I assume you are also a Muslim. But with all due respect, I doubt that you are typical. I would guess that you and AK are much better educated than the typical Muslim, even in the US, just as most Dopers overall are much better educated than the average American.
If the survey posted is valid, and it seems to be, then scientific illiteracy is a real problem in Turkey and the US, and presumably all other countries where religion (of any denomination) has great influence on government. Whether or not people are fervently anti-science is beside the point. All it takes is scientific illiteracy to allow the people who ARE fervently anti-science to run the country, and the world, into the ground.
This. This is what I hear from (and about) Muslims in nearly every corner of the world. And the question asked if you thought people descended from earlier animals. If you believe that a deity created man, well, you’re going to answer ‘no’. Of course Turkey was ‘in red’.
Again, I cannot speak for Turkey. But I was born and raised in Pakistan and due to my fathers career (army officer) I lived all over, from the cities, to the poorest most backwards areas, and as a lawyer have managed to interact with persons of all stripes.
What you seem to be misunderstanding is that this is a different culture, with different prejudices. People are much more likely to argue that science confirms Islam, then say that Islam is incompatible with science. This is NOT due to any love or knowledge of science, rather it is a cultural position.
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I remember hearing a BBC World Service report interview a while back with a college professor in Pakistan who talked about his students rejecting science over religion. I believe it was after an earthquake in Pakistan, and the professor was explaining about how plate tectonics cause earthquakes to his students, but his students argued that saying anything more than “God causes earthquakes” was potentially blasphemous. And these students weren’t children whose only education was memorizing the Koran, they were generally from an middle to upper class background.
(Fundamentalism is scary in any religious guise.)
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I agree with your last. And IIRC that was Professor Pervez Hooudboy, Professor of Physics at the University of Islamabad (also known as Quiad-e-Azam University) and all round motor mouth. And for the 2005 Earthquake, I was in the country during that time, and I do remember that there were hundereds of articles, newspaper reports, TV documentaries, about the causes of earthquakes, and not one of them said anything about Plate Tectonics being balsphemous. On the contarary, as there were several thousand aftershocks, for weeks, there many rumours that there was to be another earthquake on this day at this time, which were of course bunk.
Then you are are in your belief, as it is not typical to be hostile to evolution. It is not even much an issue in Islamic belief. This is something American in particular.
I agree. It is more common to hear odd statements that some science theory has always been confirmed in the Quran or in some Hadith. Sometimes it is very strangely argued, but this is so much more common.
It is most common I think to hear a Muslim say that God works through the plate tectonics. It is very alien to deny science directly as there is too many Hadiths that make that an uncomfortable position.
Ah, I see. Given the way the question was phrased, then, it looks as though the Turkey results merely reflect ignorance of evolutionary theory rather than outright hostility. That is something very different (and far less disturbing) from what Dawkins reports as going on in this UK school.
I’m reminded of a flap I mentioned some months ago regarding students who did not want to watch R-rated films in class for religious reason. It was only a couple of students, though; the rest just sucked it up or were used to it already.
I was raised Christian in a relatively fundamental church (the story of Jonah is literally true in their minds). I’m having trouble finding a cite for it now, but I was told that the genealogies skip generations. My pastors taught that it’s typical in old Hebrew records to only list the most important decedents rather than listing every father and every son, so there’s no way of accurately calculating time from them. I never attended a church that claimed the Bible said the Earth was {insert four digit number here} years old, though I knew of a few that I suspect taught that. (They were rather too fundie for my family’s tastes. Plus the really fundie pastors tend to be egocentric jerks who are always right, which did not make for a church community we wanted to be part of.)
I’m wondering what kind of credentials your pastors had in ancient Hebrew studies. I always get a kick out of people who have taken at most a year of Greek or Hebrew, and more likely just have thumbed through Strong’s, and are happy to explain why the scholars who have translated major Bible versions, most of whom have devoted their lives to the study of the manuscripts in the original languages, have gotten it so wrong.
At any rate, I’m willing to bet that ancient Jewish scholars knew more about it than your pastors, and they have evidently considered the genealogies continuous for at least the thousands of years they have based their calendar on the Anno Mundi chronology. There is some variation based on different texts, but it only amounts to a few hundred years, i.e. not anywhere near enough to reconcile the Bible with science.
Just in case you aren’t aware of it, the genealogies do not say, “David’s ancestors included Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” They say, for example
So I don’t see any way to make the case that they skipped generations. The years are explicitly laid out from Adam down to Jacob at least, and there are verses saying how long the Israelites were in Egypt, and how long after the Exodus the Temple was built, so all you have to do is add up the numbers and then assign a date to Solomon’s reign. That has recently become controversial, but not as controversial as the existence of Adam and Eve.
The only time I’ve heard the skipping thing was as an explanation for why the earlier geologies had people who were so long lived.
And, no, I wouldn’t trust ancient Jewish scholars for anything for the very reason that they are ancient, and the obvious practice you see of forcing the narrative to fit multiple variations of stories. I would trust modern Jewish scholars much more.
Just to add what little I know: Adnan Oktar (Harun Yahya) seems to be one of the main players in the creationist movement in Turkey. He’s filed a bunch of lawsuits that, amongst other things, led to large chunks of the web being blocked within Turkey.
My point was (and is) that a significant number of US Christians don’t agree with the idea that you can calculate the Earth’s age from the Old Testament genealogical records. I pointed that out because it seemed relevant to this thread, but I may have been mistaken in that regard, so I’ll leave it there.
I did not attack you; I didn’t even attack your pastors, although I made it very clear that it was them I was dubious about, and not you.
As for making your point, that’s great, and it was indeed relevant. And I made a counterpoint, which IMO was also relevant. What exactly did you expect in response — applause?
I have no idea what he means by that. The oldest writing, as far as we know, is not that old, and even if you believe that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, the oldest books of the Bible are less than 3500 years old.
If he’s referring to the age of the events that people have written about, then obviously they go back far beyond 5772 years ago.
That the earth isn’t 5772 years old, we just know about 5772 years (more or less) of religious stuff from writings, oral tradition and stories told around the camp fire while we we sitting on our knuckles admiring each other’s stone hammers.
Oddly I was about to start a thread along these lines. In our reading book, we had a discussion of how the earth was formed. Billions of years ago this, then that, asteroids delivered water, the continents arose, the atmosphere was built from volcanic fumes and so on. Then the earliest single-cell organisms began. A nice application of the passive voice.
In any case, this somehow lead us to talk about the Lord creating the world in six days. I had to put a kabash on that, but after class I asked a few students if they had any religious issues with the description of the creation of the earth. They said ‘nope’ and went happily on to their math class.
So, the OP seems to be quite wrong. Modern Saudis accept the standard scientific explanation.
