How do children respond to stereotypes about race, religion and gender? A child-development expert looks at contradictions in kids’ behavior.
Child-development experts have spent years studying geekdom: what it is that makes one child more likely to be rejected by another. But University of Maryland professor Melanie Killen took a different approach. Instead of focusing on social deficits, Killen, associate director of the Center for Children, Relationships and Culture, focused on another category of rejection—when children are excluded because of gender, race or ethnicity rather than their behavior. Killen calls it “group membership.” Her study, “Children’s Social and Moral Reasoning About Exclusion,” published in this month’s issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, shows that kids become aware of group membership from at least the time they’re in preschool. But, while kids universally feel that it’s unfair to reject someone based exclusively on their gender, race or religion, there are some situations in which they do so anyway. Killen spoke to NEWSWEEK’s Anna Kuchment about why that’s the case. Excerpts:
Why are we so fascinated with the question of exclusion and inclusion? Melanie Killen: As adults, we all have to navigate social groups. We’re in hundreds of groups throughout our lives: at work, in higher education, in community organizations. Every time you join a group there are entry rituals—you have to apply, you have to know the group’s prior history. Understanding these nuances is a key to social and professional success.Why did you decide to focus on group discrimination, rather than on “Mean Girls”-style popularity contests and bullying? Our approach is: yeah, there are times when kids are rejected because they’re not good at social skills, but there’s a whole other dimension we need to look at, and that’s intergroup relations—when kids exclude others not because of social skills but because they’re a girl or a Muslim. As adults, we don’t think about that so much in children. That’s part of why adults have wars and why countries don’t get along, but it’s gotta start somewhere. We wanted to know: how early does it start and what categories do kids use to reject each other?
And what did you find?That kids become aware of gender first. Young kids [preschoolers] understand that people have different skin colors, but they don’t use that to classify people by activities or interests. If you asked them, “What do white kids like?” they wouldn’t be able to tell you. Stereotypes about race and ethnicity come in during elementary school. As kids get older, they’re aware of group dynamics, and they pick up the stereotypes of the culture and start using those as reasons for exclusion. They’ll say, “It’s OK not to let him in the club because he likes different things.” Adolescents start to become very aware of group function and what makes kids want to hang out together. Those reasons start to be more influenced by stereotypes.
Tell me about some of the discussions you had with preschoolers.We’d tell them a vignette or scenario. “Girls are playing with dolls and a boy wants to play with them, but the girls say ‘no.’ Is that all right?” What we found is, if you asked them that question, a majority of kids say it’s not all right. They’ll say, “That wouldn’t be right because he’ll feel sad.” But if you make the situation more complex and say, “A group of girls is playing with dolls and there’s only room for one more person. Would you take the boy or the girl?” Then they’ll say, “Well, maybe the girl, because she knows about dolls.”
How were those different from the conversations you had with high-schoolers? The similarities were that young kids, just like adolescents, have stereotypes about others and also recognize the unfairness of excluding someone just based on those stereotypes. But what’s very different is that adolescents are much more sensitive to group dynamics and group function in both a positive and a negative way. In a positive sense, they understand that for a group to work well there has to be a shared interest. The negative side is that they might still equate shared interest with shared race and ethnicity.
Your research gets at the larger question of: is it ever OK to exclude? Is that something you’ve thought about?What we say is that exclusion is not the same as other transgressions, like hitting someone for no reason or denying someone resources for no reason. Those are moral transgressions. But exclusion is different because there are plenty of times in society where exclusion is OK. A typical example is baseball—if you’re not good at baseball, you’re excluded.
But exclusion based on group membership is different. What we find is that, universally, if you really pose it to them in terms of exclusion based solely on group membership and no other association like competence, skill or merit, it seems that our interviewees would view that as unfair and wrong. There seems to be a universal feeling that exclusion based solely on group membership is unfair if you don’t know anything else about that person’s talent and ability. There is this sense of fairness that seems to be universal.
Is this sense inborn? Our research suggests it’s not strictly innate and not strictly learned, but it’s an interaction. Infants come into the world with a social predisposition. They like faces, they like people, they love to look at kids. And we think that’s part of the basis for some kind of moral orientation toward fairness and equality and that really does come out of peer interaction. They negotiate and develop a concept of equality.
What can be done to prevent this type of exclusion? Intervention doesn’t have to teach them that it’s wrong to do this. They already understand that. But what we have to work on is helping them see when a situation involves exclusion based on group membership, because sometimes they get confused. They think they’re making a decision that’s fair, but it’s really based on stereotypes. For example, if you ask kids about a music club that excludes kids based on race, the younger kids will say it’s wrong. But as you get older they’ll say if you don’t like the same music it’s OK. But then that’s based on stereotype. Kids understand fairness but what they don’t get is when using a stereotype might interfere with that.
What can parents do? We think schools and teachers and parents should do much more to talk to all kids about how groups form, about exclusion and what makes it wrong and when you might be being biased in a situation. A lot of the exclusion that’s based on race and gender comes from kids in the majority who are just not aware of the experiences that kids who are minorities have.
We also think it’s important for parents and teachers to promote diversity in friendships and playgroups early on. When their kids turn 5, parents often start having playdates only with girls or only with boys. They move into perpetuating a segregated culture. And why is segregating by gender so different than segregating by ethnicity?
Is there an evolutionary basis to exclusion based on groups? I don’t think there is in quite the way it’s portrayed. There’s a biological tendency for primates and humans to form groups, but just because you like your group doesn’t mean you dislike or go against the out-group. With primates and humans, there’s a social predisposition toward fairness.
Al Qaeda had hoped to rally the entire Muslim world against the West, but now it is in the middle of a dirty sectarian war within Islam.
For those in the West asking when Islam will have its Reformation, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that the process appears to have begun. The bad news is it's been marked by calumny, hatred and bloody violence. In this way it mirrors the Reformation itself, which we now remember in a highly sanitized way. During that era, Christians of differing sects massacred each other as they fought to own the true interpretation of their religion. No analogy is exact, but something similar seems to be happening within Islam. Here the divide is between the Sunnis, who make up 85 percent of the Muslim world, and the Shiites, who represent most of the other 15 percent.
The dominant new reality in the Middle East today is the growing schism between these two groups. Look at the daily sectarian killings in Iraq, listen to the dark warnings of Saudi and Jordanian leaders about a "Shia crescent," watch the power struggles in Lebanon. Islam's quiet cleavage has come out into the open. At a recent demonstration in the Palestinian territories, opponents of Hamas taunted the Sunni Islamists as "Shiites" because of their links to Iranian-backed Hizbullah.
We in the United States have spent much time asking what all this means for Iraq, for U.S. troops in the midst of this free-for-all and for America more generally. But think, for a moment, about what the trend means for Al Qaeda.
Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri, both Sunnis, created Al Qaeda to be a Pan-Islamic organization, uniting all Muslims as it battled the West, Israel and Western-allied regimes like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Neither Zawahiri nor bin Laden was animated by hatred of Shiites. In its original fatwas and other statements, Al Qaeda makes no mention of them, condemning only the "Crusaders" and "Jews."
But all ideologies change as they encounter reality. When bin Laden moved to Peshawar in the 1980s to fight the Russians in Afghanistan, he allied with radical Sunnis who had a long history of oppressing Afghanistan's Shiite minority, the Hazaras. (The novel "The Kite Runner" is about a young Hazara boy.) Even then, bin Laden didn't sanction anti-Shiite violence, nor did he add anti-Shiite accusations to his messages. But after the Sunni Taliban took power, Arab fighters under his command did support his hosts' anti-Shiite pogroms.
Iraq was the real turning point. The self-appointed leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, had a poisonous attitude toward Shiites. In a letter to bin Laden, written in February 2004, he described Iraq's Shiite majority as "the insurmountable obstacle, the lurking snake, the crafty and malicious scorpion, the spying enemy ... The danger from the Shia ... is greater ... than the Americans ... I come back and again say that the only solution is for us to strike the religious, military, and other cadres among the Shia with blow after blow until they bend to the Sunnis." Zarqawi was drawing on Wahhabi Islam—and its offshoot Deobandism in South Asia—in which there is a deep and oppressive strain of anti-Shiite ideology.
Bin Laden and Zawahiri were clearly uncomfortable with this new line, and the latter reproached Zarqawi directly. Bin Laden remained largely silent on the matter, but by the end of 2004, both had decided that Al Qaeda in Iraq was too strong to rebuke. And, rousing anti-Shiite feelings seemed the only way to mobilize Iraq's Sunni minority. It also, crucially, made them see Al Qaeda as an ally. The trouble for Al Qaeda is that as a practical matter, loathing Shiites works in only a few places: principally Iraq, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and some parts of the gulf. Most of the rest of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims are turned off by attacks on their co-religionists.
So, an organization that had hoped to rally the entire Muslim world to jihad against the West has been dragged instead into a dirty internal war within Islam. Bin Laden began his struggle hoping to topple the Saudi regime. He is now aligned with the Saudi monarchy as it organizes against Shiite domination. This necessarily limits Al Qaeda's broader appeal and complicates its basic anti-Western strategy.
These emerging divisions weaken Al Qaeda, but they will help most Muslims only if this story ends as the Reformation did. What is currently a war of sects must become a war of ideas. First, Islam must make space for differing views about what makes a good Muslim. Then it will be able to take the next step and accept the diversity among religions, each true in its own way.
The United States should avoid taking sides in this sectarian struggle and aim instead to move the debate to this broader plain. We should encourage the diversity within Islam, which has the potential to divide our enemies. But more important, we should encourage the emerging debate within it. In the end it was not murder but Martin Luther that made the Reformation matter.
For those in the West asking when Islam will have its Reformation, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that the process appears to have begun. The bad news is it's been marked by calumny, hatred and bloody violence. In this way it mirrors the Reformation itself, which we now remember in a highly sanitized way. During that era, Christians of differing sects massacred each other as they fought to own the true interpretation of their religion. No analogy is exact, but something similar seems to be happening within Islam. Here the divide is between the Sunnis, who make up 85 percent of the Muslim world, and the Shiites, who represent most of the other 15 percent.
The dominant new reality in the Middle East today is the growing schism between these two groups. Look at the daily sectarian killings in Iraq, listen to the dark warnings of Saudi and Jordanian leaders about a "Shia crescent," watch the power struggles in Lebanon. Islam's quiet cleavage has come out into the open. At a recent demonstration in the Palestinian territories, opponents of Hamas taunted the Sunni Islamists as "Shiites" because of their links to Iranian-backed Hizbullah.
We in the United States have spent much time asking what all this means for Iraq, for U.S. troops in the midst of this free-for-all and for America more generally. But think, for a moment, about what the trend means for Al Qaeda.
Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri, both Sunnis, created Al Qaeda to be a Pan-Islamic organization, uniting all Muslims as it battled the West, Israel and Western-allied regimes like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Neither Zawahiri nor bin Laden was animated by hatred of Shiites. In its original fatwas and other statements, Al Qaeda makes no mention of them, condemning only the "Crusaders" and "Jews."
But all ideologies change as they encounter reality. When bin Laden moved to Peshawar in the 1980s to fight the Russians in Afghanistan, he allied with radical Sunnis who had a long history of oppressing Afghanistan's Shiite minority, the Hazaras. (The novel "The Kite Runner" is about a young Hazara boy.) Even then, bin Laden didn't sanction anti-Shiite violence, nor did he add anti-Shiite accusations to his messages. But after the Sunni Taliban took power, Arab fighters under his command did support his hosts' anti-Shiite pogroms.
Iraq was the real turning point. The self-appointed leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, had a poisonous attitude toward Shiites. In a letter to bin Laden, written in February 2004, he described Iraq's Shiite majority as "the insurmountable obstacle, the lurking snake, the crafty and malicious scorpion, the spying enemy ... The danger from the Shia ... is greater ... than the Americans ... I come back and again say that the only solution is for us to strike the religious, military, and other cadres among the Shia with blow after blow until they bend to the Sunnis." Zarqawi was drawing on Wahhabi Islam—and its offshoot Deobandism in South Asia—in which there is a deep and oppressive strain of anti-Shiite ideology.
Bin Laden and Zawahiri were clearly uncomfortable with this new line, and the latter reproached Zarqawi directly. Bin Laden remained largely silent on the matter, but by the end of 2004, both had decided that Al Qaeda in Iraq was too strong to rebuke. And, rousing anti-Shiite feelings seemed the only way to mobilize Iraq's Sunni minority. It also, crucially, made them see Al Qaeda as an ally. The trouble for Al Qaeda is that as a practical matter, loathing Shiites works in only a few places: principally Iraq, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and some parts of the gulf. Most of the rest of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims are turned off by attacks on their co-religionists.
So, an organization that had hoped to rally the entire Muslim world to jihad against the West has been dragged instead into a dirty internal war within Islam. Bin Laden began his struggle hoping to topple the Saudi regime. He is now aligned with the Saudi monarchy as it organizes against Shiite domination. This necessarily limits Al Qaeda's broader appeal and complicates its basic anti-Western strategy.
These emerging divisions weaken Al Qaeda, but they will help most Muslims only if this story ends as the Reformation did. What is currently a war of sects must become a war of ideas. First, Islam must make space for differing views about what makes a good Muslim. Then it will be able to take the next step and accept the diversity among religions, each true in its own way.
The United States should avoid taking sides in this sectarian struggle and aim instead to move the debate to this broader plain. We should encourage the diversity within Islam, which has the potential to divide our enemies. But more important, we should encourage the emerging debate within it. In the end it was not murder but Martin Luther that made the Reformation matter.
What the West Can Learn From Islam
0 Comments Published by LeBlues on Friday, February 16, 2007 at 9:31 AM.
In late September, I finally received a response to the question I had been asking the Bush administration for more than two years: Why was my work visa revoked in late July 2004, just days before I was to take up a position as a professor of Islamic studies and the Henry Luce chair of religion, conflict, and peace building at the University of Notre Dame? Initially neither I nor the university was told why; officials only made a vague reference to a provision of the U.S. Patriot Act that allows the government to exclude foreign citizens who have "endorsed or espoused terrorism." Though the U.S. Department of Homeland Security eventually cleared me of all charges of links with terrorist groups, today it points to another reason to keep me out of the country: donations I made totaling approximately $900 to a Swiss Palestinian-support group that is now on the American blacklist. A letter I received from the American Embassy in Switzerland, where I hold citizenship, asserts that I "should reasonably have known" that the group had ties with Hamas.
What American officials do not say is that I myself had brought those donations to their attention, and that the organization in question continues to be officially recognized by the Swiss authorities (my donations were duly registered on my income-tax declaration). More important still is the fact that I contributed to the organization between 1998 and 2002, more than a year before it was blacklisted by the United States. It seems, according to American officials, that I "should reasonably have known" about the organization's alleged activities before the Homeland Security Department itself knew!
I believe the administration refuses me entry into the United States because of my criticism of its Middle East policy and America's unconditional support for Israel, which has led it to acquiesce in flouting Palestinian rights. And undeniably, some American groups that strongly support Israel and will allow no criticism of American foreign policy toward it have been highly critical of me. But academics, intellectuals, and organizations that have supported me — like the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Academy of Religion (I presented a keynote address to its annual meeting late last year by videoconference, since the administration would not let me enter the country to speak in person), the American Association of University Professors, and the PEN American Center — have understood that the real issue is my freedom of speech, and they have continued to lend their weight to my legal appeal of the decision.
I am not the only person concerned. The "fear of ideas" that has taken root in the United States since September 11, 2001, with the refusal to grant visas to a number of academics and intellectuals, most of whom are Muslims, strikes at the very heart of American democracy. The muffling of critical opinion should be of immediate concern to all freethinking individuals. To accept such a state of affairs is to accept that the United States, in the name of the "global war on terror" and national security, requires all citizens to think the same way.
There are some subjects, so it seems, about which an American citizen or permanent resident must now maintain silence. A "moderate" Muslim, in particular, should never discuss the Middle East, the suffering of the Palestinians, or the arrogance of longstanding Israeli policy. To force people to accept such limitations is not only counterproductive, but, more important, it impoverishes the open debate American society so desperately needs. In an atmosphere of perpetual fear, tongues remain tied, while those who do encourage a thoroughgoing debate are simply expelled.
We must recognize that American society, like all Western societies, has changed. The diversity of its population has produced a diversity of political views with which we must come to terms, particularly with regard to the Middle East and to our relations with the countries that have an Islamic majority. Millions of Western citizens of the Muslim faith have brought a new outlook toward the world and toward Western policy. Their presence in our midst is a source of strength.
We in the West have entered a phase of transition, fraught with tension. Just as it is true that our societies must make major adjustments, it is equally essential that Muslims, who have been residing in the West for several generations, respond clearly to the challenges of the modern, secularized societies in which they have chosen to make their homes. For the last 20 years, I have been focusing my efforts on the ways that Muslims can live their lives in the West, becoming Western Muslims: Muslims by religion; American, British, French, German by culture.
To promote that view, I have found it necessary to revisit the Islamic scriptural sources. Some of what we highlight today as core principles of Islam derive from the specific cultures of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia; we read our texts mainly against the backdrop of a period, since the 13th century, when Muslims in those areas were struggling against Western aggression. They emphasized withdrawing from the taint of the West and drew a border between two different worlds: "the abode of Islam" and "the abode of war." That polarized understanding of the world, which relies on a specific reading of only some verses of the Quran and of Prophetic traditions, is outdated.
In my work of the last several years, including To Be a European Muslim (published in 1997 in Europe by the Islamic Foundation) and Western Muslims and the Future of Islam (published in French in 2003 and in English by Oxford University Press in 2004), I have examined the key factors leading to confusion in the minds of Muslims about living between one's culture of origin and Islamic principles. I have attempted to show that one can be entirely European, or American, and Muslim (that is why I have written my books in Western languages). We all possess multiple identities, and we must, as a matter of necessity, put forward the values we share with our Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, and atheist fellow citizens of our secularized societies. Social justice, for example, is essential. As the Quran mentions: "God commands you to be just." So, too, rereading the scriptures sheds light on a concept of the citizen's attitude toward the state that is compatible with modern life in the West: The Quran reinforces the idea of consultation when it speaks of the shura, which could be a council of advisers to the government: "The Muslims are those who consult each other regarding their affair." The idea of consultation is also at the heart of Western democracy, and readers of the sources of Western tradition and of Islamic tradition may be surprised to find that the two are not so far different from each other.
We must turn our backs on a vision that posits "us" against "them" and understand that our shared citizenship is the key factor in building the society of the future together. We must move forward from integration — simply becoming a member of a society — to contribution — to being proactive and offering something to the society.
Since September 11, the shift in outlook I call for has become even more urgent. Fear, the obsession with security, and more recently the Danish cartoon crisis over caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad and Pope Benedict XVI's remarks on Islam's "evil and inhuman" teachings have polarized the debate. In most Western societies, citizens increasingly speak in terms of us (Westerners) and them (Muslims) — and vice versa.
Therefore I have also tried to tie rereading the scriptures to how, in practice, Muslims can contribute to and be more visible in debates on topics like education, social and urban policy, or marginalization. It is crucial that today's Western Muslims — men and women — make their voices heard on such issues; they must refuse to withdraw into religious, cultural, or social ghettos. They must no longer see themselves as a "minority." What I am calling for is an "ethics of citizenship" that would encourage Muslims to make their decisions as citizens in the name of shared principles (competence, integrity, justice, etc.), not solely based on their religious identity.
At the grass-roots level, a "silent revolution" is already taking place in Muslim communities. In everyday life, millions of women and men are building connecting passageways; committing themselves at the social, political, and cultural level; giving shape to a new "we." Muslims have been active, for example, in helping to produce and circulate the Rotterdam Charter. Initiated in 1996 in the Netherlands, and now being circulated for adoption in European nations, the charter pledges to develop and improve police services for a multiethnic society. In London, citizens' groups from across the city are working to bring different communities together on common projects, including steps to end discrimination in the job market and in housing. The political debates and ideological confrontations among Western elites fail to embrace those fascinating processes that are emerging at the local level and obscure the living dynamics of encounter and dialogue that are flourishing at the grass roots.
Those processes, which have been accelerating over the last 15 years, are of enormous importance for the contemporary Muslim conscience. On the theoretical and juridical level, they oblige Muslim scholars (ulema) to return to the founding texts to derive new ways of understanding, fresh responses to the challenges of our age. Indeed, as American and European Muslims in the heart of our industrialized, postmodern societies confront complex scientific, economic, political, and cultural issues, they are not finding the answers they seek from the intellectual output of the ulema living in societies where Muslims form a majority. As a result, for the first time, we are witnessing the reversal of a trend: Western Muslims — by necessity of their environments, their new understandings, and their new initiatives — are beginning to have an influence on traditional Muslim societies. Ideas of civil society, of citizenship, of democracy, and of relations with Western secularized or non-Muslim societies are now openly discussed in many parts of the Muslim world; Western Muslims and those living in countries where Muslims are in the majority share in the central debate over what rights and freedoms citizens have. It is, I believe, clear that the experience of Muslims in the West has, and will increasingly have, an impact on traditional Muslim societies.
By the same token, the presence of Muslims in Western societies is of vital interest for those societies themselves. The West today runs a substantial risk of seeing itself as a monolithic whole, as a civilization based exclusively on Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian tradition, to whose specific nature Islam is an outsider. The presence of Muslims makes it imperative to reconsider that selective, erroneous historical construction. Over and above the dialogue of civilizations, the West must undertake a dialogue with itself and revisit the sources of its own intellectual, philosophical, and cultural tradition. People must begin to learn once again that Muslim thought, ever since the Middle Ages, has been an integral part of the construction of Western identity. The contributions of the 11th-century Persian theologian al-Ghazali to the development of the mystic tradition in Islam, and his approach to rationalism, have been widely debated among Western scholars; the integration of Islamic tradition with Greek thought by Islamic philosophers like Averroës in the 12th century continued to influence the Islamic and European worlds for hundreds of years. Similarly, Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) is widely known in the West for his influential theory of history and pioneering contributions to sociological constructions.
The Prophet of Islam occupies a particular place in the life and conscience of Muslims today, just as he did in the past. In my new book, In the Footsteps of the Prophet (Oxford), I have tried to present the life of the Prophet in a way that helps both Muslims and non-Muslims grasp Islamic spiritual teachings and adapt them to our times. My aim is to invite practicing Muslims to delve deeper into the meaning of the life of Muhammad, and non-Muslims to step back from their own universe and to understand, from within, all that lies at the heart of the faith, love and the deepest hopes of Muslims. I had originally planned to narrate a film tracing the footsteps of the Prophet for a British television station, but since two Arab governments have banned me from entering their territory for my views on Islam and their regimes, that proved impossible. Hence, I have written a "biography."
From classical sources (for example, from Ibn Ishaq, the eighth-century Muslim historian who was the first to collect accounts of the journeys of Muhammad, and from Ibn Hisham, who later collected and commented on Ibn Ishaq's work) to more recent accounts, much has been said about the life of God's Messenger. My aim is not to bring new facts or revolutionary interpretations to light, but to highlight the Prophet's spiritual teaching and show the significance of his example. According to Muslims, he received and transmitted the last revealed book, the Quran, which repeatedly insists on his eminent and singular position, all at once a prophet, a bearer of news, a model, and a guide. Muslims do not consider the Messenger of Islam a mediator between God and people. Each individual is invited to address God directly, and although the Messenger did sometimes pray to God on behalf of his community, he also insisted on each believer's responsibility in his or her dialogue and relationship with the One.
During the first five years of Revelation, after the first Revelation in 610, the Quranic message had gradually taken shape around four main axes: the oneness of God, the status of the Quran, prayer, and life after death. The first Muslims were called to a profound and radical spiritual conversion, and that was well understood by opponents within their own clans who feared the considerable upheavals the new religion was bound to bring. A delegation came to the Prophet, and offered him goods, money, and power. He refused. When the time for the annual market period drew near, the clan chiefs posted men at the entrances to Mecca, to warn visitors against him. The Prophet was facing humiliation and mockery. Violence became more common, particularly as clan chiefs attacked poor Muslims and those who had no protection. The Prophet's safety was ensured by his uncles Abu Talib and Hamzah, but that by no means extended to the spiritual community of Muslims. Muhammad set out to approach the chief of one of the clans, who had wide power. But he was interrupted by a blind man, poor and old, who had already converted to Islam and was asking him to recite some suras, or chapters, from the Quran for him. Anxious to make his case to the clan chief, Muhammad became irritated and turned away. The chief, full of contempt, eventually refused to even hear the matter.
As a result of this incident, a sura was revealed, requiring Muslims to draw a lesson from the incident for eternity:
In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. He [the Prophet] frowned and turned away, because the blind man came to him. But what could you tell but that perhaps he might grow in purity? or that he might receive admonition, and the reminder might profit him? As to one who regards himself as self-sufficient, you attend to him, though it is no blame to you if he does not grow in purity. But as to he who came to you striving earnestly, and with fear [in his heart], of him you were unmindful. By no means [should it be so]! For it is indeed a message of remembrance. Therefore let who will, keep it in remembrance.
The Prophet, moved by his desire to protect his community, is reproached by his Educator. Seeking the protection of a person of distinction, socially and politically useful, Muhammad had neglected a poor man, apparently of no significance to his cause, who was asking for spiritual solace. That mistake, that moral slip, is recorded in the Quran, which through the story teaches Muslims never to neglect a human being, never to turn away from the poor or treat them without dignity, never to compromise principles in the pursuit of wealth or faith in a political strategy. The Prophet was never to forget that teaching, and he repeatedly invoked God, saying: "O God, we implore You to grant us piety, dignity, [spiritual] wealth, and love of the poor."
Thus the Prophet is a model for Muslims through both the excellence of his behavior and the weaknesses of his humanity. The echoes non-Muslims hear help show that more unites us than divides us, and that the life of the Prophet, which stands as a veritable introduction to Islam, can open new perspectives for greater mutual knowledge, dialogue, and encounter.
For Muslims, the Prophet's life demonstrates first and foremost the importance of love; how crucial it is that Muslims do not reduce their fellow Muslim citizens to the narrow definition of "problems" or "threats." For non-Muslims in the West, the Prophet's life should be a reminder of the value of respect. The presence of Muslims is a test for their societies: Much is made of pluralism, of equality, of racial nondiscrimination, and yet a great many Western societies have chosen to apply an "ethnic" or "Islamic" label to social problems rather than devising political and social responses to social crises. The upshot is that Muslims, even though they are citizens, are seen as a problem rather than as partners in a solution. It is inevitable that we find ourselves in a period of tension. Yet, paradoxically, the outcome of contemporary strain in Western societies may well be positive, an occasion to renew their commitment to true diversity.
Seeking out what Muslims love, how they love, and the nature of their aspirations can be the beginning of a difficult but respectful encounter. Far from political debates and politicians, that encounter brings us back to the essentials: learning how to respect the feelings, the loves, and the complexities of those who do not share our faith, nor our entire memory, but with whom we must build a future together.
That is the task to which I have devoted my energies for many years. It was precisely that experience that I have hoped to share with Americans, both in the academic field and on the political and social level. In the view of the current administration, my criticism of American foreign policy has disqualified my work, which I continue to believe deeply relevant to American society. Over and above political decisions to banish or to exclude, we must refuse to accept the notion that borders can stop the free exchange of ideas.
Tariq Ramadan, formerly a professor of Islamic studies at the University of Fribourg, in Switzerland, is a research fellow at the University of Oxford's St. Antony's College and at the Lokahi Foundation for interfaith research and education in London, as well as a visiting professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam, in the Netherlands. He is president of the European Muslim Network, in Brussels. His most recent book is In the Footsteps of the Prophet: Lessons From the Life of Muhammad, published this month by Oxford University Press.
What American officials do not say is that I myself had brought those donations to their attention, and that the organization in question continues to be officially recognized by the Swiss authorities (my donations were duly registered on my income-tax declaration). More important still is the fact that I contributed to the organization between 1998 and 2002, more than a year before it was blacklisted by the United States. It seems, according to American officials, that I "should reasonably have known" about the organization's alleged activities before the Homeland Security Department itself knew!
I believe the administration refuses me entry into the United States because of my criticism of its Middle East policy and America's unconditional support for Israel, which has led it to acquiesce in flouting Palestinian rights. And undeniably, some American groups that strongly support Israel and will allow no criticism of American foreign policy toward it have been highly critical of me. But academics, intellectuals, and organizations that have supported me — like the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Academy of Religion (I presented a keynote address to its annual meeting late last year by videoconference, since the administration would not let me enter the country to speak in person), the American Association of University Professors, and the PEN American Center — have understood that the real issue is my freedom of speech, and they have continued to lend their weight to my legal appeal of the decision.
I am not the only person concerned. The "fear of ideas" that has taken root in the United States since September 11, 2001, with the refusal to grant visas to a number of academics and intellectuals, most of whom are Muslims, strikes at the very heart of American democracy. The muffling of critical opinion should be of immediate concern to all freethinking individuals. To accept such a state of affairs is to accept that the United States, in the name of the "global war on terror" and national security, requires all citizens to think the same way.
There are some subjects, so it seems, about which an American citizen or permanent resident must now maintain silence. A "moderate" Muslim, in particular, should never discuss the Middle East, the suffering of the Palestinians, or the arrogance of longstanding Israeli policy. To force people to accept such limitations is not only counterproductive, but, more important, it impoverishes the open debate American society so desperately needs. In an atmosphere of perpetual fear, tongues remain tied, while those who do encourage a thoroughgoing debate are simply expelled.
We must recognize that American society, like all Western societies, has changed. The diversity of its population has produced a diversity of political views with which we must come to terms, particularly with regard to the Middle East and to our relations with the countries that have an Islamic majority. Millions of Western citizens of the Muslim faith have brought a new outlook toward the world and toward Western policy. Their presence in our midst is a source of strength.
We in the West have entered a phase of transition, fraught with tension. Just as it is true that our societies must make major adjustments, it is equally essential that Muslims, who have been residing in the West for several generations, respond clearly to the challenges of the modern, secularized societies in which they have chosen to make their homes. For the last 20 years, I have been focusing my efforts on the ways that Muslims can live their lives in the West, becoming Western Muslims: Muslims by religion; American, British, French, German by culture.
To promote that view, I have found it necessary to revisit the Islamic scriptural sources. Some of what we highlight today as core principles of Islam derive from the specific cultures of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia; we read our texts mainly against the backdrop of a period, since the 13th century, when Muslims in those areas were struggling against Western aggression. They emphasized withdrawing from the taint of the West and drew a border between two different worlds: "the abode of Islam" and "the abode of war." That polarized understanding of the world, which relies on a specific reading of only some verses of the Quran and of Prophetic traditions, is outdated.
In my work of the last several years, including To Be a European Muslim (published in 1997 in Europe by the Islamic Foundation) and Western Muslims and the Future of Islam (published in French in 2003 and in English by Oxford University Press in 2004), I have examined the key factors leading to confusion in the minds of Muslims about living between one's culture of origin and Islamic principles. I have attempted to show that one can be entirely European, or American, and Muslim (that is why I have written my books in Western languages). We all possess multiple identities, and we must, as a matter of necessity, put forward the values we share with our Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, and atheist fellow citizens of our secularized societies. Social justice, for example, is essential. As the Quran mentions: "God commands you to be just." So, too, rereading the scriptures sheds light on a concept of the citizen's attitude toward the state that is compatible with modern life in the West: The Quran reinforces the idea of consultation when it speaks of the shura, which could be a council of advisers to the government: "The Muslims are those who consult each other regarding their affair." The idea of consultation is also at the heart of Western democracy, and readers of the sources of Western tradition and of Islamic tradition may be surprised to find that the two are not so far different from each other.
We must turn our backs on a vision that posits "us" against "them" and understand that our shared citizenship is the key factor in building the society of the future together. We must move forward from integration — simply becoming a member of a society — to contribution — to being proactive and offering something to the society.
Since September 11, the shift in outlook I call for has become even more urgent. Fear, the obsession with security, and more recently the Danish cartoon crisis over caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad and Pope Benedict XVI's remarks on Islam's "evil and inhuman" teachings have polarized the debate. In most Western societies, citizens increasingly speak in terms of us (Westerners) and them (Muslims) — and vice versa.
Therefore I have also tried to tie rereading the scriptures to how, in practice, Muslims can contribute to and be more visible in debates on topics like education, social and urban policy, or marginalization. It is crucial that today's Western Muslims — men and women — make their voices heard on such issues; they must refuse to withdraw into religious, cultural, or social ghettos. They must no longer see themselves as a "minority." What I am calling for is an "ethics of citizenship" that would encourage Muslims to make their decisions as citizens in the name of shared principles (competence, integrity, justice, etc.), not solely based on their religious identity.
At the grass-roots level, a "silent revolution" is already taking place in Muslim communities. In everyday life, millions of women and men are building connecting passageways; committing themselves at the social, political, and cultural level; giving shape to a new "we." Muslims have been active, for example, in helping to produce and circulate the Rotterdam Charter. Initiated in 1996 in the Netherlands, and now being circulated for adoption in European nations, the charter pledges to develop and improve police services for a multiethnic society. In London, citizens' groups from across the city are working to bring different communities together on common projects, including steps to end discrimination in the job market and in housing. The political debates and ideological confrontations among Western elites fail to embrace those fascinating processes that are emerging at the local level and obscure the living dynamics of encounter and dialogue that are flourishing at the grass roots.
Those processes, which have been accelerating over the last 15 years, are of enormous importance for the contemporary Muslim conscience. On the theoretical and juridical level, they oblige Muslim scholars (ulema) to return to the founding texts to derive new ways of understanding, fresh responses to the challenges of our age. Indeed, as American and European Muslims in the heart of our industrialized, postmodern societies confront complex scientific, economic, political, and cultural issues, they are not finding the answers they seek from the intellectual output of the ulema living in societies where Muslims form a majority. As a result, for the first time, we are witnessing the reversal of a trend: Western Muslims — by necessity of their environments, their new understandings, and their new initiatives — are beginning to have an influence on traditional Muslim societies. Ideas of civil society, of citizenship, of democracy, and of relations with Western secularized or non-Muslim societies are now openly discussed in many parts of the Muslim world; Western Muslims and those living in countries where Muslims are in the majority share in the central debate over what rights and freedoms citizens have. It is, I believe, clear that the experience of Muslims in the West has, and will increasingly have, an impact on traditional Muslim societies.
By the same token, the presence of Muslims in Western societies is of vital interest for those societies themselves. The West today runs a substantial risk of seeing itself as a monolithic whole, as a civilization based exclusively on Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian tradition, to whose specific nature Islam is an outsider. The presence of Muslims makes it imperative to reconsider that selective, erroneous historical construction. Over and above the dialogue of civilizations, the West must undertake a dialogue with itself and revisit the sources of its own intellectual, philosophical, and cultural tradition. People must begin to learn once again that Muslim thought, ever since the Middle Ages, has been an integral part of the construction of Western identity. The contributions of the 11th-century Persian theologian al-Ghazali to the development of the mystic tradition in Islam, and his approach to rationalism, have been widely debated among Western scholars; the integration of Islamic tradition with Greek thought by Islamic philosophers like Averroës in the 12th century continued to influence the Islamic and European worlds for hundreds of years. Similarly, Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) is widely known in the West for his influential theory of history and pioneering contributions to sociological constructions.
The Prophet of Islam occupies a particular place in the life and conscience of Muslims today, just as he did in the past. In my new book, In the Footsteps of the Prophet (Oxford), I have tried to present the life of the Prophet in a way that helps both Muslims and non-Muslims grasp Islamic spiritual teachings and adapt them to our times. My aim is to invite practicing Muslims to delve deeper into the meaning of the life of Muhammad, and non-Muslims to step back from their own universe and to understand, from within, all that lies at the heart of the faith, love and the deepest hopes of Muslims. I had originally planned to narrate a film tracing the footsteps of the Prophet for a British television station, but since two Arab governments have banned me from entering their territory for my views on Islam and their regimes, that proved impossible. Hence, I have written a "biography."
From classical sources (for example, from Ibn Ishaq, the eighth-century Muslim historian who was the first to collect accounts of the journeys of Muhammad, and from Ibn Hisham, who later collected and commented on Ibn Ishaq's work) to more recent accounts, much has been said about the life of God's Messenger. My aim is not to bring new facts or revolutionary interpretations to light, but to highlight the Prophet's spiritual teaching and show the significance of his example. According to Muslims, he received and transmitted the last revealed book, the Quran, which repeatedly insists on his eminent and singular position, all at once a prophet, a bearer of news, a model, and a guide. Muslims do not consider the Messenger of Islam a mediator between God and people. Each individual is invited to address God directly, and although the Messenger did sometimes pray to God on behalf of his community, he also insisted on each believer's responsibility in his or her dialogue and relationship with the One.
During the first five years of Revelation, after the first Revelation in 610, the Quranic message had gradually taken shape around four main axes: the oneness of God, the status of the Quran, prayer, and life after death. The first Muslims were called to a profound and radical spiritual conversion, and that was well understood by opponents within their own clans who feared the considerable upheavals the new religion was bound to bring. A delegation came to the Prophet, and offered him goods, money, and power. He refused. When the time for the annual market period drew near, the clan chiefs posted men at the entrances to Mecca, to warn visitors against him. The Prophet was facing humiliation and mockery. Violence became more common, particularly as clan chiefs attacked poor Muslims and those who had no protection. The Prophet's safety was ensured by his uncles Abu Talib and Hamzah, but that by no means extended to the spiritual community of Muslims. Muhammad set out to approach the chief of one of the clans, who had wide power. But he was interrupted by a blind man, poor and old, who had already converted to Islam and was asking him to recite some suras, or chapters, from the Quran for him. Anxious to make his case to the clan chief, Muhammad became irritated and turned away. The chief, full of contempt, eventually refused to even hear the matter.
As a result of this incident, a sura was revealed, requiring Muslims to draw a lesson from the incident for eternity:
In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. He [the Prophet] frowned and turned away, because the blind man came to him. But what could you tell but that perhaps he might grow in purity? or that he might receive admonition, and the reminder might profit him? As to one who regards himself as self-sufficient, you attend to him, though it is no blame to you if he does not grow in purity. But as to he who came to you striving earnestly, and with fear [in his heart], of him you were unmindful. By no means [should it be so]! For it is indeed a message of remembrance. Therefore let who will, keep it in remembrance.
The Prophet, moved by his desire to protect his community, is reproached by his Educator. Seeking the protection of a person of distinction, socially and politically useful, Muhammad had neglected a poor man, apparently of no significance to his cause, who was asking for spiritual solace. That mistake, that moral slip, is recorded in the Quran, which through the story teaches Muslims never to neglect a human being, never to turn away from the poor or treat them without dignity, never to compromise principles in the pursuit of wealth or faith in a political strategy. The Prophet was never to forget that teaching, and he repeatedly invoked God, saying: "O God, we implore You to grant us piety, dignity, [spiritual] wealth, and love of the poor."
Thus the Prophet is a model for Muslims through both the excellence of his behavior and the weaknesses of his humanity. The echoes non-Muslims hear help show that more unites us than divides us, and that the life of the Prophet, which stands as a veritable introduction to Islam, can open new perspectives for greater mutual knowledge, dialogue, and encounter.
For Muslims, the Prophet's life demonstrates first and foremost the importance of love; how crucial it is that Muslims do not reduce their fellow Muslim citizens to the narrow definition of "problems" or "threats." For non-Muslims in the West, the Prophet's life should be a reminder of the value of respect. The presence of Muslims is a test for their societies: Much is made of pluralism, of equality, of racial nondiscrimination, and yet a great many Western societies have chosen to apply an "ethnic" or "Islamic" label to social problems rather than devising political and social responses to social crises. The upshot is that Muslims, even though they are citizens, are seen as a problem rather than as partners in a solution. It is inevitable that we find ourselves in a period of tension. Yet, paradoxically, the outcome of contemporary strain in Western societies may well be positive, an occasion to renew their commitment to true diversity.
Seeking out what Muslims love, how they love, and the nature of their aspirations can be the beginning of a difficult but respectful encounter. Far from political debates and politicians, that encounter brings us back to the essentials: learning how to respect the feelings, the loves, and the complexities of those who do not share our faith, nor our entire memory, but with whom we must build a future together.
That is the task to which I have devoted my energies for many years. It was precisely that experience that I have hoped to share with Americans, both in the academic field and on the political and social level. In the view of the current administration, my criticism of American foreign policy has disqualified my work, which I continue to believe deeply relevant to American society. Over and above political decisions to banish or to exclude, we must refuse to accept the notion that borders can stop the free exchange of ideas.
Tariq Ramadan, formerly a professor of Islamic studies at the University of Fribourg, in Switzerland, is a research fellow at the University of Oxford's St. Antony's College and at the Lokahi Foundation for interfaith research and education in London, as well as a visiting professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam, in the Netherlands. He is president of the European Muslim Network, in Brussels. His most recent book is In the Footsteps of the Prophet: Lessons From the Life of Muhammad, published this month by Oxford University Press.
Is hell nothing more than eternal torture of the unsaved? Why would God engage in punishment that seems so cruel?
God would not be party to anything as sordid as torture; Christians can agree on that. However, theologians are divided about how eternal judgment is not tantamount to such.
Two competing answers are proposed: (1) Yes, hell involves eternal pain inflicted on the unsaved, but this should not be regarded as gratuitous, unjust, or cruel; and (2) the final judgment will not involve eternal, conscious torment as has been traditionally assumed, and this misreading of biblical teaching needs modification. Both sides raise legitimate concerns worth careful consideration.
The first position is the view of most Christians. It argues that people commonly underestimate the appropriate punishment for defying an infinitely holy God. When human rebellion wrecked God's original good design, God undertook, at great cost, to restore humans to a loving relationship with himself. Those who spurn God's love deserve their eternal destiny, justly suffering the pain of God's wrath.
Of course, God alone has the right to execute this type of sentence. And God gets no sadistic enjoyment from pain he inflicts (Ezek. 18:23, 32). In righteousness and justice, God exacts deadly retribution for wickedness on those not under the blood atonement of Christ.
Other Christians argue that God would never be so seemingly punitive or vicious. They say the Bible's imagery occasionally reflects vindictive presuppositions of ancient cultures, but no one should take this imagery literally. Since rejection of God's love is reprehensible, they say, God will ultimately (and here the answers vary): overcome all evil and all resistance (universalism), destroy all evil (annihilationism), or inflict only as much pain as is necessary to extract repentance, leaving only the incorrigibly evil in everlasting pain (a purgatorial view of hell).
As we contemplate the questions raised by hell, it is helpful to remember two strands of complementary biblical teaching. First, just sentences for sin, as described in Scripture, are both proportional and prorated. Divine punishment is meted out in accordance with the severity of a crime and the awareness a person had of God and of sin. To whom much is given, much is required.
The deuteronomic code forbade beating a guilty person beyond 40 lashes, lest the person be "degraded" (Deut. 25:3). In addition, although a person guilty of heinous crimes might be executed, nowhere was infliction of pain over a lengthy period of time commanded or countenanced. That is partly why medieval Christians constructed an elaborate purgatorial scheme, which allowed for varying levels and lengths of suffering, and which posited a host of variables that God might take into account in rendering verdicts (see Luke 12:47-48). In purgatorial hell, only incorrigibly evil people suffered a limitless duration of pain (see Rev. 14:9-11). This view has never been common among Protestants, but believing in purgatory as the state that purifies and hell as the state of eternal damnation continues to be an official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church.
Second, we must remember that it is never cruel for God to enforce penalties appropriate to crimes committed. Pity toward the guilty is actually suppressed in the Old Testament (Deut. 7:2, 16; 19:21; 25:12). We sometimes assume that this stands in contrast to Christ and his work. It does not. Indeed, God in the Old Testament may have overlooked some wrongs as a concession to the immaturity of his people, but he never forbade them to do something (showing pity to the guilty, in this case) that Jesus later declared to be godly. Jesus came to fulfill the Old Testament, not to overturn it.
The prophets warn that God executes his wrath without pity (Jer. 13:14; Ezek. 5:11-13; 7:4-9; 8:18). Jesus and the New Testament writers confirm that God's future outpouring of wrath will be horrific (Matt. 13:40-42, 48-50; 2 Thess. 1:5-9). If such biblical descriptions of God's character strike us as harsh, perhaps we need to consider whether our thinking has been compromised by the sentimentalist humanism of our culture.
Studying the views of theologians throughout history can give us insight into how God's loving reconciliation may be consummated along with his righteous judgment. But in the end, we are simply called to trust—to put our faith in the goodness of God, knowing that he will do what is right and that he will not acquit the unrepentant guilty.
Todd Mangum is associate professor of theology at Biblical Theological Seminary in Hatfield, Pennsylvania.
God would not be party to anything as sordid as torture; Christians can agree on that. However, theologians are divided about how eternal judgment is not tantamount to such.
Two competing answers are proposed: (1) Yes, hell involves eternal pain inflicted on the unsaved, but this should not be regarded as gratuitous, unjust, or cruel; and (2) the final judgment will not involve eternal, conscious torment as has been traditionally assumed, and this misreading of biblical teaching needs modification. Both sides raise legitimate concerns worth careful consideration.
The first position is the view of most Christians. It argues that people commonly underestimate the appropriate punishment for defying an infinitely holy God. When human rebellion wrecked God's original good design, God undertook, at great cost, to restore humans to a loving relationship with himself. Those who spurn God's love deserve their eternal destiny, justly suffering the pain of God's wrath.
Of course, God alone has the right to execute this type of sentence. And God gets no sadistic enjoyment from pain he inflicts (Ezek. 18:23, 32). In righteousness and justice, God exacts deadly retribution for wickedness on those not under the blood atonement of Christ.
Other Christians argue that God would never be so seemingly punitive or vicious. They say the Bible's imagery occasionally reflects vindictive presuppositions of ancient cultures, but no one should take this imagery literally. Since rejection of God's love is reprehensible, they say, God will ultimately (and here the answers vary): overcome all evil and all resistance (universalism), destroy all evil (annihilationism), or inflict only as much pain as is necessary to extract repentance, leaving only the incorrigibly evil in everlasting pain (a purgatorial view of hell).
As we contemplate the questions raised by hell, it is helpful to remember two strands of complementary biblical teaching. First, just sentences for sin, as described in Scripture, are both proportional and prorated. Divine punishment is meted out in accordance with the severity of a crime and the awareness a person had of God and of sin. To whom much is given, much is required.
The deuteronomic code forbade beating a guilty person beyond 40 lashes, lest the person be "degraded" (Deut. 25:3). In addition, although a person guilty of heinous crimes might be executed, nowhere was infliction of pain over a lengthy period of time commanded or countenanced. That is partly why medieval Christians constructed an elaborate purgatorial scheme, which allowed for varying levels and lengths of suffering, and which posited a host of variables that God might take into account in rendering verdicts (see Luke 12:47-48). In purgatorial hell, only incorrigibly evil people suffered a limitless duration of pain (see Rev. 14:9-11). This view has never been common among Protestants, but believing in purgatory as the state that purifies and hell as the state of eternal damnation continues to be an official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church.
Second, we must remember that it is never cruel for God to enforce penalties appropriate to crimes committed. Pity toward the guilty is actually suppressed in the Old Testament (Deut. 7:2, 16; 19:21; 25:12). We sometimes assume that this stands in contrast to Christ and his work. It does not. Indeed, God in the Old Testament may have overlooked some wrongs as a concession to the immaturity of his people, but he never forbade them to do something (showing pity to the guilty, in this case) that Jesus later declared to be godly. Jesus came to fulfill the Old Testament, not to overturn it.
The prophets warn that God executes his wrath without pity (Jer. 13:14; Ezek. 5:11-13; 7:4-9; 8:18). Jesus and the New Testament writers confirm that God's future outpouring of wrath will be horrific (Matt. 13:40-42, 48-50; 2 Thess. 1:5-9). If such biblical descriptions of God's character strike us as harsh, perhaps we need to consider whether our thinking has been compromised by the sentimentalist humanism of our culture.
Studying the views of theologians throughout history can give us insight into how God's loving reconciliation may be consummated along with his righteous judgment. But in the end, we are simply called to trust—to put our faith in the goodness of God, knowing that he will do what is right and that he will not acquit the unrepentant guilty.
Todd Mangum is associate professor of theology at Biblical Theological Seminary in Hatfield, Pennsylvania.
God and science: You just can't please everyone
0 Comments Published by LeBlues on Tuesday, February 13, 2007 at 4:40 AM.
LET me start by declaring an interest: I am that Steve Fuller who gave evidence for the defence in the trial over whether intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution in schools in Dover, Pennsylvania, last year. And books like this persuade me that I did the right thing.
The Language of God is by Francis S. Collins, director of the Human Genome Project for the US National Institutes of Health. He became a born-again Christian after reading C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity as a biochemistry graduate student. Collins is now part of the American Scientific Affiliation, a group of 3000 Christians which aims to render science consistent with its beliefs.
Collins's mission is to deny any real conflict between God and Darwin. He wants to square things for scientists who don't want intelligent design on their doorstep but who also don't want to examine their own beliefs too closely. Collins's comprehensive but exclusive training in the hard sciences may explain his belief in a God who communicates plainly through natural sciences but who refuses to cooperate with social sciences, and such biologically inflected fields as sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. These latter fields, Collins asserts, would reduce "the existence of the moral law and the universal longing for God" to culturally specific or deeply genetic survival strategies.
In trying to accommodate too many camps, Collins ends up mired in confusion. Ironically, rather like Richard Dawkins, he treats religions equally, thereby homogenising them. Collins promotes "theistic evolution", a philosophy sufficiently devoid of controversy, if not content, to be "espoused by many Hindus, Muslims, Jews and Christians, including Pope John Paul II". It amounts to a treaty with God, whereby science does the "how" and religion the "why" of reality.
Dawkins and Collins clearly need a lesson in social science. The idea that, say, Hinduism and Islam can be lumped together is left over from 19th-century attempts to understand how complex social relations survived long stretches of time without the modern nation state. Repeating this idea uncritically in 2006 when we know better is bizarre.
As is Collins's refusal to deal with Christianity's uniqueness in being both most inspirational and most resistant to science. On the one hand, Christians extended the Biblical entitlement of humanity to understand and exercise dominion over nature. On the other, they baulked at theories such as Darwinism that failed to put humans on top. The alleged war between science and religion has really been a fight over the soul of Christianity.
For all their faults, intelligent-design theorists grasp this much better than Collins. Immanuel Kant argued that moral law is no more and no less than our private imitation of God's enforcement of physical law. Subsequently, as our understanding of nature changed, our relationship to each other changed too. So when intelligent-design theorists think of a Darwinist, they don't imagine a Collins, who sees evolutionary theory as a boon to medicine. Rather, they see an animal-rights protester who wonders, on good Darwinian but anti-Christian grounds, why human comfort has priority over animal suffering.
Collins is most interesting when he deals with his fellow Christians head-on. He invokes St Augustine's The Literal Meaning of Genesis, a treatise that still sets the standard for sophisticated exegesis. Collins interprets Augustine as saying that Genesis should not be read literally in matters that stray beyond its remit. However, devout Bible readers like Newton did not read either Genesis or Augustine that way. They simply inferred that "literal" does not mean simple-minded. From nature to the Bible, God's works can be understood only in the original, be that mathematics and DNA, or Hebrew and Aramaic.
The Language of God is by Francis S. Collins, director of the Human Genome Project for the US National Institutes of Health. He became a born-again Christian after reading C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity as a biochemistry graduate student. Collins is now part of the American Scientific Affiliation, a group of 3000 Christians which aims to render science consistent with its beliefs.
Collins's mission is to deny any real conflict between God and Darwin. He wants to square things for scientists who don't want intelligent design on their doorstep but who also don't want to examine their own beliefs too closely. Collins's comprehensive but exclusive training in the hard sciences may explain his belief in a God who communicates plainly through natural sciences but who refuses to cooperate with social sciences, and such biologically inflected fields as sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. These latter fields, Collins asserts, would reduce "the existence of the moral law and the universal longing for God" to culturally specific or deeply genetic survival strategies.
In trying to accommodate too many camps, Collins ends up mired in confusion. Ironically, rather like Richard Dawkins, he treats religions equally, thereby homogenising them. Collins promotes "theistic evolution", a philosophy sufficiently devoid of controversy, if not content, to be "espoused by many Hindus, Muslims, Jews and Christians, including Pope John Paul II". It amounts to a treaty with God, whereby science does the "how" and religion the "why" of reality.
Dawkins and Collins clearly need a lesson in social science. The idea that, say, Hinduism and Islam can be lumped together is left over from 19th-century attempts to understand how complex social relations survived long stretches of time without the modern nation state. Repeating this idea uncritically in 2006 when we know better is bizarre.
As is Collins's refusal to deal with Christianity's uniqueness in being both most inspirational and most resistant to science. On the one hand, Christians extended the Biblical entitlement of humanity to understand and exercise dominion over nature. On the other, they baulked at theories such as Darwinism that failed to put humans on top. The alleged war between science and religion has really been a fight over the soul of Christianity.
For all their faults, intelligent-design theorists grasp this much better than Collins. Immanuel Kant argued that moral law is no more and no less than our private imitation of God's enforcement of physical law. Subsequently, as our understanding of nature changed, our relationship to each other changed too. So when intelligent-design theorists think of a Darwinist, they don't imagine a Collins, who sees evolutionary theory as a boon to medicine. Rather, they see an animal-rights protester who wonders, on good Darwinian but anti-Christian grounds, why human comfort has priority over animal suffering.
Collins is most interesting when he deals with his fellow Christians head-on. He invokes St Augustine's The Literal Meaning of Genesis, a treatise that still sets the standard for sophisticated exegesis. Collins interprets Augustine as saying that Genesis should not be read literally in matters that stray beyond its remit. However, devout Bible readers like Newton did not read either Genesis or Augustine that way. They simply inferred that "literal" does not mean simple-minded. From nature to the Bible, God's works can be understood only in the original, be that mathematics and DNA, or Hebrew and Aramaic.
Intelligent design: The God Lab
0 Comments Published by LeBlues on Monday, February 12, 2007 at 4:44 AM.
Pay a visit to the Biologic Institute and you are liable to get a chilly reception. "We only see people with appointments," states the man who finally responds to my persistent knocks. Then he slams the door on me.
I am standing on the ground floor of an office building in Redmond, Washington, the Seattle suburb best known as home town to Microsoft. What I'm trying to find out is whether the 1-year-old institute is the new face of another industry that has sprung up in the area - the one that has set out to try to prove evolution is wrong.
This is my second attempt to engage in person with scientists at Biologic. At the institute's other facility in nearby Fremont, researchers work at benches lined with fume hoods, incubators and microscopes - a typical scene in this up-and-coming biotech hub. Most of them there proved just as reluctant to speak with a New Scientist reporter.
The reticence cloaks an unorthodox agenda. "We are the first ones doing what we might call lab science in intelligent design," says George Weber, the only one of Biologic's four directors who would speak openly with me. "The objective is to challenge the scientific community on naturalism." Weber is not a scientist but a retired professor of business and administration at the Presbyterian Whitworth College in Spokane, Washington. He heads the Spokane chapter of Reasonstobelieve.org, a Christian organisation that seeks to challenge Darwinism.
The anti-evolution movement's latest response to Darwin is intelligent design (ID). Its fundamental premise is that certain features of living organisms are too complex to have evolved without the direct intervention of an intelligent designer. In ID literature that designer remains cautiously anonymous, but for many proponents he corresponds closely with the God of the Christian Bible. Over the past few years the movement's media-savvy public face has been the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, which has championed intelligent design, claiming it to be a legitimate scientific theory, and supported its key architects. It was Discovery that provided the funding to get the Biologic Institute up and running.
Last week I learned that following his communication with New Scientist, Weber has left the board of the Biologic Institute. Douglas Axe, the lab's senior researcher and spokesman, told me in an email that Weber "was found to have seriously misunderstood the purpose of Biologic and to have misrepresented it". Axe's portrayal of the Biologic Institute's purpose excludes religious connotation. He says that the lab's main objective "is to show that the design perspective can lead to better science", although he allows that the Biologic Institute will "contribute substantially to the scientific case for intelligent design".
This science-first message suggests that the developing anti-evolution movement in the US has moved on to a new stage - one in which opponents of evolutionary biology, trained as research scientists, take to the lab in search of the creator's handiwork. In light of recent events, it also makes sense as a public relations strategy.
ID was dealt a significant blow when parents in the Dover school district of Pennsylvania successfully challenged the right of school board officials to introduce pro-ID material into high school biology classrooms. In December 2005, US federal court judge John Jones ruled that it was unconstitutional to teach ID in public schools because it would violate the separation of church and state as laid out in the First Amendment (New Scientist, 7 January, p 8).
In addition to its religious undertones, ID had not "been the subject of testing and research", Jones stated, nor had it "generated peer-reviewed publications", and so had no business in science classes. Wary of losing similar court cases, at least four state education boards subsequently rejected or removed ID-friendly language from their high-school curricula, or are expected do so when newly elected members take office next year.
These developments underscored ID's most serious weakness. "The criticism that has been levelled against them most frequently is that they talk about science but they don't do science," says Richard Olmstead, a biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle who has spoken out against the teaching of ID in science classes.
Research agenda
The message is clear. If ID supporters can bolster their case by citing more experimental research, another judge at some future date might conclude that ID does qualify as science, and is therefore a legitimate topic for discussion in American science classrooms. This is precisely the kind of scientific respectability that research at the Biologic Institute is attempting to provide. "We need all the input we can get in the sciences," Weber told me. "What we are doing is necessary to move ID along."
Axe appears to be one of the prime movers in this latest version of the anti-evolution enterprise. In a Discovery Institute strategy paper that was leaked on the internet in 1999, Axe is identified as heading up a molecular biology programme that has the aim of undercutting the scientific basis for evolution. At that time he was funded by the Discovery Institute and working as a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Protein Engineering, a research centre in Cambridge, UK, funded by the Medical Research Council, under the supervision of protein specialist Alan Fersht of the University of Cambridge.
Fersht says he did not at first know about the Discovery Institute's support for ID. "People do work in labs on external funding. Basically he [Axe] had a fellowship from what I thought was a bona fide research institute," he says. When another researcher in his lab pointed to the Discovery Institute's agenda and suggested that Axe be asked to leave, Fersht refused. "I have always been fairly easy-going about people working in the lab. I said I was not going to throw him out. What he was doing was asking legitimate questions about how a protein folded."
In 2000 Axe published a paper about protein mutations (Journal of Molecular Biology, vol 301, p 585). The paper itself makes no mention of ID, but William Dembski, a philosopher and senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, cites it as peer-reviewed evidence for ID (see "Building a case").
By 2002 it was becoming clear that Axe and Fersht were in dispute with each other over the implications of work going on in Fersht's lab. At the time Fersht was preparing to publish a retraction of a paper in which he and three colleagues had claimed to have caused one enzyme to evolve the functionality of another (Nature, vol 403, p 617). Axe interpreted the fact that problems had surfaced with the result as evidence that there were problems with the theory of evolution. "I described to Alan preliminary results of mine that seemed to challenge the ability of spontaneous mutations to produce proteins with fundamentally new structures, and I suggested that the struggling projects under his direction might actually be pointing to the same conclusion," Axe told me in an email. Fersht disagreed with the suggestion. The problem result "didn't show anything of the sort", he says. "It showed there were inadequacies in our knowledge."
In March 2002, Axe left Fersht's lab to work as a visiting scientist at the structural biology unit of the Babraham Institute, also in Cambridge. His work there, again funded by the Discovery Institute, led to the publication of a second paper in 2004 (Journal of Molecular Biology, vol 341, p 1295) that was again cited by ID proponents as evidence in its favour.
Since 2004 Axe has resurfaced in Washington state, where he has set up shop at the Biologic Institute, a short drive away from the Discovery Institute. Weber told me that Biologic was a "branch of Discovery". Both Axe and Discovery spokesperson Rob Crowther insist that it is a "separate entity".
Biologic's staff consists of at least three researchers, including Ann Gauger, who like Axe signed a petition titled "a statement of dissent against Darwin's theory of evolution" that was organised by the Discovery Institute in September 2005. In 1985 Gauger published a paper on cell adhesion in fruit flies (Nature, vol 313, p 395) while completing a PhD from the University of Washington, and then went on to publish more papers as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. Her former supervisor, Larry Goldstein, now at the University of California, San Diego, expressed surprise when he learned of her association with the anti-evolution movement.
Gauger would not speak to New Scientist about her work. According to Axe, the projects currently under way at Biologic include "examining the origin of metabolic pathways in bacteria, the evolution of gene order in bacteria, and the evolution of protein folds".
Certainly the topics Axe mentions are of interest to science, says Kenneth Miller, a cell biologist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who testified as an expert witness for the pro-evolution side at the Dover trial. Miller adds that they might be of particular interest to people intent on undermining evolution if, like Axe's earlier work on protein folding, they can be used to highlight structures and functions whose origins and evolution are not well understood.
In addition to protein and cell biology, Biologic is pursuing a programme in computational biology which draws on the expertise of another of its researchers, Brendan Dixon, a former software developer at Microsoft. According to Axe, "On the computational side, we are nearing completion of a system for exploring the evolution of artificial genes that are considerably more life-like than has been the case previously."
Dixon also declined to speak with New Scientist, but there are reasons why the computational arena might be of interest to the anti-evolution movement. Starting in 2001, Robert Pennock at Michigan State University in East Lansing and colleagues wrote a computer program that behaves like a self-replicating organism able to mutate unpredictably and evolve (Nature, vol 423, p 139). The experiment demonstrates how natural selection and random mutation give rise to increasingly complex organisms.
For anti-evolutionists, this was a discouraging result. "That one really got to them," says Barbara Forrest, a philosopher at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond who studies the anti-evolution movement. It would not be surprising if Biologic wanted to challenge the impact of Pennock's work by finding a counter-example in which a computer simulation fails to produce complexity by random mutation alone. Such a counter-example, once published, would be available for citation by proponents of ID. Even if the citations do not appear in peer-reviewed literature, says Forrest, they could still have an influence on politicians and school board officials, who might not be sensitive to this distinction.
Miller agrees that work of this kind would help anti-evolutionists politically. "If Axe can produce a few more papers in good journals they will be able to cite a growing body of evidence favouring ID," he says.
However, Steve Fuller, a sociologist at the University of Warwick, UK, who testified in favour of ID in the Dover trial, believes the Biologic Institute's activities could help break down barriers between religious people and scientists. "Regardless of whether the science cuts any ice against evolution, one of the virtues is that it could provide a kind of model for how religiously motivated people can go into the lab."
Ronald Numbers, a historian at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who has studied creationism, views it in a different light. The lab's existence will help sustain support within the anti-evolution community, he says. "It will be good for the troops if leaders in the ID movement can claim: 'We're not just talking theory. We have labs, we have real scientists working on this.'"
I am standing on the ground floor of an office building in Redmond, Washington, the Seattle suburb best known as home town to Microsoft. What I'm trying to find out is whether the 1-year-old institute is the new face of another industry that has sprung up in the area - the one that has set out to try to prove evolution is wrong.
This is my second attempt to engage in person with scientists at Biologic. At the institute's other facility in nearby Fremont, researchers work at benches lined with fume hoods, incubators and microscopes - a typical scene in this up-and-coming biotech hub. Most of them there proved just as reluctant to speak with a New Scientist reporter.
The reticence cloaks an unorthodox agenda. "We are the first ones doing what we might call lab science in intelligent design," says George Weber, the only one of Biologic's four directors who would speak openly with me. "The objective is to challenge the scientific community on naturalism." Weber is not a scientist but a retired professor of business and administration at the Presbyterian Whitworth College in Spokane, Washington. He heads the Spokane chapter of Reasonstobelieve.org, a Christian organisation that seeks to challenge Darwinism.
The anti-evolution movement's latest response to Darwin is intelligent design (ID). Its fundamental premise is that certain features of living organisms are too complex to have evolved without the direct intervention of an intelligent designer. In ID literature that designer remains cautiously anonymous, but for many proponents he corresponds closely with the God of the Christian Bible. Over the past few years the movement's media-savvy public face has been the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, which has championed intelligent design, claiming it to be a legitimate scientific theory, and supported its key architects. It was Discovery that provided the funding to get the Biologic Institute up and running.
Last week I learned that following his communication with New Scientist, Weber has left the board of the Biologic Institute. Douglas Axe, the lab's senior researcher and spokesman, told me in an email that Weber "was found to have seriously misunderstood the purpose of Biologic and to have misrepresented it". Axe's portrayal of the Biologic Institute's purpose excludes religious connotation. He says that the lab's main objective "is to show that the design perspective can lead to better science", although he allows that the Biologic Institute will "contribute substantially to the scientific case for intelligent design".
This science-first message suggests that the developing anti-evolution movement in the US has moved on to a new stage - one in which opponents of evolutionary biology, trained as research scientists, take to the lab in search of the creator's handiwork. In light of recent events, it also makes sense as a public relations strategy.
ID was dealt a significant blow when parents in the Dover school district of Pennsylvania successfully challenged the right of school board officials to introduce pro-ID material into high school biology classrooms. In December 2005, US federal court judge John Jones ruled that it was unconstitutional to teach ID in public schools because it would violate the separation of church and state as laid out in the First Amendment (New Scientist, 7 January, p 8).
In addition to its religious undertones, ID had not "been the subject of testing and research", Jones stated, nor had it "generated peer-reviewed publications", and so had no business in science classes. Wary of losing similar court cases, at least four state education boards subsequently rejected or removed ID-friendly language from their high-school curricula, or are expected do so when newly elected members take office next year.
These developments underscored ID's most serious weakness. "The criticism that has been levelled against them most frequently is that they talk about science but they don't do science," says Richard Olmstead, a biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle who has spoken out against the teaching of ID in science classes.
Research agenda
The message is clear. If ID supporters can bolster their case by citing more experimental research, another judge at some future date might conclude that ID does qualify as science, and is therefore a legitimate topic for discussion in American science classrooms. This is precisely the kind of scientific respectability that research at the Biologic Institute is attempting to provide. "We need all the input we can get in the sciences," Weber told me. "What we are doing is necessary to move ID along."
Axe appears to be one of the prime movers in this latest version of the anti-evolution enterprise. In a Discovery Institute strategy paper that was leaked on the internet in 1999, Axe is identified as heading up a molecular biology programme that has the aim of undercutting the scientific basis for evolution. At that time he was funded by the Discovery Institute and working as a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Protein Engineering, a research centre in Cambridge, UK, funded by the Medical Research Council, under the supervision of protein specialist Alan Fersht of the University of Cambridge.
Fersht says he did not at first know about the Discovery Institute's support for ID. "People do work in labs on external funding. Basically he [Axe] had a fellowship from what I thought was a bona fide research institute," he says. When another researcher in his lab pointed to the Discovery Institute's agenda and suggested that Axe be asked to leave, Fersht refused. "I have always been fairly easy-going about people working in the lab. I said I was not going to throw him out. What he was doing was asking legitimate questions about how a protein folded."
In 2000 Axe published a paper about protein mutations (Journal of Molecular Biology, vol 301, p 585). The paper itself makes no mention of ID, but William Dembski, a philosopher and senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, cites it as peer-reviewed evidence for ID (see "Building a case").
By 2002 it was becoming clear that Axe and Fersht were in dispute with each other over the implications of work going on in Fersht's lab. At the time Fersht was preparing to publish a retraction of a paper in which he and three colleagues had claimed to have caused one enzyme to evolve the functionality of another (Nature, vol 403, p 617). Axe interpreted the fact that problems had surfaced with the result as evidence that there were problems with the theory of evolution. "I described to Alan preliminary results of mine that seemed to challenge the ability of spontaneous mutations to produce proteins with fundamentally new structures, and I suggested that the struggling projects under his direction might actually be pointing to the same conclusion," Axe told me in an email. Fersht disagreed with the suggestion. The problem result "didn't show anything of the sort", he says. "It showed there were inadequacies in our knowledge."
In March 2002, Axe left Fersht's lab to work as a visiting scientist at the structural biology unit of the Babraham Institute, also in Cambridge. His work there, again funded by the Discovery Institute, led to the publication of a second paper in 2004 (Journal of Molecular Biology, vol 341, p 1295) that was again cited by ID proponents as evidence in its favour.
Since 2004 Axe has resurfaced in Washington state, where he has set up shop at the Biologic Institute, a short drive away from the Discovery Institute. Weber told me that Biologic was a "branch of Discovery". Both Axe and Discovery spokesperson Rob Crowther insist that it is a "separate entity".
Biologic's staff consists of at least three researchers, including Ann Gauger, who like Axe signed a petition titled "a statement of dissent against Darwin's theory of evolution" that was organised by the Discovery Institute in September 2005. In 1985 Gauger published a paper on cell adhesion in fruit flies (Nature, vol 313, p 395) while completing a PhD from the University of Washington, and then went on to publish more papers as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. Her former supervisor, Larry Goldstein, now at the University of California, San Diego, expressed surprise when he learned of her association with the anti-evolution movement.
Gauger would not speak to New Scientist about her work. According to Axe, the projects currently under way at Biologic include "examining the origin of metabolic pathways in bacteria, the evolution of gene order in bacteria, and the evolution of protein folds".
Certainly the topics Axe mentions are of interest to science, says Kenneth Miller, a cell biologist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who testified as an expert witness for the pro-evolution side at the Dover trial. Miller adds that they might be of particular interest to people intent on undermining evolution if, like Axe's earlier work on protein folding, they can be used to highlight structures and functions whose origins and evolution are not well understood.
In addition to protein and cell biology, Biologic is pursuing a programme in computational biology which draws on the expertise of another of its researchers, Brendan Dixon, a former software developer at Microsoft. According to Axe, "On the computational side, we are nearing completion of a system for exploring the evolution of artificial genes that are considerably more life-like than has been the case previously."
Dixon also declined to speak with New Scientist, but there are reasons why the computational arena might be of interest to the anti-evolution movement. Starting in 2001, Robert Pennock at Michigan State University in East Lansing and colleagues wrote a computer program that behaves like a self-replicating organism able to mutate unpredictably and evolve (Nature, vol 423, p 139). The experiment demonstrates how natural selection and random mutation give rise to increasingly complex organisms.
For anti-evolutionists, this was a discouraging result. "That one really got to them," says Barbara Forrest, a philosopher at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond who studies the anti-evolution movement. It would not be surprising if Biologic wanted to challenge the impact of Pennock's work by finding a counter-example in which a computer simulation fails to produce complexity by random mutation alone. Such a counter-example, once published, would be available for citation by proponents of ID. Even if the citations do not appear in peer-reviewed literature, says Forrest, they could still have an influence on politicians and school board officials, who might not be sensitive to this distinction.
Miller agrees that work of this kind would help anti-evolutionists politically. "If Axe can produce a few more papers in good journals they will be able to cite a growing body of evidence favouring ID," he says.
However, Steve Fuller, a sociologist at the University of Warwick, UK, who testified in favour of ID in the Dover trial, believes the Biologic Institute's activities could help break down barriers between religious people and scientists. "Regardless of whether the science cuts any ice against evolution, one of the virtues is that it could provide a kind of model for how religiously motivated people can go into the lab."
Ronald Numbers, a historian at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who has studied creationism, views it in a different light. The lab's existence will help sustain support within the anti-evolution community, he says. "It will be good for the troops if leaders in the ID movement can claim: 'We're not just talking theory. We have labs, we have real scientists working on this.'"
Christian faith in the other good book
0 Comments Published by LeBlues on Sunday, February 11, 2007 at 3:58 AM.
Flocks of the Christian faithful in the US will this Sunday hold special services celebrating Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. The idea is to stand up to creationism, which claims the biblical account of creation is literally true, and which is increasingly being promoted under the guise of "intelligent design". Proponents of ID say the universe is so complex it must have been created by some unnamed designer.
Support for "Evolution Sunday" has grown 13 per cent to 530 congregations this year, from the 467 that celebrated the inaugural event last year. Organisers see it as increasing proof that Christians are comfortable with evolution.
"For far too long, strident voices, in the name of Christianity, have been claiming that people must choose between religion and modern science," says Michael Zimmerman, founder of Evolution Sunday and dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Butler University in Indianapolis. "We're saying you can have your faith, and you can also have science."
Zimmerman and his backers believe the biblical account of creation is allegorical. "Creationists fear that if you believe evolution, you're an atheist," he says. But for Zimmerman, attempts to try and "ratify God's existence" through intelligent design signify lack of faith. "If you have enough faith, you don't need science to prove God exists, and science can't prove this anyway," he says.
The event arose from the Clergy Letter Project, a pro-evolution letter signed in 2004 by 10,500 Christian clergy. It is spreading internationally, and this year will also be celebrated in Australia, the UK, Canada and Nigeria. Seven publishers are donating material for the services.
From issue 2590 of New Scientist magazine, 10 February 2007
Support for "Evolution Sunday" has grown 13 per cent to 530 congregations this year, from the 467 that celebrated the inaugural event last year. Organisers see it as increasing proof that Christians are comfortable with evolution.
"For far too long, strident voices, in the name of Christianity, have been claiming that people must choose between religion and modern science," says Michael Zimmerman, founder of Evolution Sunday and dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Butler University in Indianapolis. "We're saying you can have your faith, and you can also have science."
Zimmerman and his backers believe the biblical account of creation is allegorical. "Creationists fear that if you believe evolution, you're an atheist," he says. But for Zimmerman, attempts to try and "ratify God's existence" through intelligent design signify lack of faith. "If you have enough faith, you don't need science to prove God exists, and science can't prove this anyway," he says.
The event arose from the Clergy Letter Project, a pro-evolution letter signed in 2004 by 10,500 Christian clergy. It is spreading internationally, and this year will also be celebrated in Australia, the UK, Canada and Nigeria. Seven publishers are donating material for the services.
From issue 2590 of New Scientist magazine, 10 February 2007
Ehsan Masood's opening question, "Does Islam's vibrant scientific past hold the key to its intellectual future?" misses the entire point (1 April, p 53). The attempt to equate a period of scientific development with one of social achievement shows a lack of intellectual rigour.
The Third Reich, or Nazi Germany, had a blossoming of scientific development for the same reasons that states controlled by sharia law were able to do the same - namely to have social stability and funding for scientists. Unfortunately both achievements were gained at the expense of slavery and aggression. The great failing of Islam was not its failing to continue its achievments in science, but rather that Islam did not follow through with an enlightenment or similar social development.
The final question of "If Islam inspired great learning in the past, why not now?" is problematic. It appears that in the past Islam funded technical progress but did not inspire intellectual progress, and this remains true. Islamic societies are running this experiment all across the world, with different settings and many natural resources, and in none of them have they achieved a prosperous, free self sufficiency. So maybe the question should be, "If Islam was not able to flourish intellectually in the past, why expect it to now?"
The Third Reich, or Nazi Germany, had a blossoming of scientific development for the same reasons that states controlled by sharia law were able to do the same - namely to have social stability and funding for scientists. Unfortunately both achievements were gained at the expense of slavery and aggression. The great failing of Islam was not its failing to continue its achievments in science, but rather that Islam did not follow through with an enlightenment or similar social development.
The final question of "If Islam inspired great learning in the past, why not now?" is problematic. It appears that in the past Islam funded technical progress but did not inspire intellectual progress, and this remains true. Islamic societies are running this experiment all across the world, with different settings and many natural resources, and in none of them have they achieved a prosperous, free self sufficiency. So maybe the question should be, "If Islam was not able to flourish intellectually in the past, why expect it to now?"
A Tale of Two Cities: Resisting the Atheist Attack
0 Comments Published by LeBlues on Friday, February 9, 2007 at 2:12 AM.
Every generation has a few atheists who seem eager to tell the world how much smarter they are than everybody else. The fact that such individuals still exist, and that they are still producing popular tracts in defense of their disbelief, is no surprise.
Nevertheless, because ideas have consequences, one cannot ignore the recent push by big-name skeptics to persuade Americans that there is no God and that we should therefore adopt a new set of ethical standards. In previous times, most people had a solid enough understanding of moral truth that they were not easily persuaded by atheist rhetoric, but today many Americans are so influenced by relativism that they find it difficult to respond. Some men and women are beginning to wonder if they really believe America's founding principles, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights..."
A couple of weeks ago, Peter Singer, a bioethicist at Princeton University, wrote an article for the New York Times that essentially denies the Declaration's core principles. While discussing the sad case of Ashley, a severely disabled girl whose parents had her uterus removed and put her on hormones to stunt her growth, Singer said:
We are always ready to find dignity in human beings, including those whose mental age will never exceed that of an infant, but we don't attribute dignity to dogs or cats, though they clearly operate at a more advanced mental level than human infants. Just making that comparison provokes outrage in some quarters. But why should dignity always go together with species membership, no matter what the characteristics of the individual may be?....[Ashley] is precious not so much for what she is, but because her parents and siblings love her and care about her.
In Singer's mind, Ashley is not precious for what she is, and she does not have dignity simply because she is human. He even strongly implies that dogs and cats have more dignity than this handicapped little girl. Yet the Founders believed that all people are created equal, even those whose mental age does not advance very far.
We have here a tale of two cities. One is the city envisioned by the Founders where God has created all men and women with a fundamental equality which ensures that every person's rights are secure. The strong do not have more worth than the weak, the young do not have more value than the old, and the rich do not have more human rights than the poor. The self-evident truth is that, despite the differences, every human being enjoys an essential dignity. Every life is precious, even the wretched, weak, penniless, despised, feeble and frightened.
Then there is the city envisioned by modern atheists like Peter Singer. This is a place where a dog can have more worth than a handicapped child. This is a place where a grandmother with Alzheimer's disease has no dignity if she has no one who loves her. This is a place where newborn babies can be killed if they are imperfect or unwanted. It is a godless city where human worth is measured on a sliding scale. Woe is she who is wretched, weak, penniless, despised, feeble and frightened. Such people may have been better off as a dog or a cat than an unwanted and imperfect human being!
Ultimately, America will choose one city or the other as its destiny. This week we celebrated the 96th birthday of the man who saw the United States as the shining city on a hill, Ronald Reagan. As the late president said, "A troubled and afflicted mankind looks to us, pleading for us to keep our rendezvous with destiny; that we will uphold the principles of self-reliance, self-discipline, morality, and, above all, responsible liberty for every individual, that we will become that shining city on a hill." This is the same city envisioned by the Founders, and it is the vision that is still admired by a troubled and afflicted mankind.
How might we guard against the men and women who try to persuade us that God does not exist, that there is no inherent human dignity, and that some people have less worth than others? If ideas really do have consequences, this set of ideas will inevitably lead to great human suffering and utter cultural collapse. Therefore, how can America keep its "rendezvous with destiny" and protect the shining city?
Our response must be multifaceted. First, men and women of faith should be educated in their own intellectual heritage. Many of the great Christian minds of the past have confronted similar challenges in their own generation, and they have left behind solid answers. Atheism is not new, nor is the idea that some human beings lack inherent worth. Rather than reinvent the wheel, we should become acquainted with the way these challenges were previously addressed.
Christians must also be involved in the culture. Though a few famous atheists are churning out books, it is the movie makers, the song writers, and the television show creators that have the greatest influence. The church has a long history of producing beautiful and captivating art; there is no reason why Christians should not continue to engage and inspire the culture through art. One outstanding movie can do more to influence the culture than dozens of scholarly books.
Finally, Christians must be involved in the public square. When the ideas of Peter Singer, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris are translated into laws, injustice results. It is terrifying to contemplate a world where the law does not consider human beings to have any inherent value or dignity. We have seen this world in the past; we must never allow it to happen again. As Christians, our obligation is to love and serve our neighbors by remaining a persistent public voice in resistance to the growing threat against our culture and our nation. We must not abandon the shining city on the hill.
Nevertheless, because ideas have consequences, one cannot ignore the recent push by big-name skeptics to persuade Americans that there is no God and that we should therefore adopt a new set of ethical standards. In previous times, most people had a solid enough understanding of moral truth that they were not easily persuaded by atheist rhetoric, but today many Americans are so influenced by relativism that they find it difficult to respond. Some men and women are beginning to wonder if they really believe America's founding principles, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights..."
A couple of weeks ago, Peter Singer, a bioethicist at Princeton University, wrote an article for the New York Times that essentially denies the Declaration's core principles. While discussing the sad case of Ashley, a severely disabled girl whose parents had her uterus removed and put her on hormones to stunt her growth, Singer said:
We are always ready to find dignity in human beings, including those whose mental age will never exceed that of an infant, but we don't attribute dignity to dogs or cats, though they clearly operate at a more advanced mental level than human infants. Just making that comparison provokes outrage in some quarters. But why should dignity always go together with species membership, no matter what the characteristics of the individual may be?....[Ashley] is precious not so much for what she is, but because her parents and siblings love her and care about her.
In Singer's mind, Ashley is not precious for what she is, and she does not have dignity simply because she is human. He even strongly implies that dogs and cats have more dignity than this handicapped little girl. Yet the Founders believed that all people are created equal, even those whose mental age does not advance very far.
We have here a tale of two cities. One is the city envisioned by the Founders where God has created all men and women with a fundamental equality which ensures that every person's rights are secure. The strong do not have more worth than the weak, the young do not have more value than the old, and the rich do not have more human rights than the poor. The self-evident truth is that, despite the differences, every human being enjoys an essential dignity. Every life is precious, even the wretched, weak, penniless, despised, feeble and frightened.
Then there is the city envisioned by modern atheists like Peter Singer. This is a place where a dog can have more worth than a handicapped child. This is a place where a grandmother with Alzheimer's disease has no dignity if she has no one who loves her. This is a place where newborn babies can be killed if they are imperfect or unwanted. It is a godless city where human worth is measured on a sliding scale. Woe is she who is wretched, weak, penniless, despised, feeble and frightened. Such people may have been better off as a dog or a cat than an unwanted and imperfect human being!
Ultimately, America will choose one city or the other as its destiny. This week we celebrated the 96th birthday of the man who saw the United States as the shining city on a hill, Ronald Reagan. As the late president said, "A troubled and afflicted mankind looks to us, pleading for us to keep our rendezvous with destiny; that we will uphold the principles of self-reliance, self-discipline, morality, and, above all, responsible liberty for every individual, that we will become that shining city on a hill." This is the same city envisioned by the Founders, and it is the vision that is still admired by a troubled and afflicted mankind.
How might we guard against the men and women who try to persuade us that God does not exist, that there is no inherent human dignity, and that some people have less worth than others? If ideas really do have consequences, this set of ideas will inevitably lead to great human suffering and utter cultural collapse. Therefore, how can America keep its "rendezvous with destiny" and protect the shining city?
Our response must be multifaceted. First, men and women of faith should be educated in their own intellectual heritage. Many of the great Christian minds of the past have confronted similar challenges in their own generation, and they have left behind solid answers. Atheism is not new, nor is the idea that some human beings lack inherent worth. Rather than reinvent the wheel, we should become acquainted with the way these challenges were previously addressed.
Christians must also be involved in the culture. Though a few famous atheists are churning out books, it is the movie makers, the song writers, and the television show creators that have the greatest influence. The church has a long history of producing beautiful and captivating art; there is no reason why Christians should not continue to engage and inspire the culture through art. One outstanding movie can do more to influence the culture than dozens of scholarly books.
Finally, Christians must be involved in the public square. When the ideas of Peter Singer, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris are translated into laws, injustice results. It is terrifying to contemplate a world where the law does not consider human beings to have any inherent value or dignity. We have seen this world in the past; we must never allow it to happen again. As Christians, our obligation is to love and serve our neighbors by remaining a persistent public voice in resistance to the growing threat against our culture and our nation. We must not abandon the shining city on the hill.
