Islamic Creationism

This morning there’s an article in NYT about a new “challenge” to evolutionary theory, not from fundamentalist Protestants, but from Islam. There's a guy who has produced what is apparently a magnificent book, glossy, beautifully made, illustrated with many photos of fossils… and he has sent his book around to scientists all over the world. He is arguing that no change in species has ever occurred (he believes such changes would be contrary to the Koran).

Again, we see the fundamentalist antipathy toward science; and, in a larger sense, their antipathy toward human experience as a necessary resource in our understanding of the true nature of the universe, ultimate reality, and (some would say) an understanding of God. We are seeing it full-blown among many North American Protestants; Catholicism has its share (for example, the refusal to ordain women; the insistence on forbidding birth control).

It is this tendency within Christianity (and, apparently, Islam as well) that makes Buddhism so attractive, by comparison. The Buddha never permitted a contradiction between the teaching (the dharma), and human experience. There is no Buddhist “dogma” that must be swallowed whole. There is only the invitation to use the Buddhist pathway, and to see if human experience itself does, or does not, then verify the usefulness of the pathway. The Four Noble Truths about the existence, the source, and the end of human suffering are offered more as hypotheses than as infallible propositions that must be “believed.” Today, the Dalai Lama is the most prominent and vocal example of the Buddhist openness to science (see his new book, The Universe in a Single Atom).

And, of course, it is the failure to respect human experience, including scientific findings, that contributes so heavily to defections from religion among the well-educated, and scorn toward religion from many who cannot see the depth of understanding found among those who choose to practice their religion along a path of awareness, mindfulness, compassion, and seeking truth (and even Truth) from within our human experience. The “reign of God,” Jesus said, is within us.