Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

CAIRO (Reuters) - The new leader of the Muslim Brotherhood said on Tuesday government efforts to squeeze Egypt's biggest opposition group out of politics would only spur on "deviant" and potentially violent Islamic movements.

Mohamed Badie, 66, told Reuters the group would campaign in this year's parliamentary election, but a state crackdown would likely prevent a repeat of its success in 2005 when it secured a fifth of the seats.

The government of President Hosni Mubarak, whose predecessor was gunned down by Islamic militants, is wary of any group with Islamist leanings, including the Brotherhood which long ago renounced violence and insists it seeks peaceful reform.

Since 2005, the authorities have gradually pushed the officially banned Brotherhood out of mainstream politics and regularly rounded up its members. The Brotherhood secured its seats in parliament by fielding candidates as independents.

"The Muslim Brotherhood, which carries the banner of moderate Islam, must be given the chance to teach Egyptian society to benefit the nation and its people," Badie, picked as the group's new leader this month, said in an interview.

"When we were prevented from playing the role of spreading moderate Islam, thorns sprouted in Egypt's soil and so did terrorism," he said, adding he rejected "deviant and 'takfiri' ideology", referring to groups that declared people infidels.

Analysts see no sign of a return to the 1990s when al-Gama'a al-Islamiya, a group spurned by the Brotherhood, took up arms in a bid to set up purist Islamic state in Egypt. But they say pushing the Brotherhood out of politics may leave a gap for militants to fill and could lead to sporadic violence.

Badie echoed those comments, saying Mubarak's ruling National Democratic Party had monopolised decision-making.

"If the channels are blocked, then this room we live in will become full of gas ... In a charged atmosphere, in a room full of gas, if you strike a match, the place will explode."

Once he's finished paying taxes on his £1 million Templeton Prize, Bernard d'Espagnat says that he wants to use part of his award to foster study of apophatic, or “negative”, theology. “It's the only form of theology that I appreciate,” the French physicist said. “It would be a good thing if it were investigated a little more than it now is.”

D'Espagnat is the 2009 winner of the Templeton Foundation's annual award for affirming life's spiritual dimension. The award, which boasts a monetary value pegged above that of the Nobel Prize, was announced on Monday at Unesco in Paris and will be presented to D'Espagnat by Prince Philip in a private ceremony at Buckingham Palace on 5 May. Now a spry 87, the laureate can look back on a long and illustrious career as senior physicist at the Cern particle physics laboratory in Geneva and physics professor in leading French and American universities. But it's his metaphysical thinking, most recently set out in his 2006 book On Physics and Philosophy, that won him the prize.

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With creationism now coming in Christian and Muslim versions, scientists, teachers and theologians in France are debating ways to counteract what they see as growing religious attacks on science.

Bible-based criticism of evolution, once limited to Protestant fundamentalists in the United States, has become an issue in France now that Pope Benedict and some leading Catholic theologians have criticized the neo-Darwinist view of creation.

An Islamist publisher in Turkey mass-mailed a lavishly illustrated Muslim creationist book to schools across France recently, prompting the Education Ministry to proscribe the volume and question the way the story of life is taught here.

The Bible and the Koran say God directly created the world and everything in it. In Christianity, fundamentalists believe this literally but the largest denomination, Catholicism, and most mainline Protestant churches read it more symbolically.

This literalism led Christian fundamentalists to reject the theory of evolution elaborated in the 19^th century by Charles Darwin, the foundation stone of modern biology. Muslim scholars also dispute evolution but have not made this a major issue.

“There is a growing distrust of science in public opinion, especially among the young, and that worries us,” said Philippe Deterre, a research biologist and Catholic priest who organized a colloquium on creationism for scientists at the weekend.

“There are many issues that go beyond strictly scientific or strictly theological explanations,” he said at the colloquium in this university

Neuroscientists are making such rapid progress in unlocking the brain’s secrets that some are urging colleagues to debate the ethics of their work before it can be misused by governments, lawyers or advertisers.

The news that brain scanners can now read a person’s intentions before they are expressed or acted upon has given a new boost to the fledgling field of neuroethics that hopes to help researchers separate good uses of their work from bad.

The same discoveries that could help the paralyzed use brain signals to steer a wheelchair or write on a computer might also be used to detect possible criminal intent, religious beliefs or other hidden thoughts, these neuroethicists say.

“The potential for misuse of this technology is profound,” said Judy Illes, director of the Stanford University neuroethics program in California. “This is a truly urgent situation.”

France’s Education Ministry has warned schools around the country against Islamic creationism theories after several thousand copies of an anti-Darwinist book from Turkey were mailed to them, an official said on Friday.

The lavishly illustrated Atlas of Creation by Harun Yahya, a shadowy figure who runs a large Islamic publishing operation from Istanbul, was sent to schools and universities over the past 10 days in a move that has baffled authorities, she said.

The Turkish original of the 768-page book, which rejects evolution, first appeared in Turkey late last year when it wa also sent unsolicitedly to schools.

It sees Charles Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest as the root of many of today’s ills, including modern terrorism.

A lavishly illustrated Atlas of Creation is mysteriously turning up at schools and libraries in Turkey, proclaiming that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is the real root of terrorism.

Arriving unsolicited by post, the large-format tome offers 768 glossy pages of photographs and easy-to-read text to prove that God created the world with all its species.

At first sight, it looks like it could be the work of United States creationists, the Christian fundamentalists who believe the world was created in six days as told in the Bible.

But the author’s name, Harun Yahya, reveals the surprise inside. This is Islamic creationism, a richly funded movement based in predominantly Muslim Turkey which has an influence U.S. creationists could only dream of.

Creationism is so widely accepted here that Turkey placed last in a recent survey of public acceptance of evolution in 34 countries—just behind the United States.

“Darwinism is dead,” said Kerim Balci of the Fethullah Gulen network, a moderate Islamic movement with many publications and schools but no link to the creationists who produced the atlas.

Scientists say pious Muslims in the government, which has its roots in political Islam, are trying to push Turkish education away from its traditionally secular approach.

Aykut Kence, biology professor at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, said time for discussing evolution had been cut out of class schedules for the eighth grade this year.

Pope Benedict and his former doctoral students plan to publish the proceedings of their weekend seminar on evolution to promote a dialogue between faith and science on the origins of life, participants said.

The minutes, to be issued later this year, will show how Catholic theologians see no contradiction between their belief in divine creation and the scientific theory of evolution, they said after the annual closed-door meeting ended on Sunday.

The theory of evolution has long been controversial in the United States, where conservative Christians oppose teaching it in public schools and promote rival views such as “intelligent design” that scientists reject as religion in disguise.

Benedict and some aides have joined the debate in the past year, arguing for evolution as a scientific theory but against “evolutionism”—which he calls a “fundamental philosophy … intended to explain the whole of reality” without God.

“He said this meeting could be an impulse to revive the discussion between theologians and evolutionists,” said Father Stephan Horn, who organizes the sessions for top students the then Professor Joseph Ratzinger mentored in the 1960s and 1970s.

“He’s been concerned for a long time, and especially now that he is pope, about fostering a discussion between faith and reason,” Horn said by telephone from Rome.

“He probably believes there is not enough public discussion about this, so that’s why he wants to revive it.”

Philosophy, Not Science

Vienna Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the papal associate most active in presenting the Catholic view of evolution in public, said the proceedings could be published in November.

Pope Benedict and his former doctoral students spent a weekend pondering evolution without discussing controversies over intelligent design and creationism raging in the United States, a participant said on Sunday.

The three-day closed-door meeting at the papal summer residence of Castel Gandolfo outside Rome ended as planned without drawing any conclusions but the group plans to publish its discussion papers, said Father Joseph Fessio S.J.

Media speculation had said the debate might shift Vatican policy to embrace “intelligent design,” which claims to prove scientifically that life could not have simply evolved, or even the “creationist” view that God created the world in six days.

Pope Benedict gathers some of his former theology students on Friday for a private weekend debate on evolution and religion, an issue conservative Christians have turned into a political cause in the United States.

Benedict, who taught theology at four German universities before rising in the Catholic Church hierarchy, has pondered weighty ideas with his former Ph.D students at annual meetings since the late 1970s without any media fuss.

But his election as pope last year and controversies over teaching evolution in the United States have aroused lively interest in this year’s reunion on September 1–3 at the papal summer residence of Castel Gondolfo outside Rome.

Hans Küng is not a man afraid of challenging authority. The liberal Swiss priest has confronted the Vatican so often that he was barred from teaching Catholic theology in 1979 and was long a “persona non grata” in Rome.

He also has clear ideas about where theologians should not tread. The row about evolution and intelligent design, a major issue in the United States, is a case where he says believers should not claim to know more science than the scientists.

As a man of faith, Küng sees God reflected in creation, but says this does not mean the Almighty tinkers with the laws of nature or creates life forms so complex they could not have evolved.

Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna touched off a storm in July 2005 with an op-ed page article in the New York Times questioning Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and appearing to endorse the concept of intelligent design—the theory that life forms are too complex to have been the product of random mutation. Scientists accused the 60-year-old cardinal, who has often been named as a possible future pope, of trying to steer Catholic teaching away from its cautiously positive view of evolution and toward what they said was the pseudo-science of intelligent design.

In a recent interview with Beliefnet in the Austrian capital, Schönborn set out his sometimes misunderstood views, clearly distinguishing between evolution and what he calls “evolutionism.” He explained that while he believes that God is the intelligent designer of the universe, his position on evolution springs from a philosophical rather than a scientific standpoint. His main concern, he said, was not to denigrate evolution as a natural process but to criticize atheistic materialism [the idea that only matter, not spirit, exists] as the dominant philosophy of today’s secular societies.

Framing the question this way, this close associate of Pope Benedict XVI echoed views that the new pontiff has expressed about the dangers of relativism. Saying he was not qualified to comment on American legal issues, Schönborn declined to comment on the recent Pennsylvania case in which U.S. District Judge John Jones ruled that intelligent design is not science and cannot be taught in public-school biology classrooms. The following is an English translation of Schönborn’s remarks in German:

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