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Muslim Medical Students Boycott Darwin Lectures
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."
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.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Another aspect of this is that some of these people may well actually cause harm to society in this way: it is known that overprescribing antibiotics is causing evolution of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria. A doctor who does not believe in or agree with principles of evolution might then ignore the guidelines and thus add to emergence of new strains. (Overprescribing is also a problem in some countries where the medical practice is rather casual and antibiotics are too-commonly given out for viral diseases like colds or flu.)
As many said before me: just fail them and let natural selection take its course.
Studying religion(s) doesn't necessarily mean you have to practise or believe it. In fact, studying religion is quite likely to result in you seeing religion as just mythology and not believing it.
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
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.
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
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. Which is strange, after centuries of a strong drive in the Jewish community to achieve a good education.
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.
-- Cheers!
While I find radical religious fundamentalism just as distasteful as any other atheist, I would also hesitate to launch into Muslim bashing just because one professor has noticed "an increasing number" of Muslim students boycotting his lectures. For all we know, it may be a small number of students boycotting that do not represent a larger trend, and there may be more to the story than reported here (what if, for example, the professor made offensive remarks about Islam and its followers during a lecture, a la Richard Dawkins).
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.
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.
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 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 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.
Indeed. If I drop rocks a 1000 times and then drop a coin 1000 times and then something else over and over again. I might conclude that dropping ANYTHING will make it fall to the ground.
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".
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" 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...
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.
And there is this:
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."
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The courts themselves aren't secret. Rabbinical Courts exist in the U.K. 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.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
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.
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
Yeah, they and the religious laws they enforce are also incredibly, unbelievably sexist. Notice not just the really creepy arguments used, but also how a man can divorce his wife without her agreement but not vice-versa. It's actually worse than the article implies; women that ignore religious law and remarry are meant to be treated as tainted, along with their children and their children's children and so on forever. (I don't think this example of sexism actually has any Islamic counterpart.) Also, while the religious courts are nominally voluntary, there's a huge amount of religious and social pressure to use them; it's part of the reason why there's so much objection to the creation of sharia courts.
Actually the problem seems to be a sorting order, I heard. Instead of gathering everything in chronological order (which isn't that easy of course) and thus giving a chance to know what commands where made obsolete by newer ones, they sorted everything from shortest sentence to longest.
No they did not sort it by sentence length. They sorted it by the chronological order in which these sayings were found after the death of Mohammad. Mohammad was illeterate (some Muslims dispute that assertion) and his sayings were transcribed by Abu Bucr, the scribe, when Mohammad was in a trance communicating with Archangel Gabriel. Abu Bucr was also the Confirmer of Truth, also the father of Mohammad's most beloved wife A'yisha, and he wrote them on whatever was available at that time. Abu Bucr was the second Caliph is buried close to Mohammad in Medina. (There is an empty grave for Jesus there to buried after the Second coming. Details are a little murky) After the death of Mohammad, the third Caliph wanted to collect all the sayings and compile it into a Book. There were objections to that even at that time, "Should we do which the Prophet himself did not do in his life time, and did not leave instructions for it, and did not consider the transcriptions to be important when he was alive" were the counter arguments.
But the Caliph collected as many of the sayings as possible, from various sources and numbered and listed them all in one official version. So there are no organizing themes to the chapters. You will get one surah about inheritance rules, the next one might prohibit usury, then jump to Jesus, then back to dietary rules etc. The Caliph also ruled that any further sayings found after the first compilation were all either duplicates or false. Thus was born Q`ran. But most Muslims believe that Q`ran existed before it was compiled, it was merely revealed to Mohamad by Gabriel and Q`ran predates the formation of the universe too.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact