Srila Prabhupada Quoted in National Geographic

November 10, 2004

Evolutionary theory, though, is a bit different. It's such a dangerously

wonderful and far-reaching view of life that some people find it

unacceptable, despite the vast body of supporting evidence. As applied to

our own species, Homo sapiens, it can seem more threatening still. Many

fundamentalist Christians and ultra-orthodox Jews take alarm at the thought

that human descent from earlier primates contradicts a strict reading of the

Book of Genesis. Their discomfort is paralleled by Islamic creationists such

as Harun Yahya, author of a recent volume titled The Evolution Deceit, who

points to the six-day creation story in the Koran as literal truth and calls

the theory of evolution "nothing but a deception imposed on us by the

dominators of the world system." The late Srila Prabhupada, of the Hare

Krishna movement, explained that God created "the 8,400,000 species of life

from the very beginning," in order to establish multiple tiers of

reincarnation for rising souls. Although souls ascend, the species

themselves don't change, he insisted, dismissing "Darwin's nonsensical

theory."

Other people too, not just scriptural literalists, remain unpersuaded about

evolution. According to a Gallup poll drawn from more than a thousand

telephone interviews conducted in February 2001, no less than 45 percent of

responding U.S. adults agreed that "God created human beings pretty much in

their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so."

Evolution, by their lights, played no role in shaping us.

Only 37 percent of the polled Americans were satisfied with allowing room

for both God and Darwin-that is, divine initiative to get things started,

evolution as the creative means. (This view, according to more than one

papal pronouncement, is compatible with Roman Catholic dogma.) Still fewer

Americans, only 12 percent, believed that humans evolved from other

life-forms without any involvement of a god.

The most startling thing about these poll numbers is not that so many

Americans reject evolution, but that the statistical breakdown hasn't

changed much in two decades. Gallup interviewers posed exactly the same

choices in 1982, 1993, 1997, and 1999. The creationist conviction-that God

alone, and not evolution, produced humans-has never drawn less than 44

percent. In other words, nearly half the American populace prefers to

believe that Charles Darwin was wrong where it mattered most.

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