Biological scientists in the National Academy of Science 

have the lowest rate of belief 

(5.5% in God, 7.1% in immortality)

 http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v394/n6691/full/394313a0_fs.html
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/news/file002.html

Vatican Gives Darwin a Big Birthday Hug, Leaving Creationists on the Fringes

Some religious leaders may take issue with Charles Darwin and what he represents, but the Vatican has announced that it is officially on board with evolution. A leading official declared yesterday that Darwin's theory of evolution was compatible with Christian faith, and could even be traced to St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas. "In fact, what we mean by evolution is the world as created by God," said Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi [Times Online].Both St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas recognized that life changes slowly over time, Ravasi said, and that was a step towards comprehending evolution.

The Vatican's effort to show that science is not incompatible with religion will culminate in a conference on evolution next month, organized to mark the 150th anniversary of Darwin's landmark publication, On the Origin of Species. The Vatican has backed away slightly from its original proposal to completely ban discussion of intelligent design at the event, which organizers called "poor theology and poor science". [Instead,] Intelligent Design would be discussed at the fringes of the conference at the Pontifical Gregorian University, but merely as a "cultural phenomenon", rather than a scientific or theological issue, organisers said [Times Online]. 

The Catholic Church was certainly hostile to Darwin's ideas when they were new. But Ravasi pointed out that the Church had never formally condemned Darwin, and he noted that in the last 50 years a number of Popes had accepted evolution as a valid scientific approach to human development [The Register]. A recent poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that Catholics joined mainline Protestants, Orthodox Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and the "unaffiliated" in accepting evolution as the best explanation for the origin of human life on earth.The strongest opponents of evolution were Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons and evangelical Christians (76 per cent of whom opposed evolutionary theory.) U.S. Muslims were almost evenly divided on the question [Vancouver Sun].

Although evangelical Christians are unlikely to seek common ground between their religious views and Darwin's theory, many other religious groups are actively promoting that reconciliation. This coming weekend, 929 churches in 14 countries will be holding special services to celebrate the compatibility of Christianity and evolution at "Evolution Weekend" events launched in 2005 by an organisation called the Clergy Letter Project [New Scientist]. The Clergy Letter argues that the Bible should not be taken literally, as its "purpose is not to convey scientific information but to transform hearts."

A group of prominent scientists and religious leaders also signed their names to a letter last weekend calling for an end to fights over Darwin and evolution, and asking both sides to scale down their rhetoric. They argued that militant atheists are turning people away from evolution by using it to attack religion while they also urge believers in creationism to acknowledge the overwhelming body of evidence that now exists to support Darwin's theory [Telegraph].

Related Content:
DISCOVER: DISCOVER Does Darwin: Special Section on Evolution 
DISCOVER: How to Teach Science to the Pope
80beats: Vatican's New Bioethics Rules Grapple With 21st Century Medical Advances
80beats: Anglican Church Owes Darwin an Apology, Senior Clergyman Says

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/02/11/vatican-gives-darwin-a-big-birthday-hug-leaving-creationists-on-the-fringes/

*  *  *

Albert Einstein, shown at left in a 1938 photo, revolutionized physics
and became a cultural icon. Charles Darwin, shown at right
in a circa-1880 painting, laid the foundation of modern evolutionary
theory, and today that theory is a cultural flashpoint.
Einstein, Darwin: A tale of 2 theories

David Friedman / MSNBC.com Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium and co-author of the book "Origins," says it's simply a matter of time before the fundamentals of evolutionary biology are as widely accepted as the fundamentals of relativistic physics.

Q&A with 'Origins' astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson

By Alan Boyle

Science editor

updated 9:05 a.m. PT, Tues., April. 19, 2005

SEATTLE - One scientist came up with a new way of explaining how biology works. A generation later, the other one came up with a new way of explaining how physics works.

Today, after a century of scrutiny, both explanations still pretty much hold up. But in popular culture, physicist Albert Einstein is idolized, while biologist Charles Darwin's legacy is clouded  with controversy.

Why do Darwin's theories on the origin of species, put forth in 1859, hold a status so different from that of Einstein's theories on relativity, published between 1905 and 1916? Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of New York's Hayden Planetarium and co-author of the book "Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution," reflected on that question during a recent interview at the University of Washington.

Here's an edited question-and-answer transcript of the interview:

MSNBC: Einstein and Darwin seem to hold two different places in our society. One is virtually a pop culture icon, while some people almost want to take down the other guy's statues. Why is that we have two different approaches to these people, even though they developed theories that are in very similar states of evidence?

Neil deGrasse Tyson: While they were both scientists, Einstein was the first very public scientist who was visibly active in social causes as well as political causes. I don't know that the same was true with Darwin. I know he was well known in his day. I know his book, "On the Origin of Species," was a best seller. But I don't know that he was active in politics, influencing governments. I don't know that he was approached by a sovereign nation and was asked to be its president, as Einstein was with the new state of Israel, for example.

As a citizen, as a public scientist, I can tell you that Einstein essentially overturned a so strongly established paradigm of science, whereas Darwin didn't really overturn a science paradigm. There was a paradigm there, but it was a gradual process: "Does evolution work as Lamarck said, with the inheritance of acquired traits? No, it doesn't" … You can see the evolution of an idea there, settling on what works, whereas Einstein took Newtonian physics and said this is incomplete, which is something that was unimaginable for the hundreds of years that we were doing Newtonian physics.

My read of history is that people wanted to get opinions on everything from someone who was so widely recognized as being so smart.

It's kind of like the situation with rock stars today: You want to know what Bono thinks about global hunger, even though he made his money as a musician.

Exactly. So Einstein is not necessarily an expert in these other fields. Not even necessarily informed in these other fields. But people know that he's a deep thinker. So what are his deep thoughts about Jews and Arabs, and the civil rights movement, and the bomb, and Nazi Germany? He became this sounding board for people to try to get some point of view from someone they implicitly trust, from a smart person.

So there's that factor that distinguishes Einstein from Darwin. But I think there's a stronger factor: There is no science in this world like physics. Nothing comes close to the precision with which physics enables you to understand the world around you. It's the laws of physics that allow us to say exactly what time the sun is going to rise. What time the eclipse is going to begin. What time the eclipse is going to end. What time the meteor is going to hit.

Do you remember when David Levy and Carolyn and Gene Shoemaker discovered a comet, and they had a few measurements of it, and they said, 'The next time around, it's going to slam into Jupiter.' And what's remarkable is that no one questions that. Because they know it is the powers of understanding, derived from the fundamentals of physics, that give you that capacity to basically predict the future with high precision.

Biology doesn't do that. Chemistry doesn't do that. You can predict reactions, yes. You can get an understanding of how things work, yes. Darwin's theory of evolution is a framework by which we understand the diversity of life on Earth. But there is no equation sitting there in Darwin's "Origin of Species" that you apply and say, "What is this species going to look like in 100 years or 1,000 years?" Biology isn't there yet with that kind of predictive precision.

So, when we speak of the theory of relativity, and the theory of evolution, they are each extremely important ways of understanding the world. But the tool kit that comes with the relativity theory, that comes with any physics theory, has a level of precision that puts it just in another category. It's not simply an organizing principle.

When you predict that the sun is going to rise at 7:22 tomorrow morning, and someone wants to debate you … you're going to be wasting your time having that conversation. Just walk away from it, because you know in advance what's going to happen.

For that reason, Darwin's theory of evolution, because it's a theory of biology, because biology is a different kind of science from physics, it looks to the outsider as if you can just jump in and claim that things are just not what the biologist sees them to be. Now of course that's false, but I'm just submitting to you that when you have your tool kit of predictive powers, that's kind of like an armor at the perimeter. You're not going to get past that to say that somehow that equation is wrong. The equation is demonstrably correct, so go home.

The trouble with evolutionSince evolution is an organizing principle of biology that allows you to understand phenomena, there are people who resist it.

Now the way I see it, that level of resistance is not fundamentally different from the resistance that prevailed when Copernicus and Galileo demonstrated that Earth goes around the sun and not vice versa. We didn't have Newtonian gravity back then. You couldn't predict, with high precision, the clockwork solar system. That would have been a new word back then: "solar system," implying that the sun is at the center of things.

Back then, you had religious types arguing this, saying that it was against scripture, against God, against God's way, God's will. Back then, of course, the church was very powerful. They were basically the state in Italy. So there was the power to enforce a point of view, which made it bad for your health to espouse views that were different from people's interpretation of scripture.

Today, I'm happy to report that they don't burn people at the stake if they claim that Earth goes around the sun, or that there are other stars that might have other planets that themselves could have life. It's statements like that that got Giordano Bruno burned at the stake in 1600, just 10 years before Galileo really came on the scene with his "Starry Messenger," reporting that Jupiter had moons, which made Jupiter the center of that motion, and not Earth.

So things were changing rapidly back then, from burning Bruno at the stake, to putting Galileo under house arrest, to modern days, with the Catholic Church issuing statements saying evolution's OK. So history has shown that some theistically based belief systems have been able to adapt to the prevailing discoveries of science. Those that don't will be left behind. And if you're left behind, you become disenfranchised from the forces that control emerging economies.

We're in the 21st century. The emerging economies are going to be scientifically and technologically driven. We're not agrarian anymore.

What were the consequences in the mid-1800s of saying you didn't believe Darwin? There weren't any, really. But today, with biotech companies, there is no understanding of biology without the theory of evolution. And so if you say, 'I don't believe the theory of evolution, I think we were all specially created,' you must understand the consequences of it to your own employability.

Now if you don't want to become a scientist, then maybe it doesn't matter. Fine. There are plenty of professions that do not involve scientists. But as I said, the emergent economies are going to be scientifically and technologically driven, with biotech front and center. If you're coming in saying that there was Adam and Eve, you're not going to get past the front door. Because they can't use your knowledge base to invent the next vaccine, the next medicine, the next cure for cancer. That knowledge base does not track into discoveries we know are awaiting us in the halls of biotech firms.

You're saying that your perspective on those theories affects the pace of innovation?

Yes. And I would add this, just to nip this argument over "theories" in the bud: Until Einstein, all tested, confirmed physical theories were labeled laws. There's Newton's three laws of motion … the laws of gravity … the laws of thermodynamics. When Einstein came along, he showed that Newton was incomplete — not wrong, but incomplete, describing just a subset of reality. Einstein showed that a deeper understanding was required to account for this reality. At that point, physicists – I think not even consciously, just sort of subconsciously – stopped calling things "laws."

There are no "laws" of physics in the 20th century. It's quantum theory … the theory of relativity … you just look in the books, they all use the term "theory." I think it's a recognition that someone who comes after you may achieve an even deeper understanding of how things work. But "deeper" doesn't mean that what you did is no longer valid. It just means that there's a larger sphere of understanding that awaits you, in which what you just learned is embedded.

It's like the old classical Venn diagram: Here's the Newton universe. The Einstein universe is now that, enclosing Newton. Einstein's equations look like Newton's equations, when you put in low gravity and low speeds. They all reduce, and they're identical to Newton's equations. Because Newton's equations work: They don't suddenly fail to work in the regime in which they were demonstrated to work. They don't become undone. They're still there.

So now we know that general relativity is incomplete, because it doesn't marry with quantum mechanics. They don't talk to each other. We know that already. So now we are asserting that there's yet an even bigger circle out there, that would include quantum mechanics with general relativity. And this is what the string theorists are doing. That's what drives them. They're not driven by some whim.

Right. It's not a mere desire to come up with something esoteric.

They're not doing this just for the hell of it. No. There's a gap there. And that deeper understanding, like I said, is an understanding that encloses the previous understandings because they've already been demonstrated to work.

But the change in vocabulary is not received the same way by the public. They hear the word "theory" and they say, "Well, it's only a theory. Tomorrow it could be different." Well, if it's different tomorrow, it's because we've found something that's even more powerful than this. It's not because we looked and found something completely different over here.

Now, the word "theory" is also used to describe ideas that are very tentative. That's true. So now we're stuck with a problem: We've got evolutionary theory, quantum theory, all very well tested and very well established – and now we've got somebody's theory on the frontier of the science, that will probably be shown to be wrong, because most fresh theories are wrong. But they keep you investigating. You're hacking through the brush and bramble, trying to make a clearing where you understand what's going on. There's an unfortunate mismatch in the way scientists use the word "theory" and the public's interpretation of the word, as applied to these century-old understandings of the world.

So that's unfortunate. But what the public needs to understand is, there is nothing more powerful than successful theories. They organize ideas in ways that grant you a power of understanding that is without equal in any system of human thought that has ever come before.

Do you expect that there would be a test down the line that would enable the confidence in Darwin's theory to be solidified to the point that the Copernican view of the solar system holds today? Are there tests that can be done to show that kind of precision that we have for planetary motion nowadays?

There are two issues there: Let me unpack them to make them separate. The issue of precision simply distinguishes Einstein from Darwin. I think that alone is not what accounts for the resistance that we see in the various communities.

Most of what Einstein said and did has no direct impact on what anybody reads in the Bible. Special relativity, his work in quantum mechanics, nobody even knows or cares. Where Einstein really affects the Bible is the fact that general relativity is the organizing principle for the Big Bang. That's where it affects origin science, and then you have the religious community reacting to that.

Going back to the analogue with Copernican systems, I think it's a matter of time. The world fully accepted the heliocentric model long before Newton came out with his laws of gravity and laws of motion. Copernicus' book was 1543. Newton was 1687, OK? That's 130 years.

Now it's been 130 years since Darwin. So you have to ask, what is your measure of this resistance? Is it most of the world? No, it's not most of the world that's resisting this. It's a small subset of the world. One might even say the holdouts. But they need to understand that their counterparts in the past were no less passionate about their objection to a scientific discovery as people objecting to the sun going around the earth or vice versa.

They were no less passionate in the invention of the microscope, the discovery of germs: that when you got sick, it wasn't because God made you sick, it was because you exposed yourself to these microorganisms. And I can hand you these microorganisms and you'll come down with all these symptoms. That discovery removed God from many equations that people had going in their head for why you got sick.

There's a famous statement about venereal disease… when penicillin was demonstrated to cure venereal disease, there was some bishop who at the time said that this medicine was the work of the devil, because it allows you to fornicate and not face God's punishment. And you still see a little bit of that with the AIDS virus. But by and large, people are not thinking that germs are handed off by supernatural powers.

So I think it's a matter of time. There's an old saying about the evolution of every great truth: First, people say they don't believe it; then, they say it contradicts the Bible; and third, they say they've known it all along.

So just give them a little more time. They might warm up to it.

On the other hand, Einstein's work was inspired by the incompleteness of past theories – how some experiments showed that the way scientists thought the world worked in the late 1800s was just plain wrong.

There were some gaps in physics, and if you did not have foresight, you might think, "Oh, they will just resolve themselves. Add a little decimal place, and they'll fix themselves." But they were not fixable by themselves. It took someone like Einstein, and the other forward-thinkers around him, to figure it out.

Would you say that the analog for the present age are the discoveries about the accelerating universe?

Yeah, we've got gaps today. We don't know what dark matter is. We don't know what dark energy is. We don't know what was around before the Big Bang. We don't know what's going on at the center of a black hole. We don't know how gravity can merge with quantum mechanics. We don't know how galaxies formed. There are major areas of the unknown that remain today. But that's the nature of science.

And are those the sorts of things that could spark the sort of inspiration that Einstein had?

I would hope. What you really want out of this is to have someone come up with an explanation of, let's say, dark matter — and just as part of the accoutrements of the theory, it explains 10 other things. That's what happened with relativity.

Einstein said, 'Well, here's the speed of light,' and so on, and all of a sudden general relativity explained Mercury's precession around the sun, it explained the bending of starlight, it explained all this stuff. He didn't start the day with that objective, but that's what gives you that much more confidence in the theory. If you start the day wanting to explain something, then you'd wonder whether somebody made something up just to account for it. ...

Einstein was explaining stuff for free. And that power of understanding led to extreme confidence that he was on the right track, and was deeply plugged into how nature worked.

© 2009 msnbc.com Reprints

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7490426/

Leading scientists still reject God

Nature, Vol. 394, No. 6691, p. 313 (1998) © Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

Sir — The question of religious belief among US scientists has been debated since early in the century. Our latest survey finds that, among the top natural scientists, disbelief is greater than ever — almost total. Research on this topic began with the eminent US psychologist James H. Leuba and his landmark survey of 1914. He found that 58% of 1,000 randomly selected US scientists expressed disbelief or doubt in the existence of God, and that this figure rose to near 70% among the 400 "greater" scientists within his sample ^[1]. Leuba repeated his survey in somewhat different form 20 years later, and found that these percentages had increased to 67 and 85, respectively ^[2]. In 1996, we repeated Leuba's 1914 survey and reported our results in Nature ^[3]. We found little change from 1914 for American scientists generally, with 60.7% expressing disbelief or doubt. This year, we closely imitated the second phase of Leuba's 1914 survey to gauge belief among "greater" scientists, and find the rate  of belief lower than ever — a mere 7% of respondents. Leuba attributed the higher level of disbelief and doubt among "greater" scientists to their "superior knowledge, understanding, and experience" ^[3]. Similarly, Oxford University scientist Peter Atkins commented on our 1996 survey, "You clearly can be a scientist and have religious beliefs. But I don't think you can be a real scientist in the deepest sense of the word because they are such alien categories of knowledge." ^[4] Such comments led us to repeat the second phase of Leuba's study for an up-to-date comparison of the religious beliefs of "greater" and "lesser" scientists. Our chosen group of "greater" scientists were members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Our survey found near universal rejection of the transcendent by NAS natural scientists. Disbelief in God and immortality among NAS biological scientists was 65.2% and 69.0%, respectively, and among NAS physical scientists it was 79.0% and 76.3%. Most of the rest were agnostics on both issues, with few believers. We found the highest percentage of belief among NAS mathematicians (14.3% in God, 15.0% in immortality). Biological scientists had the lowest rate of belief (5.5% in God, 7.1% in immortality), with physicists and astronomers slightly higher (7.5% in God, 7.5% in immortality). Overall comparison figures for the 1914, 1933 and 1998 surveys appear in Table 1.

Table 1 Comparison of survey answers among "greater" scientists
Belief in personal God	1914	1933	1998
Personal belief	27.7	15	7.0
Personal disbelief	52.7	68	72.2
Doubt or agnosticism	20.9	17	20.8
Belief in human immortality	1914	1933	1998
Personal belief	35.2	18	7.9
Personal disbelief	25.4	53	76.7
Doubt or agnosticism	43.7	29	23.3
Figures are percentages.

Repeating Leuba's methods presented challenges. For his general surveys, he randomly polled scientists listed in the standard reference work, American Men of Science (AMS). We used the current edition. In Leuba's day, AMS editors designated the "great scientists" among their entries, and Leuba used these to identify his "greater" scientists ^[1,2]. The AMS no longer makes these designations, so we chose as our "greater" scientists members of the NAS, a status that once assured designation as "great scientists" in the early AMS. Our method surely generated a more elite sample than Leuba's method, which (if the quoted comments by Leuba and Atkins are correct) may explain the extremely low level of belief among our respondents. For the 1914 survey, Leuba mailed his brief questionnaire to a random sample of 400 AMS "great scientists". It asked about the respondent's belief in "a God in intellectual and affective communication with humankind" and in "personal immortality". Respondents had the options of affirming belief, disbelief or agnosticism on each question ^[1]. Our survey contained precisely the same questions and also asked for anonymous responses. Leuba sent the 1914 survey to 400 "biological and physical scientists", with the latter group including mathematicians as well as physicists and astronomers ^[1]. Because of the relatively small size of NAS membership, we sent our survey to all 517 NAS members in those core disciplines. Leuba obtained a return rate of about 70% in 1914 and more than 75% in 1933 whereas our returns stood at about 60% for the 1996 survey and slightly over 50% from NAS members ^[1,2]. As we compiled our findings, the NAS issued a booklet encouraging the teaching of evolution in public schools, an ongoing source of friction between the scientific community and some conservative Christians in the United States. The booklet assures readers, "Whether God exists or not is a question about which science is neutral"^[5]. NAS president Bruce Alberts said: "There are many very outstanding members of this academy who are very religious people, people who believe in evolution, many of them biologists." Our survey suggests otherwise.

Edward J. Larson Department of History, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia 30602-6012, USA e-mail:edlarson@uga.edu Larry Witham 3816 Lansdale Court, Burtonsville, Maryland 20866, USA

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References Leuba, J. H. The Belief in God and Immortality: A Psychological, Anthropological and Statistical Study (Sherman, French & Co., Boston, 1916). Leuba, J. H. Harper's Magazine 169, 291-300 (1934). Larson, E. J. & Witham, L. Nature 386, 435-436 (1997). Highfield, R. The Daily Telegraph 3 April, p. 4 (1997). National Academy of Sciences Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science (Natl Acad. Press, Washington DC, 1998).

[ PDF format (208 K) ]

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Nature © Macmillan Publishers Ltd 1998 Registered No. 785998 England
 http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v394/n6691/full/394313a0_fs.html
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/news/file002.html

Fewer Americans Accept Evolution Theory
Published 16 Aug 2006

GUEST: Jon Miller, Jon Hennah Professor of Integrative Studies at Michigan State University, lead author of a study on popular acceptance of evolution theory
A new study published in Journal Science last Friday reveals that only forty percent of Americans accept the theory of evolution. In European nations, such as Iceland, Sweden, Denmark and France, more than eighty percent of adults surveyed stated an acceptance of evolution. The United States posted the second lowest numbers of the thirty-four nations surveyed, ranking only slightly higher than Turkey. The study also found an increasing skepticism about evolution among the U.S. adult population. Over the last two decades, the percentage of Americans who are uncertain about the merits of evolutionary theory has increased from seven percent to twenty-one percent; a three fold increase. The lead author of the study, Professor Jon Miller, cites religious fundamentalism, the politicization of the evolution debate and a poor understanding of biology to be among the leading factors in the decreasing acceptance of the theory of evolution among Americans.

Graph of study results:

http://uprisingradio.org/home/?p=682

http://www.livescience.com/images/060810_evo_rank_02.jpg

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Gallup 'Darwin's Birthday' Poll: Fewer than Four in Ten Believe in Evolution

February 11, 2009 05:33 PM ET | Dan Gilgoff | Permanent Link 

By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country

Charles Darwin would have been 200 tomorrow, an event that Gallup is marking with a new poll showing that 39 percent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution. A quarter say they don't believe in evolution, and 36 percent say they have no opinion.

The strongest predictor of respondents' views on evolution? Church attendance.

In fact, Gallup's analysis says religiosity outweighs educational level in shaping views on evolution, even though those with the most education are far more likely to support evolution than those with the least. Just 21 percent of respondents who had up to a high school level of education believe in evolution, compared with 74 percent of those with postgraduate degrees.

But Frank Newport, Gallup's editor in chief, says religion is the determining factor:

Previous Gallup research shows that the rate of church attendance is fairly constant across educational groups, suggesting that this relationship is not owing to an underlying educational difference but instead reflects a direct influence of religious beliefs on belief in evolution.

Among weekly churchgoers, 24 percent believe in evolution, while 41 percent do not and 35 percent have no opinion. Among those who seldom or never attend church, 55 percent belief in evolution, while 11 percent do not, and 34 percent have no opinion.

Look to the question of how many Americans believe in Darwin's theory of natural selection, and the numbers shrink further. Gallup puts that number at 14 percent, while the Pew Research Center puts it at 26 percent. Both organizations put the number of Americans who favor creationism at about 43 percent, higher than the proportion than believes in evolution, according to a recent Pew report.

http://www.usnews.com/blogs/god-and-country/2009/2/11/gallup-darwins-birthday-poll-fewer-than-four-in-ten-believe-in-evolution.html

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On Darwin's 200th Birthday, Americans Still Divided About Evolution
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1107/polling-evolution-creationism

Video:  Darwin's evolution ideas remain controversial - 13 Feb 09
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQLKDd1PH2o&eurl=http://news.google.com/news?rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS291US307&sourceid=chrome&q=darwin&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hliurl=http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/LQLKDd1PH2o/hqdefault.jpg

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Vatican Accepts Darwin's Theory Of Evolution Compatible With Christianity
February 12, 2009 12:14 p.m. EST
AHN Staff

Vatican City (AHN) - The Vatican has changed its stand about the Theory of Evolution advanced by Charles Darwin. Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said Darwin's theory which the Church was against in the past, is compatible with Christianity.

The archbishop pointed to the writings of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas as proofs. St. Augustine, a 4th century theologian, wrote about the big fish eating the smaller fish and the slow transformation over time of the forms of life. Similar observations were voiced by Aquinas during the Middle Ages.

The acknowledgement of Darwin's theory coincides with the holding of a papal-backed conference at the Pontifical Gregorian University to observe the 150th anniversary of Darwin's "On the Origin of Species".

Ravasi clarified Darwin's theories were not formally condemned by the Roman Catholic Church.

Meanwhile, Pope Benedict XVI sought to ease the controversy created by a Catholic bishop who said Jews were not killed by the Nazis in gas chambers. At a Thursday meeting with the delegation of the Conference of American Jewish Organization, the pontiff said the Church is "profoundly and irrevocably committed to rejecting all anti-Semitism and to continuing to build good and lasting relations between our two communities."

Pope Benedict also announced during the private audience with the CAJO he has tentatively scheduled a visit to Israel on May.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-shasha/a-jewish-voice-left-silen_b_487586.html

 

David Shasha

 Posted: March 5, 2010 01:51 PM

The Arab Jewish Tradition and the Past and Future Promise of Peace

The modern state of Israel is composed of Sephardic Jews, Jews from Arab-Islamic lands, and Ashkenazic Jews, Jews who hail from Christian Europe. Occidental Jews have taken on many of the traits of Western culture, while the Oriental Jews, many of whom continued to speak Arabic and partake of a common Middle Eastern culture until the mass dispersions of Jews from Arab countries after 1948, have preserved many of the folkways and traits of Arab civilization. The current demographic composition of Israel maintains a majority of people whose native family origins and history are in the Middle East - be they Jewish or Muslim.

Because of the stigma against all things Arab propounded by Zionism, many Arab Jews have surrendered their native Sephardic perspective in favor of the ruling Eurocentric ideology in Israel and have become among the most militant followers of the Likud and other Right Wing parties in Israel. The movement of Jews out of the Arab world and into the orbit of the Jewish state has greatly disrupted the bearings of Arab Jewry.

It is standard practice to see Jews and Arabs as embattled enemies rather than try to recall a time when the Jews of the Middle East were integrated into the Arab culture and civilization. But there was, contrary to today's assumptions, a time when Jews were culturally integrated into the Middle East.

This culture, what I have called "The Levantine Option," if adopted as a discursive model in the current dialogue, could speak in a sophisticated and humane manner to many of the underlying barriers that frame the culture of brutality permeating the region.

The term "Levantine" describes a polyglot Middle Eastern culture inclusive of the many ethnic groups that reside in the eastern Mediterranean under the rubric of Arab-Islamic civilization. The Levantine civilization is part of a Mediterranean world that in earlier times stretched from Muslim Spain all the way to Iraq and Syria, extending to India and even China.

The most recent chronicler of this forgotten civilization is the great Turkish writer and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, who, in his excellent memoir Istanbul laments this eclipse of this venerable culture:

The cosmopolitan Istanbul I knew as a child had disappeared by the time I reached adulthood. In 1853 [the French writer Theophile] Gautier, like many other travelers of the day, had remarked that in the streets of Istanbul you could here Turkish, Greek, Armenian, Italian, French, and English (and, more than either of the last two languages, Ladino, the medieval Spanish of the Jews who'd come to Istanbul after the Inquisition). Noting that many people in this "tower of Babel" were fluent in several languages, Gautier seems, like so many of his compatriots, to be slightly ashamed to have no language other than his mother tongue.

Sephardic Jews acculturated to the Arabic model as articulated in the first centuries of Islam. Prominent Sephardic rabbis, such as Moses Maimonides and Abraham ibn Ezra, disdained clericalism while espousing humanism and science. The synthesis that was created by these sages permeated the religious values of Muslim, Jewish, and Christians in what the scholar Jose Faur has called "Religious Humanism."

Sephardic rabbis were thus not merely religious functionaries; they were poets, philosophers, astronomers, doctors, lawyers, accountants, linguists, merchants, architects, civic leaders and much else. Samuel the Nagid, the famous polymath of Granada, even led military troops into battle in the 11th century.

While Ashkenazi Jews in the modern period broke off into bitter and acrimonious factions, Sephardim, true to "The Levantine Option," remained united rather than let doctrine asphyxiate them. A Jewish Reformation never took place in the Sephardic world because the Sephardim continued to maintain fidelity to their traditions while absorbing and adapting the ideas and trends of the world they lived in.

Arab Jews created a place for themselves in their countries of origin by serving in government, civic affairs, business, and the professions: James Sanua, an Egyptian Jewish writer, was at the forefront of the nascent Egyptian nationalist movement. The last chief rabbi of the Ottoman Empire and then of Egypt (who died in Cairo in 1960), Haim Nahum Effendi, was elected as a member to the Egyptian Senate and was a founder of the Arabic Language Academy. By request from the Egyptian civil authorities Rabbi Masud Hai Ben Shimon composed a digest of Jewish legal practice written in classical Arabic that served as a primary source on Judaism for Egyptian courts.

In his best-selling 2002 book What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, Bernard Lewis makes a telling statement in his interpretation of this ethno-cultural impasse. Echoing his infamous "Clash of Civilizations" thesis, made famous by the late Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, Lewis sees that the dichotomy between Judaism and Islam extends to the Jews of Israel as well:

The conflict, coexistence, or combination of these two traditions [i.e. the Judeo-Christian and the Judeo-Islamic] within a single small state, with a shared religion and a common citizenship and allegiance, should prove illuminating. For Israel, this issue may have an existential significance, since the survival of the state, surrounded, outnumbered, and outgunned by neighbors who reject its very right to exist, may depend on its largely Western-derived qualitative edge.

Israel, according to this logic, must be a representative outpost of Western civilization in a brutal and barbaric region of culturally inferior Arabs.

Indeed, when they arrived in the state of Israel from the Arab world in the 1940's and 50's, Sephardim underwent a forced process of de-Arabization, losing their native tongue, Arabic, which led to a complete abandonment of the deep ties they once had with the rich civilization of the Middle East and set them at the very bottom of the social and economic ladder in the new state.

The opposition between East and West promoted by Lewis, a permanent feature of the discourse on the conflict as reproduced by the Western media, is a dangerous mechanism that has occluded the voice of Jews who once maintained a crucial connection to the organic world of the Middle East. The silencing or marginalizing of the Arab Jewish voice has had a profoundly deleterious affect on the conflict.

What if the future of the Middle East lay in the amicable interaction of the three religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, in a symbiotic formation that lays out the commonalities rather than the deep-seated differences that are rooted in the Ashkenazi experience?

If such a symbiosis were desirable, the memory of Moorish Spain where the three religions were able to coexist and produce a civilization of great worth, would take prominence. The Sephardic voice would be central in articulating what was termed Convivencia, the creative cultural dynamic that fired medieval Spanish civilization, until its collapse in 1492.

"The Levantine Option" would help collapse the alienating cult of persecution harbored in classical Zionist thought and omnipresent in the rituals of the state of Israel, replacing it with a more positive view of the past. The nihilistic "realism" of the current Israeli approach, centered on the institutionalized perpetuation of the twin legacies of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, would be countered by memories of an indigenous Jewish past that had a constructive relationship with its surrounding environment. "The Levantine Option" would create a shared cultural space for Jews and Arabs to bring down the walls and barriers between the peoples.

Until we develop ways to talk to one another in a substantial and civilized way - from within a shared cultural space that exists for those of us who still espouse "The Levantine Option" - the questions surrounding Israel and Palestine, as well as the endemic violence that is a malignant cancer in the region, will continue to haunt Jews, Arabs and the rest of the world.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-shasha/a-jewish-voice-left-silen_b_487586.html

Israel’s former top Rabbi, Shas party spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef

Israeli rabbi describes Islam as “ugly”

CAIRO: Israel’s former top Rabbi, Shas party spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, harshly criticized Islam as a religion and described it as an “ugly” faith during a speech he delivered on Saturday night for the occasion of Hanukah. The comments have left many in the Arab world questioning the role of religious leaders in the Jewish state.

The Rabbi, according to a report by Egypt’s al-Youm al-Saba’a newspaper, who quoted the statements of the Rabbi from Israel’s Ma’arev daily newspaper, reportedly said, “Islam is the worst religion and a religion that disregards the rules of marriage and divorce among Muslims,” adding that according to Islam, “a man cannot get back to his wife if he has divorced her three times, without a Mohalal; the wife has to marry another man before getting back to her ex-husband and if he divorced her for more than three times, according to the Islamic law.”

Ovadia continued to tell of marriage in Islam, saying, “the woman who commits adultery and has intercourse with another man, then gets back to her husband.”

Ma’arev said that the Rabbi, who doubles as the Spiritual Leader of the religious political party, statements will spark anger and cause a storm of attack on him by the Muslim world this year.

The editor of the newspaper Avishai Ben-Haim, said Yosef’s sermon on Saturday night, in which he explained that the conditions of marriage and divorce in Judaism has no similar concept of the one that exists in the Islamic faith in an apparent defense of the Rabbi’s statements.

Yosef was born in Basra, Iraq, in 1924 before moving to Israel early in his life. He currently resides in Jerusalem and is largely seen as one of the most conservative rabbis in the country, with especially rash opinions on Islam.

“He often says these things about Islam and it is disgusting,” said Israeli analyst Avi Cohen from Jerusalem. The analyst hopes that the Muslim world does not take the rabbi’s comments to heart, as “he doesn’t represent the mainstream view of Islam by Israelis and is largely seen as a person not to be listened to. Only the ultra-right conservatives follow what he says.”

But with Islamophobia on the rise in Europe, Muslims across the region are beginning to see these verbal attacks as a pattern that must be ended.

Nidal Mohsen, a Libyan journalist based in Cairo, told Bikya Masr that he hopes people will see what Yosef said and make a concerted effort to fight back.

“I don’t think people should go and be violent and attack Jews wherever they are, instead they need to use the same language to show how he is wrong and Islam is not an ugly religion. All religions have their problems, so when someone from another faith starts to attack another faith over some small issues, it is ridiculous because his own faith has issues that are not so glorious,” Mohsen argued.

The Israeli Embassy in Cairo was unavailable for comment.

http://bikyamasr.com/?p=6795