Embedded Files
( - previous issue - )
Apologia Report 15:15 (1,020)
April 21, 2010
Subject: Are the newest critics of Darwinism a significant threat?
In this issue:
ISLAM - is the Quran "actually far less bloody and less violent than ... the Bible?"
ORIGINS - "eminent philosophers harboring doubts about Darwin"
WORD-FAITH MOVEMENT - new response to Prosperity Gospel comes from a Zacharias with whom you may not be familiar
-----
APOLOGIA AR-CHIVE
The AR-chive has been back online since at least April 17. As for why it went down, all of our inquiries to Google have gone unanswered, so we still have no idea as to the cause of the service interruption. Nevertheless, we archive by faith.
---
ISLAM
"Is the Bible More Violent Than the Quran?" -- a March 18 panel discussion on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered." NPR's BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY: "Given [militant Islam's] violent legacy, Philip Jenkins decided to compare the brutality quotient of the Quran and the Bible.
"Mr. PHILIP JENKINS (Religion Historian): Much to my surprise, the Islamic scriptures in the Quran were actually far less bloody and less violent than those in the Bible.
"HAGERTY: Jenkins is a religion historian at Penn State University and author of the forthcoming book Dark Passages [1], which is already drawing controversy before it's even published. Violence in the Quran, he and others say, is largely a defense against attack. ...
"Mr. JENKINS: What happens in all religions, as they grow and mature and expand, they go through a process of forgetting of the original violence, and I call this a process of holy amnesia.
"HAGERTY: They make the violence symbolic. Wiping out the enemy becomes wiping out one's own sins. Jenkins says that until very recently, Islam had the same sort of holy amnesia. Many Muslims interpreted jihad, for example, as an internal struggle, not physical warfare.
"Mr. ANDREW BOSTOM (Editor, "The Legacy of Jihad" [2]): This is just preposterous. I'm sorry.
"HAGERTY: Andrew Bostom is editor of the book "The Legacy of Jihad." He says there's a big difference between the Bible, which describes the destruction of an enemy at a point in time, and the Quran, which urges an ongoing struggle to defeat unbelievers.
"Mr. BOSTOM: It's an aggressive doctrine. The idea is to impose
Islamic law on the globe. ...
"HAGERTY: ... Waleed El-Ansary [Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, University of South Carolina] says in the past 30 years, there's been a sort of perfect storm that has allowed for a violent strain of Islam. The first factor is political, that is frustration at Western intervention in the Muslim world. The second is intellectual: the rise of Wahhabi Islam, a more fundamentalist interpretation of Islam subscribed to by the likes of Osama bin Laden. And so, El-Ansary says, fundamentalists have distorted Islam for political purposes.
"Mr. EL-ANSARY: Basically what they do is they take verses out of context and then use that to justify these egregious actions.
HAGERTY: El-Ansary says we are seeing more religious violence from Muslims today because the Islamic world is far more religious than is the West. Still, Philip Jenkins says Judeo-Christian culture should not be smug. The Bible has plenty of violence.
"Mr. JENKINS: The scriptures are still there. They are dormant, but not dead.
"HAGERTY: And can be resurrected at any time - for example, by white supremacists who cite the murderous Phineas [sic] when calling for racial purity or by a conservative Christian when shooting a doctor who performs abortions.
"In the end, the scholars can agree on one thing: The DNA of early Judaism, Christianity and Islam, code for a lot of violence. Whether they can evolve out of it is another thing altogether." <www.tinyurl.com/yk4aqfv>
In advance of his book, Jenkins makes his case to a broad readership: "Any Faith Can Become Violent," USA Today, Apr 19 '10, p9A.<www.tinyurl.com/22mtp6a> and "Dark Passages," Boston Globe, Mar 8 '10, n.p. <www.tinyurl.com/aatfuk>
To learn why AR consulting editor Mark Hartwig disagrees strongly with Jenkins' conclusion, see his "Spread by the Sword?"
---
ORIGINS
"Philosophers Rip Darwin" by Michael Ruse, who acknowledges that he "spends a lot of time fighting creationists" -- reports that "in the philosophical community, there is an increasingly vocal cadre of eminent philosophers harboring doubts about Darwin." Specifically, Ruse refers to three "voices from within the mainstream of philosophy questioning the veracity of evolutionary theory."
First is Alvin Plantinga, "North America's most distinguished Protestant philosopher of religion." Ruse explains that according to Plantinga, "Darwinism implies that there is and can be no direction in life's history. All change is a function of randomly appearing new variations (mutations) that are then sifted by the opportunistic mechanism of natural selection. Although new variations are not uncaused, they do not appear according to need. As Darwin himself argued, to think otherwise is to illicitly bring in a directing God.
... "Much more surprising is the position of the New York University philosopher Thomas Nagel, who has established himself right at the top of the field.... Although he states firmly that he does not believe in a deity, he has now come out against Darwinism. If Nagel is not a supporter of intelligent design, one wonders why he says what he does. He has endorsed a book by Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design [3], naming it one of the top books of 2009 in the Times Literary Supplement [www.tinyurl.com/ykfumgk]. In a recent article, Nagel argues that it is proper to teach intelligent design in the classroom [www.tinyurl.com/az6ef3]. Doubting the Darwinian claim that the sources of variation are undirected, Nagel quotes [ID proponent Michael] Behe as an authority. ...
"Jerry Fodor, no less distinguished than Nagel and Plantinga, is well known for his claim that the mind is composed of separately functioning modules. And he, too, has taken to criticizing Darwinian theory, first in an article in the London Review of Books [www.tinyurl.com/ycqkzwx] and now in What Darwin Got Wrong [4]. Fodor finds something deeply flawed in contemporary evolutionary thinking: 'An appreciable number of perfectly reasonable biologists are coming to think that the theory of natural selection can no longer be taken for granted. This is, so far, mostly straws in the wind; but it's not out of the question that a scientific revolution - no less than a major revision of evolutionary theory - is in the offing.' ...
"I want to draw attention to the way this crop of critics ignores evolutionary biology - aside from the kind of cherry-picking in which Fodor engages. Nagel may sneer about the failure to find 'accessible literature' that answers his worries. ...
"Fodor, Nagel, and Plantinga don't need to turn themselves into biochemists, but some awareness of the issues and advances would not be entirely misplaced. ...
"Plantinga is open in his fear that Darwinism makes impossible the guaranteed existence of our species. More, for years he has argued that Darwinism is bound up with the metaphysical belief that everything is natural (as opposed to supernatural), and that this leads to a collapse of rational belief and knowledge. The chance elements in Darwinism are simply not compatible with Plantinga's Christian faith.
"As nonbelievers, Nagel and Fodor are a bit different, but not that different. For years Nagel has argued against a reductive view of the human mind, believing it to be more than just molecules in motion - the obvious end result of Darwinism. ...
"And then there is Fodor. The final section of his new book is very revealing. As a dreadful warning to those who do not accept his main conclusions, Fodor prints passage after passage of claims by Darwinians that one can understand human nature and thinking as the product of natural selection: This is where we will all end up if we don't stop the rot right now. My suspicion is that Fodor doesn't really give a damn about fruit flies or finches or anything else out there. But when it comes to Homo sapiens, he wants no part of a naturalistic explanation that reduces design to the workings of blind law. There may not be a God, but we sure are made in his image." The Chronicle Review (Chronicle of Higher Education), Mar 7 '10, <www.tinyurl.com/yaq3bks>
---
WORD-FAITH MOVEMENT
"From Inside a Doublewide, a Shot at the Prosperity Gospel" by Roy Hoffman -- profiles Karen Spears Zacharias, author of the recently released Will Jesus Buy Me a Double-Wide? [5]. Notes that "Zacharias' new book is both a foray into her personal feelings about prayer and money - having had little of the latter when young - and into stories of people who offer 'parables,' she says, that illustrate her theme.
"She sees her work as a 'corrective' to what's known as the 'prosperity gospel,' or as she writes: 'We treat God like a slot machine, yanking on the prayer cable, hoping that the triple 7s will appear.'
"William Paul Young, author of mega-selling The Shack [6], gives this dustjacket endorsement: 'If the prosperity gospel had a heart, Karen has stomped that sucker flat.'
"There is no endorsement from the hugely popular televangelist Joel Osteen. Indeed, Osteen is one of the purveyors, Zacharias says, of the notion that prayer can bring down riches on one's head." EthicsDaily.com, Mar 1 '10, <www.tinyurl.com/y3qlgee>
-------
SOURCES: Monographs
1 - Dark Passages: How Religions Learn to Forget Their Bloody Origins, by Philip Jenkins (not yet listed with Amazon, look for "What's Next" in the upper right-hand corner of this page: <www.tinyurl.com/y295wht>
2 - The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims, by Andrew G. Bostom (Prometheus, 4th ed., 2005, hardcover, 759 pages) <www.tinyurl.com/2brqvyu>
3 - Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, by Stephen C. Meyer (HarperOne, 2009, hardcover, 624 pages) <www.tinyurl.com/y3xu4k5>
4 - What Darwin Got Wrong, by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010, hardcover, 288 pages) <www.tinyurl.com/275zw4s>
5 - Will Jesus Buy Me a Double-Wide? by Karen Spears Zacharias (Zondervan, 2010, hardcover, 240 pages) <www.tinyurl.com/y5qehn9>
6 - The Shack, by William P. Young (Windblown, 2007, paperback, 256 pages) <www.tinyurl.com/yyz3dl6>
-----
( - next issue - )
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse