A religious New World Order?
Australian blogger Steve Edwards delivers an interesting indictment of, and debate about, Baha'ism.
Found via Samizdata.
Personally I lost respect for Baha'ism several years ago when a Baha'i told me that it absolutely rejects the reality of evolution. No ideology can make a positive contribution to human progress if it denies the most fundamental and solidly-established fact in all of science.
Found via Samizdata.
Personally I lost respect for Baha'ism several years ago when a Baha'i told me that it absolutely rejects the reality of evolution. No ideology can make a positive contribution to human progress if it denies the most fundamental and solidly-established fact in all of science.
Labels: Religion
posted by Infidel753 at 11:25 AM
8 Comments:
Baha'is don't actually reject evolution. That is, Baha'is recognize the evolution of spcies and the evolution of humans. The distinction arises in the fact that the teachings of the Baha'i Faith say that humans have, at all times, been distinct from animals. That doesn't rule out humans existing at one time in a more ape-like (or fish-like for that matter) form, just that humans and animals have always been seperate. A better explanation can be found here:
http://reference.bahai.org/en/t/ab/SAQ/saq-48.html
Humans are not and never have been "separate" from other animals in any meaningful sense. Humans share a recent (about six million years ago) common ancestry with chimpanzees and bonobos, a slightly remoter common ancestry with the other great apes, and a much more distant common ancestry with all the other living species on Earth -- animals, plants, bacteria, etc. All the available evidence confirms this common origin of all Earthly life, including the human animal. If the Baha'i religion does not accept this, then it does reject evolution as we actually know of it.
The cited reference merely demonstrates that the person who wrote it was thinking in terms of categories which are scientifically meaningless, and knew nothing of the wealth of knowledge we have acquired about the continuity of mental development between non-human great apes and humans since the study of the former got seriously under way in the early 1960s -- hardly surprising, since he presumably lived decades before that.
The Baha'i approach is more nuanced at a philosophical level. Baha'is do not deny common ancestors with animals. I think it is important to understand the teleological position of the Baha'i community regarding evolution, which in effect considers the evolutionary lines that resulted in modern homo sapiens to have been "human" and the process of evolution as having the "purpose" of bringing about creatures who are self-aware and can recognize their Creator. In other words, whatever was to become man was human in potentio. It does not mean that there were animal species that evolved separately from human species. If you read only one portion of Baha'i thought on this, you will get a distorted impression, particularly if you do not understand the Islamic philosophical context of certain of the expressions. Some individual Baha'is are inept at imparting a nuanced understanding that also retains the essential Baha'i principle of the complementary oneness of science and religion.
However, since I gather you are an atheist, I doubt that any explanation will suffice since the Baha'i view of evolution is that it has a purpose, which is the raising up of spiritual, inetlligent life ("human").
Yes, many Baha'is take a literalist approach to the reported words of 'Abdu'l-Baha and reject the notion that man and other animals have common ancestors. However, there are other viewpoints on the issue. I recommend Evolution and Bahá'í Belief: 'Abdu'l-Baha's Response to Nineteenth-Century Darwinism: Studies in the Bábí and Bahá'í Religions, Vol. 12. Be quick, though, the Baha'i Administration is trying to wipe out the publisher, Kalimat Press.
There is no evidence that evolution has any purpose or that any supernatural guiding force was involved in it. Once self-replicating molecules existed on the primordial Earth, natural selection and differential reproductive success all by themselves would cause evolution to happen, as they have continued to drive it ever since. No other forces were needed and there is no reason to think that anything else was involved.
What I'm seeing here is mutually-contradictory statements about what exactly Baha'ism believes about evolution -- either it accepts that humans have a common ancestry with other living things or it doesn't. If it does, then it seems meaningless to say that "whatever was to become man was human in potentio". If it just means that our ancestors had the potential to evolve into us, this is self-evidently true but trivial. Our ancestors, if you go back far enough, were also the ancestors of everything else, and the evolution of that branch of the great ape line which led to humans operated by the same kinds of processes that drove the evolution of all the other species in the world.
In reality, almost all religious ideas about the origin of humanity are worthless because they were formulated by people who had no actual knowledge of what happened, since they lived and died before humans began to study and understand the evidence on the subject. Baha'ism appeared late enough in history that its founding thinkers were at least aware of Darwin's work, but I do not think they understood it very well.
Anonymous said that "Baha'is do not deny common ancestors with animals." I would correct this assertion thus: not all Baha'is deny common ancestry, but one of their chief leaders, `Abdu'l-Baha, certainly did.
Some Baha'is are trying very hard to nuance away `Abdu'-Baha's disagreement with natural selection, but the fact remains that `Abdu'l-Baha made a point of disagreeing with it, going so far as to appeal to a "missing link" argument, and reproaching Darwinism as being "materialistic".
This, by the way, is not the only place where `Abdu'l-Baha is at odds with science and current scholarship. He also seems to have believed that the ancient Greeks owed their advances to a trip that Socrates allegedly took to Syria! He also predicted world peace in the 20th Century, and the list doesn't stop there.
It seems rather disingenuous to imply that Abdu'l-Baha is the only one, even among scientists, who disagrees with current theories of evolution. Each year new discoveries and finds in the archeological field change science's understanding of the timeline of human evolution, pushing back the time when the descendants of the apes and the humans "split". 'Abdu'l-Baha's assertion that to rely solely on natural selection when human beings were the least able to take care of themselves, living as children then teenagers and elders, much longer than most of their counterparts in the other species, suggests something else at operation here than mere natural selection as described by Darwin. 'Abdu'l-Baha postulated that science and religion must agree because one without the other left you merely with materialism or superstition. A unity between the two gave you the true, holistic, picture of the truth of the matter. If 'Abdu'l-Baha did not believe so, if he did not know so, he would be giving a lie to his professed religion.
Nothing in this posting implies that Abdu'l-Baha is the only figure who rejects the theory of evolution; obviously many religious people do, a fact to which I make reference in many postings on this site (among actual scientists, by contrast, evolution is almost universally accepted).
The fact that some details of the path evolution took are unclear or are still debated does not mean that the theory itself is in serious question, any more than a disagreement about some details of the geology of the Appalachians would mean that we need to re-open the "question" of whether the Earth is flat or spherical.
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