Antiquitopia

The NYTimes has an article about a study coming out of McGill University in Montreal about the increasing prevalence of Creationism in Islamic communities and countries, a topic I know many of my regular readers will be interested in and and more informed about than I am. According to the article, Muslim Creationists tend to be "old earth" Creationists in contrast to the more Christian "young earth" Creationists, meaning most Muslim Creationists do not think the earth to be a mere 6000 years old. They have no real problem with geologists and astronomers who argue that the earth is billions of years old. But they do seem to have some problems with biologists: They do not quarrel with astronomers and geologists, just biologists, insisting that life is the creation of God, not the happenstance consequence of random occurrences. This, as with everything, varies from group to group and from country to country, but there is a growing presence everywhere in the Muslim wo...

This excerpt is the very last paragraph to the Origin of Species. It is a well-wrought piece of prose from a literary perspective, and, James McGrath will notice, sees a seemlessness in creation and evolution, at least in its prosody: It is interesting to comtemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth and Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character a...

My girlfriend just sent me this site that sells T-Shirts. It primarily has a lot of stuff on evolution, which is cool, and pro-atheism stuff, with many of the proselytizing slogans found on England's buses. It still amazes me how much at least a particular new breed of atheists are actually not willing to think, are stuck in their own (outdated 18th-century Enlightenment) worldview, and not willing to dialogue with others just like their fundamentalist counterparts on the right (I personally find this type of atheism extremely conservative, while other atheists are not this way and free to engage others in an open, not ridiculously confrontational manner). If these are the paragons of "free thinkers," we are in trouble. In the site's defense, they are responding to the far religious right, but, in doing so, they have to be careful that they do not replicate the religious right's tactics of failing to recognize everything in between--such as liberal religious f...

One of the themes I emphasized this last fall in my class is the use of deceit in literature. You can find it almost in any ancient document. It is rife in the Odyssey , Aeschylus' Oresteia , and perhaps most prominent in Genesis. You can find traces of it in the Iliad , in the Hymn to Demeter , and so on and so forth. It is probably the clearest common thread of mcuh of ancient literature. And...uh...modern behavior with all the recent scams and scandals in the news. But, we are not the only ones with the penchant for deceit. It turns out it is quite common in the animal world, particularly among other primates: In a comparative survey of primate behavior, Richard Byrne and Nadia Corp of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland found a direct relationship between sneakiness and brain size. The larger the average volume of a primate species’ neocortex — the newest, “highest” region of the brain — the greater the chance that the monkey or ape would pull a stunt like this one...

The NYTimes has an extensive article today concerning teaching evolution. It covers much of the struggle that has been occurring, particularly in areas of strong evangelical camps who take Genesis 1:1-2:3 very literally. In this evolutionary struggle to survive, when confronted with students who have been taught their whole lives that creation occurred exactly, and in every detail, as Genesis has depicted it, a bit of gentle persuasion becomes the necessary means of instruction. Evolution is not at all a controversial issue among scientists--it is one of the most established aspects of "life science" and, in fact, is often considered the cornerstone of scientific thought. Moreover, there are other ways to interpret Genesis. It is a text that has been revisited for centuries (millenia actually), sometimes read literally, sometimes allegorically, sometimes more impressionistically (getting a general impression of the meaning rather than taking every single word literally), ...