Harun Yahya’s Muslim creationists tour France denouncing Darwin
France’s staunchly secularist educational establishment was shocked four years ago when schools around the country suddenly began receiving free copies of a richly illustrated Muslim creationist book entitled the “Atlas of Creation.” The book by Istanbul preacher and publisher Harun Yahya had come out in Turkey the year earlier. After the French Education Ministry warned teachers not to use it and held a seminar on how to deal with creationist pupils, the issue dropped out of the public discussion. But the Harun Yahya group has been spreading its view in France and is now holding a series of conferences on them. Here is my feature after visiting one of the first meetings in the current series:
AUBERVILLIERS, France (Reuters) – Four years after they first frightened France, Muslim creationists are back touring the country preaching against evolution and claiming the Koran predicted many modern scientific discoveries.
Followers of Harun Yahya, a well-financed Turkish publisher of popular Islamic books, held four conferences at Muslim centers in the Paris area at the weekend with more scheduled in six other cities.
At a Muslim junior high school in this north Paris suburb, about 100 pupils — boys seated on the right, girls on the left — listened as two Turks from Harun Yahya’s headquarters in Istanbul denounced evolution as a theory Muslims should shun.
“We didn’t descend from the apes,” lecturer Ali Sadun told the giggling youngsters. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, he said, was “the scientific basis to defend atheism.”
Harun Yahya, one of the most prolific publishers in the Muslim world, gave proudly secularist France a scare in January 2007 by mass-mailing thousands of free copies of his “Atlas of Creation” to schools and libraries across the country.
The Education Ministry quickly ordered headmasters to seize and hide copies of the large format book that, over 768 pages of glossy photographs and easy-to-read text, argues that all living things were created by God exactly as they are formed today.
UK astrophysicist Sir Martin Rees wins 2011 Templeton Prize
British astrophysicist Sir Martin Rees, whose research delves deep into the mysteries of the cosmos, has won the 2011 Templeton Prize for career achievements affirming life’s spiritual dimension. The one million sterling ($1.6 million) award, the world’s largest to an individual, was announced on Wednesday in London. Rees, master of Trinity College at Cambridge University, is former head of the Royal Society and a life peer.
Announcing the award, the United States-based Templeton Foundation said Rees’s insights into the mysteries of the Big Bang and so-called black holes in space have “provoked vital questions that address mankind’s deepest hopes and fears… Lord Rees has widened the boundaries of understanding about the physical processes that define the cosmos, including speculations on the concept of ‘multiverses’ or infinite universes… The ‘big questions’ Lord Rees raises — such as ‘how large is physical reality?’ — are reshaping the philosophical and theological considerations that strike at the core of life.”
Rees, 68, says he has no religious beliefs but was brought up in the Church of England and values its culture and ethics. Theology cannot explain scientific mysteries, he told Reuters, but added: “I’m not allergic to religion or religious believers.” Previous winners of the prize, which seeks to promote better understanding between science and religion, include Catholic nun Mother Teresa, U.S. preacher Billy Graham and Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn as well as many leading scientists.
During his career, Rees has made important contributions to support the theories of the Big Bang, the explosive start to the universe 13.7 billion years ago, and of the existence of massive “black holes” in space in which even light can be trapped. Rees, who was awarded the honorary title of Astronomer Royal in 1995, has also been a leading theorist of the “multiverse.”
“Our Big Bang may not be the only one,” he said in a statement on winning the prize. “We may be living in a ‘multiverse’ — an archipelago of cosmoses, perhaps governed by an array of different physical laws.”
In the past decade, Rees has become active in public debate on global issues, notably man-made threats to the environment. His research also has led him to take huge steps back to observe humanity and its place in the vast cosmos.
Multiverses sound like some sci-fi from the “Chronicles of Riddick”, Rees is just another Kendrick Schon, but with a twist of lemon, his theories will never be proven in this century. Why is it all the intellectual elitists are atheists with a morality? They justify their disbelief with science, but whenever I ask, “how about an astronaut god, or god after the “magnus explosio theorum”, they all seem to disappear? God before creation or after would disturb the left wing liberal mind, and their preoccupation with drugs, and porn.
Imperfections mar hopes for “ethical” reprogrammed stem cells
When scientists announced five years ago they could reprogram ordinary skin cells into behaving like embryonic stem cells, religious conservatives and others who opposed the use of stem cells cheered the advance. But while they have proven to be a powerful new way to study human disease, the reprogrammed cells — known as induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells — are no substitute for embryonic stem cells.
“This has strong policy implications,” Dr. George Daley of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and Harvard Medical School said in a telephone interview. “It has not ever been a scientifically driven argument that iPS cells are a worthy and complete substitute for embryonic stem cells. Those arguments were always made based on political and religious opposition to embryonic stem cells.”
Stem cells are the body’s master cells, the source material for all other cells. Proponents of embryonic stem cells say they could transform medicine, providing treatments for blindness, juvenile diabetes or severe injuries. Scientists typically harvest embryonic stem cells from leftover embryos at fertility clinics. But the issue has been a point of controversy for some religious conservatives, for example the Roman Catholic Church, who believe the destruction of any human embryo is wrong.
When they were first discovered in 2006, induced pluripotent stem cells looked like a perfect solution to this ethical debate. Instead of destroying an embryo, iPS cells are made in a lab from ordinary skin or blood cells. Using various methods, scientists introduce three or four genes that return these cells to an embryonic-like state in which they, too, are able to turn into any type of cell.
But recently, scientists have started to raise concerns about iPS cells. Last year, a group led by Dr. Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer of Advanced Cell Technology, compared batches of iPS cells to embryonic stem cells and noticed the iPS cells died more quickly and were much less capable of growing and expanding.
“It was the first study showing there were problems. No one wanted to believe it,” Lanza said.
Lourdes calls a healing “remarkable,” avoiding the term “miracle”
The Roman Catholic shrine at Lourdes has announced the “remarkable healing” of a French invalid, avoiding the traditional term “miracle” because its doctors increasingly shy away from calling an illness or condition incurable. The case of Serge François, 56, whose left leg was mostly paralysed for years, was the first healing announced since the Church eased some rules in 2006 for declaring that a person was healed thanks to visiting the site.
The Catholic Church teaches that God sometimes performs miracles, including cures that doctors can’t explain. Sceptics reject this as unscientific and explain sudden recoveries as psychological phenomena or the delayed result of treatment.
Here’s the announcement on the official site in French, with information about Serge François. Click on “English” at the upper right for the translation (not available at the time of this posting).
“In the name of the Church, I publicly recognise the ‘remarkable’ character of the healing from which Serge François benefited at Lourdes on April 12, 2002,” said Bishop Emmanuel Delmas of Angers in western France, where François lives.
Delmas, who earned a medical degree before entering the priesthood, said the bureau of medical experts at Lourdes had concluded the recovery was “sudden, complete, unrelated to any particular therapy and durable.”
“Doctors today hesitate to use the adjective ‘inexplicable,’ or at least qualify it by adding ‘according to the current state of scientific knowledge’,” Lourdes Bishop Jacques Perrier said in a statement to explain the new wording. “They consider this reserve indispensible so they are not disqualified by their colleagues who refuse to consider things may be inexplicable.”
Saudis want more science in religion-heavy education
Saudi teenager Abdulrahman Saeed lives in one of the richest countries in the world, but his prospects are poor, he blames his education, and it’s not a situation that looks like changing soon. “There is not enough in our curriculum,” says Saeed, 16, who goes to an all-male state school in the Red Sea port of Jeddah. “It is just theoretical teaching, and there is no practice or guidance to prepare us for the job market.”
Saeed wants to study physics but worries that his state high school is failing him. He says the curriculum is outdated, and teachers simply repeat what is written in text books without adding anything of practical value or discussions. Even if the teachers did do more than the basics, Saeed’s class, at 32 students, is too big for him to get adequate attention. While children in Europe and Asia often start learning a language at five or six, Saudi students start learning English at 12. Much time is spent studying religion and completing exercises heavy with moral instruction.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia sits on more than a fifth of the globe’s oil reserves and thanks to high oil prices it has almost tripled its foreign assets to more than $400 billion (248 billion pounds) since 2005. The region’s thinkers had a profound influence on the evolving western science of the Middle Ages. But from kindergarten to university, its state education system has barely entered the modern age. Focussed on religious and Arabic studies, it has long struggled to produce the scientists, engineers, economists and lawyers that Saudi needs.
High school literature, history and even science text books regularly quote Koranic verses. Employers complain that universities churn out graduates who are barely computer-literate and struggle with English. So frustrated are some students, they have taken to the streets in protest.
“Education in our country cannot be compared to education abroad,” says Dina Faisal, mother of a 15-year old student in Jeddah. “We have a lack of sciences, physics, and biology. That is what is needed to push the country forward. There has been some change but it is far from being complete.”
Read this special report by Ulf Laessing and Asma Alsharif here.
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The US needs more Christianity in it’s science heavy education! The macro evolution faith movement and secularization of church and state have laid waste to a generation!! Science without religion is inept-Einstein!
France to renew tight bioethics limits, critics hit Catholic lobbying
France’s parliament opened debate on revising its bioethics laws on Tuesday amid protests that Roman Catholic Church lobbying had thwarted plans to ease the existing curbs on embryonic stem cell research. The bill, originally meant to update a 2004 law in light of rapid advances in the science of procreation, would also uphold bans on surrogate motherhood and assisted procreation for gays.
The debate coincided with news of France’s first “saviour sibling,” a designer baby conceived in vitro to provide stem cells to treat a sibling suffering from a severe blood disorder.
Critics of the bill said last-minute changes by deputies of the governing conservative UMP party meant the revision would hardly change the restrictive law currently on the books. The text retains tight limits for research on embryonic stem cells, a technology the Church vigourously opposes because the in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) method used to produce them creates extra embryos that are later discarded.
“The Catholics have succeeded in imposing their view on embryos and seem to be succeeding in their attack on this method,” said François Olivennes, a leading fertility expert, told Europe 1 radio. “We already have a very retrograde law compared to those in Spain, Britain, Belgium, Netherlands and all of Scandinavia. Nothing is advancing.”
“We propose the authorisation” of this research, said Alain Claeys, a deputy from the opposition Socialist Party.
The French Catholic Church has made bioethics a priority issue and overseen reports, public meetings and lobbying efforts to oppose an easing and aim for a tightening of the current law. The bill does not meet all the Church’s demands, however. Among other things, it supports prenatal screening for Down’s syndrome, which if found usually leads to an abortion.
Paris Cardinal André Vingt-Trois kept up Catholic criticism of controversial new medical techniques, saying the “saviour baby” whose birth was announced on Tuesday was produced to be used to heal another child. “Are we going to become instruments? I’m completely opposed to that,” he said. Ten other bishops issued a statement calling the technique an ethical regression and asked: “What will the child say when it finds out it was a ‘designer baby’?”
God did not create the universe, gravity did, says Stephen Hawking
God did not create the universe and the “Big Bang” was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics, the eminent British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking argues in a new book.
In “The Grand Design,” co-authored with U.S. physicist Leonard Mlodinow, Hawking says a new series of theories made a creator of the universe redundant, according to the Times newspaper which published extracts on Thursday.
“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist,” Hawking writes. “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”
Hawking, 68, who won global recognition with his 1988 book “A Brief History of Time,” an account of the origins of the universe, is renowned for his work on black holes, cosmology and quantum gravity. His latest comments suggest he has broken away from previous views he has expressed on religion. Previously, he wrote that the laws of physics meant it was simply not necessary to believe that God had intervened in the Big Bang.
For an initial sceptical reaction, see Mark Vernon’s Philosophy and Life blog.
Okay, I am not a scientists, and I am a dumb when it comes to mathematics, but very soon, we’ll see true facts behind every false theories from our scientists ( Science is not the problem, the problem is “some” of our feeble scientists who wanted to be renowned by force, thus creating problems to make science a problem). They are using calculation to define issues of observation; they are proving to you things they themselves haven’t seen with their own eyes; they designed cameras and computers to make their theories work in line; they thoughts ” we can remove the hand of the Creator by denying Him in our theories, so people could believe they existed for nothing”. They said things drop to the centre of the earth because a force attract them, and whatever does go up must come down. Well, I have seen things which goes up but never come down- How about that? Why isn’t gravity attracting it? Can we breathe in the air in the space? Is there atmosphere there atall? Not really! The theory of gravity is hoax; there is no gravity! Though it may be in the space, but never ever on this very planet I live.
Was this not the same Hawking who said God created the Sun? Few months later, he denied God didn’t! Now he is telling you gravity formed you from nothing, to make you feel nothing from nothing, so you can live for nothing and die for nothing! Guys, wake up! If you need to understand any mysteries behind human existence, please read the Bible, and simply ask for wisdom, knowledge and understanding. I did just this and I have been inspired things that can be done to effectively stop the “giant pilar that riad our lands”. All I know, and that I’ll adhere to is that there is a Creator whose hands are full of wonders and mind with creative thoughts; He created the stars and the sun, he created the moon, too. HE CREATED YOU- All these I knew before reading the Bible atall. And if you don’t want to bring in religion in this sense, simply put away religion theories and explanation of Life, and embark on serious NATURE EXPLORATION, and you’ll see a creative mind in the centre of everything in LIFE.
There is a loving, intelligent, sweet, faithful and mighty creator who created every discovered and undiscovered species we have seen and yet to see and that we’ll never see; His name is Jehovaah, the almighty, the all-powerful, the all-controller!
Thank you,
Emmanuel.
Israel Museum takes a new look at the history of the Holy Land
A new Jerusalem exhibit displaying a million years of history in the Holy Land offers Bible buffs and skeptics alike a chance to say: “I told you so!” The Israel Museum, fresh-faced after a three-year, $100 million upgrade, offers an unparalleled look into the development of monotheistic religions, while leaving plenty of room for both science and faith.
The museum’s more devout visitors may feel vindicated by a collection of three-thousand-year-old weapons used by ancient warriors in the Battle of Lachish, verifying the fighting as depicted in the Bible. The scientifically minded can point to a set of 1.5 million year old bull horns on display around the corner, by far predating Earth’s creation as described by the book of Genesis.
A new exhibit features the reconstruction of a church originally built about 400 years after the time of Jesus. It has daunting similarities to a synagogue of the same period reconstructed alongside. The influence can also be seen in later Islamic relics on display nearby.
Scientists inch towards finding elusive “God particle” creating cosmos
Scientists working with particle accelerators in Europe and the United States said on Monday they may be closing in on the elusive Higgs Boson, the “God particle” believed crucial to forming the cosmos after the Big Bang.
Researchers from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project near Geneva said in just three months of experiments they had already detected all the particles at the heart of our current understanding of physics, the Standard Model.
The International Conference on High Energy Physics in Paris heard that experiments were progressing faster than expected and entering a stage in which “new physics” would emerge. This could include long-awaited proof of the existence of the Higgs Boson and the detection of dark matter, believed to make up about a quarter of the universe alongside an observable 5 percent and 70 percent consisting of invisible dark energy.
Physicists think this subatomic speck of matter, if it is ever found, could explain the mysterious code at the origin of the physical world. To know this would be to “know the mind of God,” as Einstein wanted to do. The physicist who launched the hunt for this elusive particle doesn’t like its nickname. “It embarrasses me,” Peter Higgs has said. “Although I am not a believer myself, it’s a misuse of terminology that might offend some people.”
“Although I am not a believer myself, it’s a misuse of terminology that might offend some people.”A-OK! Great quote!
As Darwin Year ends, some seek to go “beyond Darwin”
As this Darwin Year 2009 draws to a close, I have to say a lot of the public debate it prompted came down to the sterile old clash between evolution and creationism. The issue of religion always hung in the air, with the loudest arguments coming from the creationist side defending it or the neo-atheists like the Darwinian biologist Richard Dawkins denouncing it. In the end, the squabbling seemed to be more about ideology than science and told us little we didn’t already know.
So I was intrigued by a conference held at UNESCO here in Paris recently about scientists who believe in evolution but want to go “beyond Darwin.” Organised by French philosopher of science Jean Staune, its speakers argued that Darwin could not explain underlying order and patterns found in nature. “We have to differentiate between evolution and Darwinism,” said Jean Staune, author of the new book “Au-dela de Darwin” (Beyond Darwin). “Of course there is adaptation. But like physics and chemistry, biology is also subject to its own laws.”
Michael Denton, a geneticist with New Zealand’s University of Otago, said Darwinian “functionalists” believed life forms simply adapted to the outside world while his “structuralist” view also saw an internal logic driving this evolution down certain paths. His view, which he called “extraordinarily foreign to modern biology,” explained why many animals developed “camera eyes” like human ones and why proteins, one of the building blocks of life, fold into structures unchanged for three billion years.
The speakers here — all academics from fields such as genetics, neurobiology, psychology and paleontology — are of course neither the first nor the only scientists to argue that life must have evolved by more than just natural selection. Several mentioned the British paleontologist Simon Conway Morris, who argues that the evolutionary convergence of life forms “throws severe doubt on a number of fashionable presuppositions in evolution.” But it was interesting to see how many different arguments the scientists brought to supplement the basic evolution thesis they supported.
Denton is an interesting case because he is a scientist with publications in peer-reviewed journals who was originally close to the intelligent design movement. His 1985 book “Evolution: A Theory in Crisis” helped launch the “ID” movement and he was linked to the Discovery Institute, a leading advocate of the controversial idea. But he later changed his mind and argued in the 1998 book “Nature’s Destiny: How the Law of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe” argued that evolution occurred but was channeled down certain paths by inherent structures in nature.
A few days after the conference, I sat down with Staune and Denton to find out more about their ideas and what they might mean for religion. Excerpts from these interviews are on the following page.
(UPDATE: Due to technical problems, the original “page 2″ option here did not work on this post on all our websites. Following is the second page.)
Evolution can’t explain patterns in nature? Absolute bunk.
There is a reason why common forms of animal exist in nature. Because not all forms are equal in utility or success. Natural selection shows how certain aspects will be more successful in lifeforms, hence these aspects are likely to be more common.
So a scientist claiming that evolution doesn’t explain convergent evolution is just as odd as a scientist saying that evolution as a process is random.
This has nothing to do with going ‘beyond’ Darwin.
This is probably just another attempt to insert the concepts of design into evolutionary theory. Design implies designer. Designer implies supernatural. Supernatural implies religion.
If so, its been tried before. And people are wise to it.
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