In the beginning (Evolution and religion)

The debate over creation and evolution, once most conspicuous in America, is fast going global

THE “Atlas of Creation” runs to 770 pages and is lavishly illustrated with photographs of fossils and living animals, interlaced with quotations from the Koran. Its author claims to prove not only the falsehood of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, but the links between “Darwinism” and such diverse evils as communism, fascism and terrorism. In recent weeks the “Atlas de la Création” has been arriving unsolicited and free of charge at schools and universities across French-speaking Europe. It is the latest sign of a revolt against the theories of Darwin, on which virtually the whole of modern biology is based, that is gathering momentum in many parts of the world.

The mass distribution of a French version of the “Atlas” (already published in English and Turkish) typifies the style of an Istanbul publishing house whose sole business is the dissemination, in many languages, of scores of works by a single author, a charismatic but controversial Turkish preacher who writes as Harun Yahya but is really called Adnan Oktar. According to a Turkish scientist who now lives in America, the movement founded by Mr Oktar is “powerful, global and very well financed”. Translations of Mr Oktar's work into tongues like Arabic, Urdu and Bahasa Indonesia have ensured a large following in Muslim countries.

In his native Turkey there are many people, including devout Muslims, who feel uncomfortable about the 51-year-old Mr Oktar's strong appeal to young women and his political sympathies for the nationalist right. But across the Muslim world he seems to be riding high. Many of the most popular Islamic websites refer readers to his vast canon.

In the more prosperous parts of the historically Christian world, Mr Oktar's flamboyant style would be unappealing, even to religious believers. Among mainstream Catholics and liberal Protestants, clerical pronouncements on creation and evolution are often couched in careful—and for many people, almost impenetrable—theological language. For example, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and leader of the world's 80m Anglicans, has dismissed literal readings of the Creation story in Genesis as a “category mistake”. But no such highbrow reticence holds back the more zealous Christian movements in the developing world, where the strongest religious medicine seems to go down best.

In Kenya, for example, there is a bitter controversy over plans to put on display the most complete skeleton of a prehistoric human being ever found, a figure known as Turkana Boy—along with a collection of fossils, some of which may be as much as 200m years old. Bishop Boniface Adoyo, an evangelical leader who claims to speak for 35 denominations and 10m believers, has denounced the proposed exhibit, asserting that: “I did not evolve from Turkana Boy or anything like it.”

Richard Leakey, the palaeontologist who unearthed both the skeleton and the fossils in northern Kenya, is adamant that the show must go on. “Whether the bishop likes it or not, Turkana Boy is a distant relation of his,” Mr Leakey has insisted. Local Catholics have backed him.

Rows over religion and reason are also raging in Russia. In recent weeks the Russian Orthodox Church has backed a family in St Petersburg who (unsuccessfully) sued the education authorities for teaching only about evolution to explain the origins of life. Plunging into deep scientific waters, a spokesman for the Moscow Patriarchate, Father Vsevolod Chaplin, said Darwin's theory of evolution was “based on pretty strained argumentation”—and that physical evidence cited in its support “can never prove that one biological species can evolve into another.”

A much more nuanced critique, not of Darwin himself but of secular world-views based on Darwin's ideas, has been advanced by Pope Benedict XVI, the conservative Bavarian who assumed the most powerful office in the Christian world two years ago. The pope marked his 80th birthday this week by publishing a book on Jesus Christ. But for Vatican-watchers, an equally important event was the issue in German, a few days earlier, of a book in which the pontiff and several key advisers expound their views on the emergence of the universe and life. While avoiding the cruder arguments that have been used to challenge Darwin's theories, the pope asserts that evolution cannot be conclusively proved; and that the manner in which life developed was indicative of a “divine reason” which could not be discerned by scientific methods alone.

Both in his previous role as the chief enforcer of Catholic doctrine and since his enthronement, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has made clear his profound belief that man has a unique, God-given role in the animal kingdom; and that a divine creator has an ongoing role in sustaining the universe, something far more than just “lighting the blue touch paper” for the Big Bang, the event that scientists think set the universe in motion. Yesterday America, today the world

As these examples from around the world show, the debate over creation, evolution and religion is rapidly going global. Until recently, all the hottest public arguments had taken place in the United States, where school boards in many districts and states tried to restrict the teaching of Darwin's idea that life in its myriad forms evolved through a natural process of adaptation to changing conditions.

Darwin-bashers in America suffered a body-blow in December 2005, when a judge—striking down the policies of a district school board in Pennsylvania—delivered a 139-page verdict that delved deeply into questions about the origin of life and tore apart the case made by the “intelligent design” camp: the idea that some features of the natural world can be explained only by the direct intervention of a ingenious creator.

Intelligent design, the judge found, was a religious theory, not a scientific one—and its teaching in schools violated the constitution, which bars the establishment of any religion. One point advanced in favour of intelligent design—the “irreducible complexity” of some living things—was purportedly scientific, but it was not well-founded, the judge ruled. Proponents of intelligent design were also dishonest in saying that where there were gaps in evolutionary theory, their own view was the only alternative, according to the judge.

The Seattle-based Discovery Institute, which has spearheaded the American campaign to counter-balance the teaching of evolution, artfully distanced itself from the Pennsylvania case, saying the local school board had gone too far in mixing intelligent design with a more overtly religious doctrine of “creationism”. But the verdict made it much harder for school boards in other parts of America to mandate curbs on the teaching of evolution, as many have tried to do—to the horror of most professional scientists.

Whatever the defeats they have suffered on home ground, American foes of Darwin seem to be gaining influence elsewhere. In February several luminaries of the anti-evolution movement in the United States went to Istanbul for a grand conference where Darwin's ideas were roundly denounced. The organiser of the gathering was a Turkish Muslim author and columnist, Mustafa Akyol, who forged strong American connections during a fellowship at the Discovery Institute.

To the dismay of some Americans and the delight of others, Mr Akyol was invited to give evidence (against Darwin's ideas) at hearings held by the Kansas school board in 2005 on how science should be taught. Mr Akyol, an advocate of reconciliation between Muslims and the West who is much in demand at conferences on the future of Islam, is careful to distinguish his position from that of the extravagant publishing venture in his home city. “They make some valid criticisms of Darwinism, but I disagree with most of their other views,” insists the young author, whose other favourite cause is the compatibility between Islam and Western liberal ideals, including human rights and capitalism. But a multi-layered anti-Darwin movement has certainly brought about a climate in Turkey and other Muslim countries that makes sure challenges to evolution theory, be they sophisticated or crude, are often well received.

America's arguments over evolution are also being followed closely in Brazil, where—as the pope will find when he visits the country next month—various forms of evangelicalism and Pentecostalism are advancing rapidly at the expense of the majority Catholic faith. Samuel Rodovalho, an activist in Brazil's Pentecostal church, puts it simply: “We are convinced that the story of Genesis is right, and we take heart from the fact that in North America the teaching of evolution in schools has been challenged.”

Even in the United States, defenders of evolution teaching do not see their battle as won. There was widespread dismay in their ranks in February when John McCain, a Republican presidential candidate, accepted an invitation (albeit to talk about geopolitics, not science) from the Discovery Institute. And some opponents of intelligent design are still recovering from their shock at reading in the New York Times a commentary written, partly at the prompting of the Discovery Institute, by the pope's close friend, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the Archbishop of Vienna.

In his July 2005 article the cardinal seemed to challenge what most scientists would see as axiomatic—the idea that natural selection is an adequate explanation for the diversity and complexity of life in all its forms. Within days, the pope and his advisers found they had new interlocutors. Lawrence Krauss, an American physicist in the front-line of courtroom battles over education, fired off a letter to the Vatican urging a clarification. An agnostic Jew who insists that evolution neither disproves nor affirms any particular faith, Mr Krauss recruited as co-signatories two American biologists who were also devout Catholics. Around the same time, another Catholic voice was raised in support of evolution, that of Father George Coyne, a Jesuit astronomer who until last year was head of the Vatican observatory in Rome. Mr Krauss reckons his missive helped to nudge the Catholic authorities into clarifying their view and insisting that they did still accept natural selection as a scientific theory.

But that was not the end of the story. Catholic physicists, biologists and astronomers (like Father Coyne) insisted that there was no reason to revise their view that intelligent design is bad science. And they expressed concern (as the Christian philosopher Augustine did in the 4th century) that if the Christian church teaches things about the physical world which are manifestly false, then everything else the church teaches might be discredited too. But there is also a feeling among Pope Benedict's senior advisers that in rejecting intelligent design as it is understood in America they must not go too far in endorsing the idea that Darwinian evolution says all that needs to be, or can be, said about how the world came to be.

The net result has been the emergence of two distinct camps among the Catholic pundits who aspire to influence the pope. In one there are people such as Father Coyne, who believe (like the agnostic Mr Krauss) that physics and metaphysics can and should be separated. From his new base at a parish in North Carolina, Father Coyne insists strongly on the integrity of science—“natural phenomena have natural causes”—and he is as firm as any secular biologist in asserting that every year the theory of evolution is consolidated with fresh evidence.

In the second camp are those, including some high up in the Vatican bureaucracy, who feel that Catholic scientists like Father Coyne have gone too far in accepting the world-view of their secular colleagues. This camp stresses that Darwinian science should not seduce people into believing that man evolved purely as the result of a process of random selection. While rejecting American-style intelligent design, some authoritative Catholic thinkers claim to see God's hand in “convergence”: the apparent fact that, as they put it, similar processes and structures are present in organisms that have evolved separately.

As an example of Catholic thinking that is relatively critical of science-based views of the world, take Father Joseph Fessio, the provost of Ave Maria University in Florida and a participant in a seminar on creation and evolution which led to the new book with papal input. As Father Fessio observes, Catholics accept three different ways of learning about reality: empirical observation, direct revelations from God and, between those two categories, “natural philosophy”—the ability of human reason to discern divine reason in the created universe. That is not quite intelligent design, but it does sound similar. The mainly Protestant heritage of the United States may be one reason why the idea of “natural philosophy” is poorly understood by American thinkers, Father Fessio playfully suggests. (Another problem the Vatican may face is that Orthodox Christian theologians, as well as Catholic mystics, are wary of “natural philosophy”: they insist that mystical communion with God is radically different from observation or speculation by the human brain.) The evolution of the anti-evolutionists

Whatever they think about science, there is one crucial problem that all Christian thinkers about creation must wrestle with: the status of the human being in relation to other creatures, and the whole universe. There is no reading of Christianity which does not assert the belief that mankind, while part of the animal kingdom, has a unique vocation and potential to enhance the rest of creation, or else to destroy it. This point has been especially emphasised by Pope Benedict's interlocutors in the Orthodox church, such as its senior prelate Patriarch Bartholomew I, who has been nudging the Vatican to take a stronger line on man's effect on the environment and climate change.

For Father Coyne, belief in man's unique status is entirely consistent with an evolutionary view of life. “The fact we are at the end of this marvellous process is something that glorifies us,” he says.

But Benedict XVI apparently wants to lay down an even stronger line on the status of man as a species produced by divine ordinance, not just random selection. “Man is the only creature on earth that God willed for his own sake,” says a document issued under Pope John Paul II and approved by the then Cardinal Ratzinger.

What is not quite clear is whether the current pope accepts the “Chinese wall” that his old scientific adviser, Father Coyne, has struggled to preserve between physics and metaphysics. It is in the name of this Chinese wall that Father Coyne and other Catholic scientists have been able to make common cause with agnostics, like Mr Krauss, in defence of the scientific method. What the Jesuit astronomer and his secular friends all share is the belief that people who agree about physics can differ about metaphysics or religion.

Critics like Father Fessio would retort that their problem was not with the Chinese wall—but with an attempt to tear it down by scientists whose position is both Darwinist and anti-religious: in other words, with those who believe that scientific observation of the universe leaves no room at all for religious belief. (Some scientists and philosophers go further, dismissing religion itself as a phenomenon brought about by man's evolutionary needs.)

The new book quoting Pope Benedict's contributions to last year's seminar shows him doing his best to pick his way through these arguments: accepting that scientific descriptions of the universe are valid as far as they go, while insisting that they are ultimately incomplete as a way of explaining how things came to be. On those points, he seems to share the “anti-Darwinist” position of Father Fessio; but he also agrees with Father Coyne that a “God of the gaps” theory—which uses a deity to fill in the real or imagined holes in evolutionary science—is too small-minded. Only a handful of the world's 2 billion Christians will be able to make sense of his intricate intellectual arguments, and there is a risk that simplistic reporting and faulty interpretation of his ideas could create the impression that the pope has deserted to the ranks of the outright anti-evolutionists; he has done no such thing, his advisers insist.

Not that the advocates of intelligent design or outright creationists are in need of anyone's endorsement. Their ideas are flourishing and their numbers growing. As Mr Krauss has caustically argued, the anti-evolution movement is itself a prime example of evolution and adaptability—defeated in one arena, it will resurface elsewhere. His ally Father Coyne, the devoted star-gazer, is one of the relatively few boffins who have managed to expound with equal passion both their scientific views and their religious beliefs. He writes with breathless excitement about “the dance of the fertile universe, a ballet with three ballerinas: chance, necessity and fertility.” Whether they are atheists or theists, other supporters of Darwin's ideas on natural selection will have to inspire as well as inform if they are to compete with their growing army of foes.

It has always been a battle between God and Satan

Exactly. Good vs. evil, all the time, everytime! Satan - the father of lies! He uses lies wrapped up in some truth to deceive. He attracts them with some truth and then he has them. But, then again, we are warned about that in His Word.

actually believe in God, but think that he used Evolution to make man.

They believe in a god but not the God of the Bible! Because they don't believe in what He says. Whatever He creator, He said it is good. God needed help (evolution)! LOL That's those pee-pee brains working!

Once the proof was provided, it was just a little too late when the arks doors closed.

Yeah! They, too, were thinking with their pee-pee brains - it NEVER happened before, so a flood will not wipe us out - can't possibly happen. So they sat around and laughed at Noah and his family for years and years. Not that Noah laughed - he knew what will happen because He believed in God. But the others leaned on 'THEIR OWN understanding'. God's ways are not ours.

This time, the proof will be a lot of heat......lots of heat.

Yes - and for ETERNITY. You just don't burn up and that's it! I'm taking a John Bevere class on his book - Driven by Eternity. So much info that I had no idea about - it's a somber class. They show his CD on this - he gives lots of scripture - so it's all in the Good Book!

Good post. Thank you.

****** “wrong.......You would know Jesus Christ with or without Religion.”

How?

How would you know of Jesus Christ if not from the Bible or from a preacher of some sort?

****** “....Religion was made by man as a term and is used to control people....”

James says that Religion can be good... “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.” - James 1:27

****** “Don’t forget, the POPE just declared that Babies are no longer in Limbo...:”

It’s not my job to defend the Pope - but he was addressing a commonly held belief not the dogma of the RCC. (Catholics may correct me on this.)

****** “The Holy Spirit could care less about Religion.”

The Holy Spirit inspired James to write his epistle we referenced above.

****** “you don’t need religion to have communion with God.”

Religion:

1A. Belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers regarded as creator and governor of the universe.
1B. A personal or institutionalized system grounded in such belief and worship.

2. The life or condition of a person in a religious order.

3. A set of beliefs, values, and practices based on the teachings of a spiritual leader.

4. A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion.

Based on the above, which kind of religion are you referring to?

Evolution itself has been used for so many just-so stories it is on the verge of becoming a tautology. Since atheists use evolution as an attack on the Bible and conservative Christians, there is more to evolution than a simple “mechanism of creation”. If the atheist crowd could definitively prove false Genesis, then why should they take any part of Christianity seriously?

While the young-earth crowd increasingly grasp at straws, this doesn’t mean we should throw out even a literal interpretation of Genesis entirely. But at the same time this does not mean that we understand the literal meaning of Genesis completely. For instance, due to the fluidity of time as affected by speed and gravity, the explanation in Genesis, even if accurate, may not be clear for quite a while.

While genetics should be the foundation of biology, and I don’t believe that any biologist would say that they completely understand genetics, evolution has taken over as the philosophical “foundation of biology” even while new cellular and genetic mechanisms are discovered today.

How?

****The Holy Spirit is supernatural. The Holy Spirit talks to us through our thoughts and he writes on our hearts the true word of God when we let him in. How do you think the authors of the Bible wrote the Bible in the first place. The old testament to the New testament, written by man, but his writings were inspired by a supernatural force called the Holy Spirit. Jesus said we would not be left alone, he would send the comforter. God would not has us to depend the possession of a Bible. He surpasses all that. You can take the Bible away, you can burn it, whatever, but the word of God is written in our hearts. One cannot restrict nor shut out the creator. One cannot box God up and fit him into what we would like him to be, just so we are comfortable in our own little made up world.

“How would you know of Jesus Christ if not from the Bible or from a preacher of some sort?”

****Just answered that.....Don’t need a preacher, Pope or Rabbi, or Imam. You can’t limit God to this world. Preachers, Popes, etc.....are nice to have, however, 30% +/- of Catholic priest or whoever are pedofiles...Baptist preachers sometimes “messes” around with the Deacons wife....or underage children as well.....Don’t need a preacher...I can read the Bible and so can everyone else. Don’t have a Bible, I can pray, and God will answer with words to our hearts. Confess only to him your sins, no preacher or Priest or even POPE. Does no good and will go for nothing. None of these died on the cross. They will be judged just as the common criminal as all of us will be judged.

****** “....Religion was made by man as a term and is used to control people....”

“James says that Religion can be good... “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.” - James 1:27”

*****It can be good if it is in compliance with the Bible. Mormons have religion...but, I doubt very seriously if any of them will become Gods and inherit a planet of their very own. this is in accordance with the Morman Religion. You can have this in your religion, and written in your own Bible...however, this doesn’t mean it will be true.

****** “Don’t forget, the POPE just declared that Babies are no longer in Limbo...:”

It’s not my job to defend the Pope - but he was addressing a commonly held belief not the dogma of the RCC. (Catholics may correct me on this.)

*****Sure, but, the Bible would address this in Daniel and other verses. It does not make it so because a man proclaims it to be true. What verses or part of Gods word gave him the authority to make this “determination”? If there is an answer to this question. Then, what was the hold up, the Bible was there all along.

****** “The Holy Spirit could care less about Religion.”

“The Holy Spirit inspired James to write his epistle we referenced above.”

*****Sure did, but didn’t say anything about making a religion. He was just inspired to write and testify what the Holy Spirit wrote on his heart.

****** “you don’t need religion to have communion with God.”

Religion:

1A. Belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers regarded as creator and governor of the universe.
1B. A personal or institutionalized system grounded in such belief and worship.

2. The life or condition of a person in a religious order.

3. A set of beliefs, values, and practices based on the teachings of a spiritual leader.

4. A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion.

Based on the above, which kind of religion are you referring to?

*******No Religion as I said before. Religion was a term invented and defined by man. Religion is an institution designed to control and fit mans desires to commune with whatever higher reasoning power they want. So, if this means Scientology....then, this is their religion. Shall we discuss what Christ says about false Gods? The Iron Mountain report (the hoax of the Iron Mountain Report is the claim that it was a hoax), stated that one substitute of War to control people was specifically; among others, was “New Religions and other Mythologies”.

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