With the advancement of powerful image processing and machine learning techniques, Computer Aided Diagnosis has become ever more prevalent in all fields of medicine including ophthalmology. These ...methods continue to provide reliable and standardized large scale screening of various image modalities to assist clinicians in identifying diseases. Since optic disc is the most important part of retinal fundus image for glaucoma detection, this paper proposes a two-stage framework that first detects and localizes optic disc and then classifies it into healthy or glaucomatous.
The first stage is based on Regions with Convolutional Neural Network (RCNN) and is responsible for localizing and extracting optic disc from a retinal fundus image while the second stage uses Deep Convolutional Neural Network to classify the extracted disc into healthy or glaucomatous. Unfortunately, none of the publicly available retinal fundus image datasets provides any bounding box ground truth required for disc localization. Therefore, in addition to the proposed solution, we also developed a rule-based semi-automatic ground truth generation method that provides necessary annotations for training RCNN based model for automated disc localization.
The proposed method is evaluated on seven publicly available datasets for disc localization and on ORIGA dataset, which is the largest publicly available dataset with healthy and glaucoma labels, for glaucoma classification. The results of automatic localization mark new state-of-the-art on six datasets with accuracy reaching 100% on four of them. For glaucoma classification we achieved Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve equal to 0.874 which is 2.7% relative improvement over the state-of-the-art results previously obtained for classification on ORIGA dataset.
Once trained on carefully annotated data, Deep Learning based methods for optic disc detection and localization are not only robust, accurate and fully automated but also eliminates the need for dataset-dependent heuristic algorithms. Our empirical evaluation of glaucoma classification on ORIGA reveals that reporting only Area Under the Curve, for datasets with class imbalance and without pre-defined train and test splits, does not portray true picture of the classifier's performance and calls for additional performance metrics to substantiate the results.
This is an introduction to the special issue. It provides the historical context of Islam and Science that then leads to the theme of the issue. This special issue is the proceedings of a conference ...at Cambridge Muslim College that was held in December 2022.
This book symposium begins with a concise historical overview of the emerging dialogue of Islam and Science. Against this, we trace the historical developments and pertinent discussion of Islam and ...Evolution, culminating in the release of Islam and Evolution: Al-Ghazālī and the Modern Evolutionary Paradigm. For those unfamiliar with the subject, the introduction provides a breakdown of the monograph and its core thesis. The final section contains a summative review of all the articles – ten in total – featured in this special issue.
ABSTRACTIn this article, I respond to my interlocutors, who have raised various points while engaging my book, Islam and Evolution: Al-Ghazālī and the Modern Evolutionary Paradigm. In addressing ...their arguments and points of engagement, I have ordered this article into four parts: (1) methodological issues, (2) scientific issues, (3) metaphysical issues, and (4) hermeneutic issues.
This article critically reviews how creationists or antievolutionists are using discussions in philosophy of science to undermine the efficacy of evolution to defuse the tension between evolution and ...religion. They include (1) the scientific realism debate, (2) the distinction between historical and experimental sciences, (3) the problem of induction, and (4) the definitional problem of species. It then discusses how using these specific arguments to undermine evolution is misplaced when looked at from an Ashʿarī perspective, a Sunnī school of theology. In doing so, it reveals the multiple ways that theology and philosophy of science are interacting with one another in the ongoing creationism-evolutionism debates.
AL‐GHAZĀLĪ'S DIVINE COMMAND THEORY Malik, Shoaib Ahmed
The Journal of religious ethics,
09/2021, Letnik:
49, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Abstract This article reviews al‐Ghazālī's conception of Divine Command Theory (DCT) in light of contemporary philosophical developments. There are two well‐known objections against DCT. These ...include the problem of arbitrariness (PoA), which states that God randomly chose our moral framework for no reason given His capability to choose any moral commands; and the problem of God's goodness (PoGG), which questions God's goodness if morality could be other than what it is. Modern defenders of DCT have attempted to counter these objections through various strategies. This article juxtaposes al‐Ghazālī's interpretation of DCT with modern strategies to illustrate how these two issues are untroubling concerns in al‐Ghazālī's framework. In doing so, it highlights where and how they differ in their approaches. Additionally, it critiques interpretations suggested by some contemporary thinkers who suggest that al‐Ghazālī may not be a strict proponent of DCT.
This paper presents a novel approach for the detection of tables present in documents, leveraging the potential of deep neural networks. Conventional approaches for table detection rely on heuristics ...that are error prone and specific to a dataset. In contrast, the presented approach harvests the potential of data to recognize tables of arbitrary layout. Most of the prior approaches for table detection are only applicable to PDFs, whereas, the presented approach directly works on images making it generally applicable to any format. The presented approach is based on a novel combination of deformable CNN with faster R-CNN/FPN. Conventional CNN has a fixed receptive field which is problematic for table detection since tables can be present at arbitrary scales along with arbitrary transformations (orientation). Deformable convolution conditions its receptive field on the input itself allowing it to mold its receptive field according to its input. This adaptation of the receptive field enables the network to cater for tables of arbitrary layout. We evaluated the proposed approach on two major publicly available table detection datasets: ICDAR-2013 and ICDAR-2017 POD. The presented approach was able to surpass the state-of-the-art performance on both ICDAR-2013 and ICDAR-2017 POD datasets with a F-measure of 0.994 and 0.968, respectively, indicating its effectiveness and superiority for the task of table detection.
Abstract This introduction provides an overview of the significance of the Symposium on Islam and evolution that results from a conference hosted by the Leiden University Shīʿī Studies Initiative ...(LUSSI) in July 2021. The objective of this conference was to stimulate further research in the area. Scientists, theologians, and philosophers participated in the conference to discuss the topic from various angles. The selected articles that were accepted for this thematic section are summarized.
PDF
