Maulana Wahiduddin Khan | The Sunday Guardian | January 24, 2016, p. 12
In 1859, Charles Darwin (1809-1882) published his now celebrated Origin of Species in which he put forward the very curious theory that human beings have evolved from animals. Now, man is outstandingly different from other living species. How could the amoeba’s brain have conceivably developed into the human brain? Darwin himself felt uneasy about this notion, and he writes in the final chapter of his book “Can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animals, be trusted when it draws such grand convulsions? I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems.”
It must be conceded that the interpretation of life and the universe is a matter of such magnitude and complexity, that it almost defies the imagination even to contemplate it. No man, with the limiting factors of his purely human (as opposed to supernatural) abilities and an ineluctable mortality which puts an untimely end to all endeavours, can be equal to the task. The conditions of human existence in this world simply do not equip him to undertake so monumental a pursuit. Those who bravely embark upon it, cannot but be assailed by persistent doubts on the question of human limitations. Some, like Darwin, accept that this must be so. Some do not.
Self-doubt is in itself a proof that if we are to penetrate the mysteries of life and the universe, our thinking must of necessity be on a higher plane than that of which we are humanly capable. In the last analysis, it is only God who is capable of such thought, and if we are to have access to His thinking, it can only be through His messengers. It is our own cerebral shortcomings which show us the necessity for prophetic guidance. Without this, we cannot, otherwise arrive at the truth.