Muslim Heretics Conference

Evolution and the early church, and Islam

First Published 2008-05-02


Men, women from all walks of life and ethnic backgrounds - before God

Harvard study shows positive impacts of Muslim hajj

Study finds that Muslims pilgrimage experience promotes peace, harmony, women’s rights.

HARVARD, Massachusetts – A study on the longer-term effect of participating in the Islamic pilgrimage found that Muslims communities have become more open in many ways after the Hajj experience.

The study, published by Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, says that hajj – Muslim pilgrimage - urges equality and harmony.

“It increases belief in equality and harmony among ethnic groups and Islamic sects and leads to more favorable attitudes toward women, including greater acceptance of female education and employment,” the study found.

Entitled ‘Estimating the Impact of the Haj: Religion and Tolerance in Islam’s Global Gathering’, the study also found that the hajj experience promotes peaceful coexistence.

“Increased unity within the Islamic world is not accompanied by antipathy toward non-Muslims,” stressed the Harvard study, adding that “Hajjis show increased belief in peace, and in equality and harmony among adherents of different religions.”

The study, which was based on data from over 1,600 applicants to Pakistan’s hajj visa allocation lottery in 2006, can be downloaded here.

The hajj is one of the five pillars of Islam that Muslims are expected to perform at least once in their lives if they have the means to do so.

Middle East Online

Frank Salvato

Ceasefires in Islam: Not Always What They Seem to Be

May 2, 2008 at 5:26 am · Filed under Afghanistan, Culture, Current Events, International Politics, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Middle East, OP/ED, Oppression, Pakistan, Persian Gulf, Philosophy of Mind, Politics, Religion, Society, Terrorism, VOA Iraq, VOA Middle East, VOA News Analysis, VOA Religion, VOA War and Conflict, Vox Populi, War, contributors

It seems as though every other day we hear there is another “ceasefire” in the Middle East. This is chiefly because there is so much violent Islamofascist aggression throughout the Middle East but it is also because of something more. Just as there is no exact translation between the Arabic and English languages, we in the West would be wise to realize that this “inexactness” exists as a constant in the relationship between the cultures of Islam and Western Civilization. This convolution of conceptual understanding is aptly illustrated where the subject of military ceasefires is concerned.

In the West, a ceasefire is commonly understood to mean a temporary cessation of violence or hostilities for an agreed time period or within a defined geographical area. In many cases, ceasefires have been instituted to facilitate negotiations that produced an armistice, peace treaty or unconditional surrender. Regardless of the goal – achieved or sought – in most every ceasefire agreement the terms and conditions are clearly defined so that each side has a clear understanding of what is required and what is to be considered a breach of contract, as it were.

To say that we in the West are engaged in a clash of civilizations with the fundamentalist Islamic culture would be a fair statement. Hundreds if not thousands of radical jihadist groups are mounting a violent global offensive against Western Civilization in a third attempt at establishing a global Caliphate. This contention is validated by history and we need only be good students of events passed to understand it.

While many hold the common misconception that the conflict with radical Islam started with the attacks of September 11, 2001, the reality is that radical Islam’s current confrontation with the West started in 1983 with Hezbollah’s bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon. Lesser understood is that this conflict is but the third bloody expedition in the quest for a global Caliphate; the first coming in the aftermath of Muhammad’s death in the 7th Century and the second occurring in the 11th Century, spanning the years 1071 to 1683 AD – an aggression that lasted 612 years, almost three times as long as the United States has been a country.

Three aspects of this conflict which we in the West are delinquent in understanding – and there are many others – are in defining the enemy, understanding the culture in which they are generated and familiarizing ourselves with their tools and tactics.

Many among us believe that by simply familiarizing ourselves with Islam’s religious text we will understand the Muslim dichotomy with the West. This idea demonstrates the naivety of many because it is a fact that to read the Quran without reading it in tandem and in context with the Hadith is an exercise in wasted time. In fact, few understand that the Quran wasn’t written in chronological order or that it wasn’t “written” by Muhammad, but by his “companions.” Further, many don’t comprehend that the text itself wasn’t compiled until after Muhammad’s death.

This being said, if the majority of us in the West haven’t even taken the time to understand the genesis of this aggressive ideology, how can we dare believe we have acquainted ourselves thoroughly enough with their culture, tools and tactics to have constructed a working understanding of how to defeat their aggression?

In any conflict there is a beginning and what is tantamount to an end, at least in Western culture. But in Islamic culture – and in jihadi culture especially – there are variations on a conflicts beginnings and ends; on ceasefires, armistices and peace treaties.

Where we in the West understand the idea of a basics ceasefire, in Islamic culture – in jihadi culture – there are two variants: tahadiya and houdna.

A tahadiya is roughly defined as a temporary cessation of violence that can be ended at any time for any reason. To employ tahadiya is to employ a tactic that allows for a brief “lull” in fighting for a number of reasons: to rearm, to fortify, as a military tactic or to acquire greater troop strength or a better vantage point.

A perfect example of tahadiya comes in the form of a statement made by Damascus-based Hamas Chief, Khaled Mashaal, who recently met with Jimmy Carter:

“It is a tactic in conducting the struggle…It is normal for any resistance that operates in its people’s interest…to sometimes escalate, other times retreat a bit…The battle is to be run this way, and Hamas is known for that.”

As any Israeli can attest, the calm that comes in conjunction with tahadiya is a pensive and cautious calm at best. During tahadiya, one must be prepared for a resurgence of aggression at any moment.

The pensive peace of tahadiya stands in contrast to the more stable cessation of violence achieved in a houdna.

Ahmed Youssef, a senior advisor to Hamas leader Ismail Haniya described a houdna this way:

“A truce is called in Arabic ‘houdna.’ Covering ten years, it is recognized by the Muslim jurisprudence as an agreement both legitimate and binding. A houdna goes beyond the western concept of a cease-fire and forced the parties to use this period to seek a lasting resolution and nonviolent their differences. The Koran is a great merit in these efforts to promote understanding among peoples. As the war dehumanizes the enemy and make it easier killing, the houdna provides an opportunity to humanize the opponents and understand their position with the purpose of resolving disputes that they are inter-tribal or international.“

This would all sound very honorable if not existing in tandem with other genocidal and apocalyptic tenets held within radical, fundamentalist Islam. A simple examination of Sunni Islam’s Wahhabi ideology or a fundamental understanding of al taqiyya compromises the sincerity of the concept of houdna, especially at the tongue of Hamas or any other aggressive faction of the fundamentalist Islamic culture.

Where the Western concept of ceasefire and the Islamic concepts of tahadiya and houdna intersect, a blogger named Chaim Grosz, in response to an article in Haaretz titled In the Heart of Palestinian Consensus by Danny Rubinstein may have said it best:

“Since the believers of the Islamic ideology consider Islam timeless, a houdna for a thousand years is acceptable…but the right to reignite the jihad at any time is predicated upon the belief that such a battle can be won and the lands ‘occupied by the infidels’ reverted back to Islamic rule.”

With the recent White House directive instructing all Executive Branch governmental agencies to refrain from using accurate, fact-based terminology when referring to radical Islam and its aggressive action, with our government’s refusal to educate the people on the issue while opting to institute politically correct policy, our government has sent a signal that they are ill-prepared for the encroachment of this violent and aggressive ideology within the United States.

In light of this it would appear that the responsibility and the urgency of educating ourselves about those who would enslave the West to Sharia Law has grown exponentially. We can no longer abdicate our responsibility to be learned about the issue of radical, aggressive Islamofascism. To fail in understanding this aggressive culture is to gamble with our lives and the lives of future generations.

Frank Salvato is the Executive Director and Director of Terrorism Research for Basics Project a non-partisan, 501(C)(3) research and education initiative. His writing has been recognized by the US House International Relations Committee and the Japan Center for Conflict Prevention. His organization, Basics Project, partnered in producing the original national symposium series addressing the root causes of radical Islamist terrorism. He also serves as the managing editor for The New Media Journal. Mr. Salvato has appeared on The O’Reilly Factor on FOX News Channel and is the host of the The New Media Journal Internet radio program broadcast globally on NetTalkWorld global talk radio. He is a regular guest on talk radio including on The Right Balance with Greg Allen on the Accent Radio Network and on The Captain’s America Radio Show catering to the US Armed Forces around the world. His opinion-editorials have been published by The American Enterprise Institute, The Washington Times & Human Events and are syndicated nationally. He is occasionally quoted in The Federalist.

MND: News and Commentary Since 2001 » Ceasefires in Islam: Not Always What They Seem to Be

Power points

May 1st 2008
From The Economist print edition

The slogans of political Islam remain highly resonant, whether as a programme for peaceful governance or an inspiration to wage war. Two new books explain why

AFP

WHEN the British and French empires were at their height, imperial service often provided an outlet for the talents of precociously clever ethnographers, social anthropologists and scholars of religion. On the face of things, Noah Feldman is a similar figure, rendering important services to the American imperium, both as a rising star in the intellectual establishment and in more practical ways—he helped to draft Iraq’s new constitution.

A young professor at Harvard Law School with a doctorate in Islamic political thought, Mr Feldman is brimming with the sort of expertise that America’s new proconsuls in the Middle East and Afghanistan badly need. Above all, he is qualified to opine on how America should react to the dilemma posed by the huge popular support, in Muslim lands, for explicitly Islamic forms of administration.

In a short, incisive and elegant book, he lays out for the non-specialist reader some of the forms that Islamic rule has taken over the centuries, while also stressing the differences between today’s political Islam and previous forms of Islamic administration. In particular, he shows why “justice” is such a resonant slogan for Islamist movements. At least subliminally, it evokes memories of a dimly remembered era when Islamic law, as interpreted by scholars, acted as a real constraint on the power of rulers. To many Muslims, the legal tradition of their faith is not viewed as an alternative to Western democracy, based on secular law, but rather as the only real alternative to totalitarianism.

That perceived dilemma—either Muslim law and scholarship, or unfettered dictatorship—is not just a hangover from history; it also reflects the fact that many secular regimes which replaced traditional Muslim empires were dictatorships, with no separation of powers.

So far, that is a familiar argument. Mr Feldman becomes more interesting when he shows how the Ottoman empire, in its efforts to modernise while retaining some Islamic legitimacy, almost unavoidably grew more dictatorial and less Islamic.

The very fact that Islamic law was codified implied a downgrading in the authority of Muslim scholars; their task had been to apply a set of abstract, unwritten principles to an infinite variety of situations, and the written law code risked putting them out of a job. When the Ottoman sultan-caliph tried some cautious constitutional experiments in 1876, it appeared to his pious subjects that he was undermining God’s sovereignty. This was not so much because the experiments seemed bad, but because constitutional change implied that an earthly ruler could tinker with systems that had been divinely ordained.

The modernising challenges facing the late Ottoman era dimly foreshadow, as Mr Feldman demonstrates, some of the problems of modern political Islam. But there are differences: the Islamists of today are not trying to reinstate the power of the scholars, which was a hallmark of all previous Islamic regimes. Instead, what modern Islamism proposes is an odd mix of popular sovereignty and the sovereignty of God; as though the people, having been offered sovereign power, freely decide to render that power straight back to God.

Another of Mr Feldman’s paradoxes: any modern constitution or legal code that consciously proclaims its intention to be Islamic and deferential to God, will fall short of the early Islamic ideal, where the sovereignty of God was so deeply assumed that it did not need spelling out.

Mr Feldman’s book is more descriptive than prescriptive. But many readers may conclude that in Islam’s heartland only forms of governance that incorporate Muslim values can hope to be legitimate. If secularism has been imposed in many places by dictatorial methods, that is not because the secular rulers were gratuitously cruel; it was because secular principles had little hope of gaining spontaneous popular assent.

One huge question, unanswered by this book, is how minorities—practitioners of other religions or none—can expect to fare in countries where a form of political Islam is practised by the will of the majority. Even if the Islamic majority offers its non-Muslim compatriots generous forms of cultural autonomy, the infidel minorities can hardly be anything more than second-class subjects of an Islamic realm.

Whereas Mr Feldman’s argument is about Islamic principles as a basis for creating stable, legitimate regimes, Mark Juergensmeyer, a professor of sociology and religious thought at the University of California, Santa Barbara, highlights the odd fact that the slogans of Islam, and other religions, are more effective than any secular battle-cry as a way of rallying people to wage war, or at least to live in armed readiness. Mixing analysis with reportage, he describes encounters with the leaders of Hamas, and with Jewish zealots who cheer the killing of Palestinians. He traces the advent of Hindu bigotry as a force in Indian politics and the role of Buddhism in Sri Lanka’s conflict.

Any book that takes in such a sweep is bound to have errors of detail. But it is more than a minor error to describe the first decade of the Soviet communist regime as “relatively tolerant” towards religion. Still, Mr Juergensmeyer is right in his broader point—that in the early 21st century, religion retains a mobilising power that secular nationalism and universalist ideologies like Marxism have lost. If you are trying to make people risk their own lives and take the lives of others, then calling the enemy “infidels” (or, literally, demonising them) is more effective than calling them foreigners or class enemies.

In each of these books, there is at least one lacuna. Having made the fair point that scholarship and modern political Islam don’t easily mix, Mr Feldman should have said something about Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the hugely influential and telegenic sheikh based in Qatar who seems to straddle both those worlds quite happily.

Mr Juergensmeyer distinguishes between the effects of secular nationalism and transnational religion, but he says little about religious nationalism, the opportunistic but effective combination of these two supposed opposites. As any thieving Balkan warlord knows, decent people often kill in the name of a half-forgotten national cause and for a religion in which they hardly believe. Using both tricks at once is especially effective.

Religion and secularism | Power points | Economist.com

Dogma cloys debate in Arab world-Islamic scholar

Thu 1 May 2008, 8:39 GMT

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By Alistair Lyon, Special Correspondent

BEIRUT, May 1 (Reuters Life!) - Islamic dogma is narrowing the space for debate in the Arab world, argues an Egyptian professor whose own life was overturned by persecution for free thinking.

Thirteen years after an Egyptian sharia court declared him an apostate from Islam, annulled his marriage and effectively forced him into exile, Nasr Abu Zayd looks back without rancour.

“I define myself as an ordinary Muslim who is able to think,” he told Reuters during a recent visit to Beirut.

“Now when some people say ‘you are an apostate’ or something, I really laugh rather than try to defend myself.”

Abu Zayd, a short, portly man whose eyes often gleam with humour beneath bushy eyebrows, said in early Islamic tradition different modes of thinking about the divine were acceptable.

Today, constant claims to a monopoly of Islamic truth by Arab rulers and opposition groups scrabbling for legitimacy have stifled discussion, in contrast to debate flourishing elsewhere in the Muslim world, notably in Iran and Turkey, he added.

“Religion has been used, politicised, not only by groups but also the official institutions in every Arab country,” the 64-year-old professor of humanism and Islam at the University for Humanistics in Utrecht, The Netherlands, asserted.

“Nearly everything is theologised — every issue society faces has to be solved by asking if Islam allows it. There is no distinction between the domain of religion and secular space.”

He said ulema (Muslim scholars) were all too keen to deliver rulings on economic, social or even medical issues like organ transplants: “You’ll hardly find any scholar who says, ‘I’m very sorry, but this is not my business, go consult a doctor’.”

Abu Zayd has not altered the liberal, critical approach to Islamic teachings that upset some Muslim conservatives in his homeland in the 1990s, a decade when President Hosni Mubarak’s government was combating an uprising by armed Islamic militants.

“I am anti-dogma,” he declared. “Dogma in the history of any religion was made by authoritative institutions. It’s a meaning produced by humans, and I don’t find that I am going outside the domain of religion if I challenge this dogma.”

Abu Zayd left Egypt in 1995 with his wife after finding it irksome to teach at university under police protection — the sharia court decision had elicited death threats against him, notably from the Islamic Jihad group led by Ayman al-Zawahri, now deputy leader of Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network.

CHALLENGE OF COLONIALISM

He said the pressure of colonialism on Muslim societies in the 19th and 20th centuries had prompted debate over how to respond to modernity and how to match the power of Europe.

The abolition of the Islamic caliphate by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s secularist Turkey in 1924 fuelled a traditionalist backlash, with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, founded just four years later, fighting secularism and demanding sharia law.

Abu Zayd, who believes Islam is compatible with modernity, democracy and human rights, said the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. cities had unleashed a flood of ill-informed, simplistic debate in which stereotypes and slogans often triumphed on both sides.

Islam should be understood in its historical, geographic and cultural background, he argued, adding that “pure Islam” did not exist and even the Koran was “a collection of discourses”.

After Sept. 11, there was a tendency in the United States and Europe simply to blame Islam and to refuse to recognise any link between terrorism and politics, the scholar contended.

“If you analyse the messages of terrorist groups, you find a message to the believers quoting the Koran or Sunna (Islamic practice based on words and deeds of the Prophet) — they know they don’t represent Islam and need to justify their actions.

“But there is also a political message, whenever they mention the situation in Palestine or elsewhere. These are real, burning issues, which we need to analyse and deal with, to disconnect them from the message to the believers,” he said.

Abu Zayd sometimes lectures in Egypt now, after staying away for years in anger at the court ruling to dissolve his marriage because a Muslim woman cannot stay married to an apostate.

“The entire affair was political. I served as a battleground for the religious groups and security services. Understanding that it wasn’t personal protected me from feeling victimised.”

But the affront to his family life was a different matter.

“Here I’m a real fighter. If you touch my wife, if you touch my family, I’m a real Egyptian, not a thinker,” he chuckled.

“Fortunately, my wife is a very strong intellectual, so we moved on, to give ourselves space to breathe and work.” (Editing by Sami Aboudi)

News | Africa - Reuters.com

Scientist at Work | Francisco J. Ayala

Roving Defender of Evolution, and of Room for God

By CORNELIA DEAN

For a university professor, Francisco J. Ayala spends a lot of time on the road.

An evolutionary biologist and geneticist at the University of California, Irvine, he speaks often at universities, in churches, for social groups and elsewhere, usually in defense of the theory of evolution and against the arguments of creationism and its ideological cousin, intelligent design.

Usually he preaches to the converted. But not always.

As challenges to the teaching of evolution continue to emerge, legislators debate measures equating the teaching of creationism with academic freedom and a new movie links Darwin to evils ranging from the suppression of free speech to the Holocaust, “I get a lot of people who don’t know what to think,” Dr. Ayala said. “Or they believe in intelligent design but they want to hear.”

Dr. Ayala, a former Dominican priest, said he told his audiences not just that evolution is a well-corroborated scientific theory, but also that belief in evolution does not rule out belief in God. In fact, he said, evolution “is more consistent with belief in a personal god than intelligent design. If God has designed organisms, he has a lot to account for.”

Consider, he said, that at least 20 percent of pregnancies are known to end in spontaneous abortion. If that results from divinely inspired anatomy, Dr. Ayala said, “God is the greatest abortionist of them all.”

Or consider, he said, the “sadism” in parasites that live by devouring their hosts, or the mating habits of insects like female midges, tiny flies that fertilize their eggs by consuming their mates’ genitals, along with all their other parts.

For the midges, Dr. Ayala said, “it makes evolutionary sense. If you are a male and you have mated, the best thing you can do for your genes is to be eaten.” But if God or some other intelligent agent made things this way on purpose, he said, “then he is a sadist, he certainly does odd things and he is a lousy engineer.”

That is also the message of his latest book, “Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion” (Joseph Henry Press, 2007). In it, he writes that as a theology student in Spain he had been taught that evolution “provided the ‘missing link’ in the explanation of evil in the world” — a defense of God’s goodness and omnipotence, despite the existence of evil.

“As floods and drought were a necessary consequence of the fabric of the physical world, predators and parasites, dysfunctions and diseases were a consequence of the evolution of life,” he writes. “They were not a result of a deficient or malevolent design.”

Dr. Ayala gives about 50 talks a year, he said in a recent interview in New York, a day after he delivered the inaugural Louis Levine-Gabriella de Beer lecture in genetics at City College. (He had spoken the day before, at North Carolina State University, on the evolution of morality, and spoke two days later at McGill University in Montreal, where his subject was Darwinism and religion.)

Because of his eminence — he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a winner of the National Medal of Science — Dr. Ayala “has a bully pulpit,” said Eugenie Scott, who heads the National Center for Science Education, a group that advocates for the teaching of evolution and against creationism in public schools. “When Francisco speaks, people listen.”

But Dr. Ayala said another proposed engagement, at a conference at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif., a 10,000-member church that is the base for the “Hour of Power,” a weekly televised religious service, was canceled earlier this year. A spokesman for the organization said Dr. Ayala’s talk was canceled “due to overbooking” of speakers.

Dr. Ayala said the event’s organizers wanted him to be introduced by Ben Stein, a writer (and business columnist for The New York Times) who is the star of the new anti-evolution movie, “Expelled,” and wanted to show the film in conjunction with his talk.

“I don’t mind who introduces me,” he said he told them, “but I would not want the film to be part of my presentation. They said they could not meet my conditions.”

Despite his heavy travel schedule, he continues to teach and research and publish, and work on Academy committees. He has been an opera lover since childhood, when he saw “Aida,” complete with elephants, in a Madrid park. And he is on the boards of Opera Pacific and the Pacific Symphony, both based in Orange County, Calif.

But his major outside interest is wine, specifically the vineyards he and his wife, Hana, own in Sacramento and San Joaquin Counties in Northern California, where they produce grapes for several wineries. In June, he will give a talk on wine and health, but as a wine lover. “I will not be talking much about health,” Dr. Ayala said.

The couple got into the wine business almost by accident in the 1980s when Dr. Ayala was at the University of California at Davis, near Sacramento. Property he and his wife bought as a weekend getaway turned out to have acres of vines, he said, and over the years they have expanded their holdings to 6,000 acres.

His secret for keeping all these enterprises going is “organization,” by which he means hiring what he called “superb” staff members and leaving them alone to get things done. He visits the vineyards perhaps once a month, he said, and stays on top of things by chatting with his manager by cellphone once or twice a week as he walks the mile from his home to his office on the Irvine campus.

His assistant there, Denise Chilcote, runs his professorial life, taking his phone calls, making his appointments and answering his e-mail, often signing his name.

Dr. Ayala, who is 74, was born in Madrid and studied theology at the Pontifical Faculty of San Esteban in Salamanca before coming to the United States in 1961, for graduate study in genetics at Columbia. From there he went to Rockefeller University, then Davis and then to Irvine. He became a United States citizen in 1971. He and his wife, an ecologist who works to encourage conservation efforts by resorts in tropical areas, have two grown sons.

Dr. Ayala said he remained surprised at how many Americans believe the theory of evolution is contrary to belief in God, or that the theory is erroneous or even fraudulent. (In fact, there is no credible scientific challenge to it as an explanation for the complexity and diversity of life on earth.)

Sometimes, he says, people come to his talks determined to challenge him, usually by citing familiar creationist arguments — that a body part like the bacterial tail, or flagellum, is too complex to have arisen through evolution, or that scientists lied when they demonstrated that moths in England evolved to be darker as the Industrial Revolution covered their native trees with soot.

But he said he had yet to encounter a challenge he could not meet. When people ask about the bacterial flagellum, for example, “I bring up that by now it has been worked out in great detail how the basic parts of the bacterial flagellum have evolved independently and exist independently,” he said.

As for the moths, he conceded that in famous photographs illustrating the discovery, the dark moths had been glued to the dark trees. But the observation that the moths had darkened along with the trees was real, he said. “To have a nice photograph, we glue them,” he said. “That is not falsifying science. That is something for facilitating teaching.”

And he dismisses the argument that it is only fair to teach both sides of the evolution/creationism controversy. “We don’t teach alchemy along with chemistry,” he said. “We don’t teach witchcraft along with medicine. We don’t teach astrology with astronomy.”

He said he was saddened when he saw the embrace of evolution identified with, as he put it, “explicit atheism,” as in the books of the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins or other writers on science and faith.

Neither the existence nor nonexistence of God is susceptible to scientific proof, Dr. Ayala said, and equating science with the abandonment of religion “fits the prejudices” of advocates of intelligent design and other creationist ideas.

“Science and religion concern nonoverlapping realms of knowledge,” he writes in the new book. “It is only when assertions are made beyond their legitimate boundaries that evolutionary theory and religious belief appear to be antithetical.”

It is important that Dr. Ayala “is not a religion-basher,” Dr. Scott said, “because creationists always showcase the religion-bashers in science as if they speak for all scientists. They clearly do not speak for Francisco and many others.”

Nevertheless, Dr. Ayala will not say whether he remains a religious believer.

“I don’t want to be tagged,” he said. “By one side or the other.”

Francisco J. Ayala - Evolution - Scientists Who Believe in God - - New York Times

April 24, 2008