Did you know that creationism (versus natural selection) is mainstream in the Islamic world -- and that a secretive Turk named Harun Yahya has a lot to do with it? Steve Paulson reports for Slate:
Creationist stories are now popping up in Turkish high-school science textbooks, and some government officials in the AKP, the ruling Islamic party, freely criticize evolution. In Ankara, the government's point man on religious issues, Mehmet Gormez, told me, "All the holy texts say human beings are created by God. I think evolutionary theory is not scientific, but ideological."The Quran doesn't have a detailed origins story like the six days of creation found in Genesis, but it does say Adam was created out of clay in a heavenly paradise and later banished to earth, along with Eve. Various polls show that many Muslim countries are predominantly creationist, but Turkey has recently emerged as a hub of global opposition to evolution. In 2006 Science magazine found that only 25 percent of Turks accepted the theory of natural selection--the lowest rate among any of the 34 countries surveyed. (The second-lowest was in the United States.)
Why Islamic creationism has exploded in Turkey is a complicated story that may have as much to do with politics as religion. Unlike most Muslim countries, which simply ignore the science of life's origins, Turkey's high schools have taught evolution for decades--the legacy of Ataturk's campaign to secularize Turkey's public culture. Creationism has become a way for political Islamists to attack the secular elite that governed Turkey until the recent rise of the AKP. Oktar's own agenda isn't confined to evolution. He's calling for a "Turkish-Islamic Union," a Turkish super-state that would stretch from Kazakhstan to Indonesia and western Africa--a revamped Ottoman Empire for today's Muslims.
I did not know that. I remember being in Istanbul and seeing an English-language pamphlet or a book, can't remember which, using a photograph of a piece of chewing gum to make some sort of creationist point. It was surreal. I had no idea that creationism was such a big deal in the Islamic world. Though when you think about it, it makes perfect sense.
(Countdown to the deployment of a variation of Manning's Corollary in the combox thread...)
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"Common sense" sense just means "something that I learned before the age of 12".
And a lot of people spend the rest of their trying to unlearn such basic things black is not white.
Nobody, least of all Darwin, claims that evolution means that God didn't create man, at most evolution furnishes the _how_ of creation...
From which God is excluded as a necessity.
Don't tell me how seriously I take the Bible.
In my view you're not being all that serious. If you don't like my opinion, then perhaps you should ask yourself why it's so bothersome.
That I don't read the Bible like a fundamentalist doesn't mean that I don't take it seriously. But I'll be happy to join the camp of Augustine, Origen (and Ireneaus and Basil and ...) as a "non-serious" Christian.
Well, Origen was a heretic, so I'd be careful claiming him, but even so, none of these figures were willing to concede that God was not necessary to man's creation. Again, Darwin eliminates that necessity. Man's appearance on earth in Darwin's view is no more miraculous than a rock.
"If you don't like my opinion, then perhaps you should ask yourself why it's so bothersome."
Inaccurate expressions of Christian belief combined with Christian misrepresentations of science is bothersome and tends to upset me.
It's really difficult to attract intelligent people to Christianity when so-call "Christians" are telling people they have to dump their brains at the church door.
Polichinello: If anyone's faith requires some kind of proof or necessity, then it is no faith at all. Darwin did not prove that evolution "just happened," although science fiction writers such as Richard Dawkins like to indulge that speculation. Darwin simply showed that there are complex natural processes which have been at work far longer than our limited species had realized. Arguably, God IS necessary to make the process work, but as Albert Einstein said, "The Lord God is subtle." Whatever the role of God was, chemically speaking, which is a silly way to walk by faith and not by sight, it was more subtle than Creation Science has grasped. Even if God is not NECESSARY to evolution, evolution does not PRECLUDE God. Further, even the atheist astronomer Fred Hoyle admits that the very physics of the universe suggest someone gamed the system to make life possible and probable. Still, there is the matter of the soul, and science has nothing to say about that.
Darwin did NOT make the point that evolution is not a miracle. He made the point that all life did not take its current form on Day One. That primitive vision reduced God to some oversize superhero, sitting in primordial swamps making little mud pies and breathing on them. Darwin offered a glimpse into just how vast and awesome God's creative process really was -- that is, if you believe in God. If you don't, you can pretend it all "just happened." Unfortunately, churchmen like Bishop Wilberforce chained their faith to a scientific postulate, and offered the perverse judgment that evolution is "contrary to the word of God." Rubbish. There is no scientific test for the hypothesis that God exists.
"Even if God is not NECESSARY to evolution, evolution does not PRECLUDE God."
That's brilliant. Is there anything else completely unnecessary and in any case utterly fictional anyway that you want to include because it will make you feel better?
I'm thinking Mighty Mouse, because here he comes to save the day, and as fictional beings go, what could be better than that?
"some government officials in the AKP, the ruling Islamic party, freely criticize evolution"
you're making it sound like it is illegal.
If you read his works with an open mind (although his works are bent to a single conclusion) you'll have to rethink about evolution philosophically. Darwin made his works under the most rudimentary form of knowledge in biological science during his time. That is what science all about: philosophy drives the logic behind science.
Dawkins recently pulled out a software that simulates evolution to "verify" it. Ask any software engineer if that is not using analogy as proof, when analogies being thrown to evolutionists are discredited readily.
I can't accept evolution because:
a) Evolution doesn't explain the very first living organisms forming within chemical means, this means no accepted model has been resolved. If this can't be explained, explanation about evolution for multicelled organisms are redundant.
b) Give any scenario on how wings are formed in flies and I'll give you a laughing crowd.
C'mon. Even Miller (who pioneered the Miller experiment) dismissed theories put forward about how life started chemically as "nonsense" and "paper chemistry".
Hope this is scientific enough.
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