Debate continues to swirl around the theory of evolution Charles Darwin proposed 150 years ago in his groundbreaking book, "On the Origin of Species," despite its universal acceptance among scientists.

Before Darwin's discovery, the world was generally thought to have remained more or less the same since its creation. This belief, based on Biblical interpretations, was contested through fossil studies showing that species change over time.

Darwin's legendary round-the-world 1831-1836 voyage aboard the HMS Beagle generated his most significant observations and discoveries, inspiring his work on natural selection.

Although Darwin first used the term "natural selection" in a paper in 1842, it wasn't until 1859 that he published his controversial theory that all living beings share a common ancestry -- a discovery that remains vital to modern biology.

Author Nick Spencer, director of studies at Theos, a research organisation launched in 2006 with the support of the Archbishop of Canterbury, explained why the debate persists to this day.

"People are encountering evolution not so much as a science but as a philosophy," he told Reuters ahead of a Nov. 24 lecture at Westminster Abbey to mark the anniversary of the exact date on which Darwin's book was first published.

Following up on earlier posts here and here about Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), I've been looking closely at the arrest in Chicago on anti-terrorism charges of two men linked to LeT and accused of plotting attacks in Denmark.

Analysts say the Chicago case demonstrates the global reach of the militant group and its ability to plot attacks in India and around the world. The court documents submitted by U.S. authorities also allege that Lashkar-e-Taiba had suggested that attacks on India be given priority over the planned attack in Denmark, highlighting the threat still posed by the group one year after Mumbai.

As discussed in this factbox, analysts cite several reasons for Pakistan's reluctance to dismantle Lashkar-e-Taiba. These include its role in Kashmir and in India-Pakistan rivalry, and popular support for the humanitarian work of its Jamaat ud-Dawa sister organisation. They also cite an unwillingness to create a new enemy right now when Pakistan is already fighting the Pakistani Taliban in Waziristan and facing a wave of reprisal attacks in its cities. Lashkar-e-Taiba is the only Pakistani militant group which is not believed to have been involved in attacking targets within Pakistan itself.

None of that makes the group any less dangerous. But while researching the subject, I also found myself asking questions about the nature of the group and the kind of support it has -- beyond its alleged state backing. This is not to condone violence. But by failing to look at this support, particularly for Jamaat ud-Dawa's  humanitarian work, are we perhaps missing at least part of the point?

The religious ideology of the Markaz ud-Dawa wal Irshad which gave birth to Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jamaat ud-Dawa is Ahl-e-Hadith, a Salafist school of thought which seeks a return to what it sees as the "purer" practices of the early Muslims. This ideology originally sprang from a rejection of the corruption of religion by political power and of the syncretism which had thrived in South Asia through a blending of Hinduism and Islam, and which also underpinned the popularity of the Sufi tradition.

Whatever you think of this ideology, it does bear a remarkable resemblance to the thinking behind the Protestant Reformation in Europe which rejected the power and the myths of the Catholic Church and sought what it saw as a return to the original views of the followers of Jesus, best exemplified by its then heretical efforts to translate the Bible from Latin into languages that ordinary people could understand.

The Protestant Reformation led to centuries of wars, pogroms and cruelty from which Europe only properly emerged after World War Two. It also contributed to a philosophy of clean living, hard work and individualism which some argue laid the foundations for capitalism and with it, the rising power and wealth of the west.

So my first question is whether we understand properly these similarities between such reformist traditions in Islam and Christianity, both in their time seen as hardline, fundamentalist and dangerous?  And are we drawing the right lessons from this?

Secondly, one of the reasons for the popular support for Jamaat ud-Dawa is its extensive humanitarian work in education, healthcare and disaster relief.  This is not unique to Pakistan or Islam - before the development of universal free education in many countries, most people were educated in schools originally set up by charities and religious organisations.

Providing help to the poor is common to most if not all religious organisations.  In disaster relief, the Hindu Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) was amongst the first on the spot following the 2001 Gujarat earthquake in India, just as Jamaat ud-Dawa cadres rushed to help the victims of the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan and Pakistani Kashmir

Again, are we paying enough attention to the similarities between the ways in which different religious organisations help the poor and drawing the right lessons? There are inherent dangers in this help -- as seen in the activities of some Christian missionaries in the British empire, in the global network of support for Jamaat ud-Dawa that counter-terrorism experts fear can be exploited by Lashkar-e-Taiba, and in the popular backing for the RSS after the Gujarat earthquake in 2001 that may have strengthened it in its alleged role in the communal violence in the state a year later.

There are no obvious answers to these questions. But if those posting comments here could set aside the many bitter feuds which divide nations and indeed the exploitation of religion for political gain that has been a feature of every continent, how would you start addressing them?

Please try to restrict your comments to those you would be willing to make if everyone was physically present in the same room, rather than in an internet forum.

(Photos: Mumbai skyline; earthquake-hit road near Muzzafarabad in Pakistani Kashmir; a girl rescued from the Gujarat earthquake)

A top politician in Japan’s ruling Democratic Party has praised Buddhism while calling Christianity “exclusive and self-righteous” and Islam only somewhat better.  Secretary-General Ichiro Ozawa made the remarks after meeting the head of the Japan Buddhist Federation, a group traditionally close to the rival Liberal Democratic Party, which was trounced by the Democrats in an August election.

Christianity “is an exclusive and self-righteous religion. And society in the United States and Europe, which are based on Christianity, are at a dead end,” the Nikkei newspaper quoted Ozawa as telling reporters after the meeting. “Islam is better, but it is also exclusive.”

(Photo:Buddha statue at Todaiji Temple in Nara, western Japan, 29  Oct 2008/Itsuo Inouye)

Ozawa, seen by some as the mastermind behind the Democrats’ election win, had kinder words for Buddhism, which along with Shinto is the dominant religion in Japan, although many people take a mostly secular and eclectic view.  Christians are a tiny minority and Muslims are few in Japan.

“Buddhism teaches us from the starting point of how human beings should be, their state of mind and way of life,” he said.

Religious organisations can pack clout in Japanese politics because of their ability to mobilise voters, but politicians tend to shun public remarks about people’s beliefs.

Then-prime minister Yoshiro Mori caused a furore in 2000 when he referred to Japan as a “divine nation with the emperor at its centre”, stirring memories of the state Shintoism that helped to mobilise support for Japan’s wartime military aggression. He later apologised publicly.

(Photo: Ichiro Ozawa, 27 Feb 2009/Yuriko Nakao)

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A mouse that can speak? A monkey with Down's Syndrome? Dogs with human hands or feet? British scientists want to know if such experiments are acceptable, or if they go too far in the name of medical research.

The Academy of Medical Sciences has launched a study to look at the use of animals containing human material in scientific research.

Using human material in animals is not new. Scientists have already created rhesus macaque monkeys that have a human form of the Huntingdon's gene so they can investigate how the disease develops; and mice with livers made from human cells are being used to study the effects of new drugs.

But scientists say the technology to put ever greater amounts of human genetic material into animals is spreading quickly around the world -- raising the possibility that some scientists in some places may want to push boundaries.

Religious groups are among those that are uneasy about the trend. One Catholic cardinal, Keith O'Brien of Edinburgh, has branded such work "Frankenstein science."

Martin Bobrow, a professor of medical genetics at Cambridge University is chairman of a 14-member group looking into the issue.

He says: "Do most of us care if we make a mouse whose blood cells or liver are human? Probably not. But if it can speak? If it can think? Or if it is conscious in a human way? Then we're in a completely different ballpark."

What do you say?

Anniversaries are a time to look back at how the world was before the historic event being commemorated. During a recent trip to Berlin in advance of today’s 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall, I asked the former East German theologian and politician Richard Schröder for his recollections of the life as a Protestant pastor before the country fell apart. He zeroed in on a fascinating aspect of the Communists’ anti-religion policy I’d never heard about before.

(Photo: Richard Schröder, 21 Oct 2009/Tom Heneghan)

“The Communists who took over in 1945 were trained in Russia,” he told me at his home in a southern suburb of Berlin. “Their model was the Russian Orthodox Church, which focuses heavily on the liturgy. By contrast, Protestant churches have always been a wide field that included Bible study and other discussion groups. All the charity work of the Protestant churches, like their hospitals, were started by what you might call grass roots movements of congregation members. They were not started by the churches themselves. But the Communists always tried to handle us as if we were Russian Orthodox.”

One way to do this was to demand the churches register in advance any meeting except their Sunday church services and the internal sessions of the church leadership. Officials were especially suspicious of the churches’ youth activities, such as camping trips that included Bible study sessions. The churches refused to agree because this would have been a way to block such activities without banning them outright — all they would have to do was fail to issue permission for the meeting. “The state made a second effort to impose this registration, but the churches decided to pay all the fines and not register the meetings. They got away with it. When the officials noticed the churches always paid the 500 mark fine but kept on holding their meetings, they stopped imposing the fine. It took a long time for the Communists to understand that the Protestant churches are a different version of Christianity than the strongly liturgical Orthodox Church.”

(Image: Falling church membership figures in East Germany — purple for Protestants, yellow for Catholics/ Forum of Contemporary History Leipzig)

Communist officials also seem to have had problems figuring out the theological differences between Russian Orthodox and German Lutherans.  “The Orthodox Church didn’t go through the Enlightenment,” Schröder said. “It maintained a sacred worship in which the miraculous, including some pious fraud, played a big role. Lenin once suggested to use the arguments of the French Enlightenment in the fight against religion. So the East German Communists did that here. They didn’t know that every Protestant theology student here had already learned all these arguments. They were old hat. The state established a chair for atheism at Jena University to promote anti-religious propaganda. The professor started to read Lutheran theology and had to admit it had already had its debate with the Enlightenment. They decided to stop using simple arguments like Darwin versus creationism or that the Sputnik didn’t find God out in space. They saw that didn’t work.”

This change of strategy in the 1970s led to the first meeting in 1978 between party leader Erich Honecker and the Protestant church leadership. The state toned down its atheist propaganda and tried to find ways to cooperate with the churches. “The party was aiming for a modus vivendi to boost good will with West Germany because they needed financial credits from them. West Germany had told East Germany it would measure its good will among other things by how they treated the churches.” This eased the situation for pastors, who didn’t have to fear getting arrested anymore, but officials still harrassed them by barring their children from attending high school.

Despite this limited detente, some Communist officials still took a long time to get away from the Russian Orthodox model they’d learned about in their Marxism-Leninism training, Schröder said. When they met him as a young Protestant pastor, they talked about the “dignitaries” of the church, as if they were Orthodox patriarchs dressed in ornate vestments. “Here I was, a bearded man in jeans, and I was suddenly a dignitary!” he laughed.

After East Germany collapsed, researchers found in the archives of the State Secretariat for Religious Affairs that the Communist officials slowly realised that Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his experiences in resistance to the Nazis was very important for Lutheran theology in East Germany. “

(Photo: Protest symbol saying “Swords into Plowshares –  Peace Prayers in St. Nicholas Church — Every Monday at 5 p.m.” in Leipzig, 16 Oct 2009/Tom Heneghan)

“By 1988-89 they finally understood how the Protestant church ticks,” Schröder said. “The motto “A church for others” played a big role in East Germany and it came from Bonhoeffer. They should have been able to see that Protestants had already debated during the Nazi period the question of how Christians should behave in a totalitarian state. We even had the Barmen Declaration of the Confessing Church during the Nazi period printed in our hymnbooks.” That 1934 document rejected the Nazis’ bid to subordinate the churches to the state.

By 1988-1989, of course, the protest movement linked to the Protestant churches was too far developed to be contained by some new manipulative strategy by the state. The Stasi secret police had at least 800  informers — many of the church officials and pastors — reporting from inside the churches about what was happening there, according to Stasi documents opened up after Germany reunited. They produced vast amounts of secret reports and betrayed large numbers of church members but were useless in stopping history when it happened.

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Motive probed for US army shooting rampage

KILLEEN, Texas, Nov 6 (Reuters) - Investigators searched for the motive on Friday behind a mass shooting at a sprawling U.S. Army base in Texas, in which an Army psychiatrist trained to treat war wounded is suspected of killing 13 people.

The suspected gunman, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a Muslim born in the United States of immigrant parents, was shot four times by police, a base spokesman said. He was unconscious but in stable condition.

I was wondering why, in the article about the suspect in the Fort Hood shooting, he was identified as, "Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a Muslim born in the United States" and the article about the Orlando gunman did NOT identify his religion?

I think this type of reporting perpetuates negative, stereotypes that label people inappropriately, there are plenty of murderers of all religions that are not immediately identified with a specific religion in the headline news. In fact, their religion is usually NOT used as an identifier.

Old Crabber

It is our policy not to use race, religion, etc. in a story unless it is relevant to the events. In this case, our story said the gunman had yelled "Allahu Akbar" -- Arabic for "God is Greatest" -- just before the shooting, which in my mind justifies mentioning his religion.

Further, the story also quoted the man's cousin as saying he had complained, as a Muslim, of harassment by fellow soldiers, another detail which makes religion a relevant detail: GBU Editor

Major Nidal Malik Hasan. REUTERS/Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences/Handout

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Covering religion is unlike other assignments in journalism, as any reporter on the “Godbeat” can tell you. Ruth Gledhill (photo at right), veteran religion correspondent of The Times in London and fellow blogger (hers is called Articles of Faith), recently gave a short, witty and insightful talk on reporting about faith.

There’s a lot there in only 11minutes and 27 seconds. How about this for an opener: “The only place the press is mentioned in the Bible is in Luke 19 when Zacchaeus the tax collector has to climb a tree to see Jesus because of the crowds. The King James Version renders this: ‘he couldn’t see because of the press’.”

Click here for the audio tape of the talk. And let us know if you sometimes feel like Zacchaeus.

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(Photo: Common Word conference with (from left) former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Georgetown University Professor John Esposito, Bosnian Grand Mufti Mustafa Ceric, former Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik and former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, 7 Oct 2009/Georgetown University - Phil Humnicky)

Will a common word lead to a common deed? That’s the challenge that the “Common Word” group of Islamic scholars has posed at its fourth major Muslim-Christian dialogue conference now underway at Georgetown University in Washington. The group, which next week marks the second anniversary of its launch, has broken the ice with Christian leaders and fostered a lively and fruitful interchange with them. But it always said its goal was not simply to have more harmonious conferences among theologians. They want to make a real impact lessening tensions between Christians and Muslims out in the real world.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, now a mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, clearly endorsed this aim at the opening session on Wednesday. “The single most important thing is the translation of words into deed,” he told about 600 people attending the conference. “We’ve got to show — not by a dialogue among the elites, although it is very important that the key people come together — but actually building bridges among people.”

(Photo: Tony Blair, 14 May 2009/Jason Reed)

Blair reminded his audience that many people think religion is not a solution but rather the problem in conflicts around the world. To counter this, he said, people of faith must not only foster understanding among believers but also refute the critics of faith.  “If we show by our actions that we are engaged in understanding and respect and justice, that is how we will succeed,” he said. “And that is what will overcome not just the extremism within religion but the cynicism outside of it.”

Readers of this blog may remember our reporting from the Middle East last May, when we pointed out that the same Pope Benedict who had hinted at a deep suspicion of Islam in his 2006 Regensburg speech had changed his tune and was borrowing the Common Word group’s arguments to argue for deeper Christian-Muslim dialogue. That was no small achievement itself — just ask yourself: how many Catholic theologians were able to change Cardinal Ratzinger’s mind? — but the group has higher ambitions.

(Photo: Prince Ghazi and Pope Benedict at the Jesus Baptismal Site on the River Jordan, 10 May 2009)

“Our present conference is not idly - I hope! - entitled ‘A Global Agenda for Change’,” Jordanian Prince Ghazi bin Muhammed, chief architect of the Common Word project, said in a message to the conference. “Rather, its purpose is to examine and chart out some concrete, practical, and, more importantly, actionable ideas that we can bring to fruition based perhaps on the principles of ‘A Common Word’ and the Two Greatest Commandments. In other words, we want to move, God Willing, from ‘traction’ to ‘trickledown’, and we want to start this here.”

Reviewing the first two years of the Common Word initiative, Prince Ghazi noted, on the positive side, “the apparent thaw in relations between Muslims and the Vatican, coupled with H.M. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia’s interfaith initiative, and President Obama’s Cairo Speech on June 4^th 2009 - all this being reflected in the latest Pew polls which show a slight lessening of animosity between Christians and Muslims globally.” He also praised initiatives by supporters of the Common Word such as London Church of England Bishop Richard Chartres’s St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace, Tony Blair’s Faith Foundation or Miroslav Volf’s Reconciliation Program at Yale University. He said a Common Word “sub-office” had opened in the Pakistani capital Islamabad to promote Muslim-Christian understanding in a country where the Christian minority is under attack.

But he added that “Muslims and Christians as a whole still harbour deep and dangerous animosities and prejudices towards each other. Moreover, even if we were to agree that the situation is better in Iraq now than two years ago, we must admit that it is worse in Afghanistan and that a new war has opened up in Pakistan, which in turn has been manipulated to commit murders against the native Christians there, such as recently happened in Gojra.” In the southern Philippine province of Mindanao, he said, the collapse of a planned peace deal had led to renewed fighting with thousands killed and around a million refugees or displaced people. “In short, we are still a long way away from where we could and should be,” he said.

(Photo: Pakistani Christians bury victims of attack by Muslims in Gojra, 2 Aug 2009/Mohsin Raza)

What do you think? How can Muslims and Christians use interfaith understanding to foster practical steps towards peace in the world?

Click here to watch the video of the first session, with addresses by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Georgetown University Professor John Esposito, Bosnian Grand Mufti Mustafa Ceric, former Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik and former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, as well as a Q&A session.

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(Photo: Nobel Peace Prize 2008 award ceremony, 10 Dec 2008/Ints Kalnins)

The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday in Oslo. What are the odds that a religious leader will win? I checked with our bureau in Oslo for the latest buzz.

“The Peace Nobel is basically a guessing game,” chief correspondent Wojciech Moskwa warned. A total of 205 individuals and organisations were nominated this year and a record number remained on the secret short list late last month, he learned in an interview with Geir Lundestad, the head of the Norwegian Nobel Institute. Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, French-Colombian politician and former hostage Ingrid Betancourt, Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Quang Do and various U.N. organisations have gained traction as possible nominees, but Lundestad firmly declined to comment on the speculation.

By contrast, the independent International Peace Research Institute (PRIO) in Oslo publishes its own picks and it named Colombian peace activist Piedad Cordoba, Jordanian interfaith dialogue pioneer Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad bin Talal and Afghan human rights activist Sima Samar as its favourites. “PRIO does not appear to have any special inside track, but they have on occasion been right,” said Moskwa.

Readers of this blog will recognise the name of Prince Ghazi, author of the interfaith dialogue manifesto “A Common Word Between Us And You.” That document, initially signed by 138 Muslim scholars and addressed to the leaders of all main Christian churches around the world, marked a fresh approach in interfaith dialogue by stressing two common core principles in Islam and Christianity. As the group says on its website: “Simply put, it is about the Two Golden Commandments: Love of God and Love of Neighbor, and it is an invitation to join hands with Christians on such a basis, for the sake of God and for the sake of world peace and harmony.” In an unusual departure, the document based its argument on quotes from both the Bible and the Koran, opening a new path for the world’s two largest faiths to communicate with each other.

The Common Word group, by now expanded to 305 signatories, has held several conferences with Christian leaders and theologians to explore this new path. One is taking place this week at Georgetown University in Washington. Perhaps the most notable example of its influence was the way Pope Benedict spoke about Islam during his visit to the Middle East last May. His 2006 Regensburg speech, which implied Islam was a violent and irrational faith, so upset and angered the Muslim world that 38 Muslim scholars addressed an initial letter to him in October 2006 correcting some misinterpretations and requesting a dialogue. When no response came from the Vatican, they issued the Common Word document in October 2007 with 138 signatories. They held a successful conference with the Vatican in November 2008 and, in May 2009, Pope Benedict essentially embraced their approach and used their arguments in appealing for more Christian-Muslim dialogue.

(Photo: Prince Ghazi at a Common Word conference at Yale University, 29 July 2008/Tom Heneghan)

“Interfaith dialogue is certainly part of the “bridge building” that the Nobel committee cherishes so much,” Moskwa told me. “They may also like to award a moderate Islamic scholar, especially one whose initiatives are referred to as a ‘theological counter-attack against terrorism.’ Since 9/11, the list of Nobel laureates clearly shows a bigger focus by the Nobel committee on the Muslim world. Prince Ghazi is an interesting candidate, although his name has not been widely mentioned in the Nobel context before PRIO published its picks.”

The other religious leader mentioned is Venerable Thich Quang Do, Patriarch of the outlawed United Buddhist Church of Vietnam, who seems to have been nominated several times since 2000.  The Rafto Foundation of Norway, which sometimes anticipates the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded him its annual human rights prize in 2006. Quang Do has long been held under house arrest in his monastery near Ho Chi Minh City, accused of possessing state secrets. He denies that charge and Hanoi denies he is under house arrest or that it represses religion. Now 80, he was first arrested by the Communist authorities in 1977 and has been in and out of jail several times for protesting against restrictions on religion and the forced unification of Buddhist groups into a state-run church.  He was put under his present house arrest in 2001.

“Thich Quang Do seems to get attention as a Nobel candidate year after year, but it’s not clear if the committee would pick another Buddhist leader after the Dalai Lama won in 1989. Two decades is usually not that long, in Nobel time,” Moskwa said.

(Photo: Thich Quang Do in a 1 April 1999 file photo)

Father Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo was the last person of cloth to get the prize in 1996, when he shared it for peace work in East Timor, Moskwa added. Other religious laureates include Bishop Desmond Tutu in 1984, Mother Teresa in 1979, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1964, Dominican Georges Pire in 1958 and Quaker groups (The Friends Service Council and the American Friends Service Committee) in 1947.

Another Reuters Nobel watcher in Oslo, our Environment Correspondent Alister Doyle, has been checking out the prospects of a “green” winner but the fact that environmentalists won in 2007 (Al Gore and the U.N. Climate Panel) and 2004 (Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai) might work against another one now.

But the uncertainty continues. “There is no rotation (of themes), as there is no rotation as far as geography is concerned,” Lundestad told Reuters.

What do you think? Do you have a favourite religious leader you think deserves the Nobel Peace Prize? Has he or she been nominated — and if not, why not?

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British biologist Richard Dawkins, one of the leading voices of the “neo-atheist” movement, has taken the latest book-sized shot at the “intelligent design” movement. You can read my interview with Dawkins’ here about his new book: “The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.”

For a scientist of Dawkins’ caliber, intelligent design is a barn-door sized target. In a nutshell, it maintains that life is so complex that it must be the work of a creator. Its boosters claim their view is based in science and not influenced by religion, but it is widely seen as a thinly-veiled attempt to give a scientific gloss to creationism. That claim to science is the key here — most religions believe that God created the world, of course, but they state this as an article of faith and not a scientific fact.

On this blog, we often report on issues related to science and religion. We have to remain agnostic on the biggest question of all — does God exist? — and take fundamental dogmas as the starting point for each faith. This sometimes strikes readers as strange or biased. Some think it already shows a prejudice against belief. But just imagine what would happen if we took sides on teachings such as the resurrection of Jesus or the divine origin of the Koran. We would not be practicing journalism anymore, but some kind of theological analysis or deconstruction, and our readers would not be getting the information they want about religion news around the world.

That said, we can’t just take everything on faith alone.  As journalists, we have to stick to facts on the ground. It’s hard to question some beliefs, but we can hold people responsible for what they profess. For example, if a Catholic priest has an affair with a woman, that violation of his vow of celibacy makes his affair different from one between two lay people or two non-Catholics. And if he is prominent enough, like the charismatic Miami television preacher Father Alberto Cutié, it’s worth reporting. The same applies to Islam. The scriptures of most if not all religions can be vague and sometimes seemingly contradictory, so Reuters cannot say whether the phrase  “Islam is a religion of peace” is true or false. But we can report if a Muslim known to preach that belief is found to be involved in some violent activity. In both cases, we don’t question the basic tradition or belief but we hold the believers responsible to it in their actions.

Which brings me to the question of evolution. While preparing this post, I had a lively Dallas-to-Paris email exchange with Religion Editor Tom Heneghan about how we cover an issue in which two sides are so opposed.  We agree with how we’ve been doing it so far, but setting out our approach in words took some consultation. Here’s our view of the issue.

(Photo: Portrait of Charles Darwin, 12 Feb 2009/Gordon Jack)

All serious scientists accept evolution as a fact because of the overwhelming and verifiable evidence that supports it. Much of this evidence is laid out in Dawkins’ new book and a book published earlier this year by University of Chicago scientist Jerry Coyne called “Why Evolution is True.” I regard the latter, by the way, as more readable, especially for a layman. These came out now because this year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th of the publication of his major work “On the Origin of Species,” which originally laid out the case for evolution by natural selection. They have also come out because the authors are clearly irritated by the intelligent design movement.

How does that play out when we report about evolution? For example, when we write about the wildlife of Madagascar, we usually include a background paragraph saying something like: “Madagascar separated from the rest of Africa tens of millions of years ago and so its species evolved in isolation from its mother continent.” In a story about its lemurs, we don’t write: “Scientists say Madagascar broke off from Africa tens of millions of years but some people, taking the Bible as their reference, believe it can only be 10,000 years old and that its lemurs were made in their current form by a supernatural creator.” That would create a false equivalence between the two views. The scientists have empirical evidence for their view of these natural phenomena but the religious view is based on scripture and does not stand up to empirical analysis. This is a case of comparing apples and oranges.

Does this mean we have taken sides and are not being balanced? Hardly. In fact, we would lay ourselves open to that charge if we did give equal credence to arguments such as intelligent design. For instance, some boosters for intelligent design, trying to get their perspective taught alongside evolution in U.S. public schools despite repeated defeats, have shifted their approach and argued that for the sake of balance it is necessary to “teach the controversy” between evolution’s supporters and skeptics. But the world of science sees no serious issue to discuss, just a false equivalence created by campaigners trying to claim the seal of scientific approval for arguments that do not stand up to empirical testing.

So why do we “report the controversy” if we think one side has no case? We do it because creationists are numerous and politically and culturally influential in parts of the United States. They’re challenging science teaching in some states and opening museums that claim to prove evolution never happened. We also do it because their influence is spreading to other countries, most notably to Muslim countries through the work of Islamic creationists like Harun Yahya. And we do it because their arguments, flawed though they may be in the eyes of science, challenge scientists, religious leaders, philosophers and other thinkers to refine their arguments for whichever view of mankind they support. These are serious adult questions and attempts to wedge them into high school biology lessons miss the mark by a mile.

(Photo: Ken Ham, president of the group Answers in Genesis, at a creation museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, 26 May 2007/John Sommers II)

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