Professor Richard Dawkins, author of (among other things) The God Delusion, has laid into the British education system for allowing creationism to be taught in schools. His anger is also directed at Muslims in Britain, who, he says, are adding to the problem.
His views are made known in today's Daily Telegraph, where he says, "Most devout Muslims are creationists, so, when you go to schools, there are a large number of children of Islamic parents who trot out what they have been taught."
Dawkins, professor for the public understanding of science at Oxford University, says teachers are "bending over backwards" to accommodate these prejudices; the government could do more, but it isn't doing so. It is "fanatical about multiculturalism and the need to respect the different traditions from which these children come".
Science teaching is under threat because the government accepts that theories such as "intelligent design" can be discussed "in the context of being one of a range of views". Teachers are scared of being thought racist, he says.
It's come to something when Dawkins feels he has to make these points. We have an education system that is supposed to educate, and give the best theories that are to hand so far on such subjects as the creation of the universe. And, because teachers (like so many other bodies) wish to kowtow to Muslims, whether because of this silly racism thing (Islam is a religion, not a race) or because they want to seem politically correct, we get our kids being taught creationism (whether the long or short variety).
Islam, along with some types of Christian fundamentalism, is backward-thinking and we have a supine government that allows lies to be taught as facts in a Western country in the twenty-first century. It beggars belief. Or, rather, it buggers belief in anything that's sensible.
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From http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/tls_selections/religion/article2305888.ece
"One finds in Islamic countries not only religious opposition to specific scientific theories, as occasionally in the West, but a widespread religious hostility to science itself. My late friend, the distinguished Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam, tried to convince the rulers of the oil-rich states of the Persian Gulf to invest in scientific education and research, but he found that though they were enthusiastic about technology, they felt that pure science presented too great a challenge to faith. In 1981, the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt called for an end to scientific education. In the areas of science I know best, though there are talented scientists of Muslim origin working productively in the West, for forty years I have not seen a single paper by a physicist or astronomer working in a Muslim country that was worth reading. This is despite the fact that in the ninth century, when science barely existed in Europe, the greatest centre of scientific research in the world was the House of Wisdom in Baghdad.
Alas, Islam turned against science in the twelfth century. The most influential figure was the philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali, who argued in The Incoherence of the Philosophers against the very idea of laws of nature, on the ground that any such laws would put God’s hands in chains. According to al-Ghazzali, a piece of cotton placed in a flame does not darken and smoulder because of the heat, but because God wants it to darken and smoulder. After al-Ghazzali, there was no more science worth mentioning in Islamic countries."
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