Muslim Medical Students Boycott Darwin Lectures 1319
First time submitter Readycharged writes "The Daily Mail reports on a piece from The Sunday Times revealing that University College London have seen an increasing number of Muslim students boycotting lectures on Evolution due to clashes with the Koran. Steve Jones, Emeritus Professor of Human Genetics, says, 'I've had one or two slightly frisky discussions with kids who belonged to fundamentalist Christian churches, now it's Islamic overwhelmingly.' He adds, 'What they object to — and I don't really understand it, I am not religious — they object to the idea that there is a random process out there which is not directed by God.' The article also reveals that Evolutionary Biologist and former Oxford Professor Richard Dawkins also experienced Muslims walking out of such lectures."
I have problems with this (Score:5, Interesting)
Chiefly among them the idea that randomness is not divine. How else would some being equal parts evil and good distribute his Will? In closely examining randomness we find what patterns we will, allowing us to imagine we grasp the whole until the patterns devolve until they're just a cloud.
It's humor to keep a divine being amused for all time - to tease us with imagined understanding.
Re:I have problems with this (Score:5, Funny)
I wonder if they also object to quantum mechanics?
Re:I have problems with this (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I have problems with this (Score:5, Funny)
God does not play dice.
-- Albert Einstein (aka Anti-science Jewish fundamentalist)
Re:I have problems with this (Score:5, Insightful)
God does not play dice.
-- Albert Einstein (aka Anti-science Jewish fundamentalist)
It is worth noting that the great man produced little of scientific note later in life, mostly because he could not accept the evidence produced by the quantum scientists. If you allow your beliefs to interfeer with reality, you can no longer do science.
Re:I have problems with this (Score:5, Interesting)
Quoting Albert on god and religion (Score:5, Interesting)
And there is this: [lettersofnote.com]
tl;dr version: Einstein said that "The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this."
Re:Quoting Albert on god and religion (Score:5, Interesting)
"I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being."
"The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
"In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognise, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views."
"I'm not an atheist and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God."
"I believe in Spinoza's God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind."
"I do not believe in a God who maliciously or arbitrarily interferes in the personal affairs of mankind. My religion consists of an humble admiration for the vast power which manifests itself in that small part of the universe which our poor, weak minds can grasp!"
"Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their conception of God. In general, only individuals of exceptional endowments, and exceptionally high-minded communities, rise to any considerable extent above this level. But there is a third stage of religious experience which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form: I shall call it cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it."
"The man who is thoroughly convinced of the universal operation of the law of causation cannot for a moment entertain the idea of a being who interferes in the course of events — provided, of course, that he takes the hypothesis of causality really seriously. He has no use for the religion of fear and equally little for social or moral religion. A God who rewards and punishes is inconceivable to him for the simple reason that a man's actions are determined by necessity, external and internal, so that in God's eyes he cannot be responsible, any more than an inanimate object is responsible for the motions it undergoes. Science has therefore been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is
Re:I have problems with this (Score:5, Informative)
An incredibly widespread misconception...
From Einstein's letter to Max Born, 1926:
"Die Theorie liefert viel, aber dem Geheimnis des Alten bringt sie uns kaum näher. Jedenfalls bin ich überzeugt, daß der Alte nicht würfelt."
Translated:
"The theory offers a lot, but hardly brings us closer the the old guy's secret. Anyway, I'm convicted that the old guy doesn't play dice."
Einstein never said "God does not play dice", but rather used a slightly derogatory term to describe the metaphor of finding the world formula.
Other quotes by Einstein, easily verifiable:
"It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere. Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."
"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish."
Re:I have problems with this (Score:5, Interesting)
Theologians have been deeply pondering this point for hundreds, if not thousands of years: Whether or not God made a linear story in which we have an unwilling part, predestination, or if we have free will. Both are hinted at in the Bible. In predestination, God is the author of sin, which is distasteful to some. But if free will is truly free, God doesn't know the outcome of decisions that haven't been made yet, and that limits God's omniscience.
One way to reconcile the apparent paradox is to say that, while we as humans can only perceive one branch, God has awareness of every possible branch from the beginning of time to the end. A being that could create a system like that and maintain an awareness of it would be massively omnipotent to the point of being impossible to completely comprehend with the human mind.
Polarization is recognizable when each side can only conceive a charicature of the other. "Religious people" don't conform to one way of thinking any more than "science people" do, nor are the two mutually exclusive.
Re:I have problems with this (Score:5, Funny)
I can't perceive the multiverse.
Don't worry, there's a universe where you can.
Re:I have problems with this (Score:5, Funny)
I know I do. Had a few working on my particle accelerator, but they could only tell me what was probably wrong with it...
Re:I have problems with this (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I have problems with this (Score:5, Insightful)
This desire that Science must be subjugated to religious interpretation essentially destroyed Arabic Science after islam arose. Prior to islam the Arabs were scientific leaders. After islam, their students were all directed to an internalized study of the koran - ad absurditum. Islam actively suppresses any potential reformations (like all the old time religions, they wanted to grab converts and keep people from leaving). I recall the pilgrims came to America to find freedom from religion - as distinct from freedom of religion. In schools here in Canada the islamist students hound the other students into the 5 times/day prayers. The students need freedom from this oppressive process - freedom from religion...
Re:I have problems with this (Score:5, Informative)
From what I've heard recently, the pilgrims went to the US not to escape religious persecution, but to enable it, they went to a land where they could be free to persecute the crap out of whoever they felt like in order to keep their societies pure.
AFAICT.
Re:I have problems with this (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I have problems with this (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I have problems with this (Score:5, Informative)
He must've been a very bad physics lecturer then, because that's quite a fundamental misunderstanding of the second law of thermodynamics. (Not to mention a very fundamentalist one - it's something that creationists have been pushing a lot.) The second law only requires that the entropy of a closed system increases; localised entropy decreases are entirely OK so long as entropy increases overall. If it wasn't for this life couldn't exist at all!
Re:I have problems with this (Score:5, Interesting)
I stuck my hand up and pointed out that the increase in entropy on the sun more than offsets any decrease in entropy on the earth, and if the sun went out, life in earth would die and entropy would go on as expected. He agreed with me and said it depends on what you believe. He knew he was talking crap but he had to do it for some reason. He was otherwise a very smart guy.
Re:I have problems with this (Score:5, Interesting)
He knew he was talking crap but he had to do it for some reason. He was otherwise a very smart guy.
Maybe a conflict between what was indoctrinated at a young age and what he learned later? Orwell called that phenomenon "doublethink".
Re:I have problems with this (Score:5, Interesting)
A really great physics lecturer would then go on to point out that if one takes said closed Universe and partitions it (mentally) into a (sub) "system" and its complement (everything else), the "bath", defines Nakajima-Zwanzig projection valued operators and performs a ritual incantation involving several pages of very difficult algebra and calculus, one arrives at a set of non-Markovian integrodifferential equations that describe the still-deterministic time evolution of the subsystem in contact with the bath, from the full set of initial conditions of the whole thing (including all phases in quantum theory). This lecturer could then talk about making Markov approximations to get rid of the integro- part of the solution, about the impossibility of our obtaining sufficiently complete knowledge of the bath and hence the necessity of diagonalizing it (taking the trace in QM) and thereby describing it classically and statistically, and perhaps even discuss the Langevin equation as a solvable stochastic ODE that can model the system in contact with the bath and THEN note that under these conditions, the "entropy" of the system must increase as its initial information diffuses into the basically unknown state of the bath.
He/she might title the lecture "The Generalized Master Equation and open systems in quantum mechanics", and stick it in close to the end of a good stat mech course, and perhaps direct the reader to some of the lovely review literature, e.g. an article by Breuer at arXiv:0707.0172v1.
Sadly, even in most physics departments there are still far too many faculty who are teaching what they were taught by rote -- that quantum mechanics is somehow "fundamentally non-deterministic". Not so, as the equations of motion of quantum theory themselves quite clearly demonstrate (being well-defined systems of differential equations for any closed system). It's only when one considers measurement that stochastic descriptions come into play, and the consistently derived reason is precisely that outlined above. We cannot describe the measurement apparatus itself as part of the quantum system with a definitely known state so we treat it classically and statistically via e.g. traces and random phase approximations and the like (or just treat it as a classical stochastic filter).
rgb
Re:I have problems with this (Score:5, Funny)
Creationists always try to use the second law,
to disprove evolution, but their theory has a flaw.
The second law is quite precise about where it applies,
only in a closed system must the entropy count rise.
The earth's not a closed system' it's powered by the sun,
so fuck the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun!
Re:I have problems with this (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I have problems with this (Score:5, Insightful)
It's almost as if religious folks -know- that they're wrong. Thus to preserve their wrongheadedness, it's requires to not even learn about the alternatives. (presumably, learning would risk realising that the alternative theories are correct.)
Learning about something, doesn't require *agreeing* with it. I've read both the Koran and the Bible, and spend hundreds of hours learning about both. I don't *agree* with it,but it's still useful to understand it and know about it.
But religious folks are frequently panicked about the idea that they might have to learn about something they themselves don't agree with. In my opinion, they're scared. And rightfully so. The thing about reality is that it does not go away, even if you don't believe in it.
Re:I have problems with this (Score:5, Insightful)
I was going to write basically the same comment. You'd think that if they truly believed they would not have a problem going to a lecture and hearing arguments against their belief. It's the furious opposition to education that betrays how little some people *really* believe. They just cover their ears and go "la la la" not to hear anything that would lead to even worse cognitive dissonance than they already have to face.
Re:I have problems with this (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not actually a big surprise is it? All these religious people preaching the love of their deity are all scared, really, really scared. That's the problem. They can't listen to other arguments and risk going to incarnation of a less pleasant afterlife, hell, or whatever other things they might believe in.
Religion is about instilling fear and shame in it's followers and this is just another example of what effects it has.
Re:I have problems with this (Score:5, Funny)
The thing about reality is that it does not go away, even if you don't believe in it.
I disagree. Wile E Coyote could defy gravity by denying its existence at will. Why he chose to sometimes believe in it, to his peril, and why the Road Runner never did believe is an ongoing philosophical debate with great controversy.
Your statement also reminds me of the question, "If a tree falls in a forest and kills a mime, does anybody care?". Does reality effectively cease to be if you are not aware of it, or if you become aware of it, do you even care?
Another question to ponder, one of the great mysteries too, is if Bugs Bunny really believed it was duck season, was it in fact duck season? That will bake your noodle too.
Re:I have problems with this (Score:5, Funny)
Wile E Coyote could defy gravity by denying its existence at will. Why he chose to sometimes believe in it, to his peril
Residual self-image? :)
There is More ! (Score:5, Insightful)
As I see it, the reason is fear of "being led into temptation" (spiritual this time, not carnal), and fear of getting it wrong (so that they are due for a severe, and quite possibly eternal, ticking-off by their vengeful deity in afterlife).
This is a theme that has pervaded religion as provided by the Catholic Church throughout the (Middle) Ages.
Why-ever do you think that Catholics are (and have been for as long as the Catholic Church exists) discouraged from reading the Bible on their own instead of the officially approved Catechisms?
Because the flock cannot be relied upon not to err when reading of and thinking about theological matters, and for very good reason: theological reasoning can be err ... complex and subtle ... to phrase it politely. And erring is dangerous for the soul. That's why The Flock needs a shepherd (the Latin word for that is: Pastor) as provided by the Catholic Church, in order to guide them along the True Path through the thickets of thought.
We're seeing the very same thing with Fundamentalist Christians in the good old US of A, now enthusiastically mirrored by a resurgent Muslim Fundamentalism.
The most surprising thing to me is that people are actually surprised. Religion, after all, is (as I see it) first and foremost a desire for an inviolate frame of reference (spiritual and intellectual) that provides an answer to all vexing questions ("the Lord is my shepherd") and solace ("pillar of strength"), and solace ("thy grace ... etc").
Can you not understand how awfully threatening it is when someone in a white coat starts uprooting the emotional and intellectual certainties this provides? Especially if he makes a convincing case that large parts of "the Gospel" simply have no relation to actual reality? If "God's Word" is shown to be wrong in any respect, be it ever so minute, then what of all the rest of it? The whole edifice of trust comes crumbling down. Believers will certainly not thank you for that.
In times past a popular way of dealing with such heretics was to burn them at the stake. Nowadays the preferred method seems to be to use IED's.
Re:There is More ! (Score:5, Informative)
Nice story, but Catholics are not discouraged from reading the Bible. They hand them out in those Catechism classes you're criticizing. Good thing, too, since otherwise Catholic children might go and pick up one that's missing a whole slew of books the protestants found uncomfortable and edited out.
Probably not a good idea to get your information about Catholicism from anti-Catholic propaganda literature, since "Catholics can't read the Bible" is the sort of ridiculousness found only from such sources. What's next, you'll accuse us of polytheism and ancestor worship?
Re:There is More ! (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice story, but Catholics are not discouraged from reading the Bible
You'll have to excuse the grandparent for not paying attention to recent history. When an organisation presents itself as the guardians of an immutable truth and has a certain policy for the first 85% of its lifetime, it's forgivable to assume that the policy is still in effect.
Re:I have problems with this (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I have problems with this (Score:5, Insightful)
If you honestly believed 100% that when you die you go to a beautiful place then why mourn death?
Because their friends and family and loved ones have still lost someone very dear to them. If you think about it, funerals are for the living as much as they are for the dead, if not more.
Re:I have problems with this (Score:5, Interesting)
I strongly disagree. If I had to go back in time to Nazi Germany, and listen to lectures about the evils of the Jews, I would not have the stomach to sit there and listen to it. It's not because I secretly fear that the Jews are indeed responsible for the world's suffering, just that I could only tolerate so much hatemongering bullshit before realising that I had better things to do with my time.
Of course, that's not to say that evolution is akin to Nazi propaganda, just that refusing to listen != you know you're wrong.
Re:Read a comment by a US naval commander (Score:5, Interesting)
But are Christians and Jews really that different? Yes. A lot of the advancement in the west has been due to religion taking a back seat. Take Einstein, religious but doesn't let it control him. The west still has various religions but the advances were strongest when church and state or at least science and culture were separated.
There is a big difference between the 3 religions. Although all 3 stem from a single one, all three have been influenced by different cultures and their goals. Judaism and Islam are religions of rules and laws, while Christianity is a religion of philosophy mostly influenced by the Greeks. Judaism and Islam were created to cover a need of laws and power of laws, Christianity was a result of "the search for inner peace" in a system where laws were in place. As a result, the religions differ massively on a lot of issues.
Re:Read a comment by a US naval commander (Score:5, Informative)
For some odd reason, Islam seems to emphasize obeying the laws of non-Islamic countries in a way that Judaism doesn't though. I have no idea why, but it's why you get things here in the UK like tabloid fear-mongering about the possibility of sharia courts based on laws designed to allow Jewish religious courts, which is bizarre as there's not much interest in setting up sharia courts at all whereas the Jewish population needs those religious courts and considers any restriction on them anti-semitic because they're so important.
Re:Except England has Sharia courts (Score:5, Interesting)
The courts themselves aren't secret. Rabbinical Courts exist in the U.K. [kosherdelight.com] as well as other places around the world.
A more apt term would be "private" as opposed to "secret".
To the best of my knowledge, both Rabbinical and Sharia Courts operate in secular nations under the rule of Binding Arbitration as opposed to being criminal courts.
Re:Except England has Sharia courts (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I have problems with this (Score:5, Interesting)
Sanity is defined by the norm. Most people don't believe in unicorns and there is no compelling evidence to suggest that they exist, so anyone who does genuinely believe they are real is deemed less than totally sane.
On the other hand a lot of people believe in God, despite there being no compelling evidence to suggest that he exists, so because it is a common delusion it is accepted as a sane, if not rational, point of view.
Re:They have to be...natural order (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the core assumption was "unprovable" only at the very inception of the scientific method. The vast body of scientific results since then have largely worked to prove the correctness of that assumption. To put it simply, turns out, the universe (at least the parts of it we have been able to get at thus far) is largely orderly, and even when it doesn't seem to be, when we look, we tend to find orderly rules that govern the apparently random behavior.
I see why you're afraid. You should fix that. (Score:5, Insightful)
No. You're assuming that assertions with no weight in evidence have equal value with those assertions which have support in evidence. That is fundamentally unsound thinking. It's the same kind of cognitive error that makes newspapers give equal time to evolution and "gawd didit." The reason that science shows regularity is because science looks at what is real and attempts to reveal it in human terms of metaphor, from math to rules to randomness. In the process, it consistently finds regularity. If irregularity were present, it would find that just as well (see quantum mechanics for a good example of this.)
Re:Incorrect, I'm afraid (Score:5, Interesting)
Since the modern scientific method was invented approximately 400 years ago, not one single repeatable experiment has ever been devised, by anyone, anywhere, anywhen, which has been able to show an "irregularity" (truly random processes such as radioactive decay, quantum weirdness, and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle notwithstanding)
Occam's razor. Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.
When Newton discovered his laws of motion, he was right to accept them. When the scientists who followed him for the next 300-odd years accepted them, they were right to do so. Even though he was eventually shown to be wrong by Einstein, until that point, no-one had any good reason not to accept those laws. However, as soon as Einsten came up with new data, came up with new theories, came up with new experiments, came up with new evidence and proved Newton wrong, then scientists changed how they saw motion.
Yes, scientists should always be aware that their theories might not be correct, that there may be an edge case they've not seen yet. But until someone's actually found it, the best you can do is go with what you've got. If an experiment ever comes along to show that the universe isn't regular, science will use that to show how the universe is not regular. Anyone who refuses to accept the new evidence will not be, to all intents and purposes, a scientist. And science might have to do a lot of work to probe the boundaries (if any) of that irregularity and work out how much it affects the millions of experiments and observations that have been done over the last few centuries.
But until that time comes along, it's perfectly reasonable to assume that the universe is regular. Because that's what every experiement ever done has ever shown.
Your black swan argument could just as well be a 10-headed sheep argument. So what if no-one's seen them? No-one's proven that there aren't 10-headed sheep. So it's an absurdity to say they don't exist!
Bollocks.
If you show me a 10-headed sheep, I'll believe you. Until then, it is so mind-bogglingly unlikely that such thing exists that they are not worth considering in any reasonable model of the universe, and you're just engaging in philosophical wankery, not science.
You too are making my point (Score:5, Interesting)
Your arguments are analogical or circular, and then you resort to announcing that "believe" means different things according to context. From the point of view of a sociologist of religion, you are using religious thinking.
Please don't get me wrong. I am not a relativist. I just believe that "religious" thinking is part of the way our brains cope with reality, because what we perceive as reality is actually a lot of analogies. Any scientist who thinks that he or she is 100% free of religious modes of thinking and completely objective is slightly deluded. Accepting that science involves a small kernel of unprovable and untestable assumptions is, in fact, just being objective.
Re:How many Muzzies have won a Nobel Prize? (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem isn't so much that Islam is irrational (Christianity is just as irrational), the problem is that Islam works much harder to consume the individual with learning the contents of the Koran, leaving much less time for learning how the world actually works. Then, to any degree that Islam clashes with science, Islam *must* win; that's not irrational, that's a good design feature designed to ensure Islam's continuance. What's irrational is the nonsense content in the book, and there, the bible and the Koran stand shoulder to shoulder.
Re:How many Muzzies have won a Nobel Prize? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem isn't so much that Islam is irrational (Christianity is just as irrational), the problem is that Islam works much harder to consume the individual with learning the contents of the Koran, leaving much less time for learning how the world actually works.
That's quite wrong: Ask your typical American fundamentalist Christian about whether it's better to spend time studying physics or studying the Bible, and you'll get a very clear answer. Christianity has in some places attempted to define the value of pi by legislation, for instance. And that's even ignoring the usual Christian opposition to the teaching of evolution that continues to the present day.
You also have to explain why during the period between about 750-1200 CE, the Muslim world and Mecca in particular was one of the 2 major centers of scholarship and science (the other being China), while Christian Europe had mostly paltry scientific output throughout the same period.
There's nothing that gives any indication that Islam is any more hostile to science than Christianity, or does any more to crowd out scientific thought with religious thought. Religious idiocy exists in every society and every religion.
Re:I have problems with this (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I have problems with this (Score:5, Insightful)
Greetings and salutations.....
My first reaction is "well, why are they going to college in the first place??" For much of their existence, colleges existed to provide a safe haven for the free flow of ideas and alternative theories. Many times, I, and a number of other students, would end up sitting around a table discussing a new theory in computer science, or, cosmology, or political science. We debated topics such as the morality of War (When I was in college, the Vietnam War was in full swing, so it was a topic near and dear to those of us that were classed 1A, and, had selection numbers in the single and double digits), and what America's place in the world should be. There was always a collection of quite divergent views at the table, and more often than not, little or no agreement. However, we all listened to the arguments of the other person, debated points about them, and thought about their point of view. The only folks that were not welcome were the extremists who would degenerate into screaming matches and insist that it was "their way or the highway".
WHile the education we received from the faculty was important, even there, some of the most important lessons learned came not from the lectures, but, the discussion in class and in meetings with the professor, where disagreements about the interpretation of some facts were expected, and, debated when they arose.
From a personal example, when I was taking some history classes ranging from the colonization of America and the spread Westward, to the massive social upheaval of the early 1900s in Russia, I ran into problems with my professors over my analysis of the events. Why? Well, at the time most of them held onto the concept of "manifest destiny" - the divine right of Americans to roll across the middle and Western united stats, crushing the native population under them, or, of the people to rise up and overthrow their government. I, however, was more a follower of "Economic Determanism" - holding that the best way to explain large scale actions of society was to follow the money. I could, without too much trouble, find what I felt to be an obvious and strong economic pressure that caused these changes in society. Needless to say, my papers discussing social trends were not received well by the professors. In order to get even an adequate grade, I had to provide at least twice the foundation for my arguments that other students (who DID toe the party line) had to include. Even in the best case, though, my papers were, typically, marked down by a half to full grade simply because I disagreed with their point of view. However, I did not get into a huff and walk out of class, or boycott anything. Rather, I worked twice as hard to justify my point of view, and, to ensure that my arguments were clear and well supported. I did pass the classes, but only just, but, the lessons I learned there both about life in general, and, the nitty-gritty of organizing supporting points for a given argument were a valuable addition to my life and remain so today, some 30 years later.
regards
dave mundt
Good (Score:5, Insightful)
I would rather not have a religious whack-job as a doctor.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
congratulations
you've successfully wrote a comment that makes ignorant creationists look better in comparison
Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, you're not under the impression that this will wash them out of med school are you?
I certainly hope it does. They should not be allowed to just pick and choose what classes they object to and get a free pass. Everyone has to take classes and listen to things they don't necessarily agree with, it's just part of a balanced education. If they don't want to learn about Darwin, well, that's fine... but it's still a required part of the Biology class. I certainly hope they don't get a passing grade on the material they refused to participate in. If they can salvage a grade out of the class, great, but if not... Thanks for the tuition money, good luck finishing your degree in some Islamic country, I guess?
(Of course, the article suggests this is the influence of Islam's own version of Jerry Fallwell, "Haruan Yahya" [newhumanist.org.uk] who is, of course, an anti-Semitic nutjob who thinks he's the next messiah and who specifically based his new brand of nuttery on the American Fundies...)
Of course, I'm a crazy old jerk who thinks those jackass pharmacists who refuse the morning after pill to rape victims (cause they were asking for it, or cause it was god's will, or somesuch random asshattery) should be legally enjoined from working those kind of jobs...
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Refusing to believe in various aspects of your medical training because they conflict with your own beliefs, that's the kicker.
Doesn't matter that it's evolution, it matters that they put personal conviction over and above real learning.
Up to them (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I suppose it's within their rights to up and leave a lecture because they don't like the topic. However, when they subsequently fail the exam due to their refusal to attend the lecture or personal disagreement with the topics taught, they shouldn't complain. I don't understand why you'd even take a class knowing full well that you don't accept fundamental parts of it.
Re:Up to them (Score:5, Insightful)
Especially a medical class.
I don't ever want to be examined or treated by a doctor that lets their religion get in the way of the study of basic biology or any other part or medical study.
Not to mention that 'random' and 'evolution by natural selection' are not equivalent.
Re:Up to them (Score:5, Interesting)
In the Netherlands there was a situation a couple of years ago where a muslim medical student refused to examine fellow male students (medical students practice on each other during their training). You don't want to have qualified doctors who refuse to help because the traffic casualty is of the opposite sex. I read recently a quote that the koran says that a prostitute went to heaven for giving a thirsty dog a drink (which she hauled from a well by climbing down, with the water in her shoe). So, helping a fellow (male) human being should be OK. Or she shouldn't be a doctor.
Bert
Re:Up to them (Score:5, Funny)
The problem with the Koran is that it is supposed to be the literal word of God, but apparently he was a bit confused at the time and came out with a load of contradictory and ambiguous advice. Unfortunately for Muslims you have to follow his advice if you want to get in heaven, even when it makes no sense or was seemingly written while inebriated.
Re:Up to them (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Up to them (Score:5, Insightful)
The students are not asked to like the facts, or to drop their beliefs. They are to meet scientific standards, however. Refusal to look at facts objectively disqualifies you as a scientist. In case of a court case, the students should lose, even in the UK.
Bert
Re:Up to them (Score:5, Insightful)
You are not a scientist.
Re:Up to them (Score:5, Insightful)
One can argue that Evolution is not a scientific fact - and it is indeed a theory (albeit one backed by lots of evidence).
However it would be extremely foolhardy to do a subject at University (Genetics) which depends on the Theory of Evolution as one of its main supporting pillars, unless you have a complete understanding of it.
Re:Up to them (Score:5, Insightful)
If I drop a rock 1000 times and it falls to the ground. The only thing I can say for certain is that the last 1000 times I dropped the rock, it fell to the ground.
It requires faith on my part to believe that the 1001st time I drop the rock it will also drop to the ground. However, my belief is grounded in previous FACTUAL observation. Scientist recognize this, which is why they called it "a scientific theory". Because, if for the 1001st time I drop something, it might be a helium ballooon, in which case I have to figure out why that's different than the rock that I dropped before.
Sadly, religion tends to say that because the helium balloon didn't drop to the ground, all the other knowledge I gained from the rock dropping is now completely an utterly wrong and uselss. Religious observations are NOT based on fact. Can you say for certain that Moses talked to a burning bush? Have you? However, you CAN drop a rock 1000 times and see what happens for yourself.
Re:Up to them (Score:5, Informative)
It requires faith on my part to believe that the 1001st time I drop the rock it will also drop to the ground.
You are abusing the word "faith" here.
You think you are going for b (1) : firm belief in something for which there is no proof (2) : complete trust (see m-w [merriam-webster.com] for full listing), but you aren't.
Using the word "faith" in this context is dishonest. The word you want to use is "prediction". There is no faith in any meaningful sense of the word involved. In the extremely general over-broad meaning that you are aiming for, everything would require "faith" - drawing breath and "believing" that you will again be inhaling air and not suddenly a toxic gas, gravity not turning upsides-down, everything.
But that isn't what the word "faith" implies. Rather, consistency of experience is a base assumption about reality that we learn to make very, very early on. You are abusing the word "faith" and trying to extend its meaning well beyond what it really means.
Re:Up to them (Score:5, Informative)
What do you mean by falsified? What are these cases of fossil evidence? why do you think that DNA is fragile and degenerates rather than improves. As a quick example, Amoeba have among the largest genomes documented. Mutations within that could cause all sorts of new gene expressions (both bad and good). Probably, most of them bad... the point is, over a long timeline, those beneficial mutations will be selected for and end up in a more fit organism. Check out sickle cell anemia within the African population. That's a single allele within the population, but couldn't you see that as more and more develop (say... because of geographical separation from other members of the same species) that they might even become a different species altogether?
Re:Up to them (Score:5, Interesting)
But that is not a fact, dropping a helium balloon will not drop to the ground. So my theory that dropping anything will make it fall to the ground is wrong. That's exactly why it's a theory. That's why we explore it further instead of throwing the whole thing away and then discover things like atmospheric pressure and density.
If we drop rocks into the water and they always sink to the bottom. We might conclude that all rocks sink in water... but that would also be wrong. We need to redefine what a rock is (yes, there are rocks that can float).
My point is, we take it on faith that things will work out based on our theory. It is entirely possible (in the case of evolution, the new arsenic based life form) that something will come along and show us that our theory is incomplete. Unfortunately, many people tend to take that to mean that "it is wrong".
Re:Up to them (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Up to them (Score:5, Informative)
In the UK you don't get a medical license when you get a degree - you get your license from the General Medical Council. Having a degree in no way guarantees you getting your license.
Plus you have to complete two years of work in the NHS before you can practice privately - there is no other way to get a full license in the UK.
So fail them (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't get what the problem is. If you don't grasp the material, regardless of the reason, you fail the course. I sure as hell don't want to be treated by a doctor who doesn't understand evolution.
Re:So fail them (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously. Just fail them. Tell them the only way they'll get a degree from a respected institution is to not be an idiot. Doesn't matter what your degree is in, if you think your magic book has all the answers you are delusional and not degree-worthy material.
Re:So fail them (Score:5, Funny)
Tell them the only way they'll get a degree from a respected institution is to not be an idiot.
Sadly, there are now a few creationists with degrees in things like biology or geology. They manage to fake their way through uni/college and then go on the creationist lecture tour circuit touting their degrees. It's the classic argument from authority fallacy: "I have a degree, so everything I say is factual. God did it. Really. I have a degree."
Re:So fail them (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So fail them (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is that in the social 'sciences', this is often treated as a 'everybody is right' instead of the approach of the physical sciences: "I'm right, and if you don't believe me, go do the experiment yourself".
That's a monumental difference that a lot of people just fail to grasp, even in serious fields of study. Just read this essay [columbia.edu] by Richard Feynman where he explains what it means to be properly scientific.
Nonetheless, students questioning their professors is not seen as a problem even in the physical sciences. For example, I had a very vocal disagreement with one of my Physics professors once. I simply refused to believe that what he was saying was possible. He was so impressed that he offered me a research position based on that one interaction.
Of course, this comes with a huge caveat -- I didn't 'just' disagree.
What had happened was that we were studying solid-state lasers, like the type you get in your DVD player or a laser pointer. They are made from crystals of semiconductors, like silicon, germanium, arsenic, etc... He was specifically discussing silicon lasers emitting light at about 650nm. I sat straight up and thought that's crazy -- I've held pure silicon in my hand before, and it looks like metal. Sure, it's a bit dark, but I just couldn't imagine how light that's "just barely infra-red" could go straight through the thing with nearly 0% loss, which is what a laser requires to operate. I argued with him -- surely it's very heavily doped and it's actually a compound of silicon that transmits the light? No. Maybe it's just a very thin surface layer, like transparent gold leaf? No.
The day after that, I was in the lab, and there was a piece of silicon there -- scrap from the chip lab. I took an incandescent lamp that I knew put out most of it's heat energy in the right infra-red range, put my hand in front of it, and then I waved the silicon wafer back and forth between my hand and the light. It's like it wasn't even there -- it blocked none of the IR light. There was no visible light going through, but I could feel the heat on my hand. I compared it to glass and various thicknesses of paper and plastic sheets. Only silicon transmitted all of the IR heat energy. It was like it was made of smoke. Sure, it was a primitive experiment, but very convincing in a I-can-feel-it-with-my-own-hands kind of way.
The next day, we were back in the lecture hall, continuing the topic of silicon lasers, and the lecturer jokingly asked me if I still had problems believing that silicon was transparent to infra-red light. I said no, I tried passing IR light through a piece of silicon in the lab. It doesn't look like it should, but it does.
That change in my position is the very essence of science -- not that disagreeing is bad, but there ought to be a method by which we can all become convinced of the truth and agree on it.
Sadly, the scientific method is not followed rigorously in many fields. Psychology and some areas of medicine come to mind. Just read: Why Most Published Research Findings Are False [plosmedicine.org] for an idea of just how far it's possible to stray from the truth because of only small errors in the application of the scientific method.
Re:What's evolution got to do with treatment? (Score:5, Funny)
I think this illustrates the point nicely: http://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2005/12/18 [gocomics.com]
Doctor: Afraid so, but we caught it early.
Doctor: Depends. Are you a Creationist?
Doctor: Because I need to know whether you want me to treat the TB bug as it was before antibiotics...
Doctor: Your choice. If you go with the Noah's Ark version I'll just give you streptomycin.
Doctor: They're intelligently designed.
Re:What's evolution got to do with treatment? (Score:5, Insightful)
Evolution applies to bacteria and viruses, which is very much pertinent for a doctor.
The lack of faith is astonishing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do they think that the "random" process is not the face of God, or something? If things work a certain way, that's the way they work. If it's God's will, it's God's will. If you think the two are contradictory, you have no faith. The problem is with you, not the science or the religion.
Re:The lack of faith is astonishing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Whoever modded this down is a twat.
This is exactly the question I pose to fundies - "For the sake of argument I will stipulate that God exists. Who are you to deny God His tools? God made the Universe and everything in it, including Evolution which is a manifestation of Creation itself. You think you know better than God? Who here is really denying God?"
I never get a decent enough answer. Maybe because they're wrong and can't spot allegory (Genesis) if it came up and slapped them in the face.
--
BMO
Religion truly is the opiate of the masses. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know what else to say.
Re:Religion truly is the opiate of the masses. (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed. From Wikipedia: "A 2005 survey published in Encyclopædia Britannica found that the non-religious made up about 11.9% of the world's population, and atheists about 2.3%. This figure did not include those who follow atheistic religions, such as some Buddhists." Here's the link. [slashdot.org]
Then fail them (Score:5, Insightful)
To suppress closed mindedness, exams on evolution etc. should be show stoppers. Don't pass them, no graduation. This is science. Can't handle facts? You're in the wrong business. Don't like the facts? Prove them wrong by the rules.
Bert
Re:Then fail them (Score:5, Informative)
I've met people who have biology degrees from quality institutions, and they don't 'believe' in evolution. I've met their professors, and I ask them how they could possibly get a degree in it, and their response was essentially that they had fully mastered the material... they simply didn't agree with it.
There's something to be said for that argument. But personally I believe the scientific method is "all-or-nothing" - either you agree that it works, or you don't.
Re:Then fail them (Score:5, Insightful)
The Daily Mail? (Score:5, Informative)
The Daily Mail is closer to a tabloid than to a newspaper. Technically it's 'middle-market', so it has some real stories in there, but I'd never rely on it as a sole source for any opinion or discussion....which is what this summary asks us to do.
Re:The Daily Mail? (Score:5, Insightful)
The story is basically anti-immigration trolling. A statistically unverified, anecdotally reported "increasing number" of anti-evolution Muslims making their way into the gold-paved halls of med school and thus upper society = OMG TEH BRITANNIA IZ BEING OVERRUN BY SALADIN'S HORDES. OUR PRECIOUS FISH AND CHIPZ WILL BE REPLACED BY HUMMUS.
Indeed. The very first thing I thought upon reading the summary was, "What about all the other muslim med students who don't have a problem at all with studying evolution? Why are they focusing on a tiny minority of fundos rather than the vast majority of regular mos?"
Re:The Daily Mail? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because we also focus on the tiny minority of idiots who believe in intelligent design bestowed from upon high by the Noodly Appendage.
Sorry ... I meant God and his intelligently designed banana [youtube.com].
But I may be mistaken in thinking, that we should laugh at, ridicule and point fingers at all religious nutjobs, and not just the ones of my own skin colour and my country's largest denomination.
I don't care about the colour of their skin OR their religious freedoms - they're idiots.
PS.
We also focused on Ted Stevens and his series of tubes [thedailyshow.com] and made fun of him for it. Should we instead have focused on the 534 other members of congress, who weren't this stupid? No - we shouldn't.
Re:The Daily Mail? (Score:5, Insightful)
Newsflash: At least here on Slashdot most of the people bitching about it honestly don't give a shit whether it's Muslims Christians or some Native American dropping peyote to visit spirit animals. If some ignorant fundie religious twit walks out of a medical class because they refuse to hear anything about evolution, then flunk their ass on the test and let them get a degree in burger flipping or French literature.
-
Beware the daily racist! (Score:5, Informative)
So, the article is from The Daily Mail, also known as The Daily Racist. Not that silly fairytale believing people aren't acting silly, but how big of an issue is this, really? Is there an agenda pushing this "news"?
issues with this (Score:5, Interesting)
A Muslim Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
First I should say that we ought to know a little bit more about this story before we can make a complete analysis, but as a Muslim, I will be the first to say that there is no problem with evolution. I'm not going to go into all the details of the argument about whether or not evolution explains the biological origins of man; there are mountains of evidence supporting evolution and no other plausible alternative explanations. What I would like to say is there is really no inherent conflict between believing in a Creator and accepting evolution. In Islam especially the case for conflict is weak because the Qur'an lacks a creation story as detailed as the one laid out in Genesis. Yes, the Qur'an has references to creation and even Adam and Eve (the first humans), but conspicuously absent from the Qur'an are any statements that defy the scientific view of evolution. Does the Qur'an say that Adam and Eve were put on the Earth right after the Earth was created? No. Does it say no other creatures existed or preceded humans? No. In fact, one verse of the Qur'an talks about God breathing His spirit into Adam, which some scholars have read to mean that Adam was alive prior to becoming human (in a spiritual sense), and that Adam may even have had parents instead of being materialized spontaneously. Either way there is really no timeline for creation, and Islamic theology suggests that God is *active* in creation, meaning that God didn't just create everything all at once and stopped, but that creation is a current and ongoing process (in line with evolution).
I do believe that there is no basis in Islamic tradition and culture for rejecting evolution--on the contrary, Islamic emphasis on science and knowledge would make Muslims more receptive to the idea. To me this habit of denying evolution is something that Muslim communities learned from Christian communities, and the article actually does a good job of pointing this out.
As for the lectures, what I want to know is if it's really the mere idea of evolution that is offending the students, or if the lectures contain unnecessary statements that are specifically hostile to God and religion. If the course material or the professor is unfairly preaching atheism or making wild assumptions like "God has nothing to do with evolution" then I'd say the students have some legitimate grounds to object. The article doesn't make this part of the story very clear, but at least in one way suggests that this may be what's happening.
Re:A Second Muslim Perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
I, too, will pitch my hat in the ring to provide a Muslim perspective.
I am from Pakistan, which is about as conservative and Muslim as you can get (okay, so KSA is even more so...but you get the gist)
However, when I was taught biology in school, guess what, I was taught Darwin!
It was simple, the text simply said, "Charles Darwin, a renowned Scientist hypothesized in his theory that..." and then followed by "However, we as Muslims, believe that [insert relevant verses here]"
Simple as that!
If these students were to come to a medical college in Pakistan (and we quite a few of International level) then, surprise surprise, there would be a chapter on Darwin.
Look, we are Muslims, and I know the general trend of Slashdot is towards atheism/agnosticism, but I strictly believe in a right to believe your religion in peace. So I will not say that the very idea of Creationism is wrong, If I (and they) want to believe that, it is my(/our) right.
However, if an eminent scholar presents forward a *theory*, there is no harm in at least reading what he is writing.
Re:A Second Muslim Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
I strictly believe in a right to believe your religion in peace. So I will not say that the very idea of Creationism is wrong, If I (and they) want to believe that, it is my(/our) right.
That's fine, but by the same token you have to afford us the same right - to say that we believe that Creationism is wrong.
Natural selection (Score:5, Interesting)
Just Speaking Generally (Score:5, Funny)
Wouldn't boycotting an academic lecture be equivalent to willful ignorance? Understanding your opposition's arguments, even if you know going in that you completely disagree with their conclusion, is a useful thing to have.
Odd. The Quran says differently (Score:5, Insightful)
If I understand it correctly, one of the Quran's directives is to seek all knowledge. I hypocrisy is a human failing, not a religious one... but then again, religion is a human failing.
Religion is getting nuttier (Score:5, Interesting)
Religion is getting nuttier.
Today, evolution is an engineering technology. Watching vruses and bacteria evolve from generation to generation is routine medical research. Genetic engineering and some kinds of drug discovery are forced evolutionary systems. Most of the mechanics of the process are understood. It isn't mysterious any more.
At this point, denying that evolution is real is on a par with claiming the earth is flat. Yet religious denial of evolution has increased.
More religions are anti-education than 50 years ago. Some branches of Islam are explicitly anti-education. Now that's infected Judaism, too. [typepad.com] Which is strange, after centuries of a strong drive in the Jewish community to achieve a good education.
Look up Dr. Tyson's talk "The God of the Gaps" (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason religion is getting nuttier is because there are less and less gaps for it to fill. So when you have a subset of religion who defines itself by being able to provide answers to the questions science can't, it gets threatened when science provides more and more of those answers. The gaps that you can fill get smaller and smaller.
That is why there is more and more of it. For some, religion fills a spiritual needs and specific answers about the world aren't a part of it, and as such science isn't a threat. It is a different thing. However for others, they need their religion to be right about explaining things, and science keeps encroaching on that. So they lash out and get all anti-knowledge.
Though it has been going on in Islam for a long time. Again, the talk by Dr. Tyson covers that.
Define "an increasing number" (Score:5, Interesting)
In regards to whether or not these students should be allowed to graduate and become doctors, I'm a little torn. On the one hand, I don't see how someone's stance on evolution is going to have any demonstrable impact on their ability to perform surgery, for example. On the other hand, if a doctor doesn't believe in evolution, they might also not believe that over-prescribing antibiotics can bread new strains of drug resistant bacteria, which could lead to genuine threat to public health.
I guess I'd say that if evolutionary biology is a requirement for the major, then they should be required to pass the course in order to graduate. They don't need to attend the lectures, and they don't need to believe that it's true - but in the same way that we force future doctors to suffer through organic chemistry (often against their will), these students should be required to pass the final exam in order to demonstrate that they are at least capable of understanding the material.
The Daily Mail have printed a retraction (Score:5, Informative)
http://s2.b3ta.com/host/creative/85367/1322136043/DailyMailCorrectionsbig.jpg [b3ta.com]
I'm Muslim. I don't see a conflict. (Score:5, Interesting)
Too many Muslims have gotten caught up in Christain dogma instead of reading and thinking about the book they believe in. There's nothing inherently contradictory about evolution and Islam. The Quran doesn't specifically say days in Arabic regarding creation, it uses a word that really means periods of time.
Allegory is used to explain many subjects because describing something like quantum physics to 6th century bedouins wasn't really feasible. Hell, it's something most 21st century Americans can't understand.
Re:I'm Muslim. I don't see a conflict. (Score:5, Insightful)
This does not have something to do with the religion. It has something to do with a strange interpretation of the text. Normally, people should read a text and put it in the historical context. Otherwise the language cannot be understand, as language is not a constant thing. Language reflects the traditions and context of the time it is used in, which is no surprise as it is used to communicate (and yes books are also communication). Furthermore, people use analogies to illustrate their thoughts. And in ancient times, people used to describe wonders to elevate a important person. Therefore, texts shouldn't be over interpreted, like god made everything in 6 days. We know today that time and the progression of time is not a constant. And for the assumed deity which exists out of time, 6 days is a stupid construct. It is much more logic to assume that the people of that time, assumed that the creation of everything happened in 6 phases. And this is not untrue, by what we know today. We need matter and energy to form planets and stars. We need planets to create/evolve simple life. We need simple live to evolve complex life. And yes humans appeared very late and from our perspective now the "creation" is complete.
I always wonder why religion fanatics believe in a most stupid deity which act upon a strange set of rules. And by following those rules they act disrespectful to others. Fundamentalists are a little different, they try not to be disrespectful. However, the core message for all those religions out there is: "Be nice to each other." And we all fail greatly in that.
Furthermore, if the god thing is true and one day we stand before god, he will not ask you. Have you always believed in creationism or evolution. He will ask if you tried to be a good person.
Pragmatism (Score:5, Insightful)
I was once talking to a physicist friend of mine and she was explaining to me that the math is NOT the reality, it's simply the best representation that we have currently, and using it helps us to manipulate the world around us.
If you really CHOOSE to not believe it, you should at least take a pragmatic approach and understand the usefulness of understanding the concepts.
"bye" (Score:5, Insightful)
You're welcome to get your medical or other degree from ibn Osama bin Kamel Inst of Technology, etc if our university is no longer your first choice.
Re:Another view . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
P.S. you deserve to get modded as a troll for using the phrase "Slashdot groupthink".