Creation - Evolution discussion

[arthra]

A Baha'i Take on the Creation/Evolution Debate

The conflict over evolution and the origins of humanity once again comes to the fore with the debate between Bill Nye -- the Science Guy -- and Ken Ham -- the young earth creationist. Tickets for the debate were sold out in minutes, putting it into the rarefied air of a Super Bowl or a Rolling Stones tour. Clearly, people are interested.


Of course, there is opposition. Dan Arel, writing for the Richard Dawkins Foundation, protests that "scientists should not debate creationists." The noted astrophysicist and science television show host Neil deGrasse Tyson tells Bill Moyers in a television interview that faith and reason are unlikely to be reconciled.


But not everybody is opposed to such debates or pessimistic about the future of the relationship of these two influential aspects of our organized life. Many, including members of the Baha'i Faith, look forward to a future when science and religion -- and faith and reason -- are reconciled and no longer opposed.


The Baha'i Faith holds the unity of science and religion as a core teaching and emphasizes that religion must be in accord with science. `Abdu'l-Bahá (1844 - 1921), son and appointed expounder of the teachings of Bahá'u'lláh (1817 - 1892), spoke and wrote repeatedly on the topic in his visits to the capitals of Europe and in numerous cities across the width and breadth of North America.


For example, `Abdu'l-Bahá told a Philadelphia audience in 1912 that:


God has endowed man with intelligence and reason whereby he is required to determine the verity of questions and propositions. If religious beliefs and opinions are found contrary to the standards of science, they are mere superstitions and imaginations; for the antithesis of knowledge is ignorance, and the child of ignorance is superstition.


What then does the Baha'i Faith say about evolution and creation?
According to the Baha'i teachings, God is "the Maker, the Creator". Nature and all created things are the embodiment of God's will:


Nature in its essence is the embodiment of My Name, the Maker, the Creator ... . Nature is God's Will and is its expression in and through the contingent world. ... It is endowed with a power whose reality men of learning fail to grasp. Indeed a man of insight can perceive naught therein save the effulgent splendour of Our Name, the Creator.


(Bahá'u'lláh, Tablets of Bahá'u'lláh p. 142)

Nature, according to the Baha'i teachings, "is entirely subject to the rule and control of natural law" and these natural laws provide "a complete order and a finished design, from which [nature] will never depart." All created things "were created perfect and complete from the first." But this perfection is not manifest in the beginning, but only appears by degrees. (NOTE: The terms "man" and "human" are used interchangeably below in their non-gender specific sense.)


Similarly, the terrestrial globe from the beginning was created with all its elements, substances, minerals, atoms and organisms; but these only appeared by degrees: first the mineral, then the plant, afterward the animal, and finally man. But from the first these kinds and species existed, but were undeveloped in the terrestrial globe, and then appeared only gradually. For the supreme organization of God, and the universal natural system, surround all beings, and all are subject to this rule. When you consider this universal system, you see that there is not one of the beings which at its coming into existence has reached the limit of perfection. No, they gradually grow and develop, and then attain the degree of perfection.


(`Abdu'l-Bahá, Some Answered Questions, p. 199)

The Baha'i teachings compare this process of development to growth of an embryo into an adult or the growth of a seed into a mature tree. Humans did not appear all at once, but developed through degrees and stages:


In the world of existence man has traversed successive degrees until he has attained the human kingdom. In each degree of his progression he has developed capacity for advancement to the next station and condition. While in the kingdom of the mineral he was attaining the capacity for promotion into the degree of the vegetable. In the kingdom of the vegetable he underwent preparation for the world of the animal, and from thence he has come onward to the human degree, or kingdom. Throughout this journey of progression he has ever and always been potentially man.


(`Abdu'l-Bahá, Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 225)

Man is much more than an animal, according to the Baha'i writings. Man has a threefold reality:


Man is endowed with an outer or physical reality. It belongs to the material realm, the animal kingdom, because it has sprung from the material world. This animalistic reality of man he shares in common with the animals. The human body is like animals subject to nature's laws. But man is endowed with a second reality, the rational or intellectual reality; and the intellectual reality of man predominates over nature. . . . Yet there is a third reality in man, the spiritual reality.


(`Abdu'l-Bahá, Foundations of World Unity, 51)

In short, the Baha'i writings describe evolution as having proceeded stage by stage from the world of inanimate matter to the world of humanity. In this process, there is no departure from the evolutionary sciences (for a more detailed description, see C. Mehanian and S. Friberg, Religion and Evolution Reconciled, The Journal of Baha'i Studies 2003 13 (1-4): 55 - 93.)



At the same time, the Baha'i writings describe humanity as God's creation, say that humans have always existed potentially, and characterize human reality as distinct and different than animal reality.
Here there is indeed a departure from some well-known points of view, but it is not a departure from the facts and details of evolutionary science. Rather, the departure is from certain of the perspectives and interpretations -- what are perhaps best called the evolutionary narratives -- that have developed around the evolutionary sciences.
And this Baha'i perspective is not widely different from that of "evolutionary creation" as espoused by such Christian organizations as Biologos (started by Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institute of Health, arguably the world's leading biologist), by scholarly Catholicism, or indeed, by a wide cross-section of informed religious belief throughout the world.


Why then is there so much fuss, thunder, and lighting over scientific issues like evolution that are readily reconciled with religious belief -- and have been widely perceived as such for centuries, indeed millennia? Part of the reason must certainly lie in the conflict over evolutionary science that will occupy Bill Nye and Ken Ham in their Feb. 4th debate. The impression such conflict creates -- the unfortunate resistance to well-established science that creationism inculcates -- certainly strengthens any predilections among those of a scientific persuasion to view religion as a kind of primitive pre-science that got its answers wrong.


Undoubtedly there is much more to it than that. Much of creationism is clearly a response to denunciations of religion in the name of science, as well as a reaction against populist movements like social Darwinism that proclaimed their supposed truths as facts derived from the evolutionary sciences. And the conflict is darn good drama, marvelous for motivating the troops, or the congregation, or the donors, and for grabbing headlines and commentary.


But ultimately, it is a conflict that should just be peacefully resolved. Men and women of goodwill should work together to lay the issue to rest where it belong -- along with other dead or dying 19th-century ideological battles. It is just diversion and a side-show to our main task, which is to work together towards that necessary and long-hoped for goal of peace and prosperity for all the countries and peoples of the world, regardless of their beliefs -- or lack thereof.


Let's hope and pray that Bill Nye -- the Science Guy -- and Ken Ham -- the Creationist Man -- see it this way in their debate.


A Baha'i Take on the Creation/Evolution Debate|&nbspStephen R. Friberg

 

[wil]

from wiki

Powell was an outspoken advocate of the constant uniformity of the laws of the material world. His views were liberal, and he was sympathetic to evolutionary theory long before Charles Darwin had revealed his ideas. He argued that science should not be placed next to scripture or the two approaches would conflict, and in his own version of Francis Bacon's dictum, contended that the book of God's works was separate from the book of God's word, claiming that moral and physical phenomena were completely independent.[5]
His faith in the uniformity of nature (except man's mind) was set out in a theological argument; if God is a lawgiver, then a "miracle" would break the lawful edicts that had been issued at Creation. Therefore, a belief in miracles would be entirely atheistic.[6] Powell's most significant works defended, in succession, the uniformitarian geology set out by Charles Lyell and the evolutionary ideas in Vestiges of Creation published anonymously by Robert Chambers which applied uniform laws to the history of life in contrast to more respectable ideas such as catastrophism involving a series of divine creations.[5] "He insisted that no tortured interpretation of Genesis would ever suffice; we had to let go of the Days of Creation and base Christianity on the moral laws of the New Testament."[7]
The boldness of Powell and other theologians in dealing with science led Joseph Dalton Hooker to comment in a letter to Asa Gray dated 29 March 1857: "These parsons are so in the habit of dealing with the abstractions of doctrines as if there was no difficulty about them whatever, so confident, from the practice of having the talk all to themselves for an hour at least every week with no one to gainsay a syllable they utter, be it ever so loose or bad, that they gallop over the course when their field is Botany or Geology as if we were in the pews and they in the pulpit. Witness the self-confident style of Whewell and Baden Powell, Sedgwick and Buckland." William Whewell, Adam Sedgwick and William Buckland opposed evolutionary ideas.[8]
When the idea of natural selection was mooted by Darwin and Wallace in their 1858 papers to the Linnaean Society, both Powell and his young friend William Henry Flower thought that natural selection made creation rational.[9]

The 'Philosophy of Creation' has been treated in a masterly manner by the Rev. Baden Powell, in his 'Essays on the Unity of Worlds,' 1855. Nothing can be more striking than the manner in which he shows that the introduction of new species is "a regular, not a casual phenomenon," or, as Sir John Herschel expresses it, "a natural in contra-distinction to a miraculous process."[10]
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Essays and Reviews

He was one of seven liberal theologians who produced a manifesto titled Essays and Reviews around February 1860, which amongst other things joined in the debate over On the Origin of Species. These Anglicans included Oxford professors, country clergymen, the headmaster of Rugby school and a layman. Their declaration that miracles were irrational stirred up unprecedented anger, drawing much of the fire away from Charles Darwin. Essays sold 22,000 copies in two years, more than the Origin sold in twenty years, and sparked five years of increasingly polarised debate with books and pamphlets furiously contesting the issues.[6]
Referring to "Mr Darwin's masterly volume" and restating his argument that belief in miracles is atheistic, Baden Powell wrote that the book "must soon bring about an entire revolution in opinion in favour of the grand principle of the self-evolving powers of nature.":

Just a similar scepticism has been evinced by nearly all the first physiologists of the day, who have joined in rejecting the development theories of Lamarck and the Vestiges; and while they have strenuously maintained successive creations, have denied strenuously maintained successive creations, have denied and denounced the alleged production of organic life by Messrs. Crosse and Weekes, and stoutly maintained the impossibility of spontaneious generation, on the alleged ground of contradiction to experience. Yet it is now acknowledged under the high sanction of the name of Owen (British Association Address 1858), that 'creation' is only another name for our ignorance of the mode of production; and it has been the unanswered and unanswerable argument of another reasoner that new species must have originated either out of their inorganic elements, or out of previously organized forms; either development or spontaneous generation must be true: while a work has now appeared by a naturalist of the most acknowledged authority, Mr. Darwin's masterly volume on The Origin of Species by the law of 'natural selection' – which now substantiates on undeniable grounds the very principle so long denounced by the first naturalist – the origination of new species by natural causes: a work which must soon bring about an entire revolution of opinion in favour of the grand principle of the self-evolving powers of nature.[11]
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He would have been on the platform at the British Association for the Advancement of Science 1860 Oxford evolution debate that was a highlight of the reaction to Darwin's theory. Huxley's antagonist Wilberforce was also the foremost critic of Essays and Reviews. Powell died of a heart attack a fortnight before the meeting.[6] He is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, London.