2 Encounters of the Tel Aviv Youth Interfaith Encounter - 30th November and 21st December:

On Wednesday, November 30th the Youth Interfaith Encounter group of Tel Aviv University met for the purpose of discussing the monotheistic idea of Creation and its relation to the contemporary science, particularly regarding the theory of evolution. We were listening to several interesting speakers, firstly to two distinguished guests from Turkey: Dr. Ahmet Oktar Babuna and Dr. Omer Cenker Ilicali (Science and Research Foundation – founded by the Islamic thinker Mr. Harun Yahya), while Prof. Doron Orbach (Chemistry department, Bar Ilan University) joined their view in a somewhat similar direction. Babuna and Ilicali pertinently presented their Creationist position in regard to the scientific data, as well as inferring that since man is designed by God he both can and should be fully responsible for his actions.

On the other hand, we listened to several students from natural sciences questioning Creationism along with Prof. Noiman (Botany department, Tel Aviv University). They responded to this lecture representing the Evolutionist stand-point. The discussion followed was interesting, and although there wasn’t too much agreement between the two parts, Creationists and Evolutionist, they all nevertheless agreed that the fact of life is in itself an amazing fact.

Prof. Noiman also showed his appreciation to the actuality of Jewish, Muslim and Christian students and lecturers taking part in mutual discussions through which they bring about an acceptance of each other. Eventually we thanked Dr. Babuna and Dr. Ilicali for their arrival from Turkey especially for the sake of this meeting, and they gave each of the participants Harun Yahya's book "A CALL FOR UNITY" as a present. (Harun Yahya is a Muslim thinker. In his book he calls for a dialogue between the three religions, "as", in his words, "there are no fundamental differences between Islam and the Judeo-Christian western world").

On Wednesday, December 21st, the group met on the occasion of Christmas, Hanukah and Id Al-Adha holidays. Coincidently for this year are Christmas and the first day of Hanukah occurring to fall on the same day. At the beginning we were happy to meet two new participants who trace their family roots to both Jewish and Christian traditions. We ate some doughnuts and then began a talking about some relevant traditional customs and historical events concerning Christmas, for example: the origin of the fir tree, the birth of Christ and its meaning in general. We focused on each other's previous experiences from those holidays, as several of us began to recall their Hanukah-experiences from the past. Towards the end we paid our attention to the previous and sort of much 'scholarly' meeting concerning Creation and Evolution, and the question we asked ourselves was what could be the view point of a religious person about the theory of evolution. Mali shared her view about the possibility of holding another option which wasn’t presented on the previous meeting. On the one hand, Mali said, there were the "seculars", who accepted the theory of evolution and therefore did not believe the existence of an intelligent-Creator, and on the other hand there were the "religious", who did not accept the theory of evolution and therefore do believe the existence of the Creator, but we didn’t hear the third option, namely, the voice of believing both the evolution and the existence of the Creator, as some of the Rabbis she knows hold.

At the end we summed up to try to introduce our activity in front of the Islamic Movement's students within the campus.

Reported by Shabi and Adeeb


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