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Sunday, September 27, 2015

Conversation with Robert Wright on Muslims, Science and Evolution

by Salman Hameed

These past few months have been extraordinarily hectic and as a result I have been away from Irtiqa. Lets see if we can get back on track. Lets start with a conversation I had with Robert Wright for meaningoflife.tv. Wright has written some superb books, including The Evolution of God and The Moral Animal. Below is our entire hour long conversation. You can also find segmented highlights here. One of the topics we start off with is a 2008 paper of mine titled, Bracing for Islamic Creationism. It appeared in Science and has been referenced heavily on the topic of evolution rejection in the Muslim world. The problem is that I myself don't agree with my own 2008 paper (yes - further research can lead to different conclusions). I now think that there are complex ways that Muslims are responding to biological evolution - and many (definitely not all) even accept human evolution. In any case, I wanted to set this up as we start our conversation with that paper. Here is the full episode of The Wright Show: