Video – Evolution & Religion: Are they compatible?

Here’s a link to my appearance on Al-Jazeera’s “The Stream” discussing evolution and religion (yeh I know I’m posting it a little late). It was a great experience, and I appreciate the other guests Salman Hameed of at Hampshire College and Stephen Law of Oxford, and the hosts and staff there at The Stream for their cordiality and the big comfy couch to sit on.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yEV33YJMdY

Salman makes a few good points in his post linked above. We really didn’t have time to delve deeply into the issues core to the debate, spending much of the discussion on the identity issues related to the topic. It was however refreshing to be able to have a candid conversation about the topic, and time really flew by fast. One of the problem when dealing with this topic is that we usually start with a “versus” approach, we in actuality we are talking about two separate bodies of knowledge. Epistemologically faith and science are different, each with its own tools of interpretation; ontologically the concept of man in Islam is broader than it is in evolutionary biology. We would do better investigating how these two bodies of knowledge interact, and how these two concepts complement each other, than promoting one over the other.