Creationism gains ground in Europe

David Sapsted, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: November 14. 2009 8:50PM UAE / November 14. 2009 4:50PM GMT

Muslims attend prayers at the Merkez mosque in Germany: Muslim immigrants are helping to promote the growth of creationism in Europe Rina Fassbinder / Reuters

LONDON// European nations are seeing a sudden increase in the belief in creationism because of the twin influences of Muslim migration and US-style Christian fundamentalism, a conference in the northern Egyptian city of Alexandria will hear today.

Michael Reiss, an Anglican priest and professor of education at the Institute of Education in London, is expected to tell the conference that such countries as the United Kingdom and Germany can no longer pretend that the debate between evolution and creationism is something that happened elsewhere.

The conference, attended by speakers from the scientific community across the world, including the UAE, is titled Darwin’s Living Legend and concentrates on evolution and its place in society today.

Prof Reiss will tell the gathering that many European nations are yielding to pressure exerted from both East and West in the growth of creationist beliefs, with Muslim immigrants on one side and the importation of Christian fundamentalism on the other.

“What the Turks believe today is what the Germans and British believe tomorrow. It is because of the mass movement of people between countries,” he told The Guardian newspaper yesterday. “These things can no longer be thought of as occurring in other countries. In London ... there are increasingly quite large numbers of highly intelligent 16, 17 and 18-year-olds doing advanced-level biology who do not accept evolution. That’s either because they come from a fundamentalist Christian background or from Muslim backgrounds.”

Nidhal Guessoum, a professor of physics and astronomy at the American University of Sharjah, is expected to tell the conference that recent sets of data confirm the existence of widespread rejections of evolution by Muslims today.

He will point to surveys conducted in Muslim nations, including Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan, that have shown that only about 15 per cent of respondents felt Darwin’s theory was true or probably true.

“Other surveys show that this hard stand towards evolution is equally prevalent among students and teachers at various levels of education, from high school to university,” he said before the conference.

“Most alarmingly, some reports have shown that many science/biology teachers mispresent evolution and often mix it with religious and ideological discourse, attempting to counter the materialistic connotation so tightly bundled with the scientific theory.”

Prof Guessoum said his talk to the conference, organised by the British Council, will show that evolution is far from necessarily clashing with Islamic beliefs, unless one adopts a literal reading of the sacred texts. “In particular, I will emphasise the fact that many Muslim scholars, from the Golden Age of Islam to today, adopted an evolutionary world view,” he said.

Sessions at the three-day conference, which started yesterday, will look at approaches to teaching evolution and the variety of religious responses to Darwinism.

Prof Reiss said he would be arguing at the conference that some students find it difficult to accept evolution and that educators should help them understand the evidence for it.

He said that by holding the conference in Egypt, the emphasis would inevitably be on Islam and other religions, some of whose adherents were convinced their faith and a belief in science were incompatible.

“There are lots of people who are convinced that if you’re Christian or Muslim you cannot accept science as an atheist would,” he said. “Some atheists hold that if you have a strong religious faith it is incompatible with a scientific mind.”

But Prof Reiss said although Islam does not suggest that the world was very young – a tenet of Christian creationism – its texts say different organisms had separate origins.

He said he would like to see young people allowed to discuss the question of whether organisms shared a common ancestry in religious or science lessons where the teacher could use the opportunity for a discussion on the strength of the evidence for evolution. “Some people feel that when I suggest this, I’m going soft on creationism,” he said. “They’re worried I’m not really convinced myself of evolution.”

Prof Reiss was forced to resign as education director of the UK’s Royal Society, the country’s leading science body, after he suggested that creationism should be discussed in science lessons, if only to prove it had no scientific basis.

dsapsted@thenational.ae