Iranian scientist killed in blast

IRANIAN nuclear scientist Massoud Ali Mohammadi was killed today in a rare bomb attack in Tehran which state media quickly blamed on "counter-revolutionaries" and foreign powers.

MrMohammadi, a lecturer at Tehran university, died when a bomb strapped to a motorcycle was triggered by remote control outside his home in the northern Tehran neighbourhood of Qeytariyeh, state media said.

Iran's state broadcaster said Mr Mohammadi was "assassinated in a terrorist act by counter-revolutionaries and agents of the arrogance," without naming any sources.

Iranian officials usually refer to the United States and some other Western powers as the "global arrogance".

Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi told the ISNA news agency that Mr Mohammadi was a lecturer in nuclear energy and said the booby-trapped bike was parked outside his house and exploded as he was getting into his car.

"The judiciary has launched an investigation ... no suspects have yet been arrested" he said.

Bomb attacks are rare in Iran although several security officials and members of the elite Revolutionary Guards have been killed in bombings by rebels in restive Sistan-Baluchestan province in eastern Iran.

A witness said today's explosion was a "strong blast breaking window glasses in neighbouring houses and cars."

Iran's state-run Arabic-language TV Al-Alam identified Mohammadi as a "hezbollahi" teacher -- a term used for staunch supporters of the Iranian regime.

"This assassination may have been carried out by the Hypocrites (Iran's exiled People's Mujahedeen opposition) or planned by the Zionist regime," Al-Alam said.

Iranian authorities have consistently accused arch foes the United States and Israel of seeking to ferment unrest in Iran.

Hardliners have also accused the People's Mujahedeen of infiltrating anti-government protests and carrying out attacks.

The Australian

Muslim teachers 'misrepresenting' Darwin's evolution theory

Ruth Gledhill

MUSLIMS are increasingly rejecting Darwin's theory of evolution, under the influence of conservative elements in Islam, a science conference was told yesterday.

Nidhal Guessoum, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, told the conference, being held in Egypt by the British Council, that in too many places students and academics believed they had to make a "binary choice" between evolution and creationism, rather than understanding that one could believe both in God and in Darwin's theory.

Dr Guessoum, who is a Sunni Muslim, said that in countries such as Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan and Malaysia, only 15 per cent of those surveyed believed Darwin's theory to be "true" or "probably true". This stand was equally prevalent among students and teachers, from high school to university. Most alarmingly, he claimed, science teachers were misrepresenting the facts and theories of evolution by mixing it with religious ideologies.

A survey of 100 academics and 100 students that he conducted at his own university showed that 62 per cent of Muslim professors and students believed evolution to be an "unproven theory", compared with 10 per cent of non-Muslim professors.

"The rate of acceptance of evolution and of the idea of teaching evolution was extremely low," he said. "I wondered, who are all these educated people rejecting evolution? They are even rejecting the fact that it should be taught as scientific knowledge."

Evolution did not contradict Islamic beliefs, Dr Guessoum said, unless a literal reading of the texts were adopted. "Many Muslim scholars, from the golden age of Islam to today, adopted an evolutionary world view," he said.

Addressing the conference in Alexandria, organised for the bicentenary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, he said that concerns among Muslims about evolution were being fuelled by Christian creationists. People in Muslim countries would find creationist theses on the internet and, not realising that these were on the fringes of scientific debate, assume that creationism had scientific credibility in the West.

"It is a serious problem," he said. "It would be like going to my students and telling them the planets are not related to the stars, there is no relationship between them and gravitational pull or radiation, and they were all created on one day.

We would not dream of describing the cosmos in such a ridiculous manner ... We cannot allow people to go into the 21st century with no understanding of science."

The Australian

King Abdullah: Science and Faith Are Only Adversaries in Sick Minds

By Ali Sharaya and Amal Baqzi

The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz said that throughout history, power has attached itself (after God) to science and the Muslim Ummah is well aware that it will not be powerful unless it depends (after God) upon science.

The King also stressed that science and faith are only adversaries in sick minds, and God has graced us with our minds so that we can understand and recognize God’s laws of nature.

King Abdullah made these comments during his speech at the opening ceremony for the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology [KAUST] in Thawal in western Saudi Arabia.

The opening ceremony, which coincided with the celebration of Saudi Arabia's 79th National Day, was attended by a number of leaders and representatives from Arab and Islamic countries.

King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz said, “The University that we are opening today is not starting from scratch [rather] it is the continuation of what distinguished our civilization in its age of prosperity.”

The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques added, “Humanity has been the target of vicious attacks from extremists who fear dialogue, pursue destruction and speak the language of hatred.

We cannot fight them unless we establish coexistence without conflict, with love instead of hatred, friendship instead of confrontation. Undoubtedly scientific centres that embrace all peoples are the first line of defence against extremists.

And today this university will become a “house of wisdom”…and a beacon of tolerance. This is the third meaning of the university.”

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Source: Asharq Alawsat

Science and God need not be at odds!

Many scientists — 40 percent according to a 1997 poll — believe in some form of God.

This isn't big news to scientists, but might surprise people who rely on mainstream views of science.

A handful of those folks — including Jerome Groopman, a professor of medicine at Harvard, and William D. Phillips, Nobel laureate in physics and a fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute of the University of Maryland and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, argue that the natural world and the world of faith are relatively separate, yet personally reconcilable domains.

"I think that we are all comfortable with the idea there are plenty of things in our lives that we will deal with outside of the scientific paradigm," Phillips told about 70 members of the public who attended the discussion of these issues between himself, Shermer and AEI theologian Michael Novak. "And while I think faith is a particularly important part of our lives that we should deal with outside of the scientific paradigm, it is certainly not the only one."

Phillips, a Methodist, also drew from science to make his argument in favor of God's relevance, saying physicists know there are things that are "really, really improbable, but they are not really impossible according to the laws of physics ...! From what I know about physics, it's not impossible to imagine a world in which God acts but we never can prove it."

In her booklet, philosopher Mary Midgley, who was not at the AEI event, states that science is just one worldview that has come to prevail. Science and religion need not be at odds.

"What is now seen as a universal cold war between science and religion is, I think, really a more local clash between a particular scientistic worldview, much favored recently in the West, and most other people's worldviews at most other times," she writes.

"Scientism ... by contrast, cuts [the setting of human life in] context off altogether and looks for the meaning of life in Science itself. It is this claim to a monopoly of meaning ... that makes science and religion look like competitors today."

Worldviews that transcend that competition or dichotomy are offered in the booklet by Kenneth Miller, Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy and Stuart Kauffman.

(Miller, the lead witness for the plaintiffs in the Dover trial of 2005 (in which Judge John E. Jones III barred intelligent design from being taught in a Pennsylvania public school district's science classes), takes the classic Darwinian "grandeur in this view of life" approach. God is behind it all.)

He rejects claims that the God hypothesis makes no sense, stating that "... to reject God because of the admitted self-contradictions and logical failings of organized religion would be like rejecting physics because of the inherent contradictions of quantum theory and general relativity."

Kauffman, director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary, takes a slightly New Age tack, saying we must "heal" the schism between science and religion by "reinventing the sacred" and evolving from a supernatural God to a "new sense of a fully natural God as our chosen symbol for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe."

In other words, he suggests that we can get around the divide between science and God if we come up with a new concept for God that focuses on the wonders of nature, among other things.

This new concept is a global cultural imperative, Kauffman writes, if we are to overcome fundamentalist fears and reunite reason with humanity and the mysteries of life.

A middle ground that incorporates science more than the other God-friendly writers is offered by Hoodbhoy, a physicist at Quaid-e-Azam University in Pakistan.

Science hasn't necessarily made belief obsolete, "but instead you must find a science-friendly, science-compatible God," he writes. And that is possible, he claims, calling this entity a "scientific Creator."

Hoodbhoy thinks that God can be seen as operating within the laws of physics, tweaking outcomes in small ways that have big impacts by relying on phenomena we have observed already in the universe, such as the butterfly effect (in which the flapping of a butterfly's wings alters the atmosphere in a way that ultimately alters the path of a tornado).

In his own words, here are some things She (yes, Hoodbhoy uses the female pronoun) could do, Hoodbhoy writes:

"Extraordinary, but legitimate, interventions in the physical world permit quantum tunneling through cosmic wormholes or certain symmetries to snap spontaneously. It would be perfectly fair for a science-savvy God to use nonlinear dynamics so that tiny fluctuations quickly build up to earthshaking results — the famous 'butterfly effect' of deterministic chaos theory."

Hoodbhoy ends by saying that God is neither dead nor about to die. There is still plenty of "space for a science-friendly God as well as for 'deeply religious non-believers' like Einstein ... Unsure of why they happen to exist, humans are likely to scour the heavens forever in search of meaning."

A total of 5,000 copies of the booklet became available on May 2. Free copies can be obtained at www.templeton.org.

Allan W Janssen is the author of the book The Plain Truth About God (What the mainstream religions don't want you to know!) and is available at the web site www.God-101.com

Visit the blog "Perspective" at http://Allans-Perspective.blogspot.com