Saturday Video: On a lighter note with the Cookie Monster/Tom Waits mashup

Tom Waits is always entertaining. But you bring in the Cookie Monster, and it takes everything to another dimension. Well, for a sleepy summer Saturday, here is the Cookie Monster Mash-up with Tom Waits' song God's Away on Business (lyrics here). I think the song provides a reasonable explanation for the problem of evil in the world. Tom Waits - the theologian? :)

First here is the Cookie Monster Mash-up (tip from Open Culture), and then below it is the Tom Waits video (if you are not familiar with Tom Waits - then be prepared for his unique voice. But he is an amazing performer, singer-songwriter, and even an accomplished actor!).


And here is the original video:

Rick Perry - a perfect candidate for late 19th century

by Salman Hameed

If this were the 1890s, Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, would come off as a pretty smart candidate. Global Warming: There is no definite scientific evidence that humans are responsible for it. Evolution: It is a theory with many gaps. Age of the Earth: It is quite old. But no one knows exactly how old it is. Smart answers as science was much uncertain about all of these issues in the late 19th century. The issue of age of the Earth was particularly in flux (though, no serious scientists thought that it was less than 10,000 years old. The question was whether it was tens of millions of years old - as the physics of the time suggested - or billions of years old. The discovery of radioactive materials and nuclear fusion resolved those issues permanently). Therefore, a presidential candidate would have been wise not to fully commit to any of these ideas - in the 1890s. Unfortunately, this is 2011, and his proclamations are just embarrassing. Although it would be cool, if he also argued for the presence of aether as the medium for light.

Rick Perry for President (1896)!

Here is the clip of his answers for age of the earth and evolution:

Penn Jilllete and God-believing atheists

by Salman Hameed

Here is an interesting interview with magician Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller's Bullshit! fame). He has a new book out, God, No! Signs you may already be an atheist and other magical tales. He takes the stance that there isn't much difference between atheists and religious folks when comes down to issues of morality, etc. He differs from those militant atheists who argue that primarily religion is, and has been, a source of evil in the world. Yes, there are crazies out there who act in the name of religion, but Penn believes that those are outliers, and it is a mistake to fixate on them and generalize from there. Penn takes a universalist approach to morality in humans (indeed, a huge subject...), and thinks that atheists and religious people make similar sorts of moral decisions - irrespective of what religion tells them to do - and have a lot more in common than they realize (by the way, in US the public is least likely to vote for an atheist President than any another denomination including Muslims).

This is not an academic book. Nevertheless, he is engaged with these debates at the ground-level. He understands the need and the desire to have a community, and the fact that religion fills up this niche quite nicely. In the interview there is also a nice little conversation about performing magic in the age of science, and the difference between magic and a performing a trick.

Oh - and he seems to be a local of western Massachusetts. In fact, there is even a mention of Northampton in the interview!

Listen to the full interview here (it is about 16 minutes long). 

Peer reviewed research could have saved us from the Rise of the Apes

by Salman Hameed

Saw The Rise of the Planet of the Apes. It sucks! No need to waste time on this crap.

The premise of the original book (and the original movie) is awesome. One can address some really interesting ethical and moral issues with the topic. Can we keep fellow apes in cages or zoos? How do we balance out the benefit of medical research on our closest cousins? And of course a broader range of moral and ethical issues regarding animals in general. The original Planet of the Apes played on our fears of a nuclear war, and that was quite appropriate for the time. The new film tries to bring in issues of medical benefits and the treatment of apes. Unfortunately, the screenplay is stupid and there is no effort to breath life into any of the characters.

Spoilers ahead (but really, nothing is really surprising or earth shattering):
Worst is the idiotic portrayal of science and scientists. The drug company, of course, is the real evil (oh and sooo evil they are). Scientists are just dumb and playing into the hands of the company. But there is one unintentional good thing from the movie: The happenings in the film make a strong case for adhering to a peer-review system, replication of results, as well as seeking permission from an Institutional Review Board (IRB) for experiments on humans and animals. If the scientists in the movie were mimicking anything close to science in practice, then we would not have any takeover of the apes - at least in this version of the film. But then the lead scientist in the film (played by James Franco who seemed to have been inspired by Keanu Reeves' wooden acting style) is not so smart and had to be told about chimp behavior (hmm...that a pet chimpanzee at home may not be a good idea) by his girlfriend.

Oh - and the movie definitely does not believe in nurture. The apes, after being bestowed with more intelligence, could immediately work out superior battle strategies and could figure out how to disable security cameras, etc. Who needs training or education? All we need is intelligence! And the humans, it seemed, tried to play even with the apes by sending only one helicopter to attack them - conveniently placing the really bad company guy on board. Yup - no one saw that helicopter going down in fire and explosions towards the end of the fight. C'mon!

Two somewhat good things in the film (and I'm trying hard to find positives here): It is actually cool to see different apes together - especially the orangutan looks great! (but why would different types of apes want to lead the rebellion together?). Second, there is an excellent use of end-credits to explain how most humans would be wiped out from the planet, and there was a subtle hint during the film that there is a human mission to Mars in progress. This is a smart way to set it up for a sequel. I just hope they get better writers for the next film.

My biggest disappointment is from the fact that the movie could have been really good with minor tweaks. For example, instead of an evil drug company, they could have had a true dilemma of a sincere effort to cure Alzheimer's (without money motivation) with the issue of experimentation on apes. Similarly, the captivity conditions could have been less horrific and could have raised issues of fundamental rights for apes and that of freedom in general.

But no. Here we have a film that appeals to the lowest common denominator. One of the apes from the film could have done a better job of writing than the buffoons who wrote the screenplay and made the film (sorry - no offense to the buffoons either). 

A sensible article on the American drones in Pakistan

by Salman Hameed

There was always division within the Obama administration about how to approach Pakistan. People like John Kerry and others were advocates of a deeper socio-economic involvement, whereas others in the administration have been arguing for taking a harder stance. There was a profile of John Kerry in the NYT Magazine and it talked about his anger after hearing of an American drone attack soon after he left Islamabad after fruitful negotiations. The article was not about US foreign policy in Pakistan, but it demonstrated the fissures within the Obama administration.

The post Bin-Laden postures clearly show that the Kerry faction has lost influence - at least for the time being. All nuance towards Pakistan, including the acknowledgement of a deeply complex and intertwined history of US and Pakistan involvement in Afghanistan, has now been set-aside. The discussions in news media now usually focus only on the fact that the US is giving so much money to Pakistan and is only getting betrayal in return. No mention of how Pakistanis view US drone attacks and civilian casualties, the costs of maintaining a sizable fraction of the army on the Afghan border, the retaliation attacks by the Taliban inside Pakistan since the US invasion of Afghanistan, and the impact of regional politics. Yes, Pakistan's domestic policies are in shambles, and the army and the ISI have also been playing with fire in continuing to harbor militant groups that have been working against India. Nevertheless, this is a complex picture in a very complex region (see an earlier post: Popular Science as a Guide to Popular Geopolitics)

It is therefore rare to see an article in NYT that takes a sensible approach to the issue of drone attacks and to the region as a whole. The issue of drones has come up again as CIA has made a ridiculous claim that for a year there has not been a single civilian casualty in drone attacks in Pakistan (by the way, even if this fairytale was true, we still have to address the legality and ethics of drone attacks to begin with). I think this strategy may be effective in the short run, but will end-up alienating the larger segment of Pakistani population. It will be a losing strategy if US exchanges turmoil in Afghanistan (population 30 million) with turmoil and anti-Americanism in Pakistan (population 180 million). And this is roughly the point of this oped in NYT:

Over the past two years, America has narrowed its goals in Afghanistan and Pakistan to a single-minded focus on eliminating Al Qaeda. Public support for a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan has waned. American officials dealing with Pakistan now spend most of their time haggling over our military and intelligence activities, when they should instead be pursuing the sort of comprehensive social, diplomatic and economic reforms that Pakistan desperately needs and that would advance America’s long-term interests.

In Pakistan, no issue is more controversial than American drone attacks in Pakistani territory along the Afghan border. The Obama administration contends that using drones to kill 10 or 20 more Qaeda leaders would eliminate the organization. This is wishful thinking.

...

 Moreover, as the drone campaign wears on, hatred of America is increasing in Pakistan. American officials may praise the precision of the drone attacks. But in Pakistan, news media accounts of heavy civilian casualties are widely believed. Our reliance on high-tech strikes that pose no risk to our soldiers is bitterly resented in a country that cannot duplicate such feats of warfare without cost to its own troops.       

Our dogged persistence with the drone campaign is eroding our influence and damaging our ability to work with Pakistan to achieve other important security objectives like eliminating Taliban sanctuaries, encouraging Indian-Pakistani dialogue, and making Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal more secure.

Reducing Al Qaeda to a fringe group of scattered individuals without an organizational structure will only succeed if Pakistan asserts control over its full territory and brings government services to the regions bordering Afghanistan.

Washington should support a new security campaign that includes jointly controlled drone strikes and combines the capabilities of both countries. Together, the American and Pakistani governments can fashion a plan that meets the objectives of both without committing to broader joint campaigns that would not be politically viable at the moment.

Read the full article here.

Also see earlier posts:
Ethics, Morality, and Legality of Robotic Wars
Sorting through some of the post Bin Laden mess in Pakistan
Drone Strategy in Pakistan Being Questioned
Obamas's blind spot in his Pakistan-Afghanistan Strategy

Blaming the Sun

This is a weekly post by Nidhal Guessoum (see his earlier posts here). Nidhal is an astrophysicist and Professor of Physics at American University of Sharjah and is the author of Islam's Quantum Question: Reconciling Muslim Tradition and Modern Science.

We humans have a strong tendency to find correlations where oftentimes there are none, and to blame external factors for serious events when most of the time they are entirely human induced.

A few months ago, when the super earthquake and tsunami in Japan came within a week or so of a “super full moon”, the latter was almost predictably blamed in a number of news stories, and I wrote a newspaper column titled “Don’t blame the moon”. In it, I mentioned that the moon used to be thought of as the reason for a variety of things, ranging from severe weather to pregnancies, but nowadays only the full moon is cited as a principal reason for increases in crime rates (during those “white nights”) to tsunamis. I explained why this is all nonsense.

These days, however, it’s the sun’s turn to be blamed. Since we’ve had major drops and wild swings in stock markets worldwide as well as extreme weather across the globe, one could almost predict that the sun, with its increase in magnetic and flare activity, would be blamed. (And let’s not forget the riots in England.) And indeed, there are articles to that effect, including one on Reuters and one on the Arabic-BBC website, though in both pieces “various views” are presented, without a clear rejection of the solar-activity “theory”. A year ago, an Algerian pseudo-astronomer predicted that Ramadan would be tough because the upturn in solar activity would make temperatures significantly higher than usual…

What’s the story exactly? Well, we know that the sun undergoes a cycle of magnetic activity every 11 years or so, resulting in greater numbers (or very few) sunspots, solar flares, and prominences. The graph on the side shows the variation of the sunspot number since 2000, with the upturn in late 2009 and the expected activity over the next several years. To what extent this affects the earth’s climate is an important issue; the short answer is “not much”; and the solar cycle can even less be called upon to explain any local or regional increases in temperatures.

But then how would anyone cite this as an explanation for the stock market’s wild ride (mostly downward) of the past few weeks? Well, people noticed that in the past week or so, several strong solar “coronal mass ejections” occurred and “coincided” with the big drops in world markets. Secondly, people noted that just like the sun goes through cycles of activity, the market seems to go through similar phases, and moreover, there seems to be some “correlation”. These people, who tend to be smart, if scientifically and methodologically challenged, explained it as a solar psychological effect on investors. They cite a 2003 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta that found that such storms could affect the stock market.

OK, that’s a testable hypothesis, so someone should check. Indeed, someone (Alexander Pakhalov of Moscow State University) recently published a study titled “The Influence of Solar Activity on the Investors' Behaviour in the Stock Markets”, in which he concluded that “based on the analysis of extensive historical data, connection between solar activity and the stock market was not found.” (OK, the source is an open-access repository of papers, not a bona fide refereed journal, and I am not an expert to vouch for this research, but it’s a statistical study, and it can be checked.)

Now, here below are graphs of both the sunspot number variation and the Dow Jones Industrial average for most of the last century, so you can take a look for yourself. Of course, we don’t do correlation studies in this “take a look” way, but it is often useful to see (by eye) what the data are showing before feeding them into statistical-analysis programs.

Last but not least, it is important to reflect on how we humans are quick to correlate phenomena and to believe that “we don’t know everything, so the connection is possible…” We humans evolved a capacity to notice patterns because that served us well in our long and difficult history, but we also have a tendency to overdo it, to see patterns where there are none and correlations that do not exist. As we scientists keep repeating, just because certain events occur at the same time or one after the other, does not mean they are related in some way, especially in a causal way. And because life is too difficult (for most people) already, it’s comforting to blame external factors, especially ones that we can do nothing about. It’s our “fate”, so let’s accept it, be strong, and move on.

But it is in fact only when we refuse to accept such reasoning that we make progress and truly move forward. We need to instill in our children and students the habit of asking for evidence, of questioning “received wisdom”, of searching for explanations that can be checked and confirmed. Anything else is superstition, irrational behavior, and just primitive thinking.

Muslims and Dutch multiculturalism

by Salman Hameed

We have been trying to understand the reception of evolutionary biology and modern science in different Muslim societies, including Muslims in Europe. From an academic standpoint, the European landscape is equally fascinating and complex as that of the Muslim majority areas from Morocco to Indonesia. Last month I had posted a link to an excellent article that looked at adjustment issues for Muslims in UK and Germany. Today there is another article in NYT that looks at multiculturalism in the Netherlands. Here is the key bit from the article:

If part of the Dutch anxiety is about identity, there are similar concerns among Muslims here. There are two parallel sets of identity crises, said Ahmed Marcouch, 42, son of an illiterate Moroccan immigrant and now a Labor member of Parliament. Most Muslims came from poor, less educated parts of Morocco and eastern Turkey, and clung to traditional values and the mosque as bulwarks against a secular society that promoted individualism, gender equality and gay rights.

“They didn’t speak Dutch, they didn’t know Holland, and they saw the sexual revolution, feminism and youth anarchism as a provocation, as part of a decadent society,” Mr. Marcouch said. He remembers his father saying with contempt, “Women are the bosses here.”

Their children, fluent in Dutch but not readily accepted, were even more at risk. A significant number, he concedes, turned to crime. They had their own identity problems, Mr. Marcouch said, asking: “Who am I? Where am I really from? Can I be Dutch?” He described his own son, 22, discussing these questions with his 10-year-old sister. “They won’t recognize you as a full citizen,” his son told her.

At the same time, Mr. Marcouch said, Dutch politicians were promoting economic integration — language training, job training. “They didn’t understand the importance of religious identity among the immigrants,” he said. They dismissed it as backward even as they failed to understand the anger a growing immigrant population was creating. “The fear,” he said, “is on both sides.”

While similar identity issues are playing a prominent role in several European countries, the way they manifest themselves are dependent on the policies of the host countries - and these policies can vary quite drastically from one country to another. It gets further complicated by the fact that some of these immigrants are from former colonies (for example, Pakistanis in UK), and in other cases, they have been part of the crucial post WWII work force (for example, the Turks in Germany or Algerians in France). Unfortunately, this article in NYT does not address the policies of the Dutch state clearly, but towards the end it does bring up an interesting issues of one of the former colonies and the question of the Dutch identity in general:

In the United States, citizenship once granted is never questioned, said Mr. Overbeek of VU University. “But in Europe it’s never quite established, no matter how long you’ve been here. Here it’s still, ‘When did you get here, and when are you going back?’ ”

East of Amsterdam, in Almere, the youngest city in the Netherlands, 30 percent voted for Mr. Wilders.

Shopping in the city center, Raihsa Sahinoer, 24, born here of Surinamese immigrants, was not surprised. “Wilders says we all have to go back even if we were born here,” she said. “It’s not only about Muslims, it’s about colored people, too.”

She lives as the Dutch do, she said. “But they tell us if you’re colored, you’re not Dutch.” Does she feel Dutch? “No,” she said, then paused, then asked: “What is Dutch?”

Read the full article here.        

God's Blog from The New Yorker

This is absolutely hilarious! Here is God's Blog. I have highlighted couple of my favorite responses here (I would have complained about allergies too. It has been nasty here today).

GOD'S BLOG 

UPDATE: Pretty pleased with what I’ve come up with in just six days. Going to take tomorrow off. Feel free to check out what I’ve done so far. Suggestions and criticism (constructive, please!) more than welcome. God out. 

COMMENTS (24)

Not sure who this is for. Seems like a fix for a problem that didn’t exist. Liked it better when the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep.

... 

Going carbon-based for the life-forms seems a tad obvious, no?

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Disagree with the haters out there who have a problem with man having dominion over the fish of the sea, the fowl of the air, the cattle of the earth, and so on. However, I do think it’s worth considering giving the fowl of the air dominion over the cattle of the earth, because it would be really funny to see, like, a wildebeest or whatever getting bossed around by a baby duck.

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The dodo should just have a sign on him that says, “Please kill me.” Ridiculous.

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Amoebas are too small to see. They should be at least the size of a plum.

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Beta version was better. I thought the Adam-Steve dynamic was much more compelling than the Adam-Eve work-around You finally settled on.

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Why do they have to poop? Seems like there could have been a more elegant/family-friendly solution to the food-waste-disposal problem.

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Unfocussed. Seems like a mishmash at best. You’ve got creatures that can speak but aren’t smart (parrots). Then, You’ve got creatures that are smart but can’t speak (dolphins, dogs, houseflies). Then, You’ve got man, who is smart and can speak but who can’t fly, breathe underwater, or unhinge his jaws to swallow large prey in one gulp. If it’s supposed to be chaos, then mission accomplished. But it seems more like laziness and bad planning.

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Putting boobs on the woman is sexist.

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Epic fail.

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Meh.

Read the full article here.

Saturday Video: 50 Academics Speaking about God

Here is a snapshot of some of prominent academics on God from a skeptical viewpoint. The snapshot format is interesting but it may give the impression that these views are relatively uniform. If you are interested in a more nuanced look on this topic (especially when you go beyond the notion of a personal God), check out Atoms and Eden: Conversations on Science & Religion by Steve Paulson. It contains interviews with scientists and philosophers, both religious and non-religious, and presents a fascinatingly complex views on these matters.

Nidhal's efforts highlighted in the journal Science

by Salman Hameed

Last week's Science has a very nice piece on Nidhal's efforts regrading Islamic calendar as well as the promotion of general scientific thinking in the Muslim world. Well we knew that already and have been benefiting from his Monday contributions on Irtiqa. But here are some of the highlights from the article:

This week will see the start of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, a time when hundreds of millions of Muslims around the globe devote themselves to fasting and prayer. But to Algerian scientist Nidhal Guessoum, a Sunni Muslim, it's also a time of chaos—and “an embarrassment” to Islam.

Tradition dictates that Ramadan, like other holy months in the Islamic calendar, begins the day after the thin crescent of the new moon is first seen with the naked eye. Because visibility is very dependent on local atmospheric conditions, religious officials in different countries—relying on eye-witness observations from volunteers—often disagree on the exact moment, sometimes by as much as 3 or 4 days. It's a recipe for international confusion.

Guessoum, an astrophysicist at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, is one of the most high-profile advocates of a scientific approach to the problem that would end the confusion. Its adoption would not only help Muslims plan their lives—“I need to know whether I can hold a meeting on August 30,” Guessoum says—but also be a sign that Muslim countries, once at the forefront of science, are again “able to integrate science into social and cultural life,” he says.

Guessoum, the vice president of an international organization known as the Islamic Crescents' Observation Project (ICOP), believes science can help solve other practical problems in the Muslim faith. In frequent TV appearances, public lectures, blog posts, and books, he has explained how astronomical techniques can help determine prayer times in countries far from the equator or establish the direction of Mecca.

This is a topic that Nidhal has written here on Irtiqa as well (for example, see this post from a few weeks ago). But his overall approach is broader and has a strong emphasis on critical thinking and an appreciation of scientific methodology: 

After leaving Algeria in 1994 to escape a bloody civil war, Guessoum moved to Kuwait and then, in 2000, to the United Arab Emirates. Since then, he has found himself devoting more and more time to the crescent-sighting problem. ICOP has designed computer models that predict how crescent visibility depends on both the position of the moon in the sky and atmospheric conditions and has used these models to propose a “universal” Islamic calendar, in which the start of each month is tied to a particular day in the international Gregorian calendar, and a “bizonal” calendar that would use separate calculations for the Americas and for Europe, Asia, and Africa. In the latter, the onset of the months would more closely match actual observations of the new crescent.

Guessoum hopes clerics can first be persuaded to adopt the bizonal calendar and, eventually, the universal version. That's a tall order, Schaefer says. Scholars have proposed other rational solutions for centuries, he says, but Muslims have remained steadfastly attached to naked-eye observations. “It is rather unlikely that his idea will get accepted by the Islamic authorities,” Schaefer says.

Guessoum recognizes that tradition is important in Islam and says naked-eye observations provide a valuable link between faith and nature. But he believes the attachment to this practice stems from an overly literal interpretation of Islamic principles. What was sound practical advice in the 8th century, a time when astronomy was pretty primitive, is mistakenly interpreted as a cast-iron rule, he argues.

Guessoum describes himself as a “rationalist” and a practicing but pragmatic Muslim. Reconciling his faith with science is “still a work in progress,” he says; he's unsure, for instance, as to whether, and how, God acts in the world. But he believes that Muslims cannot afford to be dogmatic about their religion and says that they must make a distinction between “secondary” rituals, such as prayer and fasting times, and what he regards as the essential elements of Islam: the “oneness of God,” the existence of spirit as well as matter in human beings, and the possibility of divine revelation.

He argues that only by recognizing this distinction and leaving space for critical thinking does the Islamic world have a chance of reviving the scientific glory it knew between the 7th and 14th centuries—a period in which Guessoum, like many Muslim scientists, takes great pride. A renaissance won't happen overnight, but it's possible, says Guessoum, who's heartened by the Arab Spring. An increased awareness of the wider world—thanks to the Internet—and a more meritocratic university system will, in the long run, rejuvenate science, he says.

And, he believes, Islam needn't stand in the way—provided Muslims look at their religion afresh. “We must be a little bit more flexible, pragmatic, and intelligent,” he says.

Fantastic! Read the full article here (you may need subscription to access the full article). You can find Nidhal's posts on Irtiqa here.                 

On the possibility of two Moons for the early Earth

There is an interesting new theory that Earth may have had two moons earlier on and the smaller moon merged into the big one. This collision may explain the difference in the features between the dark side and front side of the Moon (with respect to us: we only see one side of the Moon from the Earth). Here is a short podcast on the topic with Monte on WRSI - The River.

In addition, we also played a game on the National Geographic website where you can create your own solar system around your own favorite star. It is actually pretty cool. You can play with various properties of the star and the planets (including their orbits) to see how long they survive. Check out the Solar System Builder here.

Listen to the full podcast here: On two moons and playing god. 

The Adam and Eve question for Evangelicals

The issue of biological evolution and how Muslims will reconcile science and religion will say a lot about the future of scientific thinking in the Muslim world. The same is true for the many of the Evangelical groups in the US. The interpretation of Adam and Eve story is one of the key factors that give people pause about human evolution. Of course there are ways around it: For example, one can take the story a metaphorical one, or consider Adam and Eve and one of the first homo sapiens. Here is an NPR story (7 minutes) of some Evangelical Christians who are breaking away for science (and evidence) without abandoning their fundamental religious views:

But now some conservative scholars are saying publicly that they can no longer believe the Genesis account. Asked how likely it is that we all descended from Adam and Eve, Dennis Venema, a biologist at Trinity Western University, replies: "That would be against all the genomic evidence that we've assembled over the last 20 years, so not likely at all." 

Venema says there is no way we can be traced back to a single couple. He says with the mapping of the human genome, it's clear that modern humans emerged from other primates as a large population — long before the Genesis time frame of a few thousand years ago. And given the genetic variation of people today, he says scientists can't get that population size below 10,000 people at any time in our evolutionary history.

To get down to just two ancestors, Venema says, "You would have to postulate that there's been this absolutely astronomical mutation rate that has produced all these new variants in an incredibly short period of time. Those types of mutation rates are just not possible. It would mutate us out of existence."

Venema is a senior fellow at BioLogos Foundation, a Christian group that tries to reconcile faith and science. The group was founded by Francis Collins, an evangelical and the current head of the National Institutes of Health, who, because of his position, declined an interview.

And Venema is part of a growing cadre of Christian scholars who say they want their faith to come into the 21st century. Another one is John Schneider, who taught theology at Calvin College in Michigan until recently. He says it's time to face facts: There was no historical Adam and Eve, no serpent, no apple, no fall that toppled man from a state of innocence.

"Evolution makes it pretty clear that in nature, and in the moral experience of human beings, there never was any such paradise to be lost," Schneider says. "So Christians, I think, have a challenge, have a job on their hands to reformulate some of their tradition about human beginnings."

It is great that at least some Evangelicals are taking this stance. I think one can easily see similar issues with the Muslims world as well - and we see some of the similar responses as well:

But others say Christians can no longer afford to ignore the evidence from the human genome and fossils just to maintain a literal view of Genesis.

"This stuff is unavoidable," says Dan Harlow at Calvin College. "Evangelicals have to either face up to it or they have to stick their head in the sand. And if they do that, they will lose whatever intellectual currency or respectability they have."

"If so, that's simply the price we'll have to pay," says Southern Baptist seminary's Albert Mohler. "The moment you say 'We have to abandon this theology in order to have the respect of the world,' you end up with neither biblical orthodoxy nor the respect of the world."

Mohler and others say if other Protestants want to accommodate science, fine. But they shouldn't be surprised if their faith unravels.

You can listen to the full story here.

Hoodbhoy on the possibility of a Saudi bomb

by Salman Hameed

Here is an article that provides a nice context of the nuclear programs of Pakistan and Iran, and the potential of a Saudi bomb in reaction to a possible Iranian nuclear test. Despite the rhetoric of Saudis, I doubt that they will be able to do that. A big reason is that their military and security is tightly linked to the US, and any help from Pakistan would be under a severe scrutiny. Nevertheless, here is an excerpt from The Sunni Bomb:

What if Iran chooses to cross the threshold? Among other likely consequences, an Iranian bomb would be a powerful stimulus pushing the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to follow and seek the first Sunni bomb. The first, yes. Though also a Sunni-majority state, Pakistan built its bomb not for Islamic reasons, but to counter India's nuclear arsenal. In fact, Shiite-majority Iran enthusiastically hailed Pakistan's 1998 test of an atomic device. Clearly, the Iranian leadership did not see Pakistan's bomb as a threat.

But Sunni Saudi Arabia sees Shia Iran as its primary enemy. The two are bitter rivals that, post-Iranian revolution, have vied for influence in the Muslim world. Saudi Arabia has the world's largest petroleum reserves, Iran the second. Saudi Arabia is the biggest buyer of advanced US weapons and is run by expatriates. It is America's golden goose, protected by US military might. But fiercely nationalist Iran expelled US oil companies after the revolution and is building its own scientific base.

Both Saudi Arabia and Iran are theocracies, with their respective theologies locked in an irresolvable conflict that began with the death of the Prophet of Islam some 15 centuries ago. Saudi Arabia is Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques and the birthplace of Islam. It is the leader of the Sunni world, culturally conservative, and Arab.

On the other hand, Iran is a Persian, Shia-majority state that, after its revolution, sought to be the leader of all Muslim revolutionaries, both Shia and Sunni, who wanted to confront the West. Iran has a large class of educated and forward-looking young people who enjoy more cultural freedom than most Arab countries allow. But Iran is run by a backward-looking Guardian Council of clerics who, although their initial revolutionary ardor has gone, still seek to project Iranian power in Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine.

Here is bit about the Pakistan-Iran connection:

Pakistan made its first nuclear weapon in 1985 and now has many. Nevertheless, it is difficult, if not impossible, to envisage it -- or any Muslim state -- using an Islamic bomb for defense of the ummah against the United States or Israel. Although Khan has acknowledged transfer of nuclear materials and knowledge from Pakistan to other countries, his actions were not inspired by religion. In 2011, to get even with opponents, he made available documents showing that he personally transferred more than $3 million in payments by North Korea to senior officers in the Pakistani military, who subsequently approved his sharing of technical know-how and equipment with Pyongyang. If the released letter is genuine, then this episode demonstrates corruption, not ideological sympathy.

While revolutionary Iran supported the notion of an Islamic bomb, it never benefited from the concept. The main sectarian division within Islam -- between Sunni and Shia -- was too big a hurdle.

There were times when Iran was considered among Pakistan's closest allies. It was the first country to recognize the newly independent Pakistan in 1947. In the 1965 war with India, Pakistani fighter jets flew to Iranian bases in Zahidan and Mehrabad for protection. Iran's pro-US Shah was a popular figure in Pakistan, and Iran opened its universities wide to Pakistani students. Although it is 80 percent Sunni, with only a 15-20 percent Shia minority, Pakistan once considered Iran as a brother Muslim country.

In 1979, Khomenei's Islamic revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan set realignments in motion. As Iran exited the US orbit, Pakistan moved close to the Americans to fight the Soviets. With financial assistance from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the US created and armed the mujahideen. The CIA placed advertisements in journals and newspapers across the world, inviting the most hardened of Islamic fighters to participate in holy war against communist infidels. Although this worked brilliantly, the dynamics that eventually led to 9/11 had been put in place.

Iran too supported the mujahideen. But it supported the Northern Alliance while Pakistan supported the Pashtun Taliban. As religion assumed centrality in matters of state in both Pakistan and Iran, rifts widened. In the wake of the Soviet pullout from Afghanistan, the Taliban took over Kabul in 1996. An initial selective killing of Shias was followed by a massacre of more than 5,000 in Bamiyan province. Iran soon amassed 300,000 troops at the Afghan border and threatened to attack the Pakistan-supported Taliban government. Today Iran accuses Pakistan of harboring terrorist anti-Iran groups on its soil and allowing Sunni extremists to ravage Pakistan's Shia minority.

On the nuclear front, Pakistan has always publicly defended Iran's right to nuclear technology and secretly helped Iran's nuclear weapon program until the mid 1990's. But even at that time, subterranean voices within the Pakistani establishment spoke against giving nuclear support to Iran. The discomfort during the Musharraf regime was confirmed by confidential American cables, revealed by Wikileaks and highlighted by the Pakistani newspaper Dawn. The cables detail Pakistan's efforts to dissuade Iran from pursuing its weapons program. In late 2006, the cables say, former Pakistani Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri told the Americans, "We are the only Muslim country [with such a weapon] and don't want anyone else to get it."

But Iran may acquire the bomb, Pakistani desires notwithstanding. Then what?

Pakistan has close ties with Saudi Arabia, and has helped set-up Saudi Air Force and other military facilities. So it is quite plausible (and perhaps the only route for the Kingdom) that Pakistani engineers and scientists will be the source of any Saudi nuclear efforts. But as I said above, with so much scrutiny on Pakistan, I don't see this going much further. But how should we look at the broader issue of nuclear weapons? I agree with Hoodbhoy on the fact that we need fewer nuclear weapons, and that the US has no moral authority on this matter. But it is unclear how any de-nuclearization will take place. We may simply have to live with more nuclear weapons and knowing that many of us are capable of unleashing unimaginable catastrophe on fellow human beings:

Any solution is deeply complicated by one unfortunate fact: The world's pre-eminent power, the United States, lacks the moral authority to act effectively in the domain of nuclear proliferation. Whereas it has periodically threatened Iran with a nuclear holocaust for trying to develop nuclear weapons, it has rewarded, to various degrees, other countries -- Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea -- that developed such weapons surreptitiously.

The US has tried threats and coercion with Iran, but never the power of humility. Had American leaders acknowledged having wronged Iran in 1953 by engineering the coup which brought back the Shah, Iranian nuclear nationalism might have been significantly weakened. It is now probably too late for this tack.

Short of war, every attempt must be made to dissuade Iran. But nuclear nationalism and Persian pride could still override the pain of sanctions. And what if Iran does make the bomb or get close to it? Well, then the international community must accept this state of affairs as just another nasty fact of life. The world will have yet another nuclear state, surely a bad, but not catastrophic, thing. One can see Iranians becoming steadily more pragmatic and less revolutionary since 1997; in time their nuclear weapons will become like everybody else's.

The world needs fewer nuclear weapons, not more. But attacking Iran is not an option. This rash step would unleash dynamics over which the US and Israel will have little control. Sunni-Shia divisions will be pushed aside; Muslims will unite against a common enemy. However unwelcome Iran's bomb -- and the Sunni bomb that could someday follow -- may be, it is far better to live with potential danger than to knowingly create a holocaust.

Read the full article here.

Muslim Women Preachers

This is a weekly post by Nidhal Guessoum (see his earlier posts here). Nidhal is an astrophysicist and Professor of Physics at American University of Sharjah and is the author of Islam's Quantum Question: Reconciling Muslim Tradition and Modern Science.

It is Ramadan, so Muslims tend to spend an inordinate amount of time watching TV, partly because they need to “kill time” waiting for sunset to break their fast, and partly because TV channels in this part of the world often present their best programming (historical series, comedy shows, and others) during the holy month. And Muslims tend to get large doses of preaching from the TV set.

I spend much less time in front of the TV set than the average person, and my viewing habits are quite different than the typical guy, but during Ramadan my TV time increases substantially. And so the other day, as I was flipping between channels, I caught one female preacher (Dr. Lina Al-Himsi on Iqra-TV), and so I recalled a news item I had read several weeks ago about a Malaysian reality-TV program which, through auditions, aims at selecting the best female Muslim preacher, or proselytizer (“da`wa” in Islamic parlance).

The recordings of this reality-TV show started a few months ago, but the program itself will not air until October 2011. The program, titled “Solehah” (from an Arabic word meaning “pious female”), has 13 episodes, through which the candidates are judged by a panel of clerics for their religious knowledge, their oratory skills and charismatic personality.

A previous show, “Imam Muda” (Young Imam), on another Malaysian channel, had been very popular among the public on the selection process for the best Imam. The show is now going into its second season.

Now, how prevalent, accepted, or shunned, are female preachers in the Muslim world? First, it must be stated, for those who may not realize this, that in mosques, ladies, however knowledgeable or scholarly they may be, are never allowed to preach to men; they can, however, conduct sessions to a female-only audience, completely segregated, out of sight and out of hearing from the male section. And except for a few cases here and there, most famously that of Dr. Amina Wadud conducting prayers to a mixed audience a few years back, Muslim women are not allowed, by the tradition, to lead the prayer when men are present or available.

But this does not apply to the TV and Radio media, where women now quite routinely appear on air and on screen and preach to whoever will listen. And a number of them have become media stars, for example: Magda Amer, who preaches in one of Cairo’s leading mosques; Soad Saleh, who is considered as one of the world’s leading female scholars of Islam and who has a TV show titled “Women’s Fatwa” on an Egyptian satellite channel; Neveen El Guindy, who has a call-in show titled “Qadaya al-Mar’ah” (Women’s Issues) on Iqra, one of the region’s top Islamic satellite channels.

Not everyone is thrilled to see female preachers on TV. A few years ago, a heated debated broke out in Saudi Arabia (as usual between traditionalists and “liberals”) about whether women should be allowed to conduct such shows on TV. The liberals were arguing that it is important to let women at home hear one of their own explain issues in ways they can relate to; some even accepted the idea that those preachers be required to wear niqab (face-veiling). The traditionalists were invoking the same argument they hold about the prohibition of women driving, namely local tradition and not letting men watch women for hours under the pretext of religious learning…

But not all female preachers are TV or Radio personalities; many work on the ground: they go out and spread the word, presumably to female audiences (in hospitals, community centers, etc.). In Egypt, crowds of women have been reported to assemble to listen to talented female preachers.

In Morocco, for example, the Ministry of Religious Affairs has been supporting a curriculum for women preachers (“murshidat”), and indeed tens of them have graduated and taken jobs in various provinces over the past several years.

Female Qur’an reciters have also become popular, and indeed in Algeria, a popular TV show has for several years now conducted a competition of Qur’anic recitation for both young men and young women, who appear on the same stage but compete within their own gender group.

As to what kind of discourse is propagated by these female preachers, there have been reports of concern by governments that these preachers do not get used to spread a jihadi ideology. Indeed, the Palestinian Ministry of Endowment and Religious Affairs in the West Bank warned women preachers to stay away from issues of politics and activism and to concentrate only on domestic and daily life affairs.

It would be very interesting to hear from readers of Irtiqa about female preaching practices in their parts of the world and which Muslim women preachers, scholars, or personalities they may be familiar with or have seen become famous, whether deservedly or not.

Searching for Eden on Earth

by Salman Hameed

There you go. Here is a new book, Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden, that chronicles the recent history of people searching for the Garden of Eden on Earth. I think some of these searches must have been inspired by the 19th century 'discoveries' of new lands and new people by European voyages. I don't know if there have been any comparable efforts by Muslims in the past couple of centuries. Does anyone know of any such efforts? Nevertheless, this looks like an interesting and entertaining read, and here is an excerpt from NYT review:

 It seems there have always been — and continue to be — little armies of Eden chasers who take this quest very seriously, carrying their search to the most unlikely places. Wilensky-Lanford carries the reader along on some of these journeys, from the North Pole to rural Ohio, evoking the lives and characters of a collection of eccentrics that includes a professional archaeologist and a preacher, as well as a Chinese businessman and a British irrigation engineer. What these disparate types have in common is their insistence that they have finally and truly cracked the biblical code.

They all begin with the verses in Genesis. “A river flows out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divides and becomes four branches” — namely the Pishon, the Gihon, the Tigris and the Euphrates. But while it’s easy to find the Tigris and the Euphrates, which run from Turkey through Iraq into the Persian Gulf, the locations of the Gihon and the Pishon remain distinctly murky. A further complication is the theory that today’s Tigris and Euphrates are not the same as the biblical ones, a notion that allows, as Wilensky-Lanford puts it, room for a more “fanciful geography.”

“Fanciful” might be putting it mildly. William Fairfield Warren, the first president of Boston University, published a book in the late 19th century in which he argued that Eden was located at the North Pole — or, at least, that it had been there before the Flood. The river that watered the Garden, Warren proclaimed, was not a river at all but rain. Eden, he added, was populated with people “of giant stature” and its landscape dotted with enormous trees closely related to the California redwoods. (Conveniently, sequoias can reproduce asexually, making them perfect for an Eden before the Fall.)

There are other weird stories as well, but I like this one connected to political ideology:

Although some kept to the biblical location of the Tigris and Euphrates, others, like a staunch Republican named Elvy Edison Callaway, placed Eden as far away as Florida.

Callaway turned his religious vision into a political manifesto. Believing in women’s suffrage but realizing he couldn’t just drop the idea of Eve’s original sin, he gave his Eve the choice between immortality (which would lead to her living, he declared, “as a beast or a totally insane person”) or eating from the Tree of Knowledge and thus jump-starting humankind’s progress. God, he argued, had actually wanted Eve to eat the fruit, and the serpent was not a serpent at all but, rather, “a Communist or a welfare-statist.” Because eating from the Tree of Knowledge empowered Eve, Callaway said she should be blessed “forever for her great decision.”

Read the full review here.      

Saturday Video: Paul Bloom on The Origins of Pleasure

by Salman Hameed

Paul Bloom has been a speaker at Hampshire College couple of times. In fact, he was the inaugural speaker in our Science and Religion lecture series. Unfortunately, we do not have a video of his talk. He is a fantastic speaker, and here he is talking about The Origins of Pleasure as part of TED talks. Enjoy!

Moving done, internet restored

The blog is still alive. It is just that I was in the middle of a move (from Northampton to Amherst - all in Massachusetts) and there was no internet for couple of days (oh the horror - the horror!!). Now it seems that the sun is again rising from the east again. The birds are singing. The universe is now expanding as usual.

Pent up posts coming up.

Review of Dallal's “Islam, Science, and the Challenge of History”

This is a weekly post by Nidhal Guessoum (see his earlier posts here). Nidhal is an astrophysicist and Professor of Physics at American University of Sharjah and is the author of Islam's Quantum Question: Reconciling Muslim Tradition and Modern Science.

This past month, the Journal of Islamic Studies (JIS, Oxford) published the rather long review it had asked me to write about Ahmad Dallal’s book “Islam, Science, and the Challenge of History”, which was published last year by Yale University Press.

Dallal is a historian of science who has specialized in Arab-Islamic heritage. He is currently provost of the American University of Beirut (AUB), having gone there in 2009 from Georgetown University in Washington, DC, where he served as the chair of the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies. He had previously held academic appointments at Stanford University (2000-03), Yale University (1994-2000), and Smith College (1990-94).

The AUB short biographical sketch of Dallal describes this new important book, which is based on the Dwight H. Terry lectures that he delivered at Yale University in February 2008, as “trac[ing] the historical delineations between scientific knowledge and religious authority in Muslim societies.”

I cannot reproduce here my long review of the book, for copyright reasons, and the full text is only available for subscribers on the JIS website; the journal makes an “extract” available here, but it is only two paragraphs long.

The first paragraph is the opening of my review:

I often describe the field of ‘Islam and Science’ as a cultural and intellectual space in three dimensions: a) the historical developments of science during the Islamic civilization; b) the conceptual discussions of conflict, harmony, or separation between Islam and modern science; c) the issues of practical application of science in Islamic life (ranging from the calculation of prayer times to in vitro fertilization and euthanasia). Ahmad Dallal’s book, though rather concise, manages to encompass all three dimensions in a grand narrative and with a bold thesis. Indeed, while surveying the major trends of scientific activity from its emergence in the early Islamic civilization to the present time, he takes special interest in at least one specific case of application of science and intersection with religious rules (the direction of the qibla), and by the last chapter he dabbles in the conceptual issues raised by Darwinism and ‘the new astronomy’ (i.e. the heliocentric revolution).

But for the benefit of the readers of Irtiqa, let me add a couple of paragraphs (as a bonus) to help give an idea of the book’s thesis and the extent to which Professor Dallal has been successful in convincing his readers about it.

The thesis he is attempting to prove, however, is never stated clearly, but any careful reader will figure it out, especially since Dallal attempts to draw conclusions toward it at the end of each chapter. What he tries to show is that science in the Islamic civilization slowly but successfully was extricating itself from the double embrace of (Aristotelian) philosophy and religion. Dallal clearly believes that any link, whether strong or weak, made between science and religion or philosophy is counterproductive and regressive. He writes: “Yet while religion dominated the moral sphere and claimed a higher rank there […], it did not exercise an epistemological hegemony over science” (p. 147); “[w]hen Muslims were the main producers of science in the world, they did not advocate wedding science and religion” (p. 170).

…

In summary, this is an important book, with a grand narrative and a bold thesis. It is very well written, though one can find weaknesses, biases, or short-cuts here and there. It is an important book precisely because it proposes a viewpoint: separation between science and religion, and even philosophy, is not only the correct course to follow but also the historical path that Muslim thinkers took over the global Islamic history. This thesis needs to be discussed and examined in light of the historical record, a fuller treatment which looks at many more viewpoints and avoids any swift generalizations. Dallal is still to be applauded for having produced an essay which forces us to think and argue the merits of his views.

On "The Bill Newman Show" Monday morning

I haven't had a chance to post comments on latest Terrence Malick film, The Tree of Life, but I really liked it and will still have a post on it later. In the mean time, I have a chance to talk about this film and about astronomy with Reverend Peter Ives of First Churches of Northampton tomorrow (Aug 1st) morning on The Bill Newman show  at 9:30am (eastern time) on Northampton's WHMP AM1400/1250 or FM 96.9 (If you can't find the live streaming, you can access the podcast later). 


In the mean time, here is a podcast from the show from last month when we talked about Pluto, astronomy, and NASA's future (it starts about 10 minutes into the podcast). 

Saturday Video: A glimpse of Yemen

It is getting harder and harder to track all the developments in the Middle East. While there is a lot of coverage of life in Egypt and Tunisia, we don't hear much about Yemen (though you can find some excellent posts on Yemen at Tabsir). Here is a TED conversation with Nadia Al-Sakkaf: See Yemen Through my Eyes.