runner,

Hate to rain on your parade, but the phone actually is the result of billions of years of evolution. Humans evolved with greater sophistication as time went by. Eventually a phone was one of the results.

And I know you will say that your god doesn’t follow that same rules of evolving, but apart from even knowing if your particular god exists, let’s leave that aside as you really haven’t a clue if it does, how do you know that it is eternal, unchanging and has always been?

Can you supply the evidence for that? Now, I mean universally accepted evidence not the guessing of so-called theologians who can’t agree within religions let alone with other religions.

This is really kiddies make believe stuff and you want to have control of the planet.

Sorry, but we wont let you. You have had your chance for thousands of years and you really have muffed it.

David

Foyle you write

"Get used to it runner and grateful, evolution is now as well proven as the theories of gravity or thermodynamics. Medical and disease research uses the certainties of evolution every day. That research is the reason our life expectancy in the last 100 years improved by about 25 years."

There is nothing in Islam that contradicts the theory of evolution, except as it applies to human beings. Please consider the following essay by Shaykh Nuh Ha Min Keller which begins
"Dear Suleman 'Ali:

Thank you for your fax of 27 June 1995 which said, in part:

"Recently a pamphlet has been circulated around Oxford saying that evolution is synonymous with kufr and shirk. I myself am a biologist and am convinced by the evidence which supports the theory of evolution. I am writing to ask whether the Quranic account of Creation is incompatible with man having evolved. Are there any books which you would recommend on the subject?"
During my "logic of scientific explanation" period at the University of Chicago, I used to think that scientific theories had to have coherence, logicality, applicability, and adequacy, and I was accustomed to examine theory statements by looking at these things in turn. Perhaps they furnish a reasonable point of departure to give your question an answer which, if cursory and somewhat personal, may yet shed some light on the issues you are asking about. "
http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/nuh/evolve.htm

Foyle, you also state:
"I once saw a woman wearing a head scarf saying her prayers in a train. The contrast was amazing. When the prayers were finished she used her very technical, science based phone, to call a friend!"

Did i used to think like this! Foyle you were privileged to be so close to this sister, so don't let the opportunity for deeper reflection and reason pass you by.

salaams

Congratulations,another person has achieved enlightenment.

I can understand people abandoning their once cherished beliefs,why they ever believed at all is just incomprehensible.

These days I do wish to be guided on what I feel is right for me and me only, therefore I am a "Free Thinker", I do not want to be known as a Religious person or an Atheist person, promotion of either tends to draw myself away from what is being told by either side, I am sure there are many people who feel as I do.

Ojnab

Grateful and runner,
You both dispute in one way or another evolution claiming it is not a proven theory or that it doesn't apply to humans.
You need to read the evidence. Man is classified in science as homo, the toolmaker, to distinguish our line form earlier descendants from our common ancestors for whom the term is australopithecine.
In the middle of the last century an Australian in South Africa, Raymond Dart, was the first to claim that an australopithecine haunted for a living using tools (weapons). A few years later Robert Ardrey assembled 24 parallel lines of evidence to show that A. africus hunted using bones as weapons or other tools some 2-3 million years ago. A. africanus in probably entitled to be reclassified as Homo (africanus).

Sean M Carroll recently stated, "Disagreements between materialist atheists and believers in a theological God are as much matters of personality and psychology as they are about logic and evidence.
'If, for whatever reason, a person is ready (or eager) to believe in God, an abstract and philosophically remote conception of the divine can be a comfortable compromise between the implausibilities of an interventionist biblical God and the impersonal machinery of a purely materialist cosmos.
But to many of us, there is nothing discomfiting about that impersonal machinery. The universe is, and part of our job is to discover exactly what it is. Another part of our job is to live in it, and construct meaning and depth from the shape of our lives. Once we adopt that point of view, the arguments for God seem like little more than excess baggage, to be discarded without regret.
It's a big, cold, pointless universe. And we wouldn't have it any other way."

Dear Ojnab,

Religious person is not the opposite of atheist person. One can be a religious person and an atheist person. A Buddhist is a religious person who may also be an atheist.