The Great Debate UK

from FaithWorld:

As Darwin Year ends, some seek to go “beyond Darwin”

Pigeon bones display at Darwin's former home, 12 Feb 2009/Tal Cohen

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.

Jean Staune, 25 Nov 2009/Tom Heneghan

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 debate over Darwin 150 years on

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.

from FaithWorld:

Muslim creationism is back in the news, this time in Egypt

Muslim creationism is back in the news. There's been a spate of articles in the U.S. and British press recently about the spread of this scripture-based challenge to Darwinian evolution among Muslims, mostly in the Middle East but also in Europe. The fact that some Muslims have embraced creationism, a trademark belief of some conservative American Protestants, is not new. Reuters first wrote about it in 2006 -- "Creation vs. Darwin takes Muslim twist in Turkey" -- and this blog has run several posts on the issue, including an interview with Islam's most prominent creationist, Harun Yahya. What's new is that these ideas seem to be spreading and academics who defend evolution are holding conferences to discuss the phenomenon.

There are too many recent articles about Islamic creationism out there now to discuss each one separately, so I'll have to just link to them in the ... New York Times ... Washington Post ... Boston Globe ... Slate ... Guardian ... National ... Beliefnet ... ... Many of these articles highlight the role of Harun Yahya, the once secretive Istanbul preacher and publisher who has gone on a PR offensive in recent years and turned very media-friendly (as Steve Paulson describes in that Slate article). But as Michael Reiss, a London education professor and Anglican priest told the Guardian, "what the Turks believe today is what the Germans and British believe tomorrow. It is because of the mass movement of people between countries. These things can no longer be thought of as occurring in other countries."

Over the weekend, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt hosted a conference on “Darwin's Living Legacy: An International Conference on Evolution and Society” with the British Council. The simple fact of holding a conference on Darwin in the heart of the Middle East, where his theory of evolution is widely rejected, is already noteworthy. According to the Guardian's Riazat Butt, Nidhal Guessoum, professor of physics and astronomy at the American University of Sharjah, told the conference that only three Muslim or Muslim-majority countries out of a possible 22 taught evolution. Another participant, astronomer Salman Hameed, who is professor of integrated science & humanities from Hampshire College in Massachusetts, wrote on his informative science-and-religion blog Irtiqa: "It is incredible that this conference is taking place in Egypt. I don't know what will be the reaction here. Simply by its location, it may remove some of the stigma regarding evolution in the Muslim world, or it may end up generating a backlash. Frankly, I have no idea about the reaction."

In an update on Sunday, Hameed wrote: "There have been some anti-evolutionary comments made in the sessions that dealt with religion and evolution - but overall, the reception seems to have been quite positive - both in Egyptian newspapers and among the local participants."

As a example of what they're up against, another participant was Zaghloul El-Naggar, a leading proponent of the theory that the Koran foresaw scientific theories and discoveries, including the Big Bang and a possible cure for AIDS. He was quoted prominently in a recent Al-Jazeera report on the discovery of the 4.4 million year old skeleton known as Ardipithicus or "Ardi." The report claimed that the find disproved Darwinian evolution -- the opposite of what scientists said about the spectacular discovery of the most complete early hominid specimen we have.  The report only appeared in Al-Jazeera's Arabic-language television channel, which is very popular in the Middle East, and not in its English-language broadcast. "The presence of El-Naggar totally polarized the debate and evoked an equally polarizing reaction from the audience," wrote Hameed, who promised further posts from the conference ending today.

from FaithWorld:

Facts and false equivalence – reporting on evolution disputes

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 outour approach in words took some consultation. Here's our view of the issue.

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.