Here is the link to my Policy Forum article in this week's Science (Dec 12, 2008): Bracing for Islamic Creationism (if you don't have full access, you can download the paper here (pdf).A few related links: Robin Lloyd at Live Science puts the Policy Forum paper and Islamic Creationism in a larger context in Evolution Arguments Headed for Islamic World. Here is an audio interview with PRI's The World (from the BBC and WGBH) and with New Scientist.
4 comments:
Thank you for an excellent “call to action” you published in last week’s SCIENCE magazine. Evolution is a fact, and it is this simple four-word-long message that needs to be communicated efficiently and rapidly in the Islamic world by scholars such as yourself. As for those disputing evolution’s authority, this needs to be asked of them: How then do you account for molecular biology and what this new field has clearly and irrefutably demonstrated about evolution? One has only to examine the DNA of living things to recognize that we have more in common with animals than is comfortable for most people to accept. But why go that “deep”? There is ample morphological evidence around us as well. The fact that a good number of animals have the same number of eyes, nose, ears, limbs and other organs as we do is the first clue that we share more with them than the creationists in the world would like. But comfort and what we’d like to believe, hear and have repeated are neither important nor relevant here. What matters is fact. And the fact is that evolution is no “theory” in the conventional sense of the word. Evolution is the truth, regardless of whether one is religious, fundamentalist, agnostic or atheistic. Because of molecular biology’s undeniable success, it is now no easy task to suppress this truth using rational arguments. If anything, Darwin should be held in high esteem in the Islamic world. The faster the Islamic world accepts his “theory,” the faster progress it can make, and science may soon regain the high status it once enjoyed in the Islamic world. Failing this, ignorance shall cloak minds, let no truth in, and, in the process, destroy all hopes of a scientist like Darwin arising in the Muslim community some day. -- Iqbal
Islamic Creationism:
"[Koran 4:1] O people, observe your Lord; the One who created you from one being, and created from it its mate"
In other words: Muhammad was a creacionist prophet.
Fossils, genetic similaritis, lab experiments, etc, all of that doesn't disprove that Adam and Eve existed. Even evolutionary scientists still have two contradicting theories about the first human beings which are "the out of africa model" and the "all regions model".
The big bang itself is based on assumptions, one of them is the universality of laws of physics.
There's lot of vagueness in evolution, it may qualify to an acceptable theory to the community of science, but it doesn't qualify to be a fact.
If you evolutionists really have enough information to conclude that we were evolved from apes, then why don't you go ahead and make a computer simulation and let's see whether the populations of past apes could actually evolve to human beings without any control or design.
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