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."

Comments

I have problems with this

[symbolset]

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

[teadrop]

That's not entirely true. Einstein spent his later part of his life trying to disproved Quantum Physics, in doing so he inadvertently helped to confirm it. In other words, his disbelieve in Quantum Physics was a great contribution in proving Quantum Physics. "God does not play dice." has often been misquoted. Einstein is not religious (not in the traditional sense). In his private letter to Eric Gutkind, he called the Bible "childish". Publicly, he also published an essay in New York time regarding his religious belief (he was neither Christian nor Judaic). When Einstein said "God does not play dice" he meant the uncertainty principle of Heisenberg. Later by his own experiments, Einstein proved that "God did play dice." Einstein use of the word "God" is as religious as the "God" in "God damn it!", a phrase commonly used by many atheists. You can't blame Einstein in doubting the uncertain principle, any good scientist will be upset. The only people who don't doubt it are those who don't understand it (the majority) or those who completely understand it (minority).

Re:I have problems with this

[rgbatduke]

Of course, a really good physics lecturer would have pointed out that the entropy of a closed system is constant. He or she might then go on to point out that -- in both classical and quantum mechanics -- the time evolution from any given initial condition is completely deterministic. Since entropy is the natural log of the missing information, and in a closed physical system that evolves in time according the solution to what amounts to a four-dimensional boundary value problem there is no missing information, not only is the entropy constant the entropy is zero.

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

[Patersmith]

Why can't religious people see this as a much, much greater feat of creation, resulting in God being infinitely more omnipotent?

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.

Natural selection

[maweki]

As many said before me: just fail them and let natural selection take its course.

Re:So fail them

[imroy]

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.

Re:Up to them

[kanweg]

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

Define "an increasing number"

[gregrah]

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.

Re:So fail them

[bertok]

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.

Quoting Albert on god and religion

[fyngyrz]

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."

Re:Quoting Albert on god and religion

[chrb]

"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:How many Muzzies have won a Nobel Prize?

[fyngyrz]

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.

You too are making my point

[Kupfernigk]

I could actually apply your argument to that idiot who keeps forecasting the end of the world. If he gets the date wrong maybe he didn't dig deep enough. He predicts the end of the world because he expects it to happen (and interprets everything that goes right in his life as a sign from God). He believes that the Bible is the only approach to understanding the Universe. If one revelation fails, he will wait for another.

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.